Hello everybody and thank you in advance for reading my lengthy report.

I started using GOS in May 2025 with a brand new Pixel 9 Pro in Germany. I am writing this in quite some distress as I did not create a backup of my pictures taken since May and the prospect of losing all of them is a depressing thought. Although I have to measure myself to my own motto "no backup, no sympathy".

Prerequisite: I set up GOS in May 2025 on a new Pixel 9 Pro, set my PIN to a four digit number and activated finger prints

What happened: Because of a possible privacy breach on Friday 17th of October I deactivated the finger prints. Changed the four digit PIN to a five digit PIN. As I never used this number before I can make it public in case this helps. Immediately after changing the number I pressed the power button to log out. To ease my paranoia I typed the new PIN and found myself confronted with a Wrong PIN message. I panic and tried the number again. As it still did not work I tried the old PIN which also did not work anymore. I tried some more numbers that I thought could be variations of what the originally intended number was without any luck.

At first I thought I really just forgot the number or mistyped when entering it in the first place. But the more I think about it the less convinced I am that this is the case. First of all, IIRC one has to enter the new PIN twice for confirmation. If I mistyped, the same error also had to happen twice which seems unlikely as the number pad is well spaced and mistyping seems less likely than with the regular qwerty keyboard. Secondly I took the new number from a bottle I found standing around, so it was not randomly 'generated' by myself. I tested it immediately after setting it up without looking at the bottle again. Which means it was very present in my mind right before setup and immediately after the failed confirmation.

I set up a list of possible typing error, variations and reverse versions. Non of them worked until now.

After panicing and trying about ten numbers I stopped and decided to postpone any more tries to the next day. The interval at the time was already quite high. Next day I checked the table of the retry delays and found it to be way slower progressing than what I am experiencing with my phone. The current display of the retry interval is 128.972 seconds which is impossible according to the table which states a maximum interval of once per day. Also the actual interval is shorter. I am currently at at least two retries a day when I shut down the device and reboot after a couple of hours.

All of this leads to a suspicion that I am not facing (although still very possible) my own incapability to remember a code for 30 seconds but a possible technical problem. Is anyone here able to check the code behind the mechanism or test if a code change from XYZY to ABACD after a long period of usage (5 Months) might cause problems with the re-login? I know this is a straw and I hope no one finds this offensive. I understand everyone who thinks I am just and idiot. I feel the same.

So any help is appreciated, and I will give any additional info I have. The phone was running the latest version and is regularly rebooted to auto install updates. I am on the regular release channel but I do not know the current version number.

Thank you all and best regards
Paul