A few weeks ago, we wrote about how some apps had been blacklisted by the Pixel 4. This meant they couldn’t run on the Pixel 4’s 90Hz refresh rate since they would completely drain the battery. When the phone is on a lower brightness, the 90Hz Smooth Display is disabled and switches to 60Hz only. It’s understandable now because it’s all for the best.
Originally the Pixel 4 had identified these four apps not to run at 90Hz: Google Maps, Pokemon GO, Waze, and WeChat. While most of these are graphics or resource intensive apps, WeChat is an outlier in that it’s just a chat client. The reason that the refresh rate is throttled down is simply due to the app’s poor performance at 90Hz refresh rate setting.
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Months since WeChat was added to the 90Hz blocklist in August, however, Tencent has apparently spent time optimizing the app for the Pixel 4. In a new commit posted late last week to the Android Open Source Project, Google has deemed that WeChat version 7.0.8 fixes all of the “jank” issues the app faced, and subsequently removed the app from the blocklist.
Before you experience the change on your Pixel 4 or 4 XL, however, there are still a couple of hurdles that you have to get past first. WeChat, which is still on version 7.0.5 in the Play Store, needs to be updated and released. And second, Google has to integrate the new blacklist into one of its monthly security patches before sending them out to everyone. Unfortunately, yesterday’s November security patch did not come with the newer list.
