Letter of Complaint: Bootloop Issue on Nexus 5X
Dear Sir / Madam,
I am writing to complain about the bootloop issue on Nexus 5X and the poor attitude of a staff named Ms Chow (Staff ID: 100590) in the LG Customer Care Centre.
I purchased a Nexus 5X on 24/11/2015 and I started to notice the phenomenon of random yet infrequent self-reboot a few months ago. I did not take any action though as I thought this is due to some minor software malfunction. However on 18/3/2017 my phone entered a bootloop. I made a phone call to the LG Customer Care Centre on 21/3/2017 to complain about this issue.
A staff named Ms Chow (Staff ID: 100590) answered my phone call with unacceptably poor manner. She mentioned that my 1-year warranty has expired and refused to take any action on this matter. She simply denied Nexus 5X has any issues and kept repeating the statement that nothing would be done given my warranty has expired. She claimed that free replacement is nonsense, regardless of the fact that there were cases of LG offering full refund or free replacement in other countries in the past even if the phones were out of warranty*. Irritated by the staff, I requested for an escalation to higher authorities and she promised that she would ask LG to contact me on the next day. However I still have not received any calls as of today, which proved the irresponsible manner of this staff.
Leaving aside the warranty issue, LG should at least acknowledge the bootloop bug and warn the users. This bootloop issue has actually been widely mentioned on the Internet and Google has even admitted this issue already#. The denial of acknowledgement to this issue is just total nonsense. Now a large number of Nexus 5X devices start to malfunction day by day and users who are not aware of this issue would lost all their data if no backup has been made. The impact can be significantly reduced should LG warn the 5X users as early as possible, yet disappointingly LG did not take any remedy action.
In terms of the warranty contract, indeed LG has no responsibility to provide free examination, replacement or refund given that the warranty has expired. However it is the morality of the business act of the company that matters. Reports of bootloop issues of LG G4 has occurred on the Internet as early as September 2015, and LG actually acknowledged a hardware issue shortly afterwards, which was generally believed to be the problem of the system on chip - Qualcomm Snapdragon 808. However, LG did not address this issue at all in the newer phone models and kept using the same system on chip on V10 and Nexus 5X, which is a highly possible reason of the large-scale bootloop issues observed on these newer phone models. Most importantly, most of the bootloop issues only occur slightly after the 1-year warranty period so that LG does not have to bear any contractual obligation. This apparent coincidence would unsurprisingly lead to the speculation that LG intentionally make the lifetime of the smartphones only slightly longer than 1 year so as to maximize its revenue.