
Two-year-old Nexus 4 issue status changed to obsolete - reedlaw
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41626
======
stinos
It's sad no fix was released, but I find it equally sad it was marked obsolete
after just 2 years. Obsolete basically means: we don't care about this device
anymore, buy a new one instead.

In a world where striving for lower environmental impact should become core
business of every company and individual because sustaining the current
lifestyle of many is going to severely damage the planet in one way or
another, this is not the kind of sign major companies (and they pretty much
_all_ do it in the mobile business) should send into the world.

For a lot of people these companies are half gods, and what they do shall be
believed in, it becomes part of their education. Making people believe buying
devices and throwing them away after a just year or two is standard isn't
exactly noble. Yeah yeah I know money is the driving factor behind companies,
but that doesn't mean it cannot be combined with sending a 'greener' message
into the world.

~~~
slg
Let's not overreact. This is a bug report on an outdated phone and outdated
operating system in a use case that will likely only be experienced by a very
small subset of users. Should Google fix this? Probably. But that does't mean
that not fixing it is a sign of fundamental problems with Google, the mobile
industry, or consumer culture in general.

~~~
stinos
Yes maybe I am overreacting, but doesn't the simple fact a phone is considered
outdated prove something _is_ fundamentally wrong with mobile consumer 'I must
have the latest' culture? There are enough electronics and other branches in
which 2 years is merely a fraction of the lifespan of the device or product,
and it would be unseen if the company would end support for it that soon.

~~~
slg
Sure, I expect my stereo, dishwasher, iron, dryer, electric shaver, alarm
clock, and blender to work for more than two years. But how many of those
devices would receive an update (or recall) to fix a bug that prevents the use
of a single minor feature?

Your Nexus 4 doesn't stop working when it stops receiving updates. The closing
of this bug doesn't mean your phone is less functional than it was yesterday.
You are free to continue using the Nexus 4 tomorrow exactly as you have been
for the last two years. This decision only means that Google is moving on to
more pressing issues that either affect more users or have a bigger impact on
their bottom line.

~~~
danieldk
_Sure, I expect my stereo, dishwasher, iron, dryer, electric shaver, alarm
clock, and blender to work for more than two years. But how many of those
devices would receive an update (or recall) to fix a bug that prevents the use
of a single minor feature?_

But we are not talking about such devices. We are talking about something that
is nearly a general purpose computer and could have its software updated on
millions of devices any time Google wants.

The problem is that there is an incentive for vendors to start ignoring
devices when they are not sold anymore. First of all, it reduces maintenance
costs. Secondly, it encourages people to buy a new device. However, one could
question if this ethical in a time where there is scarcity and where we have
to care for the environment. Especially for a device that is still perfectly
capable (as I said in another comment, this is a device that is better spec'ed
than the currently massively popular Moto G).

It's a bit unfair to pick on Google here, since they are at least providing
Lollipop. There are many other two year-old phones that are still stuck on
Jellybean. But I think that in general it is an issue that should concern us.
I am hoping that at some point the EU will require vendors to provide at least
security updates for some period (e.g. three years).

------
simonh
I just don't get how Google keeps getting positive press for its Nexus line.
The issues with the early devices were written off as teething trouble, but
Google has been developing Nexus devices for 5 years now and still they
frequently have fundamental technical flaws and go unsupported after just a
couple of years, if that in some cases. I honestly don't know what the benefit
of getting a Nexus device is anymore.

To those people claiming all Apple does is assemble components and throw out
overpriced crap and the iPhone is essentially just a marketing exercise, this
is what it looks like when that's actually true.

~~~
Kequc
HTC Samsung LG and Motorola were the manufacturers of the Nexus line not
Google.

I bought one of the first Nexus 4's on the market and it still works, I've had
very few issues with it. My mother has one, she's had very few issues with it.
She also has a Nexus 10 which I'm somewhat jealous of because it's an
absolutely phenomenal device she uses it non stop. If you want an Apple device
get an Apple device personally I don't like them because I think the OS has
been behind for quite a while. I buy Nexus devices because they are being sold
as hardware without carrier lock or bloatware, as all phones should be.

~~~
ktran03
I've had n4/n5 and all the iPhones since 3GS. Disagree that iOS is behind
overall. It's behind in features yes, but usability I still like iOS more.

