The Pixel 6 debuted with so much fanfare, getting praise for its innovations, to the extent some even called it the best smartphone Google has ever made. These sentiments were rightly justified with the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro rocking Google’s first in house chipset, possessing a state-of-the-art camera set up among other cool flagship features.
Despite this, once out of reviewers’ hands, problems, both hardware and software plaguing the Pixel 6 devices, started surfacing, with most of them being attributed to the Android 12 system. Some of the issues have been fixed with software updates. However, there are others that are still haunting some of the early adopters of these flagships. One such bug sees the Pixel 6 and the 6 Pro randomly freezing and ignoring all touch inputs for 1-2 seconds at a time when the battery drops by 1%.
The issue definitely needs an update from Google to fix it, but one Redditor has taken it upon himself to pin down the source of the freezing issues and provide a solution instead of Pixel owners waiting for an official update. In a thread posted on the Google Pixel subreddit on the Reddit platform, the user, u/micku7zu goes into details about how he isolated the issue.
He notes that when an accessibility service with the “canPerformGesture” permission is enabled, the screen can pause for 1-2 seconds every time the remaining battery charge drops another 1 percent. He also states that the issue does not affect every single Pixel 6 device.
However, if your Pixel 6 device is one of the unfortunate ones, a temporary fix currently involves disabling all accessibility services. Not just one of them, but all of them, including Voice Access. This measure definitely sounds a bit overkill and radical, especially for a bug that should be fairly simple for the tech giant to fix. Furthermore, if you depend on one or more of the accessibility features, it is not wise to turn them off.
If this extreme measure is not your cup of tea, another route you can consider going down to is starring the report on the Google Issue Tracker to help draw attention to it. Hundreds of users mainly from the Google Pixel subreddit had already done this at the time of writing this article.
Google, to their credit, has acknowledged the report and has started working on a fix, although no timeline has yet been provided as to when the update is supposed to go live. They have instead mentioned the problems that can reproduce the freezing bug. Therefore, until a fix is provided, you will either have to live without accessibility services or put up with the annoying bug until an update arrives.
Whether this is a case of the minority shouting their concerns from the rafters or the majority of Pixel 6 users really are experiencing difficulties, it can not be overlooked that the Pixel 6 has had a fair amount of frustrating post-launch issues. It seems like every passing week, there is a new bug that has resulted from an update that was intended to fix other bugs. If this trend continues, it does not bode well for Google as they try to bring competition to Samsung and other Android flagships.
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