For a number of Google Pixel owners, the March 2025 update has brought on a bug that causes the display brightness to “flicker” when watching videos.
The March 2025 update for Pixel brings a handful of new features and tweaks, as well as a bunch of bug fixes. It’s the last major update on top of Android 15, the QPR2 release, too.
But, for some, this update has also introduced a frustrating bug.
For various Pixel devices, the March update has caused the display brightness to misbehave. The brightness jumps or drops seemingly at random, and not due to changes in the ambient light. Many reports of the issue have popped up over the past few days, and there’s a clear thread through them all.
This issue seems to only affect the display during video playback in apps such as Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and others. We noticed the problem on one of our Pixel 9 series devices, but inconsistently. This is clearly just a bug, but one that’s certainly frustrating.
Some have found that setting the display to a 60Hz mode temporarily fixes the issue.
With fairly widespread reports of the problem, Google will likely have a patch available in the coming weeks. The same update has also caused some minor problems with haptic feedback for some users.
More on Google Pixel:
- March 2025 Feature Drop: Connected Pixel 9 Camera, Satellite SOS expands
- ‘Pixel Sense’ surfaces with ‘predictive’ suggestions from Google apps for Pixel 10 [Gallery]
- New York’s MTA strapped Google Pixels to moving subway cars, for science
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