Google’s fix for a Pixel phone storage bug, the second one in the past four months, is a very technical manual process requiring access to developer tools surface筆電收購

surface筆電收購
ed that some Pixel owners were being locked out of their phone’s local storage, creating a nearly useless phone with all sorts of issues. Many blamed the January 2024 Google Play system update for the issue, and yesterday, Google confirmed that hypothesis. Google posted an official solution to the issue on the Pixel Community Forums, but there’s no user-friendly solution here. Google’s automatic update system broke people’s devices, but the fix is completely manual, requiring users to download the developer tools, install drivers, change settings, plug in their phones, and delete certain files via a command-line interface.
The good news is that, if you’ve left your phone sitting around in a nearly useless state for the last week or two, following the directions means you won’t actually lose any data. Having a week or two of downtime is not acceptable to a lot of people, though, and several users replied to the thread saying they had already wiped their device to get their phone working again and had to deal with the resulting data loss (despite many attempts and promises, Android does not have a comprehensive backup system that works).
Advertisement

The bad news is that I don’t think many normal users will be able to follow Google’s directions. First, you’ll need to perform the secret action to enable Android’s Developer Options (you tap on the build number seven times). Then, you have to download Google’s “SDK Platform-Tools” zip file, which is meant for app developers. After that, plug in your phone, switch to the correct “File transfer” connection mode, open a terminal, navigate to the platform-tools folder, and run both “./adb uninstall com.google.android.media.swcodec” and “./adb uninstall com.google.android.media.” Then reboot the phone and hope that works.
I skipped a few steps (please read Google’s instructions if you’re trying this), but that’s the basic gist of it. The tool Google is having people use is “ADB,” or the “Android Debug Bridge.” This is meant to give developers command-line access to their phones, which allows them to quickly push new app builds to the device, get a readout of system logs, and turn on special developer flags for various testing.
Google’s instructions will only work if everything goes smoothly, and as someone with hundreds of hours in ADB from testing various Android versions, I will guess that it will probably not go smoothly. On Windows, the ADB drivers often don’t install automatically. Instead, you’ll get “unknown device” or some other incorrect device detection, and you won’t be able to run any commands. You usually have to use the “let me pick from drivers on my computer” option, browse through your file system, and manually “select” (more like “guess”) the driver you need while clicking through various warnings. You can already see at least one user with driver issues in the thread, with Windows telling them, “Your device has malfunctioned,” when really it just needs a driver.

Page: 1 2 Next →

reader comments
163

Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He loves to tinker and always seems to be working on a new project.

Advertisement

（圖／翻攝高通網站）

高通發表旗下最強的筆電晶片 Snapdragon X Elite，聲稱效能足以比下蘋果 M2 以及 Intel。稍早官方進一步公開合作夥伴，台灣兩大知名電腦品牌都入列！

首波確定採用 Snapdragon X Elite 晶片打造筆電的有宏碁、華碩、Dell、HP、聯想、榮耀、微軟 surface筆電收購surface、三星與小米等 9 大品牌。數量比起過往要增加許多，先前長期承諾會採用 Snapdragon 晶片的僅有聯想、HP 與微軟，或說明高通這一代 Snapdragon X Elite 的效能進步幅度，吸引了不少品牌關注。

請繼續往下閱讀…

高通表示，對比 Intel 第 13 代的筆電處理器 i7-1360P、i7-1355U，Snapdragon X Elite 擁有 2 倍的 CPU 效能，還減少 68% 功耗。內建的 GPU 效能可以達到 Intel i7-13800H 兩倍快，峰值功耗降低 74%。對比蘋果 M2 晶片，則在多線程 CPU 快上 50%。

搭載 Snapdragon X Elite 的筆電預計會在 2024 年陸續登場，不過由於採用的是 ARM 架構，而非傳統電腦常見的 x86 架構，要如何克服軟體生態、支援性問題，仍將是高通與微軟的一大挑戰。

surface筆電收購 surface筆電收購