Urgent help required on Samsung S9 phones

[Cl4rkyPH]

In need of some urgent help!

My parents had a problem with an app on both their phones (Samsung S9) yesterday afternoon, which I thought was strange to affect both phones, so after reinstalling the app didn’t work, I checked their phones software version. Both were approximately 3 years out of date!

Thinking that it may help, I updated both phones to the latest software update (via the normal way in Settings on the phone)… and it’s completely bricked both of them (I stupidly run the update on both phones side by side)!

The issues are:

1. SIM card not recognised so the phones are basically useless if not on Wifi

2. Samsung Experience Stopped Working error

3. IMS Service Stopped Working error

4. Can’t log on to their Samsung accounts on either phone, password is definitely correct (reset it on a laptop to make sure), but just cycles back to the login page again

5. Battery usage is suddenly through the roof, to the point where they won’t hold their charge when being used. I can’t even run a backup using SmartSwitch without the phones getting too low and stopping the back up

6. Some parts of the Settings menu are completely inaccessible, like “More Communication Settings” - when I tap this, the Settings menu just crashes

I have tried:

1. Booting into safe mode
2. Resetting network settings
3. Resetting all settings to default
4. Resitting the sim card

The obvious next step is to back the phones up and reset them to factory settings but I’m unable to back them up as the battery usage doesn’t allow me.

Google doesn’t seem to find anyone with the same problem, resulted from a software update.

Has anyone got any experience of this or ideas to help?

[blingybongy]

6 year old android phones, they are past trying to fix unfortunately.
Get them a couple of new phones.
Motorola phones are a good bet and cheap.

[drdino]

Tried clearing the cache (not data as this will effectively reset the phone) from the recovery menu?

[Condi]

The software version being 3 years out of date isn't that surprising, Samsung don't support the phones especially long after they're discontinued and the S9 is quite old now. I doubt there are any more updates available.

What app stopped working? Sounds like that is the issue, not the Android version on the phone.

[Cl4rkyPH]

blingybongy said:

6 year old android phones, they are past trying to fix unfortunately.
Get them a couple of new phones.

I thought the same.

drdino said:

Tried clearing the cache (not data as this will effectively reset the phone) from the recovery menu?

Did so, didn’t work.

Condi said:

The software version being 3 years out of date isn't that surprising, Samsung don't support the phones especially long after they're discontinued and the S9 is quite old now. I doubt there are any more updates available.

What app stopped working? Sounds like that is the issue, not the Android version on the phone.

This was the conclusion I came to.

The app that wasn’t working was the TUI app. On the basis both apps stopped working, and no one (including TUI) reported that their app was down, I thought a Samsung software update would be a harmless thing to try.

How wrong I was.

Anyhoo, they’ve just signed up to two new iPhone 15’s with Vodafone and after a few hours transferring everything using “Move to iOS” (which crashed on the Samsung’s a few times) and a bit of training from me, they are loving the jump up to a new model!

Thank you all for your help.