Droid: -more os features -more customizability -like the notification centre
much better -most apps that aren't in the top echelon of apps, are gross to
use and look at. -hate multitasking multi-processes running in background

iOS: -buttery smooth like no other -touch input is much more accurate, somehow
it knows -top echelon of apps, are better on iOS than droid

Gave droid a fair shot. To me, important things to get right on mobile is lag-
free daily usage, and accurate touch input. Apple nailed both of these. And
apps are usually better done on iOS than droid from my experience. For writing
apps I prefer Xcode/Cocoa ecosystem over Java/Eclipse.

Generally I think Apple hardware+software is best in industry. And Google
makes the best software services (Gmail, drive, play music, youtube, Maps,
etc.).

------
vidoc
Over the last 3 years, I bought three 'google edition' devices (nexus 10,
galaxy nexus, htc one m7) and I am less than impressed. I haven't experienced
faster updates, and while I appreciate to run the vanilla android. Regressions
and overall poor software quality have been my experience with their devices.
They must be outsourcing large parts of the software they ship on their
devices because I'm absolutely stunned things like this go through QA.

Here's the best-of: \- The responsiveness of the nexus 10 tablet has been
enjoying enormous spikes since day 1.

\- Running into all sorts of problems with 'Mail app' and now 'Gmail app'
using a third-party imap server. Lots of message with an HTML body or
attachements are displayed blank.

\- Skype, hangout, SIP, have been a disaster with all those devices. Sometimes
due to horrible software (Skype), sometimes due to the hardware/OS (hangout
with htc).

\- Finally, lollipop is the freebsd 5.0 of android

~~~
barbs
"Finally, lollipop is the freebsd 5.0 of android"

What do you mean by this, exactly?

~~~
vidoc
What I mean by this - out of frustration because I _want_ to love this new
release - is that the 5.x release of android, on the couple of devices I
upgraded is, buggier, laggier, and less stable than version 4.x. In terms of
usability, I also noticed that they removed the ability to only display
contacts that have a phone number: I can live with that but I can tell you my
dad was furious about this. Another minor annoyance is that switching to a
different WIFI network seemingly requires more taps than before. I've owned a
few IOS devices in the past - an OS I am not a big fan of - but I am
disappointed that Google routinely overlooks those kind of details that Apple
certainly wouldn't.

~~~
hayksaakian
In 5, its two swipes from the top, then tap the name of the WiFi network or
the word WiFi (under the signal icon)

Seems pretty good to me.

In 4.4 I swipe down once then press and hold the icon.

~~~
androidsecrets
Ah, yes, the-gestures-no-one-knows-about-unless-specifically-told.

1\. Swiping down with 2 fingers brings you straight to the settings drop-down
(vs. the notification drop-down). 2\. The WiFi icon and the text beneath it do
different things when pressed.

------
d2p
I've starred a load of Android bugs in that tracker; and over the last few
weeks, _loads_ of them (many tens) have been flagged Obsolete.

Many of them are absolutely not obsolete; they're as relevant in 5.0 as they
were when they were raised.

It's great that they're cleaning up the issue tracker as if they might
actually use it (or maybe it's preperation to move to GitHub, as many other
Google projects have been), but it sucks that they're just blanked fobbing off
a load of relevant cases :(

~~~
crististm
No, they don't clean anything. For me, this is just enterprise in action. They
send a clear message that any free work that you did for them will be used as
they see fit. That includes sending it to the trash.

So much for 'community'. When it's a company involved, the sense of
participation is dissipated by the monetary interests of the shareholders
(which you are not one of).

On their defence, who do you think will check any pending fixes for those
bugs? Do you take ownership on that? They sure don't. And they are busy with
the next release anyway. Why bother with your two year old phone?

------
alkimie2
As a pretty happy galaxy nexus owner (that I just passed to my teenaged son),
I've been pretty disappointed with the price point and apparent lack of
commitment to the google phone line. As a consequence I've just bought OnePlus
Ones for myself and my family based on their apparent commitment to cyanogen
as native-from-the-factory load and a much better price point than the Google
6. It's a bit sad to see Google move away from the Nexus phones as a
touchstone for value and 'pure' android, but good to see others (e.g.,
OnePlus) filling the ecological niche.

It will be interesting to see if OnePlus continues to fill this niche or
evolves away from it.

~~~
aselzer
Sadly it looks like OnePlus is moving away from Cyanogenmod (search Google
News for `oneplus cyanogen`). Also the OnePlus One never had the fully open
source version of Cyanogenmod 11. It uses a version called 11s
([https://cyngn.com/products/oneplusone/](https://cyngn.com/products/oneplusone/))
with many proprietary features.

However, they will surely continue making phones at that price on which the
pure version of Cyanogenmod can be installed.

