Want To Ditch The Pixel 4a’s Terrible Update? You’re Out Of Luck!

The year just started, and Google is already tangled up in a bit of a controversy. Just a couple of days ago, the company sent out an update that killed the Pixel 4a’s experience, leaving users furious. Well, if you received the terrible Pixel 4a update, you’re stuck with it.

To catch you up, Google released an update for 2020’s Pixel 4a, and it really destroyed the user experience. For some reason, the update had a huge impact on the phone’s battery life. Users were reporting having their phones die after very little usage. One user said that their phone would die after an hour of usage while another one mentioned that their phone would drop “from full->2% with some very light use“.

This was a surprise update that came out of left field. What made it more surprising was the fact that Google had already dropped support for the Pixel 4a. Google gave a vague description as to why it pushed the update. The company “determined that certain Pixel 4a phones require a software update to improve the stability of their battery’s performance,” as per the changelog. That was it.

This is bad news, but it gets worse. If you’re a tech-savvy person who knows how to downgrade to older versions of the software, you’d likely be looking for the older firmware versions. Well, Google took them all down. This was also surprising, as holding onto the older firmware versions is something that Google typically does.

It would retain a few years’ worth of firmware builds for its Pixel phones, and this included the Pixel 4a. The company had the Android 10 version all the update to its final Android 13 update. However, a Reddit user found that Google had removed all of them.

Just like the update itself, Google didn’t state why it had to get rid of the firmware versions. Despite the outrage across the community, the company is staying quiet about it.

One theory

This is only speculation, but one reason could be that the Pixel 4a launched with some sort of battery defect that Google didn’t discover until just now. In order to prevent a repeat of the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, the company could be limiting the phone’s battery performance.

If this is so, then it could be why the company isn’t telling the community. A company wouldn’t want to tell its users, “You’ve been using a ticking time bomb for four years.” Again, this is only speculation. In any case, hopefully, Google will give us a reason for this, as users are still enjoying their Pixel 4as.