[LG V10 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Mlmiller:
I suppose there is a potential that a new battery would in some way help things (could I sound more doubtful?). Considering there are multiple generations of LG phones that exhibit this bootloop error, and several youtube videos and forums dedicated to people trying to solve it, we would be in for a massive collective facepalm if it were really as simple as replacing the battery.

The consensus seems to be that one or more of the incredibly tiny connections inside the phone eventually lets go or shorts out.

Some people find they can run the phone long enough to get their files off if they FREEZE it. Others find that applying intense HEAT to the unit keeps it running for a short while. Exactly how this temporarily fixes the problem, I have absolutely no idea, but I sure am glad it does. Without the temporary solution to the "bootloop" I would have lost months of photos and videos of moments with my kids that I would deeply miss looking back on.

I had read about the bootlooping problem before it actually happened to me, and the morning that I woke up and looked at my phone to discover it was frozen on the boot screen was a gut punch I had mentally prepared for, but still did not want to believe.

I'm not eligible for warranty repair since I have a fine line crack in the glass on the touch screen. You can find accounts of people sending their LG phone for warranty service and getting it back only to have it bootloop again so many weeks or months later.

I started by FREEZING my LG V10 for about fifteen minutes. I put it in a ziplock bag to help control for moisture. Sure enough, it booted up, but only for a few minutes before going back into bootloop. I gave up on it for a few days, did a little research, hoping (just like everyone else) that I would find the youtube video or forum with the solution to the problem.

My attempt at BAKING the LG V10 was approached with caution. I took the phone apart down to the motherboard, carefully popped the heat shields off (first time for everything, learning as I go) and put it in the oven in a pyrex dish at 250° F (I'm in america, the oven doesn't do celsius) for about twenty minutes. I put the phone back together and joy of joys! It worked!... for about three hours. Long enough to get my files off. I'll take it.

I had an old Moto X 2013 sitting on the shelf, so I dusted it off and got back on with my life. I miss the fantastic camera on the LG V10, I live near the beach and love to take pictures and videos of my two young boys with the V10. Manual control of every setting. When it works, it's a fantastic phone. I've been researching the LG V20, and sure enough (and to my dismay) I'm starting to here rumbling of people experiencing bootloop.

I figured I've got nothing to lose by baking the V10 again. I've done it twice more, each time at higher temperature and a longer period of time. This most recent attempt ended at 400° F for a few minutes, most of the time I kept it around 350° F, but figured what the hell and cranked it up at the end. My LG V10 worked for roughly 14 hours. All the files and settings were right where I had left them before the bootloop. I played with it for much of those 14 hours... pathetic as it sounds, it was like reconnecting with an old friend, or Frankensteining a pet back to life. I knew it wouldn't last, so I soaked it up.

Through one of the baking attempts, I figured I'd try and add some thermal compound under the heatshields. I've read that too much can be counterproductive and act as an insulator. I was careful to spread a thin layer. For those of you who haven't taken apart your LG V10, it does seem odd to me that the main snapdragon processor sits in the middle with absolutely no heatshield over it. There is what looks like a thermal pad for it to rest against when it's all put together, but here's the curious thing...

After the thermal paste and a short run with the phone working and inevitably bootlooping again, I took it apart and realized that the underside of the heatshields and the thermal pad for the snapdragon had absolutely NO THERMAL PASTE residue on them, meaning that these chips don't touch the heatshields. They don't have anywhere to directly transfer the heat. If anything, the heatshields act as tiny ovens, trapping the collective heat of the chips that they cover. IS THIS HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK?

I haven't taken apart enough other brands of phones to know if this is the standard practice, but coming from a background of building gaming computers as a hobby, it seems to me like not giving these tiny little processors anywhere to transfer their heat is asking for eventual meltdown.

But back to simply replacing the battery, it did cross my mind that the night I first bootlooped my V10, I connected it to one of the more powerful wall chargers I have floating around the house. At this point, most families have more than one wall charger on hand that you can plug a USB device into. My wife has had multiple iphones, I've had multiple phones and devices, and with them all come these little wall adapters that aren't all created equal. Some manufacturers (maybe all of them) say to only use their included adapters, and I've always shrugged that off as a marketing ploy to make me buy more of "their" adapter. But, sure enough, if you read the tiny print on each of these adapters, you'll see that the power output can vary widely. Some put out less than 1 amp, while some put out more than 2 amps. I even got in the habit of making sure I was plugging whatever phone I happened to own into the strongest adapter in the house to make sure it would charge as quickly as possible...

The most recent time that I got the LG V10 to come to life out of the oven, I made sure to use the weakest (i.e. most gentle) charging adapter I could find. 700 mAmp. And that's the time it worked for 14 hours. I let it get down to 10% battery before plugging it in and juicing it to 100% overnight and then using it for a good while after that.

So maybe... maybe there is a possibility that the LG phones and/or batteries aren't as capable of handling a slightly more (or less) powerful adapter than the one that came with it. I know I'm going way too long with all this typing and speculating over a phone that, in the end, is gonna sit dead on my shelf, with all it's glorious functionality begging me to throw it back in the oven so we can play again just a little longer.

In the end it's just a phone. A great phone with a serious serious flaw that LG won't talk openly about. If this were an old 8-bit nintendo console, some brave geek could sit there and test every trace on the board and find the dead one and go from there. But these are impossibly tiny circuits now, and electronics are now in the age of dispose and replace instead of diagnose and repair. You can fix a bug in the software, but if your phones motherboard ****s the bed, you're pretty much out of luck.

The newest LG G6 (looks awesome, by the way) was unveiled at MWC with "reliability" being one of the key terms they were marketing. So LG knows that the word is out there about bootlooping. If they were as big in the market as apple or Samsung, this would be a huge problem for them. But their profit margins are too tight for them to look back and fix yesterday's phone offerings. They're just doing their best to promise, without saying the word "bootloop", that things will be better in the future. Considering the V line of LG phones have one of the best camera games in town, I hope they're right.

Or maybe it's just the battery...