Tuesday, 16 June 2015

I'm getting shafted, who's to blame: Google or T-Mobile? (or myself?)

Samsung Galaxy Note 5 Gsmarena

This is probably the longest post I've ever written on reddit, pardon my n00b formatting.

There's a strange, yet widespread android flaw in the N6 on Sprint/T-Mobile.

So I previously had phones of the Samsung Galaxy line, they were good phones, but they always seemed to lack durability. I wanted to get more serious with my android development and figured why not get a Google Phone to stay ahead of the curve.

I figured I would try out google's flagship nexus 6. I go to the T-Mobile store, buy one- it was a GREAT phone. Super fast, super awesome- and most importantly reliable. Starting last week or so, service quality was progressively getting worse (at least to the point to where I perceived an issue). This week, it has gotten to be terrible and it fell below my threshold for acceptable service.

  • I am missing tons of calls, where people think I'm ignoring them.
  • I don't receive text messages until hours after they're sent, but the timestamp still shows the time they were supposed to arrive, making me think I simply didn't hear the notification.
  • The internet completely stops working for no reason, I hard reset- issue persists. (I pay extra for unlimited 4G)
  • I pay extra for caller ID... which doesn't even work. (I don't remember if it has ever worked on the N6, now that I think about it)

So I figure, it's probably just a defective phone. It should come with a warranty and if not- I also pay extra for insurance, so surely it will get replaced. I call T-Mobile and the service rep was extremely nice and didn't treat me like a dumbass like they usually do (none of the typical "plz hard reset your router" comcast-style troubleshooting). I explained that I work in the software industry and she skipped the typical BS for me. Then she mentioned the street that I live on and how there are two cellular towers being upgraded, explaining why my coverage was so severely degraded at home. She said the upgrade will be done in a few days and service would be restored and that it's just t-mobile adding additional capacity to my area. Makes sense. No biggie. She didn't immediately have an answer about the caller-ID, but it probably has something to do with the fact that the T-mobile names package isn't available on the Google Play store for my android build. In either case, the support rep led me to believe that this was simply a regional issue specific to the area around my house. I bought it.

Later on today, I'm out and about- same issues occur, even closer to the center of my major city. The same sporadic text messaging continues. I start to search and see if anyone else has this issue. It's not a fluke, this is a known issue and a very common one at that!! It has been reported almost verbatim as early as November of last year. I thought that I thoroughly researched my phone choices purchase when I decided on the N6, but boy was I wrong. I didn't want a bendy iPhone, didn't trust cyanogenmod as much as I trust google so no OnePlusOne. Because the same issue persists on Sprint, I can see the blame game happening where T-Mobile blames google, and vice versa. Who is at fault? Google or T-Mobile?

Some google searching uncovered numerous instances of the same issue:

After being with T-Mobile for over 10 years, I honestly feel betrayed that they knew this and didn't disclose it to their customers. The people reported the same story as me months ago, the same "adding capacity to your area" issue that was specific to the street I live on. I owned the phone for about a month now and for the first two weeks I didn't notice any issues at all. How can they charge customers fees for extra services on lines with devices that can't use them? Who will take ownership of this problem? Is T-mobile punishing those who don't want bloatware on their android devices or is Google not listening to the market to help carriers find a solution? What ever the case, this is the worst phone purchase ever- I'm considering ditching both and getting a OnePlusOne with another carrier. Bloated as it was, my Galaxy s2, s3, and s4 all worked pretty well.

What can an affected N6/T-mobile/Sprint customer do? It's hard to believe that this issue is so common, but the T-Mo tech support reps acted like it was news to them. I worked on a support team for AutoTrader and whenever service degradation impacted customers, all hell broke loose. You had to wake up in the middle of the night to restore services and thoroughly document incidents. People worked until the issue was resolved and at least acknowledged that an issue existed. I'm sure both T-mobile and Google knew that this is going on, yet they still haven't addressed it. If there were a homebrew-like fix for this, it would relinquish T-Mobile's support responsibilities, taking them off the hook.

How can I get this resolved because I really like the google phone's battery life, performance, and the physical build quality. One of the main value propositions of Android and specifically the Google phones is their ability to get the freshest releases. I'm starting to feel that this isn't so great after all. Kinda like in the workplace where you have to use RHEL 5, because you have to use RHEL 5, and that's why. If anyone is considering their next phone purchase, please keep this in mind!!

Here is version/build on my Google Nexus 6.

  • Android Version: 5.1.1
  • Build number: LYZ28E
  • Carrier: T-Mobile

As a side note, I do like how fast the phone gets to 100% charge-- TurboCharge! I guess the trade-off was only useless things like SMS/MMS/Caller-ID/Receiving Phone calls.



Submitted by nonconversant Samsung Galaxy Note 5 Gsmarena
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