Google’s recent flagship phones are randomly crashing when playing a clip from Alien
For as much as we love about the Google Pixel 7, the series hasn’t arrived without a few hiccups. Whether the camera was crashing, or scrolling behaved a little wonky, those first few months saw their fair share of bugs — and, to be fair, bug fixes. New ones keep popping up here and there, too, and sometimes it feels like complaints only seem to grow as the phones land in more hands. Now the latest issue to arrive concerns a weird glitch that causes some Pixel 7 and 6 units to crash when trying to play a video clip on YouTube.
Multiple users have taken to Reddit (via the Google News channel on Telegram) to report that when they play this specific clip from the 1979 film Alien on the YouTube app, it crashes their Pixel 6 or 7. In some cases, the video will play for a few seconds before crashing and rebooting the phone. Other users claimed that as soon as the YouTube app began to load the clip, their phones went into a soft reboot.
We’ve tested it out for ourselves, and while a number of Android Police editors and writers can confirm the issue, other staffers aren’t encountering the glitch when trying to view the content it on their Pixel 6 or 7 phones.
So what the heck is going on here? That is a very good question. Since we’re dealing with “poison” media, our thoughts first go back to the old Pixel wallpaper bug, which drove the phone to endless crashes, forcing users to do a factory reset. Back then, the glitch stemmed from an issue with calculations on the image’s color space — and seeing as we’re looking at an HDR clip here, we wonder if we’re once again in the same ballpark. It’s also possible this is tied to Tensor silicon, as older Pixels don’t appear to be affected. Thankfully, in the case of this cursed YouTube clip, while some users report momentarily disabled cellular services following the reboot, there doesn’t seem to be any lasting harm.
This isn’t the first time YouTube has caused crashes on Google’s latest and greatest Android phones. Last month, a number of Pixel 7 owners reported that their phones crashed or froze when viewing YouTube in full screen mode and swiping up on the navigation bar. That’s supposed to bring you to the home screen or open the recent apps menu.
For now, this is just an oddity, and we hope someone doesn’t find out a way to make it malicious before Google’s able to fix whatever’s causing it. If you’re curious, or just want to see for yourself, go ahead and watch the video at your own peril.
