A night with the Sprint HTC One M7 Lollipop upgrade
My wife’s Sprint HTC One M7 got the notification of an update yesterday. Since she went to bed before I did, I decided to play with her phone a bit and see what was up with the new update in the unrooted Lollipop world. What started as a simple upgrade quickly lead into a series of problems, all surmountable.
I’ll point out this is not me bashing HTC or complaining, this is just what happened.
Kim isn’t interested in rooting her phone, as such she’s got the ultimate user phone: filled with pictures, applications that haven’t been touched in forever, and a series of notifications that probably have been there since the first week we got her the phone. Imagine my repulsion at her phone’s state, which equals her repulsion at my desk state, so I got over it.
The update downloaded in about ten minutes on our 60Mbps wired connection. I got to installing it at about 11:30 p.m. I expected it to be up and running by midnight, but I saw 12:30 roll by before the phone had finished installing the update and I got past the “Android is Upgrading” message. It was the longest update I’ve ever seen, although when you’ve got a lot of applications on the phone I guess that’s standard.
The update installed, the main screen reached, I was greeted by a series of warnings, errors, and weirdness. The first notification was that Google Play Services had to be updated – OK, no biggie. The next was that Qualcomm Izat services needed to be enabled, I tried but the app was frozen for two or three minutes, then checked and it worked. Next multiple things had to be re-authorized, OK no biggie.
There was a notice that there were 70+ unlistened to voicemails… OK, that was new. Roughly half of the 140 or so voicemails on Sprint’s Visual Voicemail were showing as unlistened. I chose select all and mark as read/listened. This didn’t work. No matter what I did selecting everything and choosing to mark as read it didn’t work. Easy enough solution was to go to the first unread and then just swipe through them until they all listed as read.
I got a message that Google Play was not responding, noticed apps were installing in the background, ignored it. Got another message that there had been an error and to report it to HTC. OK, this was getting kind of erroriffic at this point. I started taking screenshots (which I don’t have, we’ll get to that). Error reported, I moved on.
That’s when I noticed the message that LTE had been disabled due to an invalid SIM. This was a new one. I figured I’d go into hands-free activation and clear that right up. Except hands free activation didn’t work. Nor did any of the normal fixes like update profile, update PRL.
As nothing had been done to the SIM, account is paid, and it worked pre-Lollipop, I decided to do the unthinkable. I turned it off and back on again. That fixed it.
But the Qualcomm Izat notification asking me to turn it on was back. I re-checked the box, decided to reboot for shits and giggles, and the Qualcomm Izat enable notification is back. While I didn’t do to much troubleshooting on it, it’ll be data wiped and/or hidden later tonight if it comes back.
Fearing the phone would die while I was playing with it, I plugged it into a wall charger. I’ll point out this wall charger has never ever had an issue being recognized as a USB device, but the M7 popped up and asked me what I wanted to do with this USB connection: drive, share my internet, etc.
As I didn’t care to share the internet with a wall socket I just unplugged it. The USB connection icon remained. I plugged it back into the wall charger, no change. No matter what I did the USB connected notification stayed up. I finally rebooted to get that notification to go away.
I didn’t notice any application failures or accounts that didn’t traverse, but there were a lot of bugs the appeared as part of the upgrade.
While generally I’d be prone to blame the general messiness of the phone, there were no apps that should have interfered, I have not rooted the thing nor have I unlocked the bootloader, this should have been an effortless and crash free operating system upgrade, but it wasn’t.
At least on my wife’s Sprint HTC One M7 the extra few days HTC asked for to squash bugs didn’t seem to translate into a flawless user experience.
The list of problems I saw
- Qualcomm Izat app refuses to take checked box
- USB connected sticks when plugged into a wall charger
- USB connected misidentifying connection
- SIM error that disables LTE until reboot
- Hands Free Activation / PRL / Profile errors when SIM error in effect
- Sprint Visual Voicemail not honoring “mark as read”
- Demon puppies
- Services crashing on first boot after upgrade
This however is the Sprint variant, my wife’s phone, and everything except the Qualcomm and USB issues seem to have been surmounted with reboots and playing around with the thing a bit.
All in all once it’s running it’s been smoother. My bet is a couple of these remaining issues might be solved by factory resetting the thing, but this is just about what I experienced during the upgrade. As such, your experience will probably vary.
At 3:00 a.m., with most of the bugs squashed, I noticed her Dropbox was full and I was tired. Not thinking about it this morning the phone slipped out of my clutches, so I’ll attempt to post screenshots of the various errors later.
