Nexus 7 fandroids tell of salty taste after sucking on Google's Lollipop

android

I'm getting quite fed up of buggy android (I've not yet updated to lollipop on my 2013 Nexus7) the damn thing crashes and hangs or loses some function on a weekly basis, resulting in the need to reboot. Does anyone else have a 2013 Nexus7 like this?

I had wished I had snapped up a Nexus 7, they looked really good, and the price (around $200) was just right. Now with this 'upgrade', and the ridiculous price Google are charging for the Nexus 6 ($400!!) I think I'll stick with my old ipad. Google getting a bit greedy, perhaps?

Google finally finds out how it feels....

Looks like Google gets to join Apple and MS in feeling user wrath. Let's see if they respond any differently than the others after the initial "we're looking into this".

Funnily enough, reverse was true for me. 4.4 had really bogged down my 2012 N7 to a crawl, trying to open an app or switch between them would take around 10 seconds. Did a wipe and reset, all returned to normal, updated to 5 when the OTA upgrade arrived a few days after that, all still fine.

Like Windows PCs, these things do slow down when they accumulate too much cruft and need the odd reinstall. Plus I gather a number of apps aren't quite suited to 5 yet, so cause problems - probably why mine's fine as I didn't reinstall all the junk that had built up since I bought it!

The iPad on the other hand does seem to get more sluggish with every update..

Trim

Isn't this related to trim support?

My nexus 5 is noticeably laggier. There's no way I'm loading this onto my 7.

2012 Nexus 7

The Tegra3 chipset and 3.1 kernel in the 2012 N7 aren't exactly modern these days. I guess NVidia/Asus couldn't be bothered porting the drivers to a newer kernel, even for the Lollipop update.

Testing

Why can't the multi billion dollar Google afford one of each device, however old, to test their crap on?

My 2012 Nexus 7 is like one of those old cars in movies now.

It splutters and crawls along, then suddenly (like in those movies where the protagonist talks to the old girl for one last race) it speeds along very nicely and then it sort of falls apart and the System UI dies and I go to bed/work/lunch.

The old 4.4 did similar but not so badly.

And every time I restart it I get an "Android updating ... starting apps" screen.

+1 on this story.

Buggy, slow random crashes. Oddly able to jump through the login sometimes without entering the code. Firefox pretty fvcked up.

Battery taking ages to charge. Bring back 4.2

My 2012 N7 has been slow for ages

When I first got my Nexus 7 back in 2012 it was a speedy little thing, and remained so until earlier this year. Android 4.4 didn't slow it down, but sometime around this summer maybe it slowed to a crawl, errors would spring up about applications not responding, and the thing would take forever to start up, open apps etc. especially when compared to my Nexus 5. I tried reflashing it, performing factory resets and so on but nothing seemed to help. From looking on sites like XDA Developers and Android Police it appears that the issue is to do with the NAND storage the 2012 Nexus 7 uses - the 2013 model is supposedly unaffected.

Nexus 2012

Last weekend I flashed my Nexus 2012 with Lollipop, so all the apps were removed and reinstalled afterwards.

I have noticed a few odd things. Like the poster above, I once did manage to "skip" the password lock screen which is worrying, but I haven't managed to reproduce it

I haven't had any crashes yet. iPlayer works properly now with no stuttering after ~25 mins. However, the tablet in general has slowed to a crawl. I can open the magnetic cover and wait around 10 seconds before I can enter my lock code. What is it doing! It's almost as if the NAND controller has a 5 second sleep built into it

No problem with my Nexus 7/2013

I had the developper preview sideloaded with no problems generally; on the day of the release I sideloaded the real version and again everything has been as smooth as is to be expected. I do tend to limit the number of programs running, though.

The WiFi draining bug of the developper preview has now gone, mine is now good for 2 to 3 days on a single charge (befeore I had to place it in airplane mode to be sure to have power for the evening use).

Seems to be quite a bit smoother than Kitkat on my (WiFi) Nexus 7 (2012). I couldn't be bothered to wait for OTA and don't use Android enough to care about having to wipe my device, so I installed it from the Nakasi factory image for Lollipop leaked a few days ago. So maybe OTA isn't the way to go? Or I'm lucky?

I loaded the factory image onto my Nexus 7 (2012) and so far (touch wood) it's been absolutely fine. I've come across a couple of apps that I reinstalled that don't appear compatible with Lollipop, but thats it so far.

It's really just the N7 2012 that is affected, and it's not even really related to Lollipop. It's more likely people are starting to use their Nexus 7 again after the update to Lollipop because they want to see what it is like, but they appear to have forgotten how terrible the Nexus 7 2012 had become BEFORE the Lollipop update. I factory flashed Lollipop on to mine, and it wasn't terribly usable before the flash. The method of getting Lollipop onto the tablet whether via OTA or factory flash makes no difference, the problem of shitty NAND is hardware not software and one of the few things that helps (which of course a factory flash does anyway) is clear /cache which will bring the tablet back to life again for a few days.

It is worth noting - that the tablet does in fact run speedier between slowdowns - and in my experience the slowdowns thus far have been cause by heavier IO use, in particular - when updating or installing something via the Play Store - because ART uses more space than DALVIK did - the tablet spends a longer time writing to NAND and you might as well not bother touching the tablet while that process is ongoing.

My nexus7 (2012) updated OTA, and touch wood (anyone got a forest handy?) it seems to be OK. We use it a lot as a baby monitor for a foscam, so screen, processor, wifi etc are used a lot, and so far so good. Its a bit sluggish but no more than before, and could probably do worth a clear out of cache. must check my 4 year old sons profile - he has a habit of leaving a number of games running, which obviously does not help things!

No surprise

The latest version of the Gmail app is a total dog and the UI has regressed to something less usable. I gather this is the new Lolipop style so its no great surprise that the OS is a total dog too.

Nexus 7 2012 & Nexus 4 Sideloaded with Lollipop

The Nexus 4 runs beautifully, this update has breathed new life into the phone, I have moved on to a OnePlus One though, and seeing Lollipop on the N4 I can't wait for it on the OnePlus One :)

The Nexus 7 2012 runs like a dog - it improved slightly by wiping the cache from the Bootloader>Recovery menu but still frustrating to use, unless you are very patient!!

Time left and time to charge are great additions to the OS.

Not running terribly well

But..my N7 2012 is loaded down with far more than I need and could probably do with a wipe and re-install. However, apart from a brief stutter of a couple of seconds in switching apps or loading a web page I had no issues with 4.4.4. Now I'm getting hang ups of 30 seconds plus .

It definitely isn't due to not using it enough to tell the difference. Firefox seems extremely bad, completely hanging the device.

Losing widgets ticked me off, I had a different clock on my lockscreen purely because I don't lke the plain Google offering.

However, Lollipop itself is a nice upgrade, notifications and general UI use feels nice. Just freezing up often enough to be frustrating.