The September Pixel Drop brought improvements to the VIP contacts widget, shored up scam detection and added the Pause Point feature to older models. And it seems that it also introduced a nasty bug to the lockscreen.
One Reddit user reports that they couldn’t get through the pattern lock on their lockscreen Pixel 10 Pro XL – they couldn’t even connect the second dot of the pattern before the screen would reset. Another 10 Pro XL user in the same thread experienced similar issues but managed to find a workaround – hard restarting the phone by holding the Power and Volume Down buttons. The first user couldn’t find a workaround, so they had to factory reset the phone.
This isn’t exclusive to the 10 Pro XL or to the pattern lock. Another thread in r/GooglePixel is from a Pixel 8a user – they use a PIN lock, but the phone would show a “wrong PIN” error after the very first digit. Another user reports the same issue with a Pixel 8 Pro.
It seems that the issues have the same root cause – the lock screen is too eager to accept the user’s input before they are done entering their PIN or tracing their pattern. One-segment patterns and one-number PINs aren’t even allowed, so this is an odd bug. This causes additional headaches too, since after a few failed unlocks, the phone will lock the user out for a few minutes.
PixelCommunity, which is an official account run by Google’s support team, has seen these threads and has contacted the users to help.
That’s not all, though. In yet another thread, Pixel 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 owners are complaining that the latest update has made their phones very laggy. So, if you haven’t already installed the September Pixel Drop, you may want to hold off until a fixed version is released.