We typically like Pixel phones a lot, but we have some reservations about Google’s quality control
r/android comment section giving the expected behavior as usual. These news sites know how to be a puppet master, I’m telling ya.
Webite wants to push pro Pixel discussion:
Proceeds to drop a article with a sensationalist title that triggers said Pixel owners.
Comment section is immediately filled with folks declaring how great their Pixel is.
This tactic flip flops between OEMS. It’s generally in Samsungs favor but not always.
Disclaimer: Idgf what phone you own. I’m only speaking on what is painfully obvious to me.
This. These sites have said anti-Pixel articles far and away get the most clicks so they keep writing them.
Great point.
It’s so weird to me when people reply with “doesn’t happen to me”.
And?
That these things happen to people is a positive claim on their part. The
idiotscommentors saying it doesn’t happen to them don’t even realize their dispositive claim is meaningless.I have a pixel 8 that doesn’t have any issues, but I can read the title that says Google’s quality control is shit. So I can understand my phone is okay and other people have problems. Even if I bought 100 pixels, my sample size would still be too small to dismiss other people’s claims.
Funnily enough, this is my first comment I’ve made about how my pixel is fine. So now I’m part of the problem :3
My pixel 7 Pro’s vector motion sensor is broken. How the hell does that even happen? I’ve never even heard of it and there’s like nothing online about it.
I can’t do anything that requires tracking how the phone is moved- no compass calibration, no Map’s guidance arrow, etc.
My old phone did that. Anyone looking at my maps data must have thought I walked like a crab everywhere.
Have you considered getting it checked at a service center? There’s a possibility it’s a hardware issue.
There have been some strange issues with my 8 pro that resemble hardware connection issues or even the start of bad memory chunks. (The display glitches are mentioned in the article, actually.)
The new screen capture feature is buggy as all hell and is prone to buffer issues after long periods of spot translation.
For what it’s worth, mine has been great. Luck of the draw?
I’d argue that a luck of the draw issue is worse than a consistent, across the board QA issue.
Still can’t bring myself to bite the bullet and buy a Pixel because of these “horror stories”.
Yeah, I am biased to QA as well.
Some of the glitches are subtle enough to make me think it’s something crunchy in the physical hardware. Many people simply wouldn’t notice the issues, TBH.
Like all hardware bugs, it’ll likely take a bit of time to manifest fully. Being cynical, I would probably say the failures will fully manifest around the Pixel 10 release timeframe.
Same.
But mainly my S20+ is still way more than I need and I see that being the case for quite some time to come. Phone tech plateaued years ago. It’s great.
All I know that really surprised me is I’d been disgusted with nothing phone 1 constantly rebooting for no reason since an update (still does it).
When I complained on a reddit sub about it I got a ton of replies saying it’s normal and not as bad as the pixel phones.
I’ve nowhere to go with that people are defending a completely unstable buggy phone and I’ve owned half a dozen androids before that and never seen any of them just randomly restarting.
I’ve had pixel phones for at least 5 years now. I’ve probably had less than 10 random restarts, most of those would have been from apps crashing.
Sometimes the device gets slow and I restart it. But that happens maybe 3 times per year. Otherwise the phone only gets restarted when an update is installed.
Yeah I’m skeptical of those claims as well, I’ve never owned a phone that did it a lot until this one and I’m pretty sure it’s Nothing who introduced the vast majority of problems.
Their just too concerned with things like clothing lines and pr stunts to actually fix anything they break
I have a 5 year old phone and it does in fact not randomly reboot.
Nothing Phone is a scam?
I wouldn’t buy the phone 1 again anyway put it that way.
It was actually great until phone 2 released then they updated it to be very unstable and the cameras also got noticeably worse from updates.
On the plus side I’ve read the custom roms for it are pretty good, I haven’t went that far yet but I know I will eventually.
I used to have that issue on my midrange samsung when i set the ramplus(virtual ram in samsung) to max and did medium to heavy multi-tasking. It was mitigated in a future update but did happen once a while. The slow storage speeds combined with heavy usage of virtual ram were the main reason for that.
My Pixel 7a’s battery life was so terrible I just gave up on the phone. I was literally charging it 2 times a day from sub-10% to 100% with light use (no games, no intense apps, under 2h SoT for the full day). I lost 7%+ per hour idle. Days when I actually needed to use my phone, I’d need to bring my charger for a third mid-day top up to 100%.
I bought a Sony Xperia 10 V to replace it. It’s not perfect (it doesn’t support all the NA carrier bands so signal is a bit spotty in big stores), but the battery life is amazing. Same usage patterns and I only go from 80% to 50% most days. I only 100% charge once/month for battery health. I frequently go 1½-2 days without charging. I don’t know how well it plays games, but with 8GB RAM, it’s snappy with app multitasking. Oh, and I can plug it into my car (3.5mm). And it’s a 68mm wide, so quite easy to use one-handed.
