Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- 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.
By far, it appears that the Pixel 9 is the most vulnerable there, although this seems to not similarly affect the Pixel 9 Pro. We’ve also tracked down a few reports of problems with older Pixel phones, like Reddit users singularity_pointer and Qewpath, who ran into the same problem on their Pixel 8 phones.
If you’re affected by this glitch, after installing the March update, your phone acts like it no longer has a fingerprint scanner. Options for the scanner disappear from phone settings, and the hardware no longer appears responsive when you try to use it.
The good news is that this isn’t permanent, and that the fix is relatively simple — if not a little mysterious itself. Basically, just turn your phone off. Resetting won’t cut it — you need to power completely down. And then when you power back up, your fingerprint scanner should be working again. A number of the reports we’ve seen mention having to repeat that cycle a handful of times before it finally clicks, but once it does, you shouldn’t have anything more to worry about.
