Upgrade to Lollipop on Note 4 has been stuck on "Android is upgrading" "Starting app." for 8 hours already.

[DavidMo]

Upgrade to Lollipop on Note 4 has been stuck on "Android is upgrading" "Starting app." for 8 hours already. Should I pull the battery? Seems risky during upgrade, but this looks unlikely to complete.

[cchamp77]

is this part 1 of the update or part 2?

[jrwraz · Accepted solution]

The upgrade should definitely not take 8 hours to complete. If the phone is still saying this, it either had some kind of error while updating, or the upgrade may be complete, and for some reason either failed to close the "please wait" notification window, or froze up while it was displayed.

At this point if it has been stuck there for 8 hours, you are probably correct that it will stay stuck there indefinitely without manual intervention. I would say although it may be risky, a power cycle is going to be your best bet at this point, unless you have extreme patience, and don't mind being without your phone for a while, which I would not be willing to do.

If it makes you feel any better, as long as there is not any kind of physical damage to the phone, issues caused by failed software updates are typically covered under the device warranty, as long as you followed the instructions and did not just get curious as to what would happen if you ignored the "DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR PHONE" warning and DID turn off your phone (accidentally, of course ) Sometimes I... err.. I mean OTHER people... simply cant resist the temptation to see what happens if you do exactly the opposite of the big, bold, all-caps warning.

[smith6612]

It sounds like your phone has already made it past the parts that would actually damage the software if you were to do a battery pull. Go ahead and pull the battery. When you re-insert the battery, press Power, then hold Up Volume and Home  buttons afterwards to boot into recovery.

When in recovery, press the Down Volume button until "Clear Cache Partition" is selected, and then hit Power. From there, select the option to reboot the phone.

After system updates, it's a good idea to clear the Cache Partition. Once the phone boots, it should be ready to go. I'd go ahead and check for app updates, since Lollipop may have caused some older apps to break. Many developers have updated their applications to resolve Lollipop issues months ago.

[DavidMo]

I ended up pulling my battery and restarting the phone. The setup restarting the portion where it was optimizing apps (or whatever it does) and successfully completed.