Xiaomi seems very promising since they also make phones at that price point
with similar specs, and Cyanogenmod ROMs are in development. I know it might
be hard to get them in the US, but in Europe they can even be ordered from
Amazon.

~~~
saurik
> Sadly it looks like OnePlus is moving away from Cyanogenmod (search Google
> News for `oneplus cyanogen`).

Having done the search you recommended, it sounds like the story is best told
in the other direction: CyangenMod signed an exclusive deal with one of
OnePlus's competitors for the Indian market, totally screwing them over in
India, making them forced to release their device there without CyanogenMod.
If they are also now dropping support for Cyanogen everywhere due to this
(which isn't clear), I honestly could not blame them: a better telling of the
story is "sadly it looks like CyanogenMod is moving away from OnePlus".

~~~
aselzer
I didn't mean to imply that OnePlus was the one to blame. Cyanogen, inc. did
not act in a fair way while selling something that was mainly a success due to
an open source community.

OnePlus (or Micromax) actually very recently announced a replacement for
Cyanogenmod 11S: [https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/rom-
official-5-0-android-...](https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/rom-
official-5-0-android-lollipop-alpha.223252/)

I somehow still don't understand how they will be able to include Google Apps
without being a member of the Open Handset Alliance when shipping an almost
exact fork of Android.([http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-
grip-on-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-
android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/3/))

------
alsutton010203
The bug tracker at
[https://code.google.com/p/android/](https://code.google.com/p/android/) is
for AOSP issues. Anything to do with a device specific issue should be
reported to the OEM and not logged in that bug tracker.

The reason that this hadn't been closed before is probably the lack of
resources to cope with the number of non-AOSP bugs reported in that tracker.
The more critical issues will ripple up from OEMs to Google if necessary, and
that is unlikely to happen via the community focused AOSP bug tracker you've
linked to.

~~~
aroch
The N4 was explicitly Google branded hardware with Google providing the
hardware support (Google handled RMAs, component replacement, etc). It is
Google's responsibility to support phones they sell as Google supported
devices.

It is no different than when you buy a car. You go to a Ford dealership, they
sell you a car, its their responsibility to repair and maintain your car
during the agreed upon warranty period. You wouldn't tell someone to "file a
ticket" with Ford instead of calling their dealer, would you?

~~~
alsutton010203
Exactly; You shouldn't file a ticket in this system for specific consumer
devices. It's not the right place for those kind of issues, you should find
the appropriate consumer support route.

~~~
aroch
You've misinterpreted me. The AOSP bug tracker is _exactly_ the right place to
file bug reports for __Google sold devices __. Google takes on the
responsibility of supporting those devices, hardware and all.

------
Zigurd
I don't want to make excuses on behalf of Google and LG, but I wouldn't expect
this kind of bug to be fixed in any phone, even a Nexus phone that's supposed
to have up to date OS releases. Acoustic echo cancellation is subject to
hardware limitations and firmware licensing decisions taken at the production
planning stage. That puts it a step or three beyond simpler prioritization
decisions.

So why didn't Google close this earlier? The media frameworks in Android have
changed enough that, maybe, workarounds or fixes could have emerged as new
media capabilities were added.

Google has lately gone on a tear of bug list clean-up. When you expose your
bug list to end users you'll get a lot of questioning regarding why this or
that bug can't be fixed. This one is particularly easy to defend.

------
captainmuon
My Nexus 4 started to have an issue where using the camera may crash the
phone... but only in third-party apps, never in the native camera app. I can't
find the link to the bug report right now, but the last I checked Google
didn't acknowledge the bug despite dozens or hundreds of reports.

Most irritating that this apparently started with a certain update (4.2.2?),
and that the problem seems to be in the closed-source blobs, so you can't fix
it yourself (I haven't checked, but that's what I read).

The Nexus 4 has another stupid defect, it has no USB OTG support, that is the
ability to use it as a USB host and plug in USB devices. If you look at the
kernel source, Google actually removed support just before shipping. The
stated reason was that since the USB port doubles as HDMI (Slimport), you
can't get 5V out of it. I managed to patch the kernel, and if you use a Y
cable (taking 5V from somewhere else), it indeed works. But the interesting
thing is, the way it is wired you can actually get 5V out of the slimport
itself, IIRC. You just have to set a bit in the kernel. I managed to get it
halfway running, but I stopped working on it because I didn't have enough
experience and time to give it a polished interface. I was also afraid that I
was violating the USB spec and might fry my phone or a USB device :-). In the
end I decided that it was just not worth it and I wanted to spend my spare
time on other things in my life.

But it makes you wonder, were there really technical reasons, or was it either
1) "stop trying to make that work, we got to get the Nexus 5 out next year!"
or 2) "stop trying to make that work, we'd like to sell phones with larger
memory (that people won't buy if they can just plug in a pen drive) / our
partners would like to sell phones with larger memory / a evil cabal decided
that it should be hard to put pirated .mp3 and .mkv on a phone, so we must
make it as cumbersome as possible to get files onto there (MTP anybody?)"

Not saying that's what happened, but Googles behavior (intransparency and
quickly obsoleting even there flagship devices) erodes trust, and Google was
one of the last companies you could have trusted a bit.

