Dear GrapheneOS users,
I had just about finished writing about how my Pixel 8 just crashed and would not turn on again, when I tried powering it up again after being connected to a power source for several minutes (30) when it suddenly turned on just fine. I guess writing this had a cathartic effect :)
So, long story short, on my Pixel 8 with the latest stable OS (2025041100) I was watching a video on the Futo Grayjay app (com.futo.platformplayer), when suddenly the screen completely froze. Given that I was at 10% battery, and that another time I had a kernel crash when the Grayjay app was playing a video, I decided to plug the charger in. The screen stayed on for many other seconds, than it completely went off. And then it stayed off, completely dead, no vibration whatsoever, for several minutes. I then freaked out.
I did try connecting it to a computer, but what solved the "issued" is (I think) having left it in charge for several minutes without touching it. Remember that the battery was very low when the system crashed. I read some time ago on this forum about a someone whose Pixel would not turn on after having completely discharged, and what fixed it was leaving it on power for several minutes (up to one full hour in charge) before trying to power it up again. So this is a lesson I've learned.
There are two more lessons I think we can learn from this incident and I wanna share:
Do not use Grayjay. My Pixel with GrapheneOS kernel-crashed 3 times in its lifetime, and on all of them I was using Grayjay and watching a video. The development team at GrapheneOS does an incredible, truly marvelous job, at creating a system so polished and so stable it amazes me every day —please donate to the project, I wanna be on GrapheneOS forever, like a drug!—; so it would be very strange if the problem lied in GrapheneOS itself. Conversely, multiple times I had notifications about a MTE tagging error in the Grayjay app, so it is very likely that a bug in the app itself is causing this kernel crashes. It is not acceptable for an app to cause kernel crashes, ever. I wrote a report to then, I hope to hear back and I hope they fix their memory problems asap.
ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP OF EVERYTHING! This is one of the most recited, boasted, flaunted and heard advice in all of IT/comp. sci., and yet it is still one of the most overlooked. I do regular manual backups of the things I most value (conversations, chat histories, photos, documents, 2FA app backups [ALWAYS BACKUP OFFLINE 2FA APPS LIKE AEGIS]) but now in the panic of having a dead phone and needing another one and having to endure the pain of restoring everything I just realised that not all of my things are backed-up: some note-taking apps are not. Many contacts are not. Some other configuration files I'd rather save than recreate from scratch are not.
Please, do yourself a favour: stop this evening (or when you have time), rethink all your backup procedure and go one-by-one every app and ask yourself: "is the data from this app backed up? If not, why not? If not, I should do it right now, and then find an automatic exporting procedure to always have it backed up in the future". Use Syncthing, Nextcloud, Proton Drive, a USB stick that you connect every day, or any other backup method you are comfortable with, and stick with it. It will save your ass, some day. That's the point of a backup: if you always have it, nothing "exciting" ever happens. But if you do not, of boy, you're gonna shed a lot of tears when the time comes. And that times always comes. So be prepared.
So, those were my thoughts. I wish you a gratifying use of GrapheneOS and a nice day.