Pixel 6 Pro camera crashes when zooming, and there is no fix

Although the Pixel 6 series is a few years old, the flagship phones still have plenty of life left. The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are promised to receive updates until Android 17, meaning users still using the phone can look forward to being on the latest Android version until next year. However, all is not well with the Pixel 6 Pro in particular, as users have long been complaining about broken video recording through the telephoto camera, and there’s still no fix in sight.

Allegedly, while recording a 4K 30fps video on the Pixel 6 Pro, the camera app will crash if the user switches from 1x to 4x zoom. The app will display a crash message: “A problem occurred, part of the video may not have been saved.” The resultant video will be saved right up to the moment when the phone tries to switch to the 4x camera.

The earliest report I could spot is from February 2025, but there are many reports across the Google Issue Tracker (1, 2, 3) and Reddit (1, 2, 3). This bug was spotted on Android 16 betas, but the latest Android 16 stable update also apparently doesn’t fix it. Exasperated users have tried resetting their phone, but the issue persists. Some users contacted customer care, which allegedly labelled the issue as a hardware fault that needs to be repaired out of warranty.

We’ve tried to replicate the issue on our Pixel 6 Pro, but we could not do so. We can smoothly transition from 1x to 4x and back during 4K 30fps video recording.

We’ve contacted Google for a statement on this issue. We’ll update this article when we learn more.