Android Upgrade Problems

The Android tablet that my wife and daughter uses, a Lenovo Yoga Tab 11, underwent an automatic system upgrade at the beginning of the month. There have many many problems since.

We purchased the tablet less than a year ago. The previous tablet had insufficient memory to the point that we were unable to update applications, so we decided to get this expensive tablet that has much more memory than we need. I purchased a good quality Micro SD card at the same time, to store my daughter’s media, as we did with the older tablet. Once configured, the tablet worked great until the recent upgrade.

Receiving system upgrades is usually a good thing. A very big problem with Android hardware is that many devices are not supported by the manufacturers for very long. With no system upgrades available, such devices become incompatible with new software. The tablet that I use is stuck on an old version of Android, and there are a number of applications that are in a constant “upgrade failure” state since the latest versions of the software do not work with the old version of Android. It is frustrating to have a perfectly capable device that is marred by such issues.

Since the Lenovo Yoga Tab 11 is a relatively new tablet, there was a system upgrade from Android 10 to Android 11. (For perspective, the current version is Android 13.) This is the last system upgrade that will be made available for this device. In my opinion, this is way too soon for a manufacturer to stop supporting the software for such an expensive device. Note that such devices are expensive in terms of environment as well as money, and it is wasteful for electronics to become “obsolete” so quickly.

After the upgrade, there were various problems:

1. Whenever an application was run, the “system UI” would crash. An modal error message was displayed, and you were sent to the lock screen when dismissing the error. After authentication, the launched application would be open. This resulted in a system that was still usable but very annoying to use. For example, each settings screen would crash while I was troubleshooting, so I had to dismiss errors and re-authenticate about ten times per minute!
2. The SD card was no longer recognized.
3. Some notes application was in a state of constant failure, and there was no way to clear the notification.
4. The despised “Entertainment Space” could not be permanently disabled. Disabling it only worked for the current session, and the settings were reverted on reboot.

I did a factory reset. I was hoping to test the system before and after the system upgrade, but I discovered that the upgrade image was saved in the device, and the factory reset was to the new OS. Oh well.

After the factory reset, the “system UI” crash problem was thankfully gone. The notes application issue was also gone. The “Entertainment Space” issue persisted, but I could teach my wife how to disable it after each reboot or configure the system to use a different launcher.

The SD card seemed to work fine, but VLC refused to open any videos from it. Android has two modes for SD cards: an SD card can be used as “internal” or “external” storage. An SD card that is used as internal storage can be used to store application data, greatly alleviating the insufficient memory problem that we had in the old tablet. (The version of Android in the old tablet did not support this, however.) For security reasons, the SD card must be formatted by the tablet and use encryption. An SD card that is used as external storage, on the other hand, cannot store application data and does not need to be encrypted.

I had configured the SD card as external memory because the tablet has sufficient system memory. The media on the SD card is not private, and encryption would only make it more difficult to work with. While the tablet could use the SD card after upgrade, VLC was no longer able to play media from external storage!

I took a backup of the SD card, reformatted the SD card as internal storage in the tablet, and then copied the media to the SD card using MTP over USB. I really dislike MTP, as it is very unreliable. Copying media is slow, and frequent failures meant that I had to babysit it. With external memory, I can format the SD card in Linux and use seqcp to copy everything overnight while I sleep. With internal memory, I used the --script option to output a script. With each failure, I had to remount the MTP device and edit the script to continue from the point of failure.

Once that was done, VLC could once again play videos! I thought that I was finished with the issues, but my daughter reported the she was unable to play videos again after a couple of days. Investigating, applications would crash when trying to access the SD card. Even the storage settings would crash immediately. The issue persists even after removing the SD card.

That is where I am at now. I plan on performing two (independent) tests simultaneously. I am going to re-format the SD card as external storage, copy the media to it, and put it into the old tablet. (I hope that the old tablet supports SD cards of this size…) The SD card works fine in Linux, and I bet that it will work fine in the old tablet as well. I am going to do another factory reset on the new tablet. We shall see if the new tablet works, without the SD card, and we shall see if the SD card works in the old tablet.