Pixel 8 phones hide lock screen notifications by default; here’s how to enable them (with a catch)

Here’s the crux of the article in video form:

With the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, Google introduced some significant improvements to the Face Unlock feature. The unbefitting facial recognition system used on the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro is gone, replaced by Google’s AI-backed Class 3-level Face Unlock system. Although it struggles in low light conditions, the general consensus is that it works pretty well, perhaps because the Pixel 8 prioritizes fast unlocking out of the box. While this makes unlocking your phone faster, it creates one little but annoying problem — you won’t interact with lock screen notifications since Google hides them to speed up the unlocking process.

This is a nuisance some Pixel 8 and 8 Pro owners have been dealing with for a few weeks now. A couple of Reddit threads have surfaced with reports of Pixel 8 users unable to interact with lock screen notifications since the phone only shows little app icons and unlocks right after they pick it up, yet that’s not what they want. At times you just want a quick glance to see a notification’s contents or replay the current song. But because Face Unlock is set to ‘Skip Lock Screen’ to make it faster, it hides or rather skips the lock screen notifications and takes you straight to the previous page once the Pixel 8 unlocks. Now you can’t swipe away that SMS from your carrier from the lock screen. You must pull down the notification shade to make any interactions with it, which is an extra and quite unnecessary step.

Rather than this, some Pixel 8 owners want the best of both worlds where they can interact with lock screen notifications and still keep faster facial recognition. If you’re among this group, you’ll be damned to know that you can’t have it all. To interact with lock screen notifications, you must disable ‘Skip Lock Screen’ in the phone’s settings. To do this, go to Settings > Security and Privacy > Device Unlock > Face and Fingerprint Unlock > Face Unlock and toggle off the ‘Skip Lock Screen’ option.

However, there’s a catch. With this option disabled, be ready to deal with slightly slower Face Unlock on your Pixel 8. Since the phone stays on the lock screen to afford you time to interact with notifications, you must swipe up or touch the fingerprint area to fully unlock the phone. This adds another layer of interaction just to reach the previous open page, which is an unwanted nuisance just because you customized a section of the Pixel 8 lock screen settings to suit your needs.

To be fair, though, the Pixel 8 isn’t the only phone with this behavior. We highlighted a similar problem with the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, something that also goes back as far as 2019’s Pixel 4 and 4 XL. It’s also worth noting that some units have the ‘Skip Lock Screen’ setting disabled or enabled by default, which explains the different experience people are having out of the box.