What to Do If Android 10 Is Killing Your Pixel Phone’s Sensors
Some early adopters ran into a rather problematic bug with Android 10 on their pixels. It’s not clear what exactly is causing the error, but the move to Android 10 has killed the sensors in their Pixel devices for some users. And at the time of this posting, there doesn’t seem to be a way to fix the issue on Android 10.
A number of Pixel users have posted bug reports on Google Issue Tracker , Reddit, XDA Forums and other message boards. Broken sensors make many features and settings unusable, such as auto-rotate, auto-brightness, screen-in-call controls, and other gestures or gyro shortcuts, just to name a few. All Pixel devices seem to be affected by this bug and users have been submitting reports that update their devices over the air (OTA) or directly flashing Android 10 to their devices.
Despite numerous complaints, the sensor issue seems to be a rare – even accidental – occurrence, and we can’t say it’s widespread enough with a full update to Android 10 . However, this is still a debilitating mistake for those affected.
So far, the only way out is to go back to Android 9 Pie . It’s a somewhat tedious process, but users report that it restored all the sensors on their devices without any problems. If you’re still looking at Android 10 after doing this, we recommend that you wait to see how Google fixes the issue with a fix before trying to update Android 10 again.