Evening Latte

Summary

My daily experience and some specific testing suggests the January 2026 patch for Google Pixel phones has drastically reduced my phone’s Bluetooth (BT) range. The primary effect has been nearly disabling app notifications on my Garmin smartwatch. Subsequent patches in February and March have not fixed the issue, and the behavior has persisted after factory resets of both the phone and watch.

I’m documenting this process for my own usage as well as reference by other Pixel owners and Google support personnel when I contact them.

How It Used to Be

I purchased my regular Pixel 10 256GB (not Pro or XL) in early November. Similar to previous Pixel models, outside of a quirk with wireless Android Auto, Bluetooth worked as expected, including my Garmin smartwatch (Forerunner 255). The range between it and my Pixel was great. The best example was the gym: I normally left my phone in my vehicle, but when I was on call for work, I brought it in and stored it in the mini lockers or the actual locker room. I was routinely 50-70ft from my phone during workouts, and when I got calls, texts, or emails, my watch frequently received and displayed the notifications.

In addition to my watch and vehicle, I occasionally used my phone to play music via BT on two speakers (Tribit StormBox Micro 2, Anker Motion+) and an amp in my unattached garage (Fosi Audio BT20A). The connection from my phone to all devices was reliable no matter where I was in my house (2-level, 2,200 square feet) or garage. In other words: everything worked well enough that I never had to think about it.

January

Shortly after the January patch became generally available, I installed it on my Pixel. I hadn’t experienced significant issues with previous patches, so I didn’t think much of it. But within a few hours, it became obvious something was broken.

I intentionally avoid spending a lot of time on my phone. Part of that is using smartwatch notifications to determine if something requires my immediately attention (rare) or I can queue it for later (common). So the loss of those notification was very noticeable.

I started with the standard troubleshooting steps:

• Power cycled the phone
• Power cycled the watch
• Confirmed Garmin Connect had the correct notification settings
• Confirmed the watch was recognized by both Connect and the phone’s Bluetooth settings

Everything checked out. Crucially, I think I had the phone in my left hand during most (if not all) the tests. More on that later.

After I’d exhausted everything I could think to do, I did a quick search online and found that many other Pixel users were experiencing connectivity issues (including BT) after applying the patch. I resigned myself to waiting for a patch to fix things.

February

I installed the eagerly-anticipated February patch, but soon found that the behavior persisted. I then uninstalled/reinstalled the Connect app and reconnected my watch per Garmin documentation to no effect. I took things one step further by performing a factory reset on the watch (restoring a backup after reconnecting), but again, there was no change.

While looking through the Garmin’s settings after the reset, I enabled connection notifications to see if that would reveal any patterns. Unfortunately, it seemed to happen at random, even while I was sitting at my office desk with my phone under my monitors or on my couch with my phone on the end table. The frequent buzzing was annoying, so I disabled the notifications. Since I hadn’t found any reliable patterns, I was back to waiting for another Pixel patch.

I also reached out to Garmin support to see if they might have a workaround, but they basically told me that it was a Google/Pixel problem, so they couldn’t do anything. Since so many people online had reported Pixel support being unhelpful, I wanted to gather some more info before starting that process.

Near the end of the month, there was an unseasonably warm weekend day, and I decided to take my bike out. When I turned on the StormBox BT speaker I use while riding, it didn’t connect to my phone as expected. When I picked up the phone and unlocked it to see what was wrong, the speaker immediately connected and started playing music. After that, the connection was fine during both rides I did.

At that point, I thought the behavior was pointing to some sort of timeout on BT connections when the phone was locked or stationary (potentially related to its gyroscope). Every time I locked the phone and put it down, my watch disconnected, the speaker had failed to connect until I picked up and unlocked the phone, and the connection has stayed stable during the ride (while the phone was constantly moving). I made another pass through the phone’s BT settings to see if there was any keep-alive function I could enable, but I couldn’t find anything.

March

Increasingly frustrated with nearly six weeks of lost functionality, I decided to finally do a factory reset on my phone. I manually backed up some files and app settings, then rebuilt the phone from the ground up without an OS-level restore just in case an underlying configuration was the root cause of the issues.

One of the first things I did was install Connect and pair my watch. Early results were promising: it stayed connected for an hour or so while I reinstalled/reconfigured apps and the operating system to get things back the way I liked them. Unfortunately, when I got a text later that day, I didn’t receive the notification on my watch, and sure enough, I saw it was disconnected from the phone.

It just so happened I performed the factory reset a day or two before the March Pixel update was released to general availability. I eagerly installed it, hoping for a blessed return to normalcy, but those hopes were again dashed when yet another notification failed to be sent to the watch.

Yesterday/Today

I decided to enable connection notifications on the watch again and just deal with t he annoying for a couple days to see if I could find any patterns. Initially, it was a repeat of the first try: seemingly random disconnects and reconnects. But after a full day, I realized that if the watch was disconnected, it would reconnect every time I picked up the phone with my left hand. This was the turning point.

After a gym trip, I ran an errand and picked up dinner, and the watch stayed connected the entire time (over an hour). Based on reports of Wi-Fi issues from other Pixel owners, I thought a Wi-Fi connection might have been interfering with BT while I was at home, but neither a public Wi-Fi connection nor disabling the Wi-Fi radio at home changed the behavior.

My focus shifted from the state of the phone (unlocked, locked, inactivity duration, Wi-Fi status) to the distance between the phone and the watch. I’d previously dismissed this path of testing since the disconnects consistently happened while the devices were within 3-4ft of each other, and as I noted in the section above, prior to the January patch, they had consistently maintained a connection from 50ft+ away, just like my Pixel 9 and previous models had done with the exact same watch and speaker.

