I updated my Pixel 4a to Android 12 a few days ago.
Today, all of a sudden, I saw this screen like symbol on the right side of status bar, which wasn't present after updating.
It is not app related because it can be seen in safe-mode also. There is nothing in the notification bar that corresponds to this symbol. Strangely, Google search didn't help. Nobody else seems to have this problem.
Any idea what this symbol means and how to get rid of it?
Since the symbol suggested it may be screen related, I went through all screen/display options and discovered that it is related to auto-rotate screen. If this is disabled this symbol shows up!
Goggling more on this, I learnt that this is a feature available on some Pixel phones, introduced in Android 12. This uses face detection (that needs to be enabled). So instead of using accelerometer to determine how the phone is held, the front facing camera determines how your face is aligned and rotates screen accordingly. It seems to work well. However, none of the articles I read mentioned this icon.
Something new learnt but it still beats me how the auto detection got disabled (I never enabled it in the first place)
Q & A