Yesterday night was quite a great day, I’ve been playing around with Jellyfin for a while, and my phone had also been experiencing multiple clients such as Findroid, Finamp, Gelli and others, testing out features and the user experience each app has.
So, my battery was dying, I also used the flashlight a lot, so my phone had been through quite a lot that day.
Anyways, while I was editing some metadata, my phone vibrated, and it finally died, without much thought I just plugged it in and went back to work.
After I was done, I had to check my phone again to get ready to sleep. I like to listen to podcasts while I sleep, so I was about to download some. I pick up the phone, press the power button, and realize that there is no charging animation, in fact, the LED light (yes, my phone has one of those) is not on either.
I plug my phone somewhere else, no luck, I got try another charger, no luck, I press the button for 4 seconds or so, nothing happens.
I got terrified, in a matter of minutes, all the apps and data in my phone could be done, I did not try plugging it to my computer, but the fact that no energy seemed to pass through the LED light did not give me any hope either.
It was only then, when I was about to sleep and just hope tomorrow it fixes itself, that I remembered something that might be my only chance to fix this issue.
I decided to plug my phone again, and try to power it on. But this time I used a key combination to go into Recovery mode. One second… two seconds… three seconds… four seconds…
Nothing happened, my phone had died. No luck. This was quite a way for my phone to simply be gone forever.
Years ago I went through a similar situation, I had a Samsung Galaxy S3 mini, a great device with minuscule battery, compared to today’s phones. One of its bad things however, is that battery percentage was all over the place, sometimes it would be at 30% and just die, because it was actually at 5%, just not shown correctly.
A reboot would normally update the percentage properly, but I didn’t want to do that all the time. One day, I was using my phone normally while doing house chores and it powered off, I just plugged it in, and no luck, it just died. Looking back, I probably should have tried another battery, but well, it happens.
So, today was happening, the same thing, out of nowhere, you blink and its gone.
Then it vibrated, and an Orange Fox icon showed up. The recovery menu was working! But the LED light was still off, I decided to try and do a reboot to system, and after watching the boot animation for a while, I finally got my lock screen, and the LED light finally decided to show up. My battery was at 12%, which means it was actually charging.
Turns out, my custom ROM has a bug where there is no charging animation, and it looks like if the Do Not Disturb option is enabled while the phone turns off, it still respects it and the LED light does not turn on. I was probably too impatient to make it power on by force, and maybe it was all just my imagination.
But it also made me think, what would you do if your smartphone stopped working out of nowhere?
This has been day 74 of #100DaysToOffload