You Are Not Using Your Pixel’s Flashlight at Full Brightness
Unlike other smartphones from companies like Apple and Samsung, Google doesn’t let you control the brightness of your Pixel’s flashlight. While in some cases this may mean the flashlight is a little brighter than you’d like, at least it’s always as bright as it can be, right? Wrong.
As it turns out, not only does Google keep your Pixel’s flashlight at one brightness level, but that set brightness isn’t even the maximum LED brightness. It’s not 90%, 80% or 70%. In fact, this is 50% – half of the potential brightness. If you’ve ever had trouble finding something in the dark with your Pixel 7 or Pixel 8 , this might be why.
Redditor Adnaks noticed the problem and posted about it on r/GooglePixel on Sunday. Luckily, they have a solution: if you use the right third-party flashlight app, you can manually adjust the flashlight intensity, including up to levels above 50%. Adnaks recommends Flashlight Tiramisu , a flashlight app you’ll need to download to your Pixel, but Android Police says other flashlight apps on the Play Store should also work.
Whichever app you choose, launch it and check what brightness your flashlight is set to. If it’s running with the Pixel’s default settings, it should be at 50% brightness, or exactly as bright as your Pixel’s flashlight has always been. Simply increase the intensity if you need extra brightness to find what you’re looking for in the dark.
It’s unclear why the Pixel of all phones doesn’t allow brightness adjustment or limits brightness to 50%. Perhaps Google thinks you’ll damage the LED or your phone if you keep it at 100% for too long, but since many other devices don’t have this limit, it seems a little silly. However, Apple applies the opposite restrictions: your iPhone’s flashlight may actually be less bright than iOS’s lowest settings, but you need a shortcut to take advantage of it .