Last week I finally got the notification I have been both excited for and dreading. My Pixel 5 was ready to upgrade to Android 12. I decided to take the plunge and dove in headfirst. As expected it was not without some headaches.

One of the first issues I encountered was a broken gesture shortcut, “Quickly Open Camera”. Double pressing the power button would either lock the screen or just do nothing. I tried reaching out to Google support to report the issue and got the usual run around. Their recommended “solution” was for me to pay a deductible and run through a warranty claim. Typical Google.

Not to be dissuaded, I decided to dig into logcat to see if it revealed any clues to what was happening.

Every time on the double press of the power button, I saw the following:

GestureLauncherService: 2 consecutive power button taps detected, 2 consecutive slow power button taps detected
GestureLauncherService: Power button double tap gesture detected, launching camera. Interval=181ms

So the good news was the Gesture Service was trying to launch the camera. Bad news, the camera never opens.

All is not lost though, Android 12 might have some new bugs, but I have the power of Tasker! Tasker can automate all kinds of settings and workflows on Android devices. In this case, I had Tasker watch logcat for the above entry and just made the call to open the camera myself. A week later of daily driving this solution and it is back to Android 11 functionality.

In case some poor soul is also running into this I uploaded the project to TaskerNet so you can easily import it yourself.

Grab it here