David Imel / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google’s been dealing with the fallout of bad batteries on the Pixel 4a and Pixel 6a.
- So far, that’s involved updates that limit charging capacity after a certain number of cycles.
- While there was a trick to avoid that update on the Pixel 4a, Google seems to have closed the loophole.
This year, Google has found itself forced to confront and deal with an awkward problem that’s been casting a shadow across its otherwise largely well-received Pixel smartphone lineup. First we got the Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program in response to concerns of overheating batteries and device failure, and then we saw the exact same story play out for the Pixel 6a and its battery. Google’s approach with both of these incidents has been multi-faceted, involving offers for repair or replacement, compensatory payouts, and perhaps most controversial of all, software updates that place a hard limit on battery performance.
In order to prevent the old batteries in these phones from causing fires, Google delivered a software update that limits charging capacity and downgrades performance. While those restrictions aren’t set to kick in until you hit a specific charging cycle threshold, and can go away after upgrading your Pixel with a new battery, some users decided to take a slightly different approach, and did everything they could to avoid that charge-limiting update in the first place.
When it announced these updates, Google was clear that there’s nothing optional about any of this. With the Pixel 4a, it described the forthcoming update as “automatic,” adding “mandatory” for the Pixel 6a. We also saw it remove past firmware downloads from its repository, making it that much more difficult to roll back.
Apparently, there’s been a trick.
Lots of us might know how to enable Developer Options in Android, probably from an attempt to interact with the phone through the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), but have you ever looked around at all the other settings in there? One in particular lets you turn off the phone’s ability to automatically install a downloaded update the next time the phone reboots. And as it happened, switching that off managed to stave off the battery-limiting update for the past few months.
This week, however, disaster has struck. Over on Reddit, posts from users like crazed98camaro, salyosen, and gxstahr all tell a similar story (via 9to5Google): They disabled that option on their Pixel 4a phones, and had been running old software for months, but sometime in the past two days their devices finally updated.
We’re not sure exactly what technical method Google turned to in order to get around that developer option, but whatever it did, it looks like it works. That’s going to be sad news for some Pixel 4a holdouts, but at least hopefully now a few of them might avoid a catastrophic battery failure.