~~~
verytrivial
Your experience and puzzlement regarding the Nexus 4 is basically identical to
mine.

------
apayan
tldr; this was fixed. It just didn't get marked as fixed by Google.

I was following this issue on the Nexus 4 (comment #20 of OP[1]), way back
when and even filed a more detailed follow up issue [2].

In short, the APIs needed for echo cancellation, noise suppression and
automatic gain adjustment weren't making use of the Nexus 4 hardware (lack of
driver, missing code, I don't know why). However, the issue was fixed in the
Android 4.3 OTA update.

I can verify this because at the time I was working on a VoIP app and my Nexus
4 was my primary phone and it was driving me mad. But in all fairness, it was
fixed by Google.

[1]
[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41626#c20](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41626#c20)

[2]
[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=42978](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=42978)

------
reedlaw
This is an issue that has affected my Nexus 4 since I purchased it two years
ago. It makes nearly all third-party voice apps unusable. I have not been able
use SIP dialers or Skype without the other side hearing echoes. I even
considered buying the Nexus 5 just to resolve this issue, but I'm not sure if
there are any fatal flaws affecting that phone which won't be resolved either.

~~~
pakled_engineer
my nexus 4 voice craps out for random reasons. I have to factory reset my
phone every 2-3 days.

I've even tried building my own rom, examining logcat to no avail, using
Cyanogenmod, using Paranoid Android doesn't matter voice cuts out at seemingly
random intervals.

Damn you LG

~~~
pja
There's a bug in the system somewhere breaking voice calls altogether on the
Nexus 4 which is apparently triggered by a recent change to Google Play
Services. Mostly the people affected are using third party ROMs (CyanogenMod
et al), but I believe it's also affecting some stock devices. Might be the
same problem?

Right now it's a choice between having a working phone with only partially
functioning Google Apps or working Google Apps with the phone not being, well,
a phone. Hopefully the CM crowd will be able to come up with a bugfix /
workaround of some sort that doesn't involve stopping half the Google Apps
from working properly.

(CM bug:
[https://jira.cyanogenmod.org/browse/CYAN-5728](https://jira.cyanogenmod.org/browse/CYAN-5728)
)

~~~
pakled_engineer
Android 5.0.1 seems to have fixed the problem, using factory image will build
my own image later to test again

------
amorphid
My Nexus 4 was pretty unstable when it got updated to Lollipop. I have one
specific memory of trying to use navigate from Point A to Point B on my first
day of work at a new job, only to have Google Maps crash about every 3
minutes. It seems to have gotten better with recent updates. At least Google
Maps isn't crashing anymore.

------
mbloom1915
For me, buying a Nexus 4 when it was first released meant there were multiple
tradeoffs in comparison to other smart phones on the market. The largest was
lack of support if anything went wrong with it in return for pure android
experience with frequent updates. There were certainly plenty of hardware and
software issues as the new device was naturally buggy and acted up upon app or
software updates. At the end of the day, tradeoffs are part of the android
experience I bought into and I wouldn't go back in time and buy any other
phone. Live with the nexus consequences or don't buy it, with technology
progressing so quickly in the mobile space every two years you should probably
be buying a new device if you are android advocate.

------
colig
Ever since updating to Lollipop, my Nexus 4 has had sudden restarts a few
times a week. It's a very disappointing reduction in quality which makes me
question whether to go Android for my next device. If Google can't support its
own hardware reliably then I don't see why anyone else should put their trust
in it.

------
josteink
It would be interesting to know if these bugs are in core Android or in the
Nexus 4 device-tree.

To me it sounds like they could potentially be fixed in third-party forks like
Cyanogenmod where Google isn't the only party deciding if a bug gets fixed or
not. Or maybe some already are fixed?

Any Nexus 4 owners here willing shed some light on this?

