Glass on the Pixel 7 rear camera bar seems to be shattering for some users
Folks over at Phone Arena hand-picked some examples from Reddit and Twitter, as there seem to be quite a few of them. A Twitter user Heydon Faber (@CSThrowaway) shared a photo that shows the damage on his Pixel 7 (shown below).
In addition to the phone, he said the following: “Not even a month, no drops just regular use. Have a case on the phone. Been told Its my problem. Is this really the quality control backed by google? It’s clearly a manufacturing defect, and I know I’m not the only one. Please fix this google! @madebygoogle #pixel7brokencamera.” On the other hand, on Reddit, a user who goes by the name ‘dalitortoise’ wrote: “I pulled my phone out of my pocket and the back camera glass was broken. I must have hit a corner while it was in my pocket. Has anyone else had this problem? I called around to the phone fixing stores and nobody has the replacement parts yet. Don’t really want to have to mail this phone in to have it fixed as it’s currently the only phone I have.”
If Google doesn’t replace your unit, the repair costs around $200
He did get a response from another Reddit with the same problem. The user said that a uBreakiFix store employee told him that the entire backplate needs to be replaced, at a cost of $200. He did report this to Google, and got a replacement unit. What’s interesting is that this problem doesn’t seem to be all that new, but more users are experiencing it. Around Thanksgiving, a Pixel 7 user complained about the same problem. He wrote: “I’m flying to the parents house today for Thanksgiving (gobble gobble). I pulled my phone out of my pocket to scan my boarding pass and what do I see? Cracked camera glass over the ultrawide side of the lens (so much so that glass is actually flaking off). A nice TSA lady gave me a piece of tape to prevent further flaking.” He also added the following: “I’m running a case, haven’t dropped the phone once, and it was literally fine 30 minutes ago. I’m quite pissed considering I don’t know what I did to crack it/what happened.” There was another interesting report on Reddit, which got reported on. The user wrote: “I took my pixel 7 out of my pocket today, and the rear camera glass in front of the ultra wide was shattered. Didn’t drop my phone or anything like that at all, my phone has a good case as well. Seems to be a defect on the pixel 7 series of phones, many people on the subreddit are having issues with this. Contacted Google support, past preferred care buy period but this is almost certainly a material defect of the phone so we will see if they cover under limited.”
Needless to say, this is a bizarre problem which points to a manufacturing defect
This is kind of a bizarre problem, and it definitely points to a manufacturing defect. It’s probably a specific manufacturing series of devices that got affected, that’s our best guess. Google still didn’t comment on the issue. Having said that, if this happens to you, you should definitely report it to Google. Considering how many reports are out there already, Google is definitely aware of the problem, and shouldn’t make things difficult. You should take a different phone, or a camera, to take some pictures of what happened, and use those when you contact Google.
