Google Doesn’t Want You To Downgrade Your Pixel 4a From Its ‘update Of Death’

David Imel / Android Authority

Pixel 4a users have been on a wild ride on their trusty old phone ever since Google rolled out a surprise battery update. Under the Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program, the update seemingly improves the battery on certain Pixel 4a units, but it made matters significantly worse for many users. Users had been scrambling to downgrade to older updates, but Google has now closed that road by removing download links for these older firmware.

A Reddit user noticed that Google used to host almost three years’ worth of firmware images for the Pixel 4a, ranging from its out-of-the-box Android 10 update to the last Android 13 update when the device reached its end-of-life status. This is fairly standard practice by Google, as it hosts a lot of older firmware for practically all of its recent devices.

However, Google has gone ahead and removed all older firmware for the Pixel 4a (codename: sunfish). The only firmware that the company now officially hosts for the Pixel 4a is the newest January 2025 surprise battery update (TQ3A.230805.001.S2), which users have also started calling the ‘update of death’ as it renders the device practically unusable. For so many Pixel 4a users, their device still powers on and functions on this update, but battery life has been so severely impacted that their phone barely survives half an hour of screen-on time.

Google usually doesn’t remove older firmware unless there is something deeply problematic with them, like a hardbrick bug, for instance. So, for this wave of removal, there must have been some bigger issue with the firmware to warrant such a move.

Unfortunately, Google hasn’t communicated its reason for removing older firmware. We’ve contacted the company again to learn more about the Pixel 4a’s battery update in general and this wave of firmware update removals in particular. We’ll keep you updated when we learn more.

As we noted in our previous report, users who hadn’t received this surprise update had begun resorting to blocking network requests. Others had been looking to install older LineageOS custom ROMs, while some were looking to downgrade to the previous end-of-life update they had happily been on for many months. With the removal of older firmware, users will likely end up with rehosted links. It’s a bad idea to download rehosted firmware as they could have been tampered with, so we’d advise users from going down this route.

Are you impacted by the Pixel 4a’s ‘update of death’? How has your experience been? How much did Google quote you for a repair? Are you exploring alternate solutions like installing a custom ROM? Let us know in the comments below!

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