Multiple phones with random, continuous restarts until crash to Android Recovery screen

[ktbonefish]

Starting with a Pixel 9 Pro I bought back in December the phone worked until it started restarting itself and going into a restart loop. It would restart as soon as it came to the unlock screen and in a few seconds restart again until after however many loops of this it crashes to the Android Recovery screen. Factory resets on the phone help for a few days but eventually the problem always comes back. I returned the 9 Pro and went back to my 7 which worked fine. Months later I got the 9a when it released and it started doing the same exact thing. Two warranty replacements later I gave up and went back to my 7 again. Google support said it was a hardware issue each time and did a warranty replacement, though they did no actual troubleshooting. My Pixel 7 has been great for a couple years except now within the past few weeks it started experiencing the same problem too.

I have now had this issue happen on multiple different Pixel devices.

• Pixel 9 Pro
• 3x Pixel 9a
• Pixel 7

Symptoms:

• Phone becomes extremely sluggish where you can barely enter your PIN at times.
• Apps like System Settings or Digital Wellbeing will crash within seconds of accessing and display a "This app has stopped working" alert.
• Phone will randomly restart until it gets to a point it continually restarts as soon as it hits the unlock screen or a few seconds after.
• The issue happens in Safe mode, airplane mode, and normal mode.
• Happens whether i'm actively using the phone or not.

Here's a 3x sped-up video of the issue:

https://imgur.com/a/XaNeHVj

Screenshot of the Android Recovery screen:

https://imgur.com/a/XaNeHVj

I'm pretty sure there's a memory leak in some service since when I look at the debug logs I have taken from the various phones I see almost all the services are crashing with Out of Memory dumps like below.

2025-07-10 10:02:59 system_server_crash (text, 1625 bytes)
SystemUptimeMs: 24345230
Process: system_server
Timestamp: 2025-07-10 10:02:59.360-0600
Build: google/panther/panther:16/BP2A.250705.008/13578956:user/release-keys
Crash-Handler: com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$KillApplicationHandler
Loading-Progress: 1.0
Dropped-Count: 0

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Failed to allocate a 10939392 byte allocation with 10221344 free bytes and 9981KB until OOM, target footprint 536870912, growth limit 536870912

2025-07-10 01:00:14 system_app_crash (text, 3106 bytes)
SystemUptimeMs: 8643153
Process: com.android.settings
PID: 23807
UID: 1000
Frozen: false
Flags: 0x38cbbe45
Package: com.android.settings v36 (16)
Foreground: No
Process-Runtime: 1617222
Timestamp: 2025-07-10 01:00:14.204-0600
Build: google/panther/panther:16/BP2A.250705.008/13578956:user/release-keys
Crash-Handler: com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$KillApplicationHandler
Loading-Progress: 1.0
Dropped-Count: 0

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Failed to allocate a 80 byte allocation with 974848 free bytes and 952KB until OOM, target footprint 268435456, growth limit 268435456; giving up on allocation because <1% of heap free after GC.


Does anyone have any suggestions on what could be causing this and how to fix it? Or how I could troubleshoot it further?