Google To Pay Rs 50.9 Crore To Owners Of Faulty Pixel Phones Following Lawsuit

Dhir Acharya - May 16, 2019

According to the settlement, each user of the faulty Pixel and Pixel XL may receive up to Rs 35,118 from Google.

Google, the company behind the original Pixel and Pixel XL phones, has agreed to a settlement following a class-action lawsuit filed by the owners of these handsets. According to the settlement, the tech giant has committed to a total financial amount of over Rs 50.9 crore.

The phones affected were made before January 4, 2017; and in February 2018, these models’ owners sued Google after accusing the company of intentionally selling faulty phones.

As stated in the original complaint, hundreds of users reported to Google about “serve microphone issues.”

The-original-Pixel-phone-1 — The original Pixel phone

In particular, the complaint says that rather than fixing, refunding or offering replacements for the defective Pixels, the company replaced the defective devices with other defective ones, causing a lot of consumers to repeatedly experience the defect in the microphone.

Under the settlement, the affected Google Pixel owners are divided into four categories. Among the categories, the group that suffered from the audio defects, including on a replacement device, will receive Rs 35,118 from the company. Meanwhile, those that underwent just one failure will get as much as Rs 24,583.

The-Pixel-XL-phone-2 — The Pixel XL phone

On the other hand, users that didn’t report undergoing the defect will still receive Rs 1,404 from Google. The fourth category includes users receiving insurance payment from third parties, each case will be judged individually.

Google first unveiled the original Pixel smartphone in October 2016. This was the first flagship phone that it branded. Before that, the tech giant had released phones via the Nexus program, but it only provided the software and made the hardware by cooperating with Huawei or LG.

The company didn’t respond immediately to a comment request on this matter but back in March last year, it said that the solder connection on the audio codec had a hairline crack that impacted on about 1 percent of all original Pixel phones.

At that time, a Google employee wrote that the defect would have an influence on all three mics and would likely lead to other issues in processing audio.

Later in 2017, the Pixel 2 XL underwent burn-in issues.