[Kerbonut]

Almost like a "soft"-brick, if you would.

[dmckeon]

Thus, perhaps "loafed" as in something brick-like, but which may also be soft. And a "loafed" device, being idle, would be loafing.

[taneq]

You could say the device was pillowed. :D Although given the typical behaviour of old phone batteries, I guess that’s a little ambiguous.

[nullhole]

A soft brick would be a brick before being fired in an oven, no?

So maybe the term shouldn't be 'soft brick' but rather 'muddied'.

"That updated muddied my device, I had to clean it up with a restore"

[dgoldstein0]

I appreciate the sentiment but I don't see that catching on. I think a variant of bricked makes sense as it basically means you can't use the device until you can figure out how to fix it. Which the "muddied" analogy doesn't really fit - it's usually possible to use muddy things if not necessarily pleasant.

[nomel]

I remember this being referred to as "the OS needs to be reinstalled", a trivial thing that nobody bothered to give a name to, because it was frequent and non-consequential.