According to various posts on the Pixel phone forums, the Google Pixel 5 is being struck with a nasty bug, reports Android Police. The thing is, this bug is not new, it is a long-standing Pixel bug.
A nasty bug is plaguing Pixel 5 phones, and you may be familiar with it
If you’ve been using Pixel phones for a long time, or at least reading about them online, chances are you’ve come across this bug before. It is new for the Pixel 5 devices, though.
We’re talking about a bug that breaks all on-device sensors. Sounds nasty, right? Well, it is. Those sensors include the compass, gyroscope, and proximity sensor. This is the same issue that plagued previous Pixel phones.
The issue could be in the corrupted ‘persist’ partition. Google did say that a fix for several sensor issues has been included in the December 2020 patch. For some people, that update did fix the issue.
It is also worth noting that not all Pixel 5 phones suffer from this issue, not at all. It seems like only a small amount of devices do. So, chances are that your phone is not affected at all, regardless if you installed the December 2020 patch or not.
We haven’t had issues with our Pixel 5 unit at all
We haven’t had such issues at all. In fact, out of all the Pixel 5 issues mentioned in reports, all of them avoided our Pixel 5 unit. Specific bugs never affect all units, it seems, as is the case with the ones we’re talking about.
Now, this particular issue causes most on-device sensors to stop working correctly. That can cause the screen not correctly sleeping or waking up when pressed to your ear during calls. It can also cause the auto rotation not to work properly, and the same goes for automatic brightness.
Those are just a few examples. All in all, if you’re affected by it, it’s definitely not a nice experience. This is a long-standing bug, and even though it affects a handful of units, it’s quite bad.
As already mentioned, the December 2020 update seems to have fixed issues for quite a few users. If it did not for you, you can always let Google know, or simply wait for a fix.