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Phone Not Charging

blbills

Lurker
I have a relatively new Pixel 4a that's spent it's entire life in a case with a screen protector that's been well taken care of.

Recently, the phone would not take a charge. I plug it in and it says "charging rapidly" but even after hours the % hasn't changed.

I've tried all the usual:
- Restart
- Different chargers (yes OEM ones)
- Thoroughly cleaned the plug
- Even done a factory reset.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
what about cables?

if its not the cables and its not the software(because you did a factory reset), then its hardware. you might want to take it in and either get it fixed or replaced.
 
Is your Pixel's battery still able to last between charges the way it usually has? if you've seen a significant drop in performance that could indicate the battery is failing but if not I wouldn't think the battery itself is the problem. A Pixel 4a will be a couple of years old so the battery is at a point where it might possibly start to decline a bit, that's inevitable. But it should be able to give you a few more years of service.

Given all the things you're already tried, you can probably rule out the battery, the cabling, and the power adapters as being the source of the problem. It is odd you're seeing that charging message when you plug it in but it's not actually charging. That might indicate there's some kind of glitch with your phone's internal charging. Note in this instance it will be relative to the lower levels of your phone, at the stage where the actual Android operating system interacts directly with the phone's hardware circuitry. We typically only interact with the user-friendly user interface that runs on top of all that. When a phone is charging itself, that's a function involving power transfers in that lower level. Anyway, try wiping your phone's system cache and see if that clears up the problem. You'll need to boot your phone up into its Recovery Mode, a multi-step process (Boot up into Fastboot, then select Recovery)
https://www.hardreset.info/devices/google/google-pixel-4a/recovery-mode/
https://clearcachewiki.com/guides/how-to-wipe-cache-partition-on-google-pixel-4a/
Wiping the system cache won't delete anything vital, nor any of your data. (cache files are all temporary).
When you did a Factory Reset, keep in mind that all it does is wipe the user data partition clean. It has no affect at all on the operating system itself so while that did rule out some kind of third-party software problem or one-off Settings menu quirk, if (big if) the problem is OS related than let's hope this does works.
 
Is your Pixel's battery still able to last between charges the way it usually has? if you've seen a significant drop in performance that could indicate the battery is failing but if not I wouldn't think the battery itself is the problem. A Pixel 4a will be a couple of years old so the battery is at a point where it might possibly start to decline a bit, that's inevitable. But it should be able to give you a few more years of service.

Given all the things you're already tried, you can probably rule out the battery, the cabling, and the power adapters as being the source of the problem. It is odd you're seeing that charging message when you plug it in but it's not actually charging. That might indicate there's some kind of glitch with your phone's internal charging. Note in this instance it will be relative to the lower levels of your phone, at the stage where the actual Android operating system interacts directly with the phone's hardware circuitry. We typically only interact with the user-friendly user interface that runs on top of all that. When a phone is charging itself, that's a function involving power transfers in that lower level. Anyway, try wiping your phone's system cache and see if that clears up the problem. You'll need to boot your phone up into its Recovery Mode, a multi-step process (Boot up into Fastboot, then select Recovery)
https://www.hardreset.info/devices/google/google-pixel-4a/recovery-mode/
https://clearcachewiki.com/guides/how-to-wipe-cache-partition-on-google-pixel-4a/
Wiping the system cache won't delete anything vital, nor any of your data. (cache files are all temporary).
When you did a Factory Reset, keep in mind that all it does is wipe the user data partition clean. It has no affect at all on the operating system itself so while that did rule out some kind of third-party software problem or one-off Settings menu quirk, if (big if) the problem is OS related than let's hope this does works.

Interestingly enough when I boot into recovery mode following your instructions above I do not see the "wipe cache partition" option in the menu??? Any ideas?
 

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More recent of versions of Android have stopped supporting a separate, dedicated system cache partition and are now just relying upon a system cache file instead. So at this point, some manufacturers do occasionally implement that 'old school' separate system cache partition, but most now use just a system cache file. Since you don't see that option in the Recovery menu, sounds like your phone simply doesn't have that partition.
So ignore my previous posting, it doesn't apply. That still leaves the charging problem you're having. Hopefully others will continue to chime in with better suggestions while my sluggish brain activity ponders over what might be going on.
 
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