[kyrra]

(Googler, opinion is my own)

I think one big thing that differs between the Nexus line and the Pixel line of phones is who was actually supporting the phone after its sale. The Nexus phones were these shared branding between Google and the makers (LG, HTC, whoever). So it led to some pointing at the other person when there were problems.

With the Pixel line, Google fully owns support of the devices, which makes it a bit easier for Google to deal with customer support issues like this.

[m0xte]

Ah yes the famed google customer support. Spent five days trying to get a g-suite dashboard error fixed immediately after provisioning. Eventually I switched to O365 with no regrets. And then there was the bricked chromecast from hell which they wouldn’t even acknowledge. Switched to Apple TV with no regrets.

Add the usual quality control (how many years did my android phone alarm not go off or my SD card get trashed with photos on). Nope!

[prepend]

I don’t accept this line of reasoning but appreciate you sticking up for your employer.

I’ve noticed this tactic more and more. Price a product as if it’s yours, but then disown it when inconvenient.

I can’t imagine Apple saying something like “that’s a Samsung issue, take it up with them” because of a component.

As a customer, I don’t want to have a decoder ring for how to get support for my product. If it says google and is sold by google then google should fix it. Maybe they sub it out to HTC or Huawei or whatever, but don’t make me know about it.

If google makes bad supply chain decisions then own up to it. Not doing so just makes Google seem incompetent at management as I don’t care or have any value in them directly for manufacturing.

[hnick]

> As a customer, I don’t want to have a decoder ring for how to get support for my product.

As an Australian this is so weird to hear. I have a business relationship with the person I gave money to, not some third party factory or manufacturer that I never met. The law requires the merchant to take the return and make it right, after that it's their problem. Most likely they have a better idea about the next step than I would as a random customer.

[pjmlp]

As European same here.

For some strange reason Google supporters never consider that had Google actually cared, there would be support contracts in place with its providers.

Apparently that is something that doesn't exist in US, the hardware maker is the only one to blame.

[totalZero]

It's not a US thing, it's mainly a Google thing. They appear to have decided that they can reduce costs by saying "it's not our problem" in response to customer complaints about defective products. They do this for defects that may not even be rooted in the hardware itself.

My general impression is that most companies are quick to take responsibility for consumer products sold in the US, unless product failure results in liability for a major safety risk (think McDonald's coffee scalds or Ford Explorer rollover accidents).

If the engine computer fails in a BMW due to a widespread defect, the BMW dealer doesn't send the customer to Bosch on a wild goose chase. If a Macbook Pro SSD fails due to a widespread defect, Apple doesn't tell the customer to call Samsung. They either take ownership of the problem and make the customer happy (with the expectation that a brand-loyal customer's next purchase will pay the cost of solving the current problem), or they make an effort to offer some kind of solution at the customer's cost.

[hnick]

I think I'm talking about something a little different, which is my mistake. The parent was discussing a manufacturer disowning components within items, as you noted.

I'm taking it a step further and saying we don't even talk to the manufacturer, just the store - it doesn't matter what Apple thinks (unless you bought it directly from them). There's a legal concept of whether or not the item is fit for purpose or defective (generally, if you knew X would happen before you bought it, would you still have bought it?) which shuts down excuses.

[ReverseCold]

I don’t think this is a US thing, it’s just a google thing. The normal thing to expect is what you’ve explained.

[abiogenesis]

To be fair Nexus series was not priced as it was theirs. I remember buying Nexus 4 for $300 while the comparable Samsung was almost twice that.

Pixel is a different story.

[nkrisc]

That's funny, when I bought my Nexus 4 I don't remember the front of the box saying, "Nexus 4: A shared branding between Google and LG." It said "Nexus 4" and had Google's logo displayed somewhere on there. I bought it from store.google.com, my credit card was charged by Google. It said "Google" on the box, so if I had an issue with it I would have expected Google to fix it. Anything less and they'd have been in the wrong.

I get what you're saying, I understand it. But from the consumer's point of view it just doesn't matter. The nature of the business relationship between Google and whomever should not be their concern. It rings of the same cop-out Amazon likes to make, that I'm not dealing with them, I'm dealing with a some third part merchant even though I visited Amazon.com, I paid Amazon, and the item is shipped to me by Amazon. They want to you deal with their suppliers.

