The kinda-official LG G4 bootloop thread

[Leandro Otero]

Hi. I have had the same problem. I'm from Argentina and bought my phone in Spain. Argentina's LG service tell me that repair it will cost u$400 They are insane!

Bye LG. G4 was its flagship, its not possible that from one day to another it stop working....

Any possible solution?

Thanks

 

[Notlimited98]

I have a LG G4 that I bought in July 2015 with the dreaded bootloop happen in April 2016. At the time LG was promising to fix all of these phones so I sent it in to LG to be fixed only to wait 1 month and they returned it unfixed after about 3 weeks, claiming that it was water damaged. It was NOT water damaged and the damage indicator was crystal white. Not only that but they broke the plastic covering over the back flashlight so that when I tried to exchange this bricked phone with Tmobile I was told that this constitutes physical damage. I went back to LG again and told them that not only did they not fix the phone but they actually caused physical damage and they told me to send it back again and that was about a month ago. It seems that now they've actually lost the phone or something and I've been without the phone for 4 months and I'm still paying for it! Any advice on how I can either get my phone back working or stop paying for this non-existent phone?

 

[talonsmith]

Got my phone back, the slip says they replaced the "board". I mailed it out on the 25th and have it back and working on the 5th of august.

Its loaded all my apps (thanks helium!) and I am back and running again. Still on the fence on keeping this with that hanging over my head of another failure with heavy use.

 

[gendo667]

Its loaded all my apps (thanks helium!) and I am back and running again. Still on the fence on keeping this with that hanging over my head of another failure with heavy use.

Ditch it. Any phone with the 820 paired with 4 gigs of ram performs better and is better regarding battery. The G5, IMO, is much better than my old G4.

 

[Sevenmack]

My G4, with serial number beginning with 505, bricked last month. This the second G4 I have owned in seven months - and the previous one also had motherboard issues. I could have gotten another G4 from Sprint. But this time, I went out and bought an HTC One M9 instead. At least HTC is reliable.

 

[ArshWar]

I found this on another thread and it helped me recover some files before I try to send it to LG.
Charge the phone to 100% then use a hot blow dryer on it til the phone is hot but not so hot that it shuts down from an overheat. Then try turning the phone on. If it doesnt work the first time try again. It came on the second try for me. I pulled the battery between attempts. It let me turn it on long enough to transfer some photos off of it. I kept the blow dryer on it every once in a while to keep it warm. Some people tried freezing the phone for 20 minutes with some success as well but I didnt try that. I hope this helps some people here. Good luck!

 

[kwegs]

So this week my husbands finally bricked up, mine died in June. After all of the back and forth with both Verizon and Best Buy a random Google search today to find out exactly which model we had for the insurance claim led me to this site and a Eureka moment! Not one person I've been in contact with mentioned anything about this issue or a recall. And two of these people were the ones that sold us these phones last year and I believe they didn't know. My question is what is LG ding about it? Those of you who got replacement, did you have to pay the insurance deductible? Did they refund any money that you had paid for the phone? Any insight will be appreciated as I try to navigate through this mess. Thanks all.

 

[jhilker]

So this week my husbands finally bricked up, mine died in June. After all of the back and forth with both Verizon and Best Buy a random Google search today to find out exactly which model we had for the insurance claim led me to this site and a Eureka moment! Not one person I've been in contact with mentioned anything about this issue or a recall. And two of these people were the ones that sold us these phones last year and I believe they didn't know. My question is what is LG ding about it? Those of you who got replacement, did you have to pay the insurance deductible? Did they refund any money that you had paid for the phone? Any insight will be appreciated as I try to navigate through this mess. Thanks all.

I'm with Sprint, and did not have to pay for a replacement through insurance. I think you could also send the phones back to LG, and they would repair free of charge.

I'm really surprised no one was familiar with this, though...

 

[Mooncatt]

I'm really surprised no one was familiar with this, though...

I think many times they are, and just trying to make us think it's not a big problem. After all, who are you going to believe, the employees or a few random people on the internet? [/sarcasm]

 

[njr]

Well my AT&T replacement just bricked after two months. The first one lasted from Nov- June and bricked then That is exactly what I was afraid of. the refurbs may have been repaired for other issues and they did not just do a wholesale fix on all the units. AT&T is sending me another one but it looks like it is an even earlier serial number than the one I had. I chatted with LG and they said I could send it to them but that there is no official fix or statement from corporate.

 

[graysonk95]

Prior to learning of this issue, the LG G4 was my favorite smartphone, hands down, after years of Samsung ownership.
I seem pretty lucky to have had my 508-numbered H815 last me a full 10 months of use, but it finally died on me in the middle of a nighttime road trip, leaving me stranded in a different state with no phone or GPS at 1am. By far the most frustratingly inconvenient time to have this happen (do I win an award?)

I utilized the “freezer trick” once I returned home to fully backup the internal storage, but after trying the “oven trick” as instructed, my phone is 100% unresponsive. Will not boot/buzz/blink/etc.

Of course, I only resorted to the oven after confirming with LGEAI that they will not provide any assistance, other than telling me to ship my phone to LG U.K., “at a cost” (without guaranteeing a fix), and that they “wish there was an answer”. What a sorry excuse for customer service. If you are in the same boat as me, H815 or not, call/email/chat them if not just to make them aware of the scope of this problem.

