A Redditor with the username of fantasticlain pointed out how he never had this issue before installing the Feature Drop. Others said the same thing pointing their accusatory fingers at the update and blaming it for this issue. With adaptive brightness disabled, that feature isn’t the problem either.
“Seems like flickering or something based on other posts I’ve seen here. I have it as well on my 9 unfortunately. I turned off smooth display and that made it go away. Thought it was just Netflix at first but it’s happened on youtube as well.”-Pixel user AttackHelicopter11″
Most smartphone users agree that once you experience a 120Hz refresh rate it is almost impossible to adjust to 60Hz. However, to stop your Pixel’s display from flickering while viewing video, you might have to disable Smooth Display until Google pushes out an update to exterminate this bug.
Some of the apps where the flickering has been seen include Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, and Disney+. That doesn’t mean that the bug is limited to those apps and only means that those who complained about the bug on Reddit happened to be using one of those apps when the flickering started. For all we know, this issue affects more than just the four apps listed in this article.
Pixel users affected by these issues are hoping that Google will soon be sending out an update that will exterminate the bugs.