[erulabs]

My Pixel broke suddenly after an update. Android debugger console clearly showing a spew of ALSA errors. Hundreds of other people having the issue on forums - been 3 years and no patch has resolved it. I hang onto the phone as a cautionary tale not to purchase anything from google... Have never been able to get a customer rep on the line who can say anything other than "sorry, cant help". No refunds, no RMA, nothing. So... What customer support are you referring to?

If it was an open platform, I'd fix the issues myself. If it was a closed platform, I'd get it replaced. Google fails at being non-Apple and also fails at being Apple.

[0134340]

This also happened with many people's Nexus Players, a Roku/Firestick competitor, myself included. It's co-developed by both Google and Asus. Of course after the update bricked them Google tried to blame Asus and put it on their shoulders to provide a fix and Asus seemed to do the same. Needless to say, I won't buy Google products anymore.

[dungdang]

dear googler. fyi -this is what that thinking and lack of integrity and support does:

you have gcp. working for vars over the years, per year i sell over $10mil of solutions that run or dr to cloud. i have not once put gcp as an option in front of a customer - all azure or aws. google has, and will, lose millions in gcp revenue. because of me. and this is true for most vars.

now, as far as others in my office -8 people like me. only one puts gcp in proposals. he's new.

this is very common. we don't trust or respect your offerings -too flaky, not going to risk our customer relationship when you drop the ball and we get the hit for proposing a bad solution. and yours are all bad solutions. not because of function -because it's risky for a business to be involved with you in any way, or count on you for anything.

you probably lose 50-80mil annually from my office alone. and it's not just lost cash. it goes to your direct competitors.

and i don't know a single person who wants you to fix your practices and act like a real company. only 2 real cloud players drives up prices, and we get more on our spiffs.

and last i checked, aws and azure have been, are, and will always be kicking your ass. because even if you fix your business practices now, you'll have to wait 30 years before all the sales staff and company decision makers retire. and that is eternity in tech time.

do you, yahoo!? see you on myspace.

[totalZero]

That's a poor (and partially false) defense for Google's handling of the Bootloop of Death, for the following reasons:

I bought Google's flagship handset online from the Google Store. It was branded as the "Google Nexus 6P", it was shipped to me by Google, and it bricked itself while booting after a Google-supplied Android update. Google provided and managed the warranty. I had one warranty claim with them prior to my phone bricking itself, handled entirely by Google; Huawei was not involved in that claim at all.

My relationship as a consumer of a Google product is with Google, not with its contract manufacturer.

The Bootloop of Death affected multiple SKUs across different Nexus models. The 5X was manufactured by LG for Google, and the 6P was manufactured by Huawei for Google. The Bootloop of Death was present on both models.

If Google has a quarrel with Huawei, LG, or another contract manufacturer over the cost of managing a defect, that's their prerogative. However, I am not party to that quarrel. I am just a customer who bought Google's flagship handset.

Google suggested that I contact the nearest Huawei service center...in mainland China. The company took an arrogant "who, me?" attitude toward its flagship handset, and tried to weasel its way out of dealing with valid customer complaints, rather than taking some semblance of responsibility for an obvious problem.

> The Nexus phones were these shared branding between Google and the makers (LG, HTC, whoever)

This is not true. The Nexus 6P was marketed by Google, not in a shared manner. You're thinking of the Nexus 6, a Motorola-made device that preceded the 6P and was offered in some markets without Google branding.

> With the Pixel line, Google fully owns support of the devices, which makes it a bit easier for Google to deal with customer support issues like this.

Google fully owned support for the Nexus 6P until the bootloop issue came around, at which point Google changed its policies. Also, Pixel devices have been manufactured by competing handset manufacturers for Google (Pixel 2 phones were manufactured by HTC and LG).

