An Android 10 bug may be causing some phones to become unresponsive

Even the Android 11 Developer Preview may be affected.

What you need to know

• An apparent bug in Android 10 is causing phones to start freezing.
• The issue occurs when an app becomes unresponsive, leading the phone to follow suit.
• The problem seemingly also extends to Android 11.

There may be a bug in Android 10. As Android Police reports, both its staff and several other users have noticed an issue with Pixel 4 devices, as well as offerings by OnePlus and Xiaomi, with the phone freezing up. The problem seemingly occurs when a single app freezes up, causing the entire system to become unresponsive as well.

Another thing that really bothers me on the Pixel 4 XL – when an app freezes up, it oftentimes locks up the whole UI. Notifications, home gesture – everything becomes unresponsive.

Sometimes the UI unfreezes when the app does, sometimes the app remains frozen.

Anyone else?

— Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) April 17, 2020

When it does happen, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get the phone to respond except to lock and unlock the phone. The notification tray and the home button also stop working.

Given that the issue is affecting phones from multiple vendors, and not just Google, and is also launcher-agnostic, the underlying cause may reside in Android 10 itself. Moreover, the issue was also seen on a device running the Android 11 Developer Preview, so the faulty code may have been carried over to the next-generation OS, as well.

There’s no word yet from Google about the recurrent problems that many users have started complaining about. The company will, hopefully, address it soon, and when it does, we’ll update this article with any comments it makes.

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