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Help Random crashes (Nexus 5, Kit Kat)

B

BigBug

Newbie
Hi:

I have a Nexus 5 (with 32G) which I got from Google Play store in March. It came with Kit Kat 4.4.2 and I have made upgrades to 4.4.4 (the phone is not rooted). I use T-Mobile. I only have a few third party apps on it.

Largely since I got it, the phone crashes once or twice a day -- it reboots. Nothing unusual seems to be happening in advance and it occurs when I am using different apps (native phone dialer, browser, sometimes just at the home screen). The only thing I have been able to replicate is opening this video in chrome, selecting "use youtube", and then it crashes about 30 seconds in: Perseus vs The Kraken (1981) - YouTube -- a funny video if you enjoy the "Release the Kraken" meme! Note that sometimes I can get through this video and it does not crash (and it rarely crashes with other videos).

I am honestly at a loss as to what to do.
- is there some sort of android file which lists events/crashes/panics which I can look at?
- putting it in safe mode is not likely to help too much since the crashes are so random and infrequent it is not going to tell me which app is causing the problem

I am concerned this could even be a hardware issue since I have had this issue since the beginning.

Thanks in advance for any guidance or suggestions on what to do!
 
Thanks for the quick reply John!

My interaction with Google customer support has been less than encouraging. They keep telling me that if they cannot find a defect they will ding me with some kinds of fees. I was hoping there would be a way to check on my own what the problem is before I send it in. Any suggestion on this would be most appreciated.
 
Well, since you have few apps it might be worth doing a factory reset and installing nothing, simply to test whether the phone itself is to blame. From your symptoms I'd strongly suspect faulty memory, and if the fault persists after a factory reset it should be enough to convince Google, who should be able to test it properly.

Memory faults can be very hard to diagnose since the symptoms vary, but random reboots - especially during memory-intensive tasks - is a big clue.
 
Ah got it. Thanks for the suggestion. I will try that and see how it goes.

BTW is there a quick link to how to do this (and what if anything is preserved)?
 
You'll need to backup anything you need as a factory reset will do what is says - make the phone look and act like it just came from the factory, completely blank.

The reset is on the Settings>Backup & reset menu, but don't use that as your only backup since it only saves app data. I'd recommend you copy the contents of your internal "SD card" to somewhere else, a PC perhaps, before you reset.
 
Hi BigBug, welcome to the site :)

I have moved your thread to the Nexus 5 forum to see if anyone with your device has this specific issue or perhaps can help solve it.
 
Thanks John and DC!

Before I wipe the phone with a factory reset, can any one let me know if there is some kind of log file which indicates Android events (like crashes or kernel panics) I can look at to try and identify the problem? All third party software I could find say that recent changes in Android do not have such a file :(
 
UGH just put it into safe mode and it crashed with the video I listed above.
So pretty sure it is hardware. Very sad here

PS I have not used safe mode much before but it is strange I can still load some third party apps which are on my home screen (NYT app, ookla speedtest app, 1weather app). How is this possible? And it definitely says safe mode at bottom left of my screen (and some apps like WSJ will not start).
 
I also wiped the data cache partition and still get errors.
Last try is the factory reset and then I am sending it back (already been in touch with Google). Not a very happy camper here.
 
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