[Google Pixel 5 Guides, News, & Discussion] badabing2003:
FYI My main phone is Pixel 6 Oriole, and I have not noticed any battery degradation with A13 but this thread is not about Pixel 6, it is about Pixel 5 and I have a Pixel 5 situation that I want to pick your brains on.

Adventures in Pixel 5 with Android 13

My son has a Pixel 5, and until recently he was not rooted (more on that further below), however he was at one point in the A13 Beta program (if it has any relevance), and was stuck there because opt out meant a wipe, and he didn't want that.

With the release of A13, he had the opportunity to opt out without a wipe which he did.

All along his updates were all OTA considering that he was not rooted.

After opting out from Beta and being on A13 August release he wanted to root.

Which I did for him using pf. Basically just flashed a patched boot.img.

All went well and he was using it fine.

As far as I know his only complaint was that reboots were now taking longer than before.

With the September release, I did full factory update on both slots keeping root.

The process had no error messages and everything went fine.

However the phone started having random freezes/hangs, and random reboots, and was getting hot.

I first tried to disable any Magisk modules he had other than SafetyNet Mod, still the same.

Next we decided to flash back the August release (one slot only) to see if going back would fix the issue, in case this was something new with the September release.

We got the dreaded Your device is corrupt message, with the phone rebooting to recovery.

I sideloaded September OTA, and that got the phone running again (not rooted)

But the freeze and reboots returned (the phone wouldn't last 5 minutes without a freeze or reboot)

I tried many ways to go back to the August release

(All without wipe)

Factory flash with or without root in pf

Factory flash manually

OTA sideload

Android flash tools (which failed with the following message) for both Sep and Aug releases

View attachment 5706779

View attachment 5706781and no matter what I did, I would get the device corrupt message, tried both slots and each slot separately as well.

One thing I noticed is that flashing the bootloader was getting an error, even though the device was already on that bootloader (incidentally, not Aug and Sep have the same version of the bootloader: bootloader-redfin-r3-0.5-8633620.img)

Sending 'bootloader' (8762 KB) OKAY [ 0.233s]Writing 'bootloader' FAILED (remote: 'No such file or directory')
fastboot: error: Command failed
Rebooting into bootloader OKAY [ 0.002s]

Whereas a successful flashing of bootloader would output

Sending 'bootloader_b' (8762 KB) OKAY [ 0.349s]
Writing 'bootloader_b' (bootloader) Flashing Pack version r3-0.5-8633620
(bootloader) Flashing partition table for Lun = 0
(bootloader) Flashing partition table for Lun = 1
(bootloader) Flashing partition table for Lun = 2
(bootloader) Flashing partition table for Lun = 4
(bootloader) Flashing partition table for Lun = 5
(bootloader) Flashing partition xbl_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition xbl_config_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition aop_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition tz_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition hyp_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition abl_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition keymaster_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition devcfg_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition qupfw_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition uefisecapp_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition featenabler_b
(bootloader) Flashing partition logfs
OKAY [ 0.251s]
Finished. Total time: 0.862s

So I didn't have a choice other than flashing back the September release and trying to figure out what was causing the freezes and reboots. Yucks

Long story short, I was able to narrow it down to a program called Greenify that he had been using, for whatever reasons that App on September release was causing the hangs and reboots.

Now he has patched September release flashed to both slots, and I haven't seen him for a while, which should be a good sign :)

My questions:

Does anyone know anything about not being able to downgrade to A13 August release? what would cause that issue?

And also why bootloader flashing was often causing that error, even though what was being flashed was already the exact same thing that was on the system.

I know it is not the fastboot drivers, that was the first thing I checked, everything else kept on flashing just fine.

Sorry for long winded post, I didn't want risk leaving out any detail that might be relevant.