PUBG: New State could brick your Android devices - here’s what we found

PUBG New State
(Image credit: Krafton)

After the PUBG mobile ban in India, Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) came as a ray of hope for many committed players. However, a day after the launch of PUBG: New State, players are reporting a major issue whereby Android devices are bricking. 

While the fans got a chance to use their old accounts on Krafton's second instalment of the PUBG game, the launch itself was delayed by two hours due to unspecified technical issues yesterday. Later in the day, Android users got the chance to try out the game and experience the innovations it offered. 

However, tipster Mukul Sharma tweeted that his device running on the Android 12 got bricked post his tryst with the new game. He also warned users to be careful and in a later tweet said his device, an Oppo Find X2 Pro also got bricked upon running the game. 

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What is ‘bricking’ of a device? 

Bricking of a smartphone is a phenomenon that interrupts the basic booting process of the device that hampers its functioning. 

There are essentially two types of bricking - the soft and the hard. In case of the soft bricking, the device stops booting up and the issue can resolved via a hard reset of the device, which means cleaning up everything and starting over again. 

However, in the case of hard bricking, the issue cannot be resolved as easily as the device would require replacement of some components and a simple software root-level fix does not do the trick. 

When is the issue getting triggered?

In most cases, the issue is triggered when the user is trying to log in. The options to login are via Facebook, Google, or a third-party account.

What happens here is that as soon as a user taps on any of the buttons, the device goes into a boot loop until it is completely dead - in other words the smartphone just becomes as useful as a brick. 

People who have not faced the bricking issues have already encountered other minor problems like the game getting stuck at 38% while loading. 

TechRadar's Analysis

Considering the situation, we also tried PUBG: New State on other Android versions, and here is what we found. 

The game got stuck briefly while loading on devices that ran on both Android 9 and 10 operating systems. However, after that, there were no hiccups until we started playing the game. 

In the midst of gameplay, we encountered some minor lagging issues. Luckily, none of the devices got bricked while playing the game, which leads us to believe that the players using Android 12 are at high risk compared to those on other versions. 

Until now, there has been no official statement regarding the issue or possible fixes same by Krafton. Players can only hope that the issue gets resolved soon. We will keep a close watch and come back to you with the outcomes as they happen. 

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Nishit Rudra Raghuwanshi
Gadgets & Appliances Analyst

A career journalist who spent three years playing around with smartphones, associated apps and home appliances. As a hobby, Rudra enjoys researching mobile games. When he's not busy in the world of gadgets, Rudra is busy with a paper and pen writing poems or engaging with his growing digital audience on the Hindi rap circuit.