Dear forum community,

I have a now unsupported Pixel 5 phone that I have been using with GrapheneOS for a couple of years now. This morning, the home screen started flashing all of a sudden and made the phone almost unusable. There is a small time window, perhaps a few seconds after rebooting the device that you can tap the phone app for example to be able to call someone; otherwise, the only non-flashing screen I can get is by pulling down notifications from the top of the screen. After several seconds of flashing, the phone gives me an error message stating that the launcher keeps stopping with three options: App info, Close app, Show details. Choosing the last option takes me to an error log, which I cannot paste here since I cannot use any app on my phone! A small portion of the message is as follows:
type: crash
osVersion: google/redfin/redfin:14/
UP1A.........
package: com.android.launcher3:34
process: com.android.launcher3
processUptime: 681 + 380 ms
a lot more lines....
Thankfully, when an app like this or the notification area is open, the phone is usable. Please help!

Just a correction to my last paragraph: When the notification area is open, the screen is readable; the phone is still unusable since no app can be launched.

More info from the error message:
java.time.DateTimeException: Invalid ID for offset-based ZoneIdL GMT+19:00 at java.time.ZoneId.ofWithPrefix(ZoneId.java:430) at java.time.ZoneId.of(ZoneId.java:400) at java.time.ZoneId.of(ZoneId.java:352) at java.time.ZoneId.of(ZoneId.java:308) at ......

Is there a way to figure out if this is a hardware vs software issue?

  • de0u replied to this.

    Try changing your time zone settings to manual with a manual time zone. If that doesn't work, try clearing data for the launcher.

    Please provide us with more information such as which time zone you're using and the carrier.

    This could be a carrier rolling out a new time zone that's not properly supported or something similar. We haven't seen an issue like this before but a 2nd person reported this after you did on the issue tracker here:

    https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4122

    It's very strange.

    The 2nd person to report it has said the issue stopped occurring for them.

    Thank you for the replies! This is how I solved the problem:

    1. Cleared cache of the launcher, but it wasn't enough.
    2. Cleared launcher storage, which reset the home screen(s) but it solved the issue.
    3. Started adding apps, widgets to home screen one by one, and when I added the NOAA weather widget, the problem reappeared.
      Therefore, I concluded that the widget mentioned above must have screwed up the time zone settings somehow. I am not using that widget anymore and things are back to normal. The app that the widget comes with (NOAA weather app) seems to behave well when opened.