My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
My experience with Google Customer Support in Germany:<p>I had a Nexus 5 with a broken dispaly (my fault), that also at one point after about 1 year and 9 months of usage got that nasty sticky on&#x2F;off-button issue where it would be stuck in a bootloop with no means of me accessing it. The broken on&#x2F;off-button is clearly a manufactoring defect. German laws demand that all stuff has to work properly for at least 2 years, if used correctly by the user.<p>So when I phoned Google about fixing that button I also mentioned that I had a crack in the display, but the display was working perfectly fine, and what I want them to fix is obviously only the button that&#x27;s been a big issue on the internet and not related to the display crack, and not fix the display. Google then proceeded to tell me, that their warranty would not cover that, I need first to get the display fixed on my own cost, before they would fix the button (which they admitted is definitely a manufacturing defect).
This is absurd. Here&#x27;s a shitty analogy: Imagine you buy a toaster, and it&#x27;s button stops working. You also made a minor scratch on it&#x27;s hull. So the company making the toaster refuses to fix it&#x27;s button unless you fix that scratch first. Ridiculous.<p>German legal stuff: In Germany, you have two choices when your product shows a manufacturing defect before the two years are over: Demand a brand new product, or a demand a repair from the dealer (not the manufactorer, thank god I bought my nexus at the play store and not at some shitty dealer). If two repairs don&#x27;t fix your product or the dealer declines to fix&#x2F;give you a new product you may demand the (usually) full price back.<p>Let&#x27;s call this German 2-year-protection the legal warranty. There is some minor stuff involved about proving that it actually is a manufacturer defect (first half year the dealer has to prove it isn&#x27;t, last one and a half years you have to prove that it is), but this wasn&#x27;t an issue as Google had already confirmed to me that it indeed is a manufacturers defect, which I had asked them to confirm me in an email. Some dealers may try to trick you demanding expensive 3rd party surveys of the problem during that second phase where you have to prove it, thus scaring many customers away from executing their rights. Sadly this works in many cases, while the only &#x27;proof&#x27; you would actually need is to say that you always used the device to its specifications, an expensive 3rd survey is just overkill.<p>So, what Google does is, they offer an additional, voluntary guarantee (I&#x27;m gonna call it like this because in German it is called &quot;Garantie&quot;, while it usually in English is called warranty, to differentiate from the legal warranty which we call &quot;Gewährleistung&quot;). That&#x27;s that little booklet that you usually find in the original package of your phone saying something along the lines of &#x27;warranty for some stuff, but not water damage and not broken displays&#x27;.
German laws say that additional, voluntary guarantees like this are super awesome and totally allowed and stuff but they may never touch any rights that you have from that legal two-year-warranty.<p>So, Googles process of executing their additional guarantee is usually that they immediately send you a brand new&#x2F;refurbished phone, while you have a couple of weeks to send them your old one. They require you to provide a credit card, and it will be charged full price of a new phone if you don&#x27;t send your old one in&#x2F;it happens to not fulfill their requirements for their additional guarantee (this is pretty brash imo btw, personally I used an empty prepaid credit card in case they were going to bitch about my phone when I finally was allowed to send it in).<p>Note that they do not have implemented a process to handle repairs. You will always get a different, brand new&#x2F;refurbished phone than your old one. And this is where they clash with German law. While I theoretically could be a bitch and demand them to repair my specific device, and get the full price back because they wouldn&#x27;t be able to, I did not. I said I&#x27;m willing to adapt to their existing processes, and allow them to send me that brand new&#x2F;refurbished phone instead of doing a prefered repair.
This conveniently would also mean I get a crack free display as a result of the process. But that is not my fault. I&#x27;d have been happy to have only the button repaired, but it&#x27;s entirely Google fault that this was not possible.<p>So, the clerks at the phone were trying to keep me from sending that phone in, because Google doesn&#x27;t want to eat all these probably very frequent display damages, while it is their own fault that they do. Also not a single of the phone clerks I reached (3 calls in total over several weeks) did knew of that legal two-year warranty, they were always refusing to give me a retour label or even an address to manually send the phone in referencing their additional guarantee that does not cover display damage (which, again, I was always emphasizing, was not what I wanted to be repaired). All of them admitted that they had not been taught about the German law of legal warranty, not even the supervisors.<p>So what I did is I set up a registered letter citing all the paragraphs by which I demanded a repair, or if not possible a new device, or if not possible my money back. Weeks of phoning did nothing, but two days after sending the letter I had that retour label without further comment in my inbox and everything went smoothly after that (with additional precaution of mine using an empty prepaid card; pretty sure that practice of Google is illegal by German laws too, but I had my low effort work around).<p>This happened during the fall of 2015. Refurbished phone is working alright. Additional benefit for the customer of getting a new device instead of a repair: your legal two-year warranty is reset.