So I'm not even going to mention the oddity of not allowing us to place widgets on the lock screen (aside for phone and camera. What about flashlight? what about another camera app? or Messaging? Why remove a feature that was already working?) or the annoying notification layout and multiple clicks it requires to address them, I'm just going to talk about everything that stopped working once I updated.
* Just to satisfy everyone - I did in fact try a factory reset to see if this will resolve any issues, and it did not.
Also - I'm an IT engineer with extensive experience in electronics and have a very good understanding of how Android devices work, but I'm always willing to try more things to get this working. Downgrading it will be a headache, so I'd rather just avoid for now.
Again just to reiterate - the phone worked amazingly well before the update, so the chances of these issues being a result of hardware failures are extremely low.
1. Calls. Why do calls go straight to voicemail without ringing, when I have full bars? This happens on a daily basis, in random locations, random times of day.
2. Speaking of bars - If I am anywhere that doesn't have reception, for some odd reason I will not be able to regain said reception until the phone is restarted. I will have no data or call signal. This happens most often when I park underground or in elevators, when signal would drop and not regain anything. Turning airplane mode on and then off does nothing to improve this.
3. Wi-fi. Known networks (home, work, etc) in which nothing changed all of a sudden drop after 2-3 minutes. IP address still remains but there's no data transport. I will have to turn off wifi and then back on, and in certain cases forget the network and re-add it.
4. The phone's battery drains so much faster now. I'm not talking about "I'm getting an hour less". I used to be able to go 18-20 hours on a full charge with intensive data usage and anywhere from 5-20 calls per day. As soon as I upgraded my phone drains within 6-7 hours. I will have a full charge leaving the house for work, and then will find that it's at 5% before leaving work. I've also tried it with my wife's battery (she also has a GS4 bought at the same time, I didn't update her phone specifically because I wanted to test it out first, and her battery lasts all day on hers, and significantly less on mine, and vice versa)
5. Applications not closing in the background. Most applications now just keep running even though I close them out. I will have to go to the app manager and kill the process.
6. Unable to update applications. For some reason even though I have about 1.4gb available on the phone updates and new installs fail saying I have no room left on the device (including after a factory reset)
7. MicroSD card mount issues. Just constantly. Since I have to reset the phone a number of times every day - I have to go to the storage settings, dismount and mount it back or applications will fail to store data, stating the storage location could not be found (along with a path on the SD card)
8. Speaker calls. For whatever reason no one can understand me anymore if I put the phone on speaker mode during calls. When you do that the microphone switches to the top one next to the earphone jack so maybe it has to do with the settings on how it listens to audio.
9. Random power off. This one isn't frequent, but when it does happen - it's always at the worst time. I've been late for work a couple of times because the phone just turned off randomly at night, while charging. I've since bought an actual alarm clock, just in case. The phone has also turned off a couple of times mid day while just sitting on the desk. It doesn't do a graceful power off, it just shuts off abruptly (from the times that I did see).
10. Notifications. Applications such as Outlook and certain games no longer give me notifications even though I've specifically set them to do so, and added them to the priority list. Nada.
11. OTG cable no longer works. Worked on KitKat. Shame it doesn't on lollipop.
Please share if you've experienced any of these as well or anything I haven't mentioned here.
Also if you've found any permanent solutions to any of these I'd love to hear about it.
I am also having notifications problems. No email notifications by sound or icon. Only text and game notifications are active. Have done everything I know how to fix this but to no avail. Sure do need my email notifications!!!
I just want my pictures back that were deleted at the time of the update!
What steps did you take to troubleshoot your problems or fix them?
Unless you backed them up, then they are gone.
Has anyone tried the factory reset WITHOUT restoring app data? The runtime changed so it makes sense that restoring old runtime apps onto a system with new runtime rules would create multiple issues with most any app.
I reset all notification options and even went so far as to delete and reinstall my email accounts (I have 3). I have even only had 1 account installed for 1 day and still no notifications. I have restarted the device several times and I have made all setting changes while NOT connected to WiFi. It is frustrating!
Update: Took my phone to the Samsung desk at Best Buy where I bought it and was told that this is a Verizon problem with Lollipop and that a patch or upgrade will be coming out this week that should fix all the problems folks are having. Watch for 5.101 in the next few days. He downloaded the AOL app and that fixed the notification problem.
BestBuy could have reflashed the phone in-store while you watched...essentially the same thing I recommended above as far as making things work properly.
Best Buy where I bought my phone Tech Center (Geek Squat) sux..they did nothing for me about my camera issues before the Android 5.0.1 update. Looked at me and told me to do a manufacturer reset. I asked if they can do it. I had done one but wanted to make sure that I did it right. Excuse me sir, I'm sorry that you just want to sit on your bumm in the back room & do nothing. I had already stood in line for about 20 minutes waiting.
Start a new topic or ask questions in the open forum.
