The Google Play System update for January has caused some problems on a “small number” of Pixel phones and Google has acknowledged the issue today. Through a community post, Google talks through a storage issue that popped up, saying that they are working on a fix while also providing a method to manually fix should you be willing to fire up the ol’ adb machine on your computer.
Google points out that after applying the January Google Play System update, some users were noticing apps crashing, screenshots not saving, and external storage working inconsistently. The likelihood of these issues popping up were more likely for those with multiple user accounts or work profiles on a phone.
Google is working on a fix for this “root system update issue” and plans to let us know as that update or fix arrives. For now, they’ve provided folks with a couple of commands that can be run in adb that should fix their devices.
There is a full set of instructions listed by Google that start from turning on USB debugging and downloading Android’s Platform Tools, before getting into the adb commands. For those new to adb, I’ll let you walk through those instructions yourselves. For those not new, it looks like two commands will straighten you out, and those are:
“./adb uninstall com.google.android.media.swcodec”
“./adb uninstall com.google.android.media”
Once you’ve run those, yoiu’;ll need to reboot your phone.
Feel free to give that a try if you are experiencing the storage issues described above after applying the January Google Play System update.
