Years ago when I took a wilderness medic course, there was a woman who wielded the term “creepy fingers” with a particularly gleeful gravity toward a male classmate of mine.

There was lots of hands-on contact between classmates (shut up), as we’d take turns assessing fake injuries, dressing fake wounds, and working through other scenarios that required physical contact.

As with a real-life scenario, you want to give firm pressure when stopping bleeding or wrapping a wound, but this one guy had such a light touch that this woman would shiver every time he dressed a “wound” of hers.

She acknowledged that he wasn’t trying to creep on her, but that by way of just how different his touch was from a typical person’s touch, it weirded her out.

With the latest update, Google’s Pixel phones are suddenly giving everyone creepy fingers.

how people can tell

Some users took to the /GooglePixel subreddit to complain that after the March 2025 update, the haptic feedback when typing on their keyboards felt different. Others said they couldn’t feel it while typing, but they could tell through other vibrations. Many said they felt a difference in both.

From the testimonials so far, most of those with Pixel 9s don’t seem to report feeling a difference, although a few outliers hedge that they think they do, they’re not entirely confident. But those with the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 8 Pro reported feeling a change after the update.

One user with a Pixel 8 Pro said, “On typing, I don’t feel it, but the back gesture I immediately felt the hollow feeling. It has less thunk and doesn’t feel as clean. Now, it has a lingering light vibration. Before, it just ended cleanly.”

Another wrote, “It feels awful on the 8a. It feels cheaper, weaker, and most importantly there’s a slight delay.”

There’s no reliable fix that I’ve seen so far. One Redditor wrote, “Try to disable and re-enable adaptive haptic vibration in the setting. It looks/feels better now after I did it on my P8Pro.” But another Redditor wrote to say that it didn’t work for their Pixel 7 Pro.

It’s safe to say it’s a bug since nothing about changing haptic feedback or vibrations was mentioned in Google’s March 2025 change log. It’s not the worst bug we’ve seen in a smartphone by a long shot, but it seems to have touched a nerve.