Flickering Pixel 10 Pro display glitch is driving users absolutely crazy, and it's hard to unsee

Forgive us. Because we may be about to ruin your relationship with your Pixel smartphone. Have you ever had someone point something out to you, and then you can never not notice it again? Well, we sure hope we aren’t about to draw your attention to it for the first time, but it turns out that quite a few Pixel 10 Pro owners have been noticing some very annoying glitches on their phones’ displays.

Over the last few weeks, posts have popping up on Reddit’s Google Pixel sub from users like Financial-Farmer8914, adbenj, and PixelSailor, all sharing similar stories: A flickering rectangle suddenly shows up on their Pixel 10 Pro (or Pro XL), a little below and to the left of the front-facing selfie camera. Here’s how the glitch tends to manifest:

We’re seeing reports of this behavior across much of the Pixel software available today, with users noticing it on the Android 17 Beta and the latest Android 16 Pixel Drop, alike.

The good news (or at least the closest thing we have to it) is that this flickering seems to usually go away when you reset your phone. And while users have seen it on lock and home screens, it doesn’t appear to pop up when you’re actually in an app. But that said, for some unlucky users it just seems to keep coming back, over and over.

What the heck is causing this phenomenon? Well, as you can see in JerryRigEverything‘s Pixel 10 Pro XL teardown, there’s actually a window in your display panel there that allows the phone’s light and proximity sensors to see through:

Presumably, the effect all these Pixel users describe is the result of the proximity sensor glitching out. We still don’t know exactly what’s causing this unwanted behavior, but the connection to that sensor and the way it at least temporarily goes away after a reset may suggest some software bug with the sensor’s operation.

Whatever the case, we hope Google’s able to get to the bottom of it and deploy a fix, because this would be seriously annoying to be looking at all day. If your Pixel 10 Pro has this problem and you’re only just noticing it now, you have our deepest apologies.