My only option I can think of now would be seeing if my local cell repair guy has a hopelessly broken 509+ H810/H811 that I could buy the board out of and swap components to make a franken-phone. Or if his supplier has any, new. I’m not paying $180 for some unverifiable H815 eBay board from China.
And why can’t I even find an H810/H811 board online anywhere? Planned obsolescence at its best. Well done LG.

I guess it’s time to go back to Samsung now that they re-introduced microSD support? Still no removable battery though…

 

[talonsmith]

Prior to learning of this issue, the LG G4 was my favorite smartphone, hands down, after years of Samsung ownership.
I seem pretty lucky to have had my 508-numbered H815 last me a full 10 months of use, but it finally died on me in the middle of a nighttime road trip, leaving me stranded in a different state with no phone or GPS at 1am. By far the most frustratingly inconvenient time to have this happen (do I win an award?)

I utilized the “freezer trick” once I returned home to fully backup the internal storage, but after trying the “oven trick” as instructed, my phone is 100% unresponsive. Will not boot/buzz/blink/etc.

Of course, I only resorted to the oven after confirming with LGEAI that they will not provide any assistance, other than telling me to ship my phone to LG U.K., “at a cost” (without guaranteeing a fix), and that they “wish there was an answer”. What a sorry excuse for customer service. If you are in the same boat as me, H815 or not, call/email/chat them if not just to make them aware of the scope of this problem.

My only option I can think of now would be seeing if my local cell repair guy has a hopelessly broken 509+ H810/H811 that I could buy the board out of and swap components to make a franken-phone. Or if his supplier has any, new. I’m not paying $180 for some unverifiable H815 eBay board from China.
And why can’t I even find an H810/H811 board online anywhere? Planned obsolescence at its best. Well done LG.

I guess it’s time to go back to Samsung now that they re-introduced microSD support? Still no removable battery though…

I was on the same boat Grayson, on long roadtrip and it dies when I needed GPS the most.
Bought a crappy prepay android phone to get me through the trip and got LG to replace it. Sucks you have the out of country model, LG came through for me.

 

[talonsmith]

PS- This topic and the other Bootloop seem to be the most important threads and get reposted daily, why aren't the stickies updated?

The other stickies are irrelevant now.

 

[Guytronic]

^^^
I've been following a bootloop thread on a different forum.
As of today there were 1529 replies about this problem there.
When I started following there the count was 850 or so.
Lately 3-4 new replies per day are popping up.

 

[jaydee5799]

So this week my husbands finally bricked up, mine died in June. After all of the back and forth with both Verizon and Best Buy a random Google search today to find out exactly which model we had for the insurance claim led me to this site and a Eureka moment! Not one person I've been in contact with mentioned anything about this issue or a recall. And two of these people were the ones that sold us these phones last year and I believe they didn't know. My question is what is LG ding about it? Those of you who got replacement, did you have to pay the insurance deductible? Did they refund any money that you had paid for the phone? Any insight will be appreciated as I try to navigate through this mess. Thanks all.

No one at VZW was familiar with this when mine went in May...about 8 months after i bought it. Since I called VZW. they replaced it with a new one and sent it in two days.

 

[jaydee5799]

^^^
I've been following a bootloop thread on a different forum.
As of today there were 1529 replies about this problem there.
When I started following there the count was 850 or so.
Lately 3-4 new replies per day are popping up.

yeah. no good news. I still haven't gotten anything but 6.0 as my OS upgrade either. Won't LG create some kind of patch to add to the OS?

 

[uw]

Just got an ATT version with 601 serial number. Read some people were having issues with 602 serial. Any other news/update on US versions with 6XX serial numbers?

 

[njr]

OK so I had an AT&T 505 that I got in Nov of '15. It bricked in June and I got a 506 under AT&T Warranty. That bricked last weekend and I just got another 505 in return. I believe that if the phone was sent back for any other reason than the brick issue the brick issue is not addressed. So, all I can do is pray that this one happened to have had the issue and the motherboard was replaced. For those of you who haven't bricked yet, as a " professional" on this issue now I have noticed that a day or so before it bricks the battery goes through a very rapid discharge period. Perhaps that can serve as a warning to back up any media that may not back up automatically via google etc.

 

[Guytronic]

For those of you who haven't bricked yet, as a " professional" on this issue now I have noticed that a day or so before it bricks the battery goes through a very rapid discharge period. Perhaps that can serve as a warning to back up any media that may not back up automatically via google etc.

Good tip.
Thanx I'll make a note of this.

 

[graysonk95]

Interesting, I didn't take note of anything like that happening on my 509 H815.
That particular day I had been awake, disconnected from a charger, for almost 20 hours when mine bootloped out of the blue. IIRC, I had about 30% battery at that point, which is actually better than expected for a very long day of moderate use.
The phone wasn't acting up at all beforehand.

I think a more accurate suggestion is, if you own an LG G4 period, back up your data and have a replacement phone waiting in the wings.


I gave up trying to find a donor phone to salvage the motherboard. The more I read, the more I learned no serial number is truly immune from issues. I'm just going to part out my phone to recoup my losses.
Then I'm actually going to buy a brand new G4... A Moto G4 Plus. Sayonara LG!