Why doesn't my phone turn on?

Hi Pedro,

This sounds suspiciously like what happened to my niece's Pixel 4 XL. Wouldn't charge, can't reset, no power, just looking dead.

I checked everything possible outside the phone and tried every suggestion I could find on the internet for resets, button presses and chanting "Wake up!" to it, with no luck.

I resigned myself to opening it up and taking a look around. For safety's sake I unplugged the battery and checked the connector and looked carefully at everything for any possible clue as to what was going on, but found nothing.

So imagine my surprise with I plugged the battery back in and pressed the power button only to have it turn on!

I literally did nothing to the phone but unplug the battery for a while then plug it back in, and all of the sudden it's working again. I tested it every way I could think of, charging it to full then running it till it died a couple of times, and it worked exactly the way it was supposed to.

I have no explanation for this miracle cure other than thinking that something in the software got royally messed up and crashed the whole thing to the point where it couldn't even reset itself and that disconnecting the battery finally reset it so it could reboot. In theory it shouldn't be possible to lock out the hardware (hard) reset function, but I don't know what else could explain it.

If you're patient you could just wait until the battery dies completely; that should accomplish the same thing as unplugging the battery, but it may take a quite a while to drain.

So my suggestion is you could open it up and unplug the battery. Give it a half hour or so - you probably only need maybe 30 seconds, but that's how long I had the niece's unplugged so that's what I'm sticking with - then plug it back in and see if it'll wake up. Unfortunately the Pixel 4a 5G looks quite a bit more difficult to open than the 4 XL, so consider carefully if you want to do this.

Here's a guide on how to remove the battery; just stop after step 23 where you unplug the battery connector.

Google Pixel 4a 5G Battery Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide

You'll probably want to pick up a new adhesive seal for the front cover to help restore the water resistance of the phone when you put it back together. You can buy that here in iFixit if you want.

Google Pixel 4a 5G Display Adhesive - Genuine - iFixit Store