Hey guys,
Bit of a story here... I've been an iPhone user for 8 years. Having always kept up with the Android world and seeing how polished things are starting to look on the green side of the fence, I decided to jump ship this year.
Just picked up a Pixel 2 yesterday and first impressions -- man this phone feels like a Ferrari compared to my old 6s. Loving the customization, performance and additional features I now have access to. Unfortunately, it's not all lollipops and rainbows...
Today whilst spending some time on my phone at work I was downloading a few apps -- Discord, Spotify, Reddit and the like. All of a sudden, out of the blue I started noticing apps I had chosen to download were getting caught at the "Download Pending..." phase and never completing. After getting home this afternoon I continued to try getting my apps to install and update, with no luck despite hours of troubleshooting and exhaustive Google searches on the matter trying about a dozen different things to kickstart the Play store. FINALLY after several hours I got to the point where I could kick off app installs, reboot the phone and ONE SINGLE app would then proceed to download/update with subsequent ones getting caught back in "Download pending" limbo. Repeated this six times, always the same behavior. At this point, I decided F it I'll factory reset I don't have really anything to lose at this point. And so I do...
Things go fine after the reset, I'm able to re-install my apps without any hang-ups. Only... I notice something a bit odd. I was never asked to update all the default Google apps like you usually are after booting up a new device. Trying to use Google assistant I received a prompt "To use Google Assistant, please update the Google App." Heading on over to the play store and checking the My Apps category I see I have no pending or available updates, that's strange. When I do a manual store search for any of those apps (Gmail, Maps, Google, etc. etc.) they all have "UPDATE" clear as day right there on their individual pages. Now I have to go through manually searching for each default app in the Store and updating it. This being my first time on Android, I see there are a lot of other framework type things that get installed via the Play Store and so I'm pretty positive I could be missing some things.
I guess for anyone reading this who has a deeper understanding of Android... is this experience typical of this operating system? I don't need lessons in troubleshooting or other things, it's my day job. I just really want to love this phone and OS and hate that two days in I'm encountering... this.