In a bit of frustrating news, Google has confirmed that it has paused the December update for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, aka the first Feature Drop update for the two devices. The majority of us assumed this was the case, as the OTA has yet to hit many devices, but now, on December 30 and with one day left for the year, Google confirms this to be the case. Thank you for the transparency, Google.
While that’s frustrating enough for some people, Google also takes it a step further. In a statement, the company confirms that there is a bug in the update that causes connectivity issues, leading phone calls to be dropped. That’s the main issue. For the people suffering from this, you have two terrible options. You can either wait for an update, which Google says will come in late January or you can manually flash an old build of Android 12 onto your device using the Android Flash Tool (flash.android.com), which will require a full system wipe.
Just to emphasize further, both of those options suck and Google should do better. In our eyes, it shouldn’t take so long to get an important bug fix out the door. Additionally, telling the public to use Flash Tool to revert to older builds and wipe their devices? Are you kidding? We have to put warning labels on coffee cups that the contents of said coffee cup may be hot. I’m not so confident in everyone being able to do this.
If you aren’t experiencing issues after the update, no action is required and you’re apparently very fortunate.
Lastly, I also want to mention again that we’re frustrated about the length of time it has taken Google to acknowledge this. We constantly have emails and tweets pouring in with Pixel users asking us where the December update is. We didn’t have a good answer until now. And with it essentially being New Years Eve, with an update not scheduled now until late January, that seems like very, very poor form on Google’s part.
We’ll keep you posted.
Note: Google has deleted this post and we’re not sure why. Either way, we’re sharing this information, but something may change. We’ll monitor the situation. Below you can view the post in its entirety before it was deleted.
Update #1: Google has republished the post. As far as we can tell, no wording has changed, so we’re not sure why they did that.
