Google confirms Android Oreo's reboot issues have been fixed, but only for Pixel phones

It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that Android Oreo’s arrival has been marked by more bug reports than admiration. Among the several issues that Android’s latest OS version brought along, random rebooting has been a key problem.

To give you a quick overview, Oreo’s random reboots have their roots in two separate issues:

First, Pixel users complained that while watching a YouTube video in PIP mode, if the screen gets in sleep mode or is locked, unlocking the screen results in a system reboot occasionally. The reboot can be clearly seen in the following GIF (from a video shared by a user):

Although it’s fairly clear from the above GIF, PIP (an acronym for picture-in-picture) mode allows video to continue playing in a small window, pinned to the corner of screen, while the user browses or switches between apps.

Moving on, in addition to this PIP-related rebooting issue, Pixel and Nexus users also reported of encountering spontaneous reboots daily. The complainants mentioned that the phone gets a soft reboot – the device freezes for a few seconds, followed by displaying a white screen with the Android icon, and finally jumping to the lock screen (all this happens while the device is being actively used).

Both these issues were actively investigated by Google, and the company recently confirmed that they have been fixed as part of the October security update. A Google employee confirmed this last week in a related discussion on the company’s issue tracking website. Here’s what they said:

Oct 2017 Pixel update has been released

and further added

I believe this will address the YouTube PIP issue and the fd leak b/63784898 that I believe is associated with this issue

Please note that the fd leak issue referenced in the above statement is the second issue (spontaneous random reboots). The reason the company is calling it ‘fd leak’ because ‘fd’ stands for file descriptor, and Google’s investigations revealed the problem was due to more than a particular number of files being open in the system.

The second issue was affecting not only Pixel users, but Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P users as well. However, the fix has only been rolled out to Pixel devices. This was confirmed by the company yesterday (October 12).

Michael, the Nexus 6P and 5X did not receive a fix for this “Too many open files” issue yet, if that is what you are indeed seeing. I can’t comment as to time lines, but I can say it was not in the October 2017 security release for those devices.

As can be seen in the comment, Google was light on sharing when a similar fix will be rolled out to affected Nexus devices, so your wait might be long.

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