How to Prevent a Pixel in Your Pocket From Being Unlocked
It’s frustrating to take your phone out of your pocket only to find it’s been on all the time, draining your battery. Pixel owners, in particular, complain about their phones being unlocked in their pockets. And while it’s entirely possible that Google will release a patch in the future, there are a few steps you can take now to fix the issue.
How to prevent your Google Pixel from being unlocked in your pocket
The first thing to try is to decrease the sensitivity of the display. After all, if the display is too sensitive to touch, it may mistake something random in your pocket for a touch, which could lead to it unlocking without your knowledge. To find the setting, open the Settings app, then go to the Display section, where you’ll find a toggle next to “Increase touch sensitivity.”
If you’ve noticed that your Pixel is still turning on in your pocket or bag, there’s another solution, albeit an annoying one: turn off “Press to check phone.” By disabling this feature, commonly referred to as “tap to wake up”, you can eliminate an accidental tap in your pocket as the cause of your pixel being triggered. The screen only lights up when you press the power button or pick up the phone to check.
However, tap to wake is a handy feature as you can check your phone without picking it up, so you might not want to get rid of it. Of course, the trade-off is that your phone doesn’t unlock in your pocket. Some users have criticized Google’s approach to “wake on tap ” and go from two taps to one. This puts the Pixel in line with how things work on the iPhone, but if the company had settled on double-tapping, it would have been harder to accidentally wake up the display.
How to disable “press to wake”
To turn off tap to wake , go to Settings > Display > Lock screen > Tap to check phone , then tap the toggle. If you want to be very aggressive in keeping your Pixel quiet in your pocket, you can also try disabling “Pick up to check phone” which wakes your Pixel when you pick it up, as well as “Wake screen for notifications”. Turning the latter off ensures that your Pixel doesn’t turn on when you receive a new notification, which in turn prevents your phone from being activated by accidentally touching the screen.