If you’re rocking a Google Pixel right now, you might be running into some frustrating quirks depending on which software channel you’re currently on. While Android 17 Beta testers are dealing with annoying touchscreen dead zones, those on the stable March 2026 Feature Drop are finding that their favorite third-party Now Playing tools are completely broken.
Android 17 Beta landscape touch issues
For those testing the bleeding edge, Android 17 Beta 2 has introduced a rather disruptive bug for media consumption and gaming. According to reports on the Google Issue Tracker, the top edge of the display becomes completely unresponsive to touch inputs when using full-screen applications in landscape mode.
Whether you’re trying to hit the settings gear or captions button in YouTube, or interacting with top-edge UI elements in games like League of Legends: Wild Rift, the touch input is simply ignored. Instead of registering the tap within the app, the system seems to think you’re interacting with the SystemUI notification shade trigger area. One user even noted that swiping down in this state only takes one swipe instead of the usual two to reveal the status bar.
Fortunately, Google’s engineering teams have already acknowledged the bug and are actively looking into a fix for a future beta release.
March Feature Drop breaks Now Playing scrobbling
If you thought sticking to the stable channel was entirely safe, think again. The March 2026 Pixel Feature Drop brought a highly anticipated Material 3 Expressive redesign to Now Playing, elevating it to its own dedicated app. However, this visual upgrade has quietly killed functionality for third-party scrobblers.
Tools like Pano Scrobbler, which sync your automatically recognized songs to platforms like Last.fm, rely on a hacky workaround of reading the Now Playing system notifications to build a history list. As noted by Android developer Kieron Quinn, the new standalone app suppresses this notification entirely. Without it, these third-party apps have nothing to extract data from.
Redditor birbeck1 pointed out that Google seemingly scrubbed the notification preference from Android System Intelligence and removed the notification channel altogether, leaving no public broadcast for non-system apps to access.
Is it a deliberate block? Not necessarily. Quinn notes that an unused flag (NowPlaying__enable_notification_and_settings_redirect) exists in the codebase. This suggests Google might restore the notification or introduce a proper workaround in a future update. For now, though, if you rely on automatic Last.fm syncing, you’re unfortunately out of luck until Google decides to tweak its new setup.
Google hasn’t commented, and unlike the Android 17 Beta issue, this one doesn’t yet appear to be on the company’s radar as a bug to fix.
Hillary Keverenge
2671 Posts
Tech has been my playground for over a decade. While the Android journey began early, it truly took flight with the revolutionary Lollipop update. Since then, it's been a parade of Android devices (with a sprinkle of iOS), culminating in a mostly happy marriage with Google's smart home ecosystem. Expect insightful articles and explorations of the ever-evolving world of Android and Google products coupled with occasional rants on the Nest smart home ecosystem.
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