I talked with Charlie about this offline...

One thing we might want to look into is that on android we are using docker containers to isolate devices. On linux systems, to communicate with the battor via serial over usb we need to run 'sudo usermod -a -G dialout <USER_NAME>'.

I'm not sure how docker works under the hood, but it is possible that we may have to re-run this under some conditions? How does docker react when we swap out devices? I know the container name changes, but does this change the username used? Does it do <insert a million corner cases I'm not knowledgeable enough to even know enough to ask about>?

Adding bpastene@ to see if he knows anything that may be helpful.

This could also all be a red-herring. 

This might be related to  bug 759160 . I'm rolling a fix forward now. Let's see if that fixes things.

Going to snooze this for two weeks and see if we've seen any more failures by then. 

The NextAction date has arrived: 2017-09-11

I'm going to close this as WontFix. Ben said that he was working on a fix that might work for this and, given that I haven't seen any consistent problems since that time, it doesn't make sense to keep open.