Gadget Weekly
Join Namerah Saud Fatmi as she explores the cool, quirky, and sometimes downright odd world of smartphone accessories, gadgets, and other nerdy toys every week.
The green line of death is an immortal enemy of modern smartphones. We’ve seen this issue resurface time and time again, for years upon years now. I personally saw many a OnePlus and Xiaomi phone succumb to this ailment as early as 2018. My close personal friend lost his precious OnePlus 7 Pro to the issue back in the day.
Unfortunately, it seems like the latest phones are not immune to the green line of death. I interviewed two phone owners in the past week, both of whom faced this issue in front of my very eyes. The first user, a friend of mine called Darryl, had a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in mint condition which fell prey to the green line of death. Meanwhile, the second victim named Chris had bought a Motorola Razr Plus 2023 less than 10 months ago when it too faced the same glitch.
I found their stories intriguing because I had thought that such issues were a thing of the past. But a quick search on community forums like Reddit or X with the keywords “green line” seems to say otherwise. These are not isolated incidents and this problem is far more widespread than I had thought.
Darryl had purchased his Galaxy S22 Ultra from Dubai about three years back. He is extremely fond of his tech and gear, so he went out of his way to keep it as fresh as possible. Bear in mind that he’s not a power user either.
One fine day the poor guy woke up to find his dear smartphone glitching out of nowhere. According to him, he did not update the device or install anything new on it. It was an ordinary day and he wasn’t doing anything unusual on his S22 Ultra. All he did was pick it up to check the time somewhere in the middle of the day. And lo and behold, the green horseman of death had arrived.
Since his warranty was already up, Darryl ended up paying out of pocket to get his display replaced by Samsung. Unlike him, Chris was a little luckier.
Unable to resist a fantastic deal offered by his Canadian carrier, Chris bought the irresistibly cool Motorola Razr Plus 2023 roughly 10 months ago. The foldable was working just fine until a couple of weeks ago, when a green line appeared out of nowhere on the internal display. It went away when he restarted the phone immediately, but soon came back and started spazzing out, going from green to black and blue, and then green again randomly.
Since Chris was still covered by Motorola’s warranty, he was able to replace his Razr+ 2023 free of charge in no time at all. Motorola did not tell him much about what was wrong, but at least the brand was quick to replace his faulty device. Users like Darryl and countless others have not been this fortunate.
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Up until very recently, Samsung had also kept mum on its Galaxy phones facing the green line of death. Some Galaxy phone screens started showing a nasty green line after the April 2024 update, affecting the Galaxy S22, S21, and Note 20 series. When numerous reports of similar incidences started piling up, Samsung India announced that it would offer free one-time screen replacement for Galaxy display defects, as long as the phone hadn’t been bought over three years ago.
My issue with this is multifaceted. Not only is this offer limited to Samsung India, but it also does nothing for other Galaxy owners who have lost devices to the green line going back to the Galaxy S9 era. What’s their consolation? Who will compensate those users for the flaw that was not their fault and yet they still had to pay to fix?
The journalist in me had a strong desire to uncover the secrets of the green line. What is it, what causes it, and why? To answer all my questions, I reached out to several smartphone and display manufacturers. Since reports of green lines include phone displays made by Samsung, LG, and BOE, I tried to reach out to all of them. BOE was unreachable, whereas Samsung and LG gave no response. The same goes for Motorola, who was also unresponsive.
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In my quest to understand what causes green lines, I also reached out to industry experts, but no one responded to my queries. Thus, I turned to my smart colleagues Jerry Hildenbrand and Harish Jonnalagadda who are fluent in nerd speak.
According to their extensive knowledge, there are various reasons why your display could start having green lines and go kaput. It’s a hardware flaw, but this flaw can sometimes remain dominant until a software change or flaw triggers it. This would explain why some displays see the green line of death appear after software updates while others see no apparent cause for it.
Green lines could be damaged pixels, but in most cases, they are there because the display driver isn’t sending a signal to those selected pixels. This can happen when the same model of phone has slightly different revisions of the components that power and drive the display, and the software may have inconsistencies on certain revisions. That’s why an update will often lead to a bunch of people seeing this green line issue.
And it’s not just the display or smartphone software at fault alone. Usually, it’s the flex cable at fault, but it could also be the substrate itself degrading over time because of overheating, or the controller. Every brand uses at least two vendors to source each part, so it becomes very hard to pin down what’s causing it.
Phone brands have been silent for far too long and refuse to give us conclusive answers about this mystery. So what’s the solution to all of this? Since this is real life, the answer is just not that simple. We need to hold companies accountable, push them to use better quality parts, and ask for better quality control measures in smartphone manufacturing plants.
It doesn’t matter whether your phone’s display is made by Samsung, BOE, or LG. What matters is that they recompense people like Darryl who are fond of their possessions and take care of them, and yet are still forced to pay for repairs that they are not liable for. What matters is that we aren’t sold faulty devices unknowingly, paying full price for phones that might stop being functional at an unknown point after purchase, quite possibly when your warranty is no longer valid.