Very Strange Phone Behavior - Is It Broken?

[arelg]

Sorry for the vague title but I can't think of a succinct way to describe the strange behavior.

First of all, in case it is relevant, I have turned off the "ambient" display of time and that worked fine for at least a day. But last night I noticed that my phone was taking a long time to wake up. I.E. I would press/release the wake-up/powerdown/powerup button and it would take a full 3-4 seconds before the screen lit up. Then this morning I noticed that the time display was not appearing even when I lifted up the phone. I didn't have an opportunity to notice if notifications were waking-up the time display. Then I noticed that the camera was completely broken. When I clicked on the camera icon I got a completely black screen except for three icons at the bottom of the screen (a left pointing triangle, the home circle, and a square). Then at some point this morning I tried to wake up the phone and saw a completely white screen except for "GOOGLE" displayed in the center of the screen in several colors. This persisted for a while but I have no idea for how long. And then ... the phone was back to normal behavior and has been for at least 5 hours.

Does this make any sense?

Thanks, Bob

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Which phone? Does this persist after a reboot, or in Safe Mode?

 

[arelg]

Hi B. Diddy. Thanks for your interest. It's an unlocked Pixel 2 purchased from Google. I use it on AT&T. The problem seems to have gone away without my having done anything. I didn't reboot. And I don't know how to put it into Safe Mode. I don't know if cell phones can reboot themselves. But if that's possible maybe it did reboot itself. But if so not until long after I noticed the first symptom. My concern now is that it could happen again. The slow to wake up problem is only annoying. But the camera not working is serious. Thanks, Bob

 

[Rukbat]

Safe mode is press the power button until you get the shutoff/restart icons, then long-press the restart icon and you'll be asked if you want to restart in safe mode. To get out of safe mode, just restart normally.

 

[B. Diddy]

When you get the phone into Safe Mode, see if the problems persist. If not, then some app you installed is causing the issue -- you may have to uninstall apps one by one until the problem goes away.

 

[arelg]

Thank you both. I have no new apps but I think that I got new versions of apps when I migrated my old Nexus to the new Pixel 2. I am thinking that if/when it happens again I will try to stop running apps one at a time. An app would have to be running to cause a problem, right? I guess that might not be possible but since the phone is not completely dead I am hoping that it will be possible to kill specific apps. Thanks again. Bob

 

[B. Diddy]

I'm not sure if simply stopping a running app would be enough, because a culprit app could be restarted relatively quickly by the system, and it's not always obvious when the app is restarted. Safe Mode is a good start, because it can broadly determine if the problem is due to an app you installed (which gets disabled temporarily in Safe Mode) or a preinstalled/system app (which doesn't get disabled in Safe Mode).

It doesn't necessarily matter if you haven't installed any new apps lately -- apps get updated frequently, and any update can potentially include bugs, so one of your usual apps could still be the culprit.