[Google Pixel 6] ech0_de:
Hi everyone,

like many other Pixel 6 and 6 Pro owners, I have experienced frequent random reboots with my Pixel 6 since getting it November 2021. They became less frequent with the monthly updates, but never went fully away and occur often when it's very inconvenient. But as reports about this seem to be quieting down, I'm now worrying that for me it's not a software problem after all. So I'm reaching out to see if anyone has a suggestion for me to try out before RMA'ing it.

The reboot frequency varies from sometimes multiple reboots per day to sometimes a whole week without a single reboot. They do occur seemingly random without any apparent causal connection to a specific app. It frequently happens at night while charging when not in use, which I only notice the next morning when I get prompted to enter my SIM PIN. I feel as if it happens more often, when I open up a app which was not running before (independent on which it is) or when I try to share a resource (e.g., an image) from one app to another. Although this might only be a skewed perception on my end, as it is a bit more annoying when trying to get something done in contrast to it happening when checking the time.

The phone mostly reboots quite fast and seems back to normal, but it is also common to reboot multiple times before being able to fully enter the pin. There have also been around 6 times since November, where it bootlooped for a couple of minutes and in the process either partially corrupting the file system or executing some type of silent system restore, which causes some apps (not all) to loose state. Most notably for me is that I have to log into Spotify again, whereas most other apps tend to keep their state. One time this week it actually managed to corrupt the Google Photos app, so that it did not start even when booted into safe mode, with adb logs showing a failure to load an asset:

java.io.IOException: Failed to load asset path /data/app/~~vPG9I1zFLLjLpeetfcyDEw==/com.google.android.apps.photos-toH31kBPyggrkw-bTY1jdw==/split_config.xxhdpi.a

However, this was easily resolved by reinstalling it (or rather uninstalling and reinstalling updates) via the play store. It's more an example on how far reaching the effects of the reboots are.

Far more common is it for some apps to refuse to open app, after such a reboot until I manually reboot the phone again. Google Chrome is the app I notice it the most with, but it occasionally happens, with other apps as well. The stacktrace seems to point to an issue with GMS:

Abort message: 'Check failed: found_virtual Didn't find oat method index for virtual method: <<invalid-method-idx-314717208>>'

For troubleshooting I so far attempted the following steps:

Factory reset: While it seemed to decrease the frequency at first it went back to the usual amount of reboots within a a few day. I did restore a backup, but I don't really have the time to not do this without knowing for certain, that it would fix the issue.

Safe mode: I have not yet been able to reproduce a crash while booted in safe mode, but it was also difficult to purposefully get a reboot while booted normally.

Uninstalled certain apps: I did remove certain apps, which are not that common or are targeted towards an older Android version. This did not result in any noticeable change. Testing every app individually (as suggested by the Pixel phone help) is obviously unfeasible.

Launcher: I recently also tried out a third-party launcher instead of the stock launcher, as the launcher also regularly crashed on me and I've read in a post that this this could help. Unfortunately, this had no impact on the issue.

In the first few months, I was patiently waiting for new system updates to increase stability, since this seemed also really common. While these updates did fix some issues, e.g., frequent camera related crashes, the reboots described where not addressed. While there are some posts about such issues, I haven't found any detailed reports of a issue similar to mine. I hence tried to use adb to look into it myself. It took me a while to purposefully crash the system, while having adb logcat running, but eventually I succeeded (first time I was really happy to see a crash 😂). As a disclaimer, my phone is neither rooted nor having an unlocked bootloader, but I enabled the developer settings solely for the purpose of debugging this issue. I have not installed or sideloaded any apps, so all software running on the device originated from the Google Play Store. I also tried to irregularly submit crash logs via the phone settings app, but this unfortunately often resulted in another crash.

Unfortunately, I did not find any obvious cause in for the crashes in the logs:

Spoiler content hidden.

This pattern seems to be consistent for every reboot, while the originating process seems to vary with mostly being Google Apps (YouTube/Google Photos) or built in services, such as search, phone, or wellbeing. The tombstones also don't reveal any more helpful information (at least to me).

I'm now at the point where I exhausted all options that I have and I'm not sure how to proceed. I have been hesitant on RMA'ing, because other people shared that this hasn't resolved the issue for them and it would be a larger inconvenience. My remaining theories are either that I have faulty hardware (e.g., bad memory), there is still a bigger os/firmware bug that causes these crashes, or if there really is an app that I installed that is causing this.

I was hoping that with this rather detailed post, someone may be able to point me in a direction on how to proceed and if my third theory is correct, how to investigate which app is the culprit. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read this rather lengthy post, I really appreciate it! 😊