Login
Android 17 is causing touchscreen issues for some Pixel owners — but there’s a potential workaround
- Android 17 is causing touchscreen issues for a number of Pixel owners
- Google is aware of the issue and has suggested some solutions, but these seemingly haven't worked for most people
- Another fix suggested on Reddit appears to work better, but still not for everyone
Android 17 hasn’t had the smoothest of starts, with some early updaters reporting issues with Wi-Fi and 5G connections, and now yet another bug has emerged — this time affecting the touchscreen.
According to various Reddit users (via Android Authority), the update to Android 17 has led to touchscreen issues, including the screen scrolling in the opposite direction to the one they swiped, completely ignoring taps, and there being dead zones where the screen is unresponsive.
It’s hard to say how widespread this issue is, but there are multiple Reddit threads about it, and it has also been submitted to Google’s issue tracker. So if you haven’t updated to Android 17 yet, you might want to hold off — though it seems the Google Pixel 6 series at least might be unaffected.
The good news is that Google is aware of the bug, as not only has it been submitted to the company’s issue tracker, but an official Google account actually replied to one of the Reddit threads, suggesting a couple of possible fixes.
Three possible fixes
These included clearing the cache, by going to Settings > Apps > See all apps > Pixel Launcher app > Storage & cache > Clear cache. If that doesn’t work the other suggestion was to boot your phone into safe mode and see if that fixes the problem.
To do this on a Pixel 6 or newer that’s currently switched on, press and hold the power button for a few seconds, and then tap and hold either the ‘Power off’ or ‘Restart’ option, followed by tapping ‘OK’. If your phone is off, you instead want to press the power button, and then when the animation starts, press and hold the volume down button until the animation ends.
In either case your phone will say ‘safe mode’ at the bottom of the screen once it starts up, and if this does fix the problem then the issue is a third-party app, so you should temporarily remove these one by one, starting with the most recent ones, until you find the culprit.
But while that’s the official Google advice, it doesn’t appear to have worked for many people. What does seem to have worked slightly more widely is a suggestion to turn off the triple-tap magnification shortcut.
To do this, head to Settings > Accessibility > Magnification, then either turn off ‘Magnification shortcut’, or tap on it and change the magnification option to something other than ‘Triple-tap screen’. However it's unclear whether this has worked for everyone or not.
So if none of the above resolves the problem for you, then unfortunately you’ll probably have to wait for Google to roll out a proper fix. Let’s just hope that doesn’t take long.
