Know what’s no fun? Smartphone failure while travelling.

Last week I was in California for a big tech summit my employer throws every 2 years. It’s a pretty big deal, with 3 days of presentations, workshops, tech demos, and interesting keynotes. I had a great time, met many of my coworkers I only know through voices on conference calls, and generally learned a ton.

Thursday night I was in the San Francisco offices, getting ready to head to the airport. I had 4 hours until my flight was scheduled to leave, and while in a meeting, I noticed my Moto X Pure (aka ‘Style’) phone reboots itself. “Okay, no worries, probably an update in progress. NBD.”

I went back to my meeting, and glanced at the phone again 10 minutes later. Looked like it was rebooting again. “Hmmm…. shouldn’t do that, but… okay…”

Half an hour later and continuous reboots, I was beginning to get worried. The pattern was the same. Boot, Optimizing apps, starting apps, reboot. Something was definitely wrong.

A little googling found me an article that describes the Moto X doing this sometimes when either an app gets corrupted, or there’s problems in the cache. Using instructions on the net I reset the cache from the bootloader, and let it try to boot again.

Nope, stuck in the loop again.

I was beginning to get very concerned. Traveling without a working phone, to echo a great movie… “Possible… but not recommended!”

In the end, I had to pull the ripcord, and do a full factory reset. Time until getting on the plane? 3 hours, with a half hour drive to the airport. This is the first time I’ve had to wipe and reload my phone from scratch as far as I can remember (we’re going back to Treo days here), at least where that sort of reload didn’t also involve replacing the phone completely.

In the end, it worked. The unit was able to do a factory reset, came up, did a few updates, and was back online with my normal account. It didn’t automatically reinstall all the apps (which I found a bit odd), so I had to manually tell Play to re-install the critical pieces I needed (including the authentication tool I use for work).

I was able to be on the road and mostly operational inside an hour, and made my flight just fine. I’ll credit my rabid use of 1Password for helping me get all my accounts re-connected.

Naturally, there’s still a few things that are out of whack. I spent a year twiddling that install to make the menus line up nicely, or set my backgrounds just so, etc, so post-reload, it sort of feels like a new phone, but really isn’t.

Now I’m on another trip, this time to Utah, and my phone is happily keeping me company. Alas, I’m finding all the little bits I haven’t reinstalled, such as all my local cached music in Spotify – something that would have been helpful on this flight But, that’s something to set up once I’m back in the hotel.