The result of my experience is that I will never, so long as I live, ever buy another Google hardware product. Not a single one. I will not buy a Nest Thermostat. I will not buy a Chromecast. If my best friend has a lapse in judgment and makes the mistake of buying a Pixelbook, I will wait for him to leave it on the couch, unintentionally sit on it, and buy him a 16" Macbook Pro as a replacement -- apologizing profusely all the while, unlike Google support which was ostensibly trained not to use the phrase, "I'm sorry." Every time someone tries to defend Google for its handling of the Nexus Bootloop of Death fiasco, I add twenty years to the length of time that the trustees of my estate will prohibit my assets from being used to buy Google hardware products after I am dead and gone.

[belval]

Modern poetry, as someone who got a Nexus 5X that boot-looped after 13 months (just enough so my carrier would say "asks the manufacturer") I wholeheartedly agree with your take. It was a pathetic demonstration of the subpar capabilities of Google to deal with actual paying customer and it makes me angry to this day.

[DoofusOfDeath]

> If my best friend has a lapse in judgment and makes the mistake of buying a Pixelbook, I will wait for him to leave it on the couch, unintentionally sit on it, and buy him a 16" Macbook Pro as a replacement -- apologizing profusely all the while

We should definitely hang out, asap.

[rainbowzootsuit]

The Keyser Söze level of retribution is a masterwork.

[Twirrim]

Ahh yes, the wonderful Google support team. Spend any time looking at /r/GooglePixel, or doing searches on twitter, and you'll realise that isn't an improvement at all.

When the Pixel works, it works great. If you ever have a problem though, good luck. You're in for a nightmare.

[Polylactic_acid]

I'm really disappointed with my pixel phone. The camera is partially stuffed up (seems to be a misaligned lens causing the image to be blurry) The battery life is really poor, and the usb port is loose.

These are all things I would be fine replacing myself but it seems that everyone who has tried this ends up cracking the display since the phone is glued together. Google also does not sell replacement cameras so you have to find one second hand which isn't easy or cheap.

I will never buy another google phone but I'm not really sure what my options are.

[o-__-o]

The libre purism BRICK if you don’t mind opening a shell randomly to do things throughout the day

[Polylactic_acid]

For the price of that phone I could buy 50 second hand android phones that would work much better. I also haven't seen any evidence that purism will be selling replacement parts or that parts will be available in 3+ years when they are needed.

[Causality1]

Well I would hope so, considering Pixel phones cost double or triple what Nexus phones did.

I remember when Google bought Revolv and then stabbed all their customers in the back by bricking all their home automation and then graciously offering them a discount on a new Nest home system.

Google would remotely brick pacemakers if they stood to make money off doing so and anyone who thinks they can be relied upon long term is a bloody fool.

[sgtnoodle]

Don't give them any ideas. Modern pacemakers are Bluetooth enabled...

[driverdan]

And Google is only supporting Pixel phones for two years now which sucks. The Pixel 2, for example, is still a perfectly fine phone.

[gambiting]

I'd argue Google doesn't support them at all. They don't have repair centres, they don't sell parts - if I break a screen in my OnePlus, I can send it back to OnePlus and have it replaced with a genuine part for £79 last time I checked. With Google I know someone who cracked the screen in the Pixel 4 and Google's response to it was "well, sucks to be you, we don't repair any phones at all". That's shocking, and unacceptable for any hardware product.

[scarface74]

Obligatory: Apple released a bug fix update for the 2011 iPhone 4s, June 2019

The iPhone 6s released in 2015 is still being supported at least through September 2021.

[dungdang]

that's cute. 2011 you say? you can run android 10 (current latest release) on galaxy s2. released in 2011. and it's actually usable, because screencandy has been removed to give it a perf boost. can you run ios 13.6 on your 2011 iphone 4s?

i know in the iphone world it's important how long apple updates it. in the android world that doesn't apply. the manufacturer doesn't have to. because literally anyone can, and does.

[culturestate]

> in the android world that doesn't apply. the manufacturer doesn't have to. because literally anyone can, and does.

I have two problems with this model. The first is that it really only applies to the kind of people who would be in this thread on HN - consumers at large are not updating their phones based on some community-supported Android rom.

The second is this: do we really want to train non-technical people that it's ok to let random organizations on The Internet control the operating system on their phones? These are deeply personal devices that can be relatively trivially turned into 24/7 remote surveillance stations, and say what you will about open source but with rare exception these roms are not undergoing line-by-line code audits.

