> It's incredible to me that there is no bullet proof recovery mode for this, even something as dumb as an Arduino can recover from almost every form of abuse.

There's a bullet proof recovery mode, check my comment below ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39145490 ) where I detail the steps and provide links.

The EDL firehose mode is just the phone showing up on a very unique USB-ID and waiting to be spoon fed the data to be rewritten to its flash. It needs partition specifications (think like a GPT partition table) + the binary data for each partition (think like the EFI partition for the bootloader, the Windows partition for the actual operating system etc)

It would take litteraly 1 minute for someone with access to the QPST to post it to archive.org and help all the people who've been affected by the bug.

It would take each of them about 5 minutes to restore their phone to a working state. You may object that not everyone may have the technical ability to do that, but I'm sure the small businesses fixing phones in the malls would be happy to charge for the "service" of plugging the phone on a Windows computer, double-clicking on an icon, drag and dropping the right files and clicking on another button.

IMHO, the fact this situation is allowed to persist, even after multiple reports of similar pixel phone problems in the past, can only have 2 explanation: 1) the good people at google writing this software have less understanding that you and I, 2 random HN users or 2) there's money to be made in not fixing the problem, as it will increase the update cycle (people with a dead phone will buy another phone)

I'm all for making money, but not if the consequence is creating ewaste, and forcing people who may not have deep pockets to spend more money on yet another broken-by-design phone.

You forgot 3) It requires money to fix the problem, and Google has become such a bureaucratic mess, that it can't get out its own way to do it.

Those of us in large corporations see that pattern quite often.

> Those of us in large corporations see that pattern quite often.

It's sad there's such a dilution of responsibility such problems are allowed to persist, and that nobody cares they are killing random people phones.

That's way beyond most ordinary users though.

> That's way beyond most ordinary users though.

To take a broken phone to the mall where there're a small store that's known to fix phones?

Yes, precisely. That puts the onus for the fix squarely on the users, who have not created the problem and who likely will mis-identify it. If it were to happen to me - it won't - it would cost me half a day and that's assuming the 'small store in the mall' will be able to do the repair on the spot, which if there is a glut of customers due to this issue may well not be the case.