- Google’s latest Android update is causing problems for the fingerprint reader on some Pixel phones.
- The bug is extremely rare, but on affected handsets the fingerprint scanner stops working altogether.
- Fixing the issue seems to be as simple as fully powering down the phone and rebooting.
One of the most important things you can do as a smartphone users is installing all your latest updates. Updated software doesn’t just add new features, but often fixes old bugs, closes up security holes, and just generally makes our phones more stable and enjoyable to use. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Over the past few days, however, a small number of Pixel users have been reporting a very weird glitch that appears to be caused by the recent March update, breaking the fingerprint scanner on their phones.
Maybe the most frustrating thing about this issue is how incredibly rare it appears to be — you could ask 100 Pixel users about their recent update experience, and odds are that they’d all tell you it went perfectly fine. But over on the GrapheneOS forums, the official account for the open source project has been gathering intel about this problem, which it estimates impacts roughly 1 in 1,000 phones.