Pixel phones are broken again with critical storage permission bug

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

It's almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones' internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit, user "Liv-Lyf" compiled a dozen posts that complain of an "internal storage access issue" and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update.

In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, "The symptoms are all the same" as that October bug, with "internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc." When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, "We're aware of this issue and are looking into it," and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments.

In the October bug, users were locked out of their system storage due to a strange permissions issue. Having a phone try to run without any user access to your own storage is a mess. It breaks the camera and screenshots because you can't write media. File Managers read "0 bytes" for every file and folder. Nothing works over USB, and some phones, understandably, just fail to boot. The issue in October arrived as part of the initial Android 14 release and only affected devices that had multiple users set up.

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