If you’ve been experiencing random crashes on your Pixel 10 smartphone, you’re not alone. Over the weekend, multiple Reddit users complained that their Pixel 10 phones, which only just hit the market in August, were already facing severe slowdowns and frequent crashes while trying to load apps. Worse yet, the problem seemed to persist across all apps and models of the phone, leaving users with little they could actually do on their new devices.
“If an app does open and load it won’t let me touch anything and it crashes,” user cdriese said, with a number of others sharing a similar sentiment.
The unfortunate news took me as a bit of a surprise, since I experienced no such issues while reviewing the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro at launch, both of which I quite liked. But the problem, it seems, only popped up recently.
Multiple users across Reddit pointed to October 10’s Google Play Services update as the culprit here, with some saying that uninstalling the update fixed the problem for them. “My running theory is that the October play services update is clashing with the September Android OS update in some way,” said user PuzzleHeadedSquid , adding that they have had no crashes since uninstalling the Play Services update. Sure enough, when I loaded my phone with both the September Android OS update and the initial October play services updates installed, I also started to have issues.
In a way, though, that’s still a relief. Your new hardware isn’t broken already—but uninstalling the new Play Services update introduces its own headaches. Luckily, as of this morning, there’s another solution, and it’s pretty simple.
If you’re experiencing crashing apps on your Pixel 10, here’s what you can do.
The official fix
Random Reddit users weren’t the only folks experiencing this problem. Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii also called out the problem in an October 12 X post, saying his Pixel 10 Pro XL had been “kneecapped” by it.
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Luckily, as a member of the press, he had a bit more resources at his disposal for fixing this bug than the average Redditor. Over the course of the weekend, Russakovskii quickly got in touch with his contacts at Google, who he says scrambled multiple teams to address the issue and has since issued a server-side fix.
Theoretically, that means a simple restart should bring your phone back to normal, although if the problem persists, you’ll also want to make sure you’re running the most recent Google Play services build (which you can check under Settings > Apps > Google Play services > App details), then do another restart.
It’s a pretty quick turnaround on a fix, and doesn’t require much on your part, but if you’ve temporarily shelved your Pixel, it’s worth booting it back up again to see if you’re still having issues.
The unofficial fix
That said, it’s possible Google’s engineers still might have missed something. If you still find yourself having issues loading apps, you can use the community method of uninstalling the October Play Services update instead. This will log you out of your Google accounts, however, and won’t include Google’s official fix, so I’d only recommend it in an emergency.
That said, if you’re at the point of pulling your hair out, you can navigate to Settings > Apps > Google Play services > App details and tap “Remove updates” to start the process. Just be sure to have your Google passwords (or passkeys !) memorized first.
First, though, try hitting the “Update” button next to it instead, then restarting your phone. That’s what I did, after initially running my testing without this morning’s update, and my apps are now as snappy as ever.
