A couple days following the update to GrapheneOS Android 13, my Pixel 5a began to experience freezing during operation.

I've observed this each time when refreshing for new podcast episodes in AntennaPod. The screen would both halt motion (when movement had been expected) and become fully unresponsive.

In one case, waiting less than a minute allowed it to recover. In two other cases, I pressed the power button to shut off its screen, whereupon it would not subsequently wake back up.

For one such case, a forced power restart resolved it (holding down the power button for 30 seconds).

However, now I cannot get it to show anything at all on the screen (fully black, not just lack of backlight), despite presumably forcing reboots with long-presses of the power button (using also volume buttons, etc.)

It makes a short vibrate initially upon holding down the power button, or when plugging into power. It makes a medium length vibrate when holding the volume-down + power buttons. This is its only sign of life. It does not output a signal to HDMI and it is not listed with adb devices or fastboot devices.

I've tried a number YouTube-found tricks short of opening it up and disconnecting the battery. Draining the battery by leaving it 'on' will surely take days.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

This is highly unlikely to be a GOS specific issue as it isn't widely reported however, if you can replicate this behaviour make sure to grab a bug report via dev options and take an interactive report as soon as you get the device back.

Create an issue on the tracker followed by sending the report and a link to the issue to the contact (as in contact@) e-mail here:
https://grapheneos.org/contact

One of my parents had a Pixel 2XL with similar black screen behaviour and unresponsiveness during or after a phone call on stock which we put down to hardware at the time.

3 months later

I have a similar behavior in Pixel 6a owner profile :

  • switching from an app to home screen the home icons aren't visible during 4-5 seconds
  • closing an app, the app is visible again during 4-5 seconds

Rebooting the device this behaviour disappear.

2 months later

So I had the same issue on my Pixel 5 and CalyxOS and now also on my new Pixel 7 and GrapheneOS.

My problem was and is: The screen is black and will not come back until I force restart it. However the device is still responsive. E.g. I get vibration feedback when I use side buttons or certain sounds play, I can receive calls. The "only" issue is that the display is black and will not come up again.

I even took screenshots in this state to know what the OS "sees" in this state but these were just black.

So it seems this is a bug with Android 13. Just to summarize what I did beforehand: Went into car, AntennaPod was automatically playing on car stereo, I switchted to spotify, come home, turn car off, go inside and then I noticed this.