- Google seems to be disabling the touch-and-hold trigger to read notifications.
- Users are instead being told to make a voice request to hear notifications.
- The timing of this move feels tied to the upcoming arrival of the Pixel Buds Pro 2.
Modern earbuds are so much more than just tiny speakers perched in our ears, and the good ones offer numerous ways to directly interact with our phones, from music playback controls, to those connected to virtual assistants. The original Pixel Buds Pro are a couple years old at this point, but have still been holding up great — at least, so far. But now it looks like Google could be removing one of the key ways these earbuds let users control their phones.
Over the past couple days, Reddit users like hintze85 and fakeaccountt12345 have been sharing reports that their Buds have lost the ability to read notifications by pressing and holding on the earbud’s side (via 9to5Google). And lest we write this off as a glitch, some of these users report hearing an audio message informing them that “touch and hold wont read notifications anymore.”