A few months ago I dropped my Motorola Moto G5s about 50cm onto tiles. Despite having a screen protector the “Gorilla Glass” shattered, making the screen pretty unusable…
I was quoted about $140 to get the broken Moto G5s screen fixed, which seemed a bit rich to me. I ended up ordering a $30 replacement screen from eBay, which arrived less than a month later, and I was able to replace it myself. After replacing the screen it worked great … until Motorola issued an OTA update to Android Oreo 8.1…
Upon loading the update the touch screen stopped working! I could see everything on the screen just fine, but the touch no longer worked.
I tried doing a factory reset, clearing the cache, etc. but nothing worked! Also, because I had not rooted my phone, I could not change the version of Android loaded on the phone.
ARGH!
Unfortunately, after doing a lot of searching, I was not the only one to have a problem with the touch screen not working after updating their Motorola Moto G5s to Android 8.1 Oreo. The best resource that I found was this forum post on Lenovo, the makers of the Moto G5s.
The problem is my replacement screen. It seems that Lenovo has “pulled an Apple“, and installed in their software what amounts to a “kill switch” if any non-original parts have been installed in the phone. There have been a few Motorola support people on the forum, but after acknowledging that it’s a problem, they have been pretty quiet.
I contacted the seller in China of my replacement screen, but they have also gone quiet, and are seemingly not willing to replace the screen with one that works, as this one worked when originally installed.
I have been over a month now without a decent mobile phone, and I’m getting rather tired of it.
Although I have generally liked my Motorola Moto G phones in the past, based on this experience, I will never be purchasing a Motorola phone again …