Watermelon What happens if you hold the power button for 33 seconds, then release it and hold the volume down key for at least 20 seconds?
Thank you for the suggestion, I tried it several times but it did not work. This bricking path results in the phone permanently putting itself into Pixel ROM Recovery mode and therefore it is completely unresponsive to input.
I also believe this might be the cause of your issues.
That is correct, specifically due to the anti-rollback bootloader update released by Google in May 2025. Per the 26 page thread on XDA describing the issue:
Things NOT to do - will permanently brick your Pixel and require repair by Google:
- Don't flash only the bootloader to one slot, and then change slots, AND boot to that newly changed slot which still has the old bootloader on it - not even boot to bootloader or recovery.
- Don't flash the entire firmware (in this example, the Full OTA Zip) to one slot and then manually change slots.
- Don't update the firmware only once if you're currently running a non-stock ROM, and then re-flash the non-stock ROM again after updating the firmware, which may change slots.
...and in each of these cases it is specifically the ARB value being set in the phone hardware by the updated bootloader that prevents any form of recovery procedure. Well, that and Google choosing to have it work this way.
You're not supposed to mess with it, it's supposed to be automatic.
That is a reasonable design.
Tangentially, several months ago I learned of corner case soft/hard-bricking scenarios that can occur with Virtual A/B operating in its "automatic" mode (as it does with a locked bootloader), where the updater system gets interrupted before it can completely merge the COW snapshots and subsequently dispose the ephemeral "slot".
This race condition can occur in scenarios like factory reset being performed after an OTA, before the merge completes. In such cases, if the bootloader can be unlocked the device can be reflashed & recovered.