In my opinion, the world is better served when companies support their own hardware.

If it turns out that Apple is spying on users, we have legal recourse. If orchiddroid928 on GitHub is doing it, that's a different ballgame.

[dungdang]

linux is community supported. just like you can get linux from redhat, you can get your android rom from large companies. lineageos is a popular one.

i won't argue with the rest of that, as you are arguing open source is inferior. one you convince every enterprise out there not to use open source, you can revisit this with me.

you are also arguing all servers and consumer pcs should be made by microsoft, since they run windows.

[culturestate]

I don't know what Linux has to do with this and I won't litigate the open source dogma, but on this point:

> you are also arguing all servers and consumer pcs should be made by microsoft, since they run windows.

That's not really what I'm saying at all; this isn't like e.g. expecting to get Windows updates through Dell, it's more like expecting that Dell will continue to deliver compatible drivers for their hardware that enable the updates I get from Microsoft to keep working.

That's a basic expectation when we buy PC hardware, in part thanks to the relative standardization of PC components - if I couldn't update Windows ~2 years after I bought a laptop and Dell's answer was "maybe someone in the community can help you", I'd be incensed.

In the smartphone/tablet market, that's just business as usual.

[scarface74]

So exactly how does a normal person get Android 10 working on S2? Can they simply get an over the air upgrade directly from Samsung?

[dungdang]

a normal person downloads a recovery app and the rom, and uses the app to flash any rom they want. what you're saying is you'd rather get your windows updates from lenovo. software and hardware are different things.

[scarface74]

No, I get my operating system updates from Microsoft and Apple. Why shouldn’t I get Android updates from Google?

[stallmanite]

I’m all in on Apple phone-wise due to having too many Androids die on me in one year but the point about 3rd parties supporting some old hardware is very true. I have an ancient Barnes & Noble Nook tablet that I flashed with a custom rom and the thing is really snappy and responsive. The battery holds a charge and everything it’s really surprising.

[Tepix]

Can your mom without you helping her?

You can't even go to a store and ask them for help to have a custom rom installed. Plus you don't know what's inside that ROM.

[dungdang]

can your mom upgrade windows 7 to windows 10 without you helping her?

i actually do know what's in the rom. and so does. anyone else who wants to check. and you have hundreds of 3rd party people who do. source code is available. you're literally arguing hardware and software should be tied together to the hardware manufacturer. the entire world of computers disagrees.

what's inside your ios rom?

[vondro]

>can your mom upgrade windows 7 to windows 10 without you helping her?

Quite possibly, yes! I recall Microsoft pushed upgraded to Windows 10 quite aggressively at the beginning to the point it basically scheduled automatic upgrade. That was 5 years ago, I might not recall correctly.

The big difference between iOS/Windows 10 upgrades and installing custom ROM is that in the iOS/Windows 10 case, you click one button (or even let it install automatically!) and it installs itself. It cannot be easier probably. I can expect it was reasonably tested and that it's reasonably safe.

With custom roms, it really needs to be your hobby to do that. For majority of people, it's not viable solution to do that - they lack time and/or knowledge.

Putting Android 10 into Samsung Galaxy S2 is kinda like putting Corvette V8 engine into VW Beetle. It's possible, there are people that did it, but it requires skill and time to do that.

[culturestate]

We probably have (at least in part) Apple’s iOS enterprise success to thank for this. No procurement manager is going to sign off on a fleet deal for 10,000 phones without some long-term support assurances.

Google seems completely uninterested in servicing that market with hardware. They could’ve absolutely dominated e.g. aerospace MRO with Glass + pixel tablets but instead most companies are just building iPad apps.

[pjmlp]

That is why support contracts exist.

Had Google been serious about the Nexus it would have made contracts that would legally bind those maker to how many years Google would see fit, and they would have to provide such support or pay compensation when not.

Google excuses only work for those that don't understand law.

[jaxn]

Google fiber support is terrible too. There is no way to transfer service to another address. Instead you have to sign up with a different Google account at the new address.