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Occasionally when I'm out for a walk I take my phone out of my pocket to look something up. As soon as I touch my finger to the fingerprint icon, the screen goes black. It'll stay black for several minutes, though the phone vibrates when I touch the screen. This happens maybe 10% of the time.

It only happens when I'm out walking. I had considered it may be related to the sun, but it never happens on the back porch. Perhaps it has something to do with being out of wifi range, but I don't think it's happened when I've been traveling (though I walk more than I travel so there is some sampling bias). The phone doesn't come back to life immediately when I get home. It takes a few minutes.

Once it's gone black, pressing the power button does not energize the screen.

There are errors in logcat, but they seem identical between the successful unlocks and the black screen unlocks.

UPDATE: I was able to rewind in my podcast by tapping at the screen. So it seems the screen unlocks but is black.

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    For those not familiar, I believe the Pixel 6 has an optical fingerprint sensor. "The OLED panel shines a bright light on your fingerprint [only], and the sensor reads that reflected light". So it makes some sense, but I'm not sure why sun would matter. I've always thought the Pixel lights up the fingerprint at max intensity even in a dark room.
    – sourcejedi
    Commented Aug 10 at 9:47
  • "So it seems the screen unlocks but is black." I had experienced this before on Nexus 5, Lineage OS 14.1, where the screen suddenly blacked out but the touchscreen worked. It looks like the adaptive screen brightness "dropped" to 0, resulting in a total black (should be a bug). I don't know the root cause or the fix (and my Nexus 5 has died), but I managed to turn the screen back on by blindly swiping down the quick settings panel and dragging the brightness.
    – Andrew T. ♦
    Commented Sep 6 at 13:06
  • Does it happen in safe-mode? (You can Google how to put your device in safe mode, if you don't know). If it doesn't, it means an user installed app is responsible for this. Brute force approach would be to factory-reset and try
    – beeshyams
    Commented Sep 11 at 5:11

1 Answer 1

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Maybe its happening because of movement. Perhaps you have dropped the phone once too often and the connector the screen is a bit loose. Try it while jogging on your porch.

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  • It always happens immediately after I scan my fingerprint, so I think it's a software problem rather than a loose connector.
    – Dan Stahlke
    Commented Sep 8 at 17:09

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