14 DAY TRIAL // It becomes harder and harder to keep track of all the issues that Nexus and Pixel users have reported soon after Android Nougat was released as an update. Since both the Pixel and Pixel XL already come with the new version of Google's OS, reports of issues go back as far as early November.
The Pixel User Community on Google's Product Forum features many threads about various issues that Google hasn't yet been able to address. One of these issues was reported for the first time on November 4 and concerns all Pixel variants and models.
It appears that both Pixel and Pixel XL phones randomly freeze and will automatically reboot after 1-5 minutes if the user doesn't manually reboot it. Google advised Pixel owners experiencing the issue to reboot their phones in safe mode and see whether or not they continue to randomly freeze.
That would allow the search giant to pinpoint the cause of the issue by eliminating the possibility of a third-party app being the culprit here. After many trial and error attempts, Google has reached the conclusion that a third-party app called Life360 is to blame for these freezes.
Is this a memory leak issue?
Many Google Pixel owners reported that after uninstalling said app, their smartphones never froze again. Unfortunately, many Pixel phones continue to be affected by these random freezes, even without the Life306 app installed.
In fact, many Pixel users claim they never had Life360 installed on their devices, so this isn't really a universally valid solution. Since Google hasn't yet managed to replicate the issue, we don't know what's causing it.
Some Pixel owners believe that this is a memory leak issue, so when a certain application (Google or third-party) hogs the phone's memory, the device freezes.
Strangely enough, the built-in task manager doesn't close the app to prevent it from burning through all the phone's memory.
Also, since the Pixel phones come with 4GB of RAM inside, it takes a longer time for the devices to automatically reboot or kill the application. A phone with half amount of RAM would have rebooted in just 10 seconds.