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How to disable the persistent battery icon that appears in YouTube on Pixel 4

Some early Pixel 4 owners have noticed that the battery icon in the status bar shows even when viewing YouTube videos in full-screen. It can be pretty annoying, but luckily there’s an easy solution to the problem.

It’s unclear why, but on the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL the battery icon will show when you’re watching YouTube videos where, on other Android phones, it disappears alongside the rest of the status bar. One might assume this is a bug, but it might be intentional since the icon is “dimmed” to make it less obtrusive.

The issue was first highlighted on Twitter and saw several replies mentioning the same issue on other Pixel 4 devices.

There are a couple of quick troubleshooting fixes that can solve this problem. In my case, the status bar was never fully going away in any apps. For whatever reason, turning off developer options fixed the issue on my device and it has not come back since.

For most people that only have the battery icon, though, Android Police noticed that there’s a correlation between the battery icon and the Pixel 4’s Motion Sense feature. When the “Skip Songs” functionality is turned off, the icon disappears.

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