Android OEMs have been giving users the option to change screen resolutions for years, but stock Android didn’t support this. This feature is finally in Android 13, and a developer has found a way to add it unofficially to the Pixel 6 Pro.
XDA developer Freak07 has updated his Kirisakura-Kernel mod so that Pixel 6 Pro users on stable Android 13 can switch from the native QHD+ screen resolution to FHD+ (h/t: XDA-Developers and Mishaal Rahman).
You can now run your Pixel 6 Pro's display at FHD resolution with Mile's Kirisakura Kernel! Enabling this will also unlock Android 13's new screen resolution settings, which I revealed a few months back.https://t.co/xOniMECmtC https://t.co/NvEkDAsnL6
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) August 16, 2022
The developer says that right now, features like adjusting the brightness and the dynamic refresh rate are working well. They also say that there are no problems with the contrast or the colour of the screen when the brightness is high.
It’s not perfect, though. Freak07 says there are a few small problems (e.g. icons overlapping or UI glitches). Another problem is that if you switch resolutions while the “show refresh rate” developer toggle is on, the screen goes black and you have to restart.
This isn’t an official way to do it, though, so if Google adds this feature to the Pixel 6 Pro, we’d expect it to work better. But we’re still glad to see the community step up and add a feature that Pixels has needed for a long time, even if it requires a lot of work.
Thanks to Samsung and Huawei, Android devices have been able to change their screen resolution since the early to mid-2010s. This lets device owners lower the screen resolution to save battery life. Since then, we’ve seen that some brands also offer automatic display resolution changes, switching between resolutions based on a number of factors. This doesn’t seem to be on the Pixel 6 Pro mod, but we hope to see it on Pixel phones in the future.