It quickly became apparent I was onto something: for the first time, I was able to reliably reproduce both connect and disconnect events. If I left the phone on a counter or table, walked several feet away, and stayed there for 10-20 seconds, the watch would disconnect every time. When I walked back to the phone and picked it up with my left hand (where I wear my watch), it would reconnect every time. I could now finally build a formalized test.

Connection Distance Test

In this test, I recorded the distance that a connection was successfully established in the the following scenarios:

• The phone (in an unlocked state) and the watch
• The phone (in a locked state) and the watch
• The phone (in an unlocked state) and the speaker
• The phone (in a locked state) and the speaker

For all tests, the phone was placed on the edge of my standard-height kitchen counter, and I used a tape measure on the floor to determine the distance between the phone and the other devices.

For the watch tests, I walked down the hall and waited until the disconnect notification was triggered (normally 10-20 seconds). I then stood 10 feet away from the phone for 10 seconds (I play ultimate frisbee, so I’m accustomed to counting 10 seconds pretty accurately). If a connection wasn’t established, I took a step to 9 feet from the phone and stood there for 10 seconds. I continued this until a connection was established. I held the watch at my waist (roughly counter height) and pointed the face at the phone to give full line of sight and minimize the chance of interference.

For the speaker tests, I powered it on at 12ft and waited for a few seconds to see if it connected. If it didn’t, I slowly walked forward (roughly a foot every 3 seconds) until the speaker made its connection sound. I held it on the edge closest to me to give full line of sight and minimize the chance of interference.

I performed the test five times for each combination. All measurements are in feet.

Phone (U) + watch	Phone (L) + watch	Phone (U) + speaker	Phone (L) + speaker
1	2	8	7
3	4	7.5	3.5
3	4	8	6
2	3	11	8
4	5	Magic	8
Avg: 2.6	Avg: 3.6	Avg: 8.6	Avg: 6.5

Observant readers will notice that the fifth iteration of the unlocked phone and speaker resulted in magic. When I turned the speaker on at 12ft, not only did it connect immediately, but the speaker continued playing music as I walked around the kitchen and even into adjacent rooms. I went to the spot I’d been using to get the watch to disconnect, and music continued playing (albeit with intermittent dropouts). The range wasn’t anywhere near what it was before the patch, but it was much better than any other iteration of either device. I could not reproduce the behavior in subsequent tries. Hence, magic.

Those distances are abysmal, and the anecdotes below of more real-world usage are even worse. I didn’t think a BT radio could possibly be bad enough to have such limited range, but here we are.

Informal Anecdotes

Once I knew what to look for, it became easy to see just how limited the range was during everyday use.

After I wrote the first draft of this post, I took a shower. That shower is ~5ft wide, ~30in deep, and the frame of its doors is 6ft tall. As a test, I placed my phone on the door frame opposite of the shower head (to minimize spray). Within a minute, the watch disconnected. I then moved the phone to the center of the frame so it was as close to the watch as possible while not actually being in the shower. The connection stayed active for a couple minutes, but when I turned so my left hand was on the other side of the shower, the watch disconnected. It continued connecting and reconnecting for the rest of the shower.

While blow drying my hair, I put the phone at its normal counter spot: to the right of where I stand. The watch disconnected almost immediately, so I moved the phone to the left side of the counter, and it reconnected. As I dried my hair, the watch would disconnect if my hand was near or behind my head for more than a few seconds, then reconnect when I moved my hand down closer to the phone.

When I returned to my desk to start editing this post, the watch disconnected as I was typing even though it was only ~2ft from the phone. It intermittently reconnected and disconnected as I typed until I moved the phone so it was just to the left of the keyboard (~1ft from the watch). Even then, if I put my hand in my lap or ran my fingers through my hair while reading a section, the watch occasionally disconnected.

The latency of the notifications also seems to be affected by the distance between the devices. Even when they were connected, Gmail notifications seemed to take an extra couple seconds when the distance was ~2 ft versus in my left hand.

The range is just hilariously short/unreliable.

Controls

Of course, it’s possible something about my home is interfering with the phone’s radio and causing the range reduction. Two scenarios/tests suggest that’s not the case.

I use a Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ as a home media player. Two speakers connect to it via BT to play music throughout my day (JBL Charge 4 downstairs, JBL Flip 6 upstairs). All that still works normally with full range.

To match the phone test as closely as possible, I paired the StormBox BT speaker (the same one I used during the tests above) to the tablet and placed the tablet in an exterior corner of a downstairs room. I was able to walk the speaker around the entire house with no connection issues, even when the devices were separated by a floor and multiple interior walls.

This further suggests the issues are isolated to the Pixel phone. The tablet is running Android 16, but per usual for Samsung, it’s a little behind (security patch is January 1), so the differing behavior could be due to patch/OS levels, hardware, or something else. But the continued functionality of the tablet and speakers (as well as other BT peripherals like keyboards and mice) essentially proves there’s nothing about my house that is generally inhibiting BT performance.

Current State

March 5th

The day after all the testing above. I’ve moved the phone stand on my office desk so it’s next to the left side of my keyboard to decrease the number of disconnect/reconnect notifications. Still, every time I get up from my desk, put my arm above my head, or do anything else that moves my left wrist more than two feet from the phone for most than a few seconds, it disconnects.

After publishing this, I’m going to reach out to Google support and link here for details of the problem and what I’ve tried to isolate/fix it. Per normal IT rules, I really, really hope that since I’ve put in all this effort, the fix will now present itself and be something silly/easy.