Google Glass XE16 Has a Lot of Problems

Google Glass has just been updated to XE16 and it seems like it comes with a lot of problems and bugs, unfortunately. It’s a significant update which brought Glass to Android 4.4 KitKat and problems were expected, but we didn’t image we’d encounter so many.

Some Glass users, including us, have experienced a lot of problems after updating to XE16. The problems include lag, reboots, connection issues, lower battery life and the device is also freezing sometimes. No fix has been found yet and Google didn’t make any official statement about this, unfortunately, but we expect them to issue a new update very soon, which might be called XE16.1.

XE16 was supposed to be faster and to increase the battery life, but it seems it made Glass worse for many users. We don’t know how many devices have been affected, but we believe the number is pretty high.

We’ve notice lag from time to time and cards sometimes take very long to load. We’ve expected loading times of up to 30 seconds, which we didn’t encounter before. Lag is a really big issues with XE16 and it makes user experience very bad.

Some people have reported that Glass freezes and the user can’t do anything about it. After some time, it reboots automatically and, according to them, this happens multiple times a day. The device also reboots out of the blue sometimes and we have no idea why this happens.

We’ve had problems with the WiFi connection, which keeps disconnecting. This started happening immediately after updating to XE16 and we’ve tried different smartphones and routers, so we are pretty sure it’s the software.

Google reported that XE16 will improve Glass’ battery life, but we beg to differ. We’ve experienced an up to 30% worse battery life during our tests and it doesn’t seem like we can do anything about it. This might be caused by the other problems though, as Glass keeps reconnecting to WiFi and the hardware might be used more due to the lag.

Potential Fix

We don’t have any official or sure fix for the problems, but we’ve managed to improve things a bit by flashing the factory image again. This is a risky process which can void the warranty or brick the device, so you shouldn’t do it if you aren’t experienced. If you want to try it, though, you can download the factory images here.

Hopefully us or another developer will find a fix soon and we will update this article once we have something working. Make sure to come back if problems persist. If we are even more lucky, then Google will probably release a XE16.1 update soon to fix all the issues we’ve encountered.

Do you have any problems with Google Glass since you updated to XE16?