Google’s fingerprint sensor calibration tool for Pixel 6 repairs appear to fail in some cases

Ben Schoon | Feb 16 2022 - 12:58 pm PT

The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are Google’s first phones with an under-display fingerprint sensor, and to assist with repairs Google released a tool to calibrate that sensor in the event of a device repair. As it turns out, though, that tool has some ongoing issues.

Louis Rossmann, the owner of the Rossmann Repair Group store in NYC and a Right to Repair activist, posted a video to YouTube highlighting this issue with Google’s fingerprint sensor tool. In the video, Rossmann cites several threads on Google’s forums, Reddit, iFixit, and XDA forums regarding Google’s calibration tool failing.

When the tool fails, a message appears saying that Google “couldn’t find the unique calibration software for this device” while trying to calibrate a repair Pixel 6 or Pixel 6 Pro’s display and fingerprint sensor. There appears to be no fix for this problem, and it affects both DIY repairs as well as some in-store repairs at locations including uBreakiFix.

In one thread, a user claiming to be a Google Certified Technician says that there are issues with the fingerprint calibration connection while using Windows, and he was successful when running the tool through a Pixel 5 and a Chromebook, but that “some other locations” had managed to get it up and running on their computers.

The error in question looks like this, as one user on Google’s forums shared.

Reports of this issue first came to light in November, but they have continued up until earlier this month. Notably, a Google employee accepted the task of looking into this issue on Google’s public issue tracker earlier this month, but no updates have been shared in the time since.

Of course, on the other hand of this story, we don’t actually know how well this tool is working for the people who are actually having success with it. So while this clearly isn’t an edge case issue, it’s unclear exactly how widespread the problem is.