Google Pixel 6 faces sensor issues, breaking auto-rotate

According to an Android Police report, both models in Google's latest flagship models are prone to annoying bugs in their software, with the one seemingly hardest hit being the auto-rotate feature on the devices. 

An Android December patch has already gone live to take care of some of the predominant bugs in the series, but it didn't fix everything by a long shot—and certainly not the recurring auto-rotate issue, rendering users unable to get their phone screen to flip sideways or back to a vertical position.

It appears as if the issue stems from faulty communication between the Pixel 6's on-board physical sensors and the software. At times, the device is seemingly unable to read the data provided by some of these sensors, namely the gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass. This was discovered by running tests with the Sensor Test app, and finding that the feedback from the sensors simply fails at times.

It's the gyroscope and the accelerometer that are responsible for detecting when to automatically flip a user's screen, and with the system unable to properly read the data provided by these sensors, the device has no way to know if the phone is positioned vertically or horizontally.

Pixel 6 and 6 Pro users have also been complaining that when using navigational apps such as Google Maps, their phone is often unable to correctly show which direction they are facing on the map. The tiny pointer either goes spinning every which way, or points to a stationary—and wrong—direction, making it ever harder for them to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B.

This, just like the auto-rotate bug, is in turn attributed to lack of feedback from the compass sensor situated inside the device. 

So far, there has been no word from Google on these persistent sensor-related issues, but hopefully, the tech giant is already hard at work prepping another Android patch for the Pixel 6 series to solve what could be some of the most frustrating (albeit small) bugs once and for all!