[kneel]

I remember several iphones suddenly start performing poorly after updating coincidentally when Apple released new iphone models. It happened so much that people refused to update iOS because "that's how they get you."

Apple knew about the complaints, it was very loud. They did this for several update cycles and hit pay-dirt on their sales.

[acdha]

This was mostly apocryphal, with one basis in reality. Spotlight reindexing could use a lot of CPU if you had a large photo library, but that was also a background task so it meant lower battery life for the day or two.

What happens in almost all cases is that people attribute things to the biggest visible change they know about, which is usually a major OS release. Facebook used to use like 30% of an iPhone’s battery life but because it was in the background people would say the iOS release did it because they remembered installing that and it changed the UI palpably, whereas the Facebook update automatically installed in the background.

I used to see this with people saying an OS release killed their hard drive: when pressed, they’d remember that they’d had things get slow or files corrupted before but hadn’t recognized that as a sign of imminent failure, whereas that OS upgrade was a really visible change which caused a ton of I/O activity.

[filoleg]

Meanwhile, Google didn’t utilize a similar workaround with their Nexus 6P models (which was their flagship around the similar timeframe as the iOS “batterygate” scandal), as their phones were hitting the same issue.

You know what happened? While my friends who had iPhones were sometimes complaining about slowdowns, pretty much everyone I knew who owned a Nexus 6P (including myself) ended up having to deal with the RMA process. Why? Because the phone would just shutdown instantly while at double-digit percentage charge.

For me personally, it started with shutting down instantly at 8%. Then it creeped into the 12-15% territory. By the time I felt like I had it enough to deal with it, the phone would just shutdown entirely at 27-29%. The problem initially started around a year after the purchase, and progressed to this awful state in less than half a year. For a lot of people, it would straight up just start hitting a bootloop too, so your phone was entirely toast no matter what.

Nexus 6P was an extremely popular “clean android flagship from google” phone at the time (Samsung was not the clear “apple of android” player at yet, but was visibly getting there at a breakneck pace, as they were gearing up for the release of their Galaxy S8 series). Every single person I knew who owned that phone hit that problem within the first 18 months at latest.

To Google’s defense, their remediation was (at one specific narrow point in time) to just give people their newer Pixel 1 in exchange for RMA. The problem was that Google butched even that, as they didn’t expect such volume of requests, and they started denying RMA for people who didn’t have their “protection plan.” Oh, and that option was only available in certain locales in the first place, and you had to get a bit lucky even then.

The situation was so disastrous for the owners, I have no idea how Google managed to not get dragged through the mud in press for this even remotely as much as Apple continues getting dragged for their approach to almost the exact same problem that occurred around the exact same time period. My only bet is that, overall, Nexus phone market share wasn’t nearly as massive as that of iPhones.

Every single person I knew who owned a Nexus 6P hit this issue, and that included myself too.

For context, look at the number of comments on the “official RMA thread” in r/Nexus6P related to this[0]. Just reading the replies on it today almost gave me a headache, with how vividly I remember having to deal with this at the time.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/s/XPfDqktozm