Google Pixel 4 won’t work with some USB tables google Pixel 4 turned out to be a bit of a controversial phone. I have a cutting edge idea, but there are already a lot of things I hate about the phone. The battery capacity is higher than the grip list, and the charger can not be charged to make matters worse. The Pixel 4 doesn’t seem to work well with certain USB cables. We’ve found several Pixel 4 floating around the Android Authority team and found this problem when trying to charge the phone with a lot of third party adapters and cables. To investigate exactly what works and what doesn’t work, I took the USB-C ammeter, the charger, and the cable and started the measurement.

Pixel 4 doesn’t like some USB devices
Google’s Pixel series uses USB Power Delivery (PD) as the default charging technology. This is the technology you can find on the Google charger. It works great as a clock at about 15W. The Pixel 4 also charges well with other chargers that support USB Power Delivery through the USB-C to USB-C connector, including older Pixel chargers and third-party USB PD products.

So USB-C to USB-C works normally. At first, however, it was not possible to charge the Pixel 4 with another USB-A charger. The quick charge port, the USB BC 1.2 power bank, and the standard USB ports on PCs and laptops also do not work. Only when replacing it with another device was it possible to connect the Pixel 4 to these devices. However, all other phones I tested, including Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a, work correctly with this same cable. Pixel 4 is the first phone I’ve seen and refuses to connect or charge with some cables. Note that the Pixel 4 does not achieve fast charge when connected to a Quick Charge or USB BC 1.2 2.4A port. As with the Pixel 3 and 3a, the charging power for these accessories is limited to 7W.In general, if your cable doesn’t support enough power for a particular charging standard, you’ll want to drop to the default USB charging speed of 2.5W or negotiate something more appropriate. Do this on another phone if you connect it to another charger or use a cable that is not optimal. For further investigation, various USB cables were selected to resolve the issue. After testing 18 different cables, I’m not sure how angry Pixel 4 is. The previous Huawei 5A cable was the only smartphone cable that refused to work. The original cable that started this investigation was a 5A cable designed to work with the fast charging unit. Both sport purple identified colours inside. But these work fine on all other phones I have tested. Interestingly, the high-current cables of OnePlus and Oppo were considered acceptable on the Pixel 4.It doesn’t work for data transfer as well as charging. There is nothing obvious to cause problems with such cables. Otherwise, it will work well on older Google handsets and is not a cheap or unknown manufacturer. There may be a problem with some high current cables that Google recently raised issues.

Not just charging the cable
I don’t have a lot of USB-C accessories but I thought to check whether the situation was limited to the cable. Unfortunately, the Pixel 4 hates third-party USB-C-3.5mm adapters as much as its predecessors. Pixel 3 audio adapter works with Pixel 4, but versions of OnePlus and Huawei do not. It’s annoying that Google no longer includes the adapter in the box.

Some third-party USB-C-3.5mm adapters are still not supported. And Google no longer includes any in the box.