All these reports and speculation about the underlying issue are very interesting (and I am sure frustrating for those affected).
The Infotainment system is self-contained and glitches like those reported suggest that it was overloaded due to some kind of problem activity taking all its CPU resources: this could be an inherent bug that was triggered by an attempt to do an OTA, or some kind of normal server response when the car wakes up. My money is on the latter, since it is very unlikely everyone's car was trying to do an OTA at the same time - perhaps merely saying an OTA update was available was enough to trigger a bug, or beginning to download it did.
Actually doing an OTA would most likely require the car to not be driving and would take some time. This is how it works on most other vehicles.
Note that none of this should have affected the car's core driving systems and aids that don't use the Infotainment. They should still continue to function fine. The report of the car going backwards is probably coincidental report of the earlier (and oft mentioned) 1-pedal driving issue where the car can sometimes reverse and is likely not connected to this issue.
Of course features that depend on the Infotainment system, like the reversing camera, navigation, CarPlay/AA won't work properly in these situations, which can be considered "core" systems if you depend on them.
It is highly unlikely it was anything sinister. Far, far, far more likely it was an unexpected bug triggered by something someone changed on the server and it eventually got changed back.
Obviously it shouldn't have happened, and it doesn't speak well of MG's quality control processes. Hopefully lessons have been learned!
This was the whole reason why the OTA rollout is going to be slow, selective and focused on particular models as it comes. Would be nice to have a simple way to opt-out: but then again, I don't think the OTA updates will be automatic, they will be opt-in, I think it is likely something failed well before we got to the point of having that option. But still, some will want to have the option to "Never download any updates", it should be there.
If I had to guess, the car starts polling their server and goes into a busy loop under some server failure condition (haven't dug onto what but it should be simple to find) - then that's what uses the entertainment cpu and causes everything else. This loop only happens after the boot complete intent or at least late, hence it works for a moment after a reboot. This is also why disabling data sorts the problem.
This is very very amateur on multiple ways and has killed my confidence on the car:
* Lane assist and emergency brake were listed as disabled. This is terrible. Those are safety critical systems that should not ever have anything remotely to do with infotainment. Android is not a real time OS and has no latency assurances - you wouldn't want Spotify being slow writing a file because of say a full filesystem impacting the car ability to do emergency braking!
That's the case (it works fine, as I'd expect) with the retention levels - even if adjusting it via (customized) wheel button wasn't displaying the message because of lag, it showed immediately in the front screen and was perceivable. But there's no good reason why emergency braking should ever be affected by anything involving a server problem. Ever.
(Also, it's very flaky under rain conditions, which is when it's more likely to be needed!).
* 360 cameras should also be real time and separate. Parking without them was interesting with the car rear visibility. Again there's a good reason why automotive android (as in say Renault's!) needs a separate os driving compositing screens for say the speedometer. But anyway.
* It's been over 24h without a fix or even acknowledgement from saic. Are they even aware this is happening? Do they monitor their servers at all? Will we have to wait until Monday to be able to use the cars full functionality, is anyone looking? Will they ever work again? Why is the problem not even mitigated yet? Can't they roll back the release? Have they even tested this before rolling it, have they tested the rollback before launching it? Are they incapable or unaware? Or do they just not care?
* Android auto was choppy. Worse yet, it stayed frozen at times on navigation until it crashed; then went into crash looping, being severely distracting while driving, and not possible to stop it from the car because of the lag on the ui. I assume saic shares the blame on how it is implemented here with Google.
* If my assumption on the busy loop is half close to what happens, that's a very poor practice - exponential backoff exists for a reason, and the ways to recover fleets of distributed clients are well known and documented by now. This makes me question where else are they developing like this - surely hope not on the engine! Toyota issues with sudden acceleration due to software come to my mind here.
I'll definitely consider selling the car and taking the hit after this because of the above.
(Anyone knows the engineering mode pins? I'm more than curious to validate my assumptions here!)