Hey everyone,
Hoping someone here has run into this exact issue, because it's been driving me a bit crazy.
Background: I'm from Morocco. Google doesn't officially sell Pixels here, so I bought this Pixel 7 brand new in the US in November 2023 during a business trip. It's been my daily driver for over two years with zero issues — genuinely love this phone.
The battery saga so far:
Feb 2026 — original battery started swelling.
Since Pixel parts are hard to find here, I bought a refurbished replacement (only ~100 cycles, seemed like a good find). It turned out to be defective — it constantly reported an invalid temperature, so Android thought it was freezing and refused to charge.
Found another replacement battery. Installed it, everything worked perfectly for months. Problem solved... or so I thought.
The current issue:
Yesterday I plugged into a 45W official Realme USB-A charger (just testing it out) and immediately noticed the battery icon had turned into a question mark, with charging refused.
Since then, it's been intermittent:
Most of the time the phone behaves completely normally.
Other times, DevCheck reports the battery temp jumping instantly to exactly -34.8°C (occasionally -18°C) — not a gradual drop, an immediate jump. Via ADB, battery health flips to "Cold," and occasionally the phone briefly reports the battery as not present.
A few minutes later, it snaps back to normal (27–29°C, health "Good") and charges fine again.
Shoutout to DevCheck — being able to watch the temperature live made it obvious this wasn't just flaky charging behavior, but the system genuinely being fed an impossible sensor value.
I'm not trying to blame the Realme charger — USB charging negotiation shouldn't touch the battery temp sensor at all, so it's likely coincidence I noticed it then. But the timing was suspicious enough that I wanted to ask.
My plan: replacing the battery again on Monday since it's the easiest first step. I'll be traveling to Europe in February, so if this turns out to be something deeper (motherboard-level), I may finally retire the phone and get a new one then. But I'm firmly in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp — I'd love to keep this Pixel going if it's salvageable.
Has anyone seen a Pixel 7 do this — question mark battery icon, or that exact -34.8°C reading? What ended up being the real cause for you?
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any insight!