Trying to save a Samsung A50s
Published on 2025-09-29. #diy
HANG ON!
This is not meant to be used as a guide or technical document of anything specific. This is just a log of what I have done to save my phone. The entire post could be wrong.
Read with a cold head!
ChatGPT was used to fix typos in this blog post. The content however was written by a normal human being.
The Canon Event
On a not-so-beautiful day, my phone decided to stop working. It’s not just a normal “stopping”; nearly all apps are unable to start. Some can start up just fine, like Settings and Firefox, while others will crash after a few seconds of running. Every approximately 30 seconds, a pop-up will appear for a split second and then close itself. After staring at the screen for almost 5 minutes trying to read the flashing pop-up, I managed to read its content:
Google Play Services keeps stopping.
Just a guess, but I think Google Play Services (GPS) crashing is the culprit. Because GPS is crashing, all apps that depend on it will also crash like a domino effect.
Failed Attempts
I tried/considered some solutions:
1. Restart My Phone
Tried. Doesn’t work.
The problem is still there; apps still crash after restarting my phone.
2. Factory Reset via Settings App
My phone is linked to my Samsung account. Because of that, to reset my phone, I will need to type my Samsung account password in. This is a precaution that is meant to protect your phone from thieves resetting your phone to resell it.
But unfortunately, the very Samsung account application that I need to type my password into is also crashing. This means it will crash after opening for a few seconds, making me unable to type my password in.
Crazy…
3. Factory Reset via Find Your Phone Websites
At one point, I remembered that Google and Samsung have websites that allow you to find your phone in the event that you lose it:
Both websites do have features that allow you to reset your phone remotely.
So I logged into both of them, just to find out that both Samsung and Google are unable to contact my phone. Turns out, the applications that actively report my location to Samsung and Google are also in the list of crashed apps, so my phone is unable to connect to both Google and Samsung.
4. Flash My Device with a Custom OS, Degoogling Myself
At this point, I began to consider flashing my phone, perhaps with a custom OS.
This option makes sense to me because even if I manage to get my phone back to working properly, there’s no guarantee that this event won’t happen again. But I want to avoid it for now because:
- Security concerns, obviously.
- Application compatibility for a custom OS; for example, some applications like Vietnamese bank apps need Google components to work properly. While there are solutions that can get these apps to start, most are not guaranteed to work on my device. I personally don’t want to spend significant time getting things to work and possibly have to do it again when things stop working in the future.
- I can’t say I won’t make a mistake, so there’s a possibility that making a mistake will convert my phone into an expensive paperweight.
5. Buy a New Phone
Some people who are experts on… phones? may have already recalled that my phone - Samsung A50s - was first released in August 20191, which is more than 6 years ago. It’s pretty old according to today’s standards, but I’m currently having financial problems, so I want to avoid buying a new phone if possible, at least until after I graduate and get a job.
So, fixing it myself is the most viable solution for me.
Last Hope…
Back to the second option.
There’s something I didn’t mention as I didn’t think it would help at first: the time from the login UI showing up until it crashes varies, and it could stay up working for several seconds before it crashes again.
It could be my last hope.
So, with sheer hope and determination, I copied my password to my clipboard, then continuously reopened the Samsung account UI, trying to paste my password in as fast as possible while hoping it wouldn’t crash.
Eventually, I succeeded. I managed to paste the password in, got it to communicate with the server, and brought me to the next screen where I can continue resetting my phone. Hooray!
It was 11 at night. It cost me a whole night to do this, lol.
Result
Resetting the phone actually fixed the problem. I can’t describe how happy I was when I saw my phone working as expected again.
As mentioned above, I cannot guarantee this will never happen again, but this is all I need for now. I had a lot of fun trying to fix this by myself anyway.
But to be honest, I still don’t know what caused the crash in the first place.