I had been buying Google phones exclusively since the early Nexus days, but I’m unlikely to buy one again. At least for the foreseeable future.
I hope Google can figure their shit out. It’s bad for everyone when Apple and Samsung capture increasingly large marketshare, and Google’s fuck ups are turning people off smaller vendors.
Were you using Firefox? On my phone, FF browser takes ~5% battery per hour, even if I force close it, there is some background task eating battery. I uninstall it and bam! No more 40% drain during the night but only 2-3% drain in 8 hours.
Might have been Firefox. My phone reported it was Amazon Photos, so I uninstalled it, but then it was another app instead, which I uninstalled, then it was a third one (which I think was Firefox?). At that point I gave up, assuming it was a problem with the G2 Tensor chip not cycling down while idle, not a specific app. Even if 3 apps that I’ve never had a problem with on other phones all have problems on the Pixel 7a, that’s just not good enough.
Were you using Firefox? On my phone, FF browser takes ~5% battery per hour,
Mine drains about 6% per hour, it’s absolutely unsustainable. Just uninstalled firefox, let’s see. I regret getting it so much (pixel 7) lol.
edit. wasnt it, what a piece of shit this phone is.
I am using Mull (on a Pixel 6a) and it took 3% with 40min screen time. Thats great.
I have no idea what is causing that for you.
I am also using
- ublock origin
- noscript
- dark background light text (saves a ton of screen energy)
Largely exaggerating bugs. If it happens to you that sucks, but I’ve never actually met anyone in the real world running into these bugs. This is “your holding it wrong” writing designed to rile up nerds.
You shouldn’t discount these reports just because you haven’t seen them yourself. I mean, how many people do you talk to in the real world about their Pixel phones? If it’s less than hundreds, it doesn’t really say much — that’s well within chance since, as the article states, the problem is inconsistency. If 1% of users experience a given problem, that’s actually a pretty big deal. If 10% experience it, it’s pitchfork time.
Pixel phones are notorious for poor quality control, and Google is notorious for poor customer support. That’s a bad combination. Lots of people have perfectly good experiences, but there are still a lot of problems that aren’t just flukes.
I read the article and I think it’s pretty fair. I’ve used a couple different Pixel models and followed their respective subreddits for years. It’s always something. Green tint, or poor signal, or overheating, or a barely-functional fingerprint reader, for example. None of these things affect everyone, but they’re real problems. Probably the fingerprint reader is the most widespread. At least that’s improved (for me) over time.
I have an 8 Pro that has had bugs since it was released.
They’re mostly frustrating inconveniences that make using it annoying. Graphical glitches, phone calls hanging up unexpectedly, being able to type even after going into open apps view, not being able to switch apps because it just disappears from the open apps view, the fingerprint sensor just not working at all sometimes, and more.
Nothing that breaks the phone, but it’s real annoying more often that it should be.
IDK, nobody gets any real numbers so it’s hard to say. I just know 9 pixel 6-8s and nobody has run into anything major.
My Motorola Edge 30 is fantastic and the best phone I’ve ever had. I think the massive focus on Samsung and Pixel phones are paid and bought for by ad companies.
Motorola seems to be back on track. I didn’t get the G84 because the CPU seems a bit slow, and I don’t like the curved screens from the Edge models, but it’s definitely on my radar for their next models.
I love that it’s default android and no crap installed. And it has fantastic battery time. I can easily see myself keeping this phone for a long time and maybe later put Lineage on it just to get rid of Googles tracking.
Seems very interesting, thanks
Also super pleased with my Sony, after years of Samsung. Unbloated, battery lasts, good settings in all the right places.
That’s interesting, I use to use Sony phones during my time at uni and stopped due to all the software I couldn’t delete. Might have to give them a look next time I’m shopping around.
There’s very little bloatware preinstalled nowadays. Mostly the Google stuff. They come with a couple of extra apps (Netflix, LinkedIn, Facebook) but they can be disabled. Sony themselves have a couple of Xperia apps but same thing, easily disabled. It’s more than Pixel but nothing compared to the bloat on a Samsung.
How long do you get updates? Also, is that for every component? What ARM version does it use?
They have said 3 years of software updates. It’s on Android 13 now and got it’s last security update in December 2023.
Not sure about arm version but probably you can find info about that online. It’s an Edge 30 Pro.
Okay so they are not good with Updates, because Android 14 is out since October, and at least Google ships full security patches every month, i.e. somewhere in Februrary.
GrapheneOS consumes the Google updates into its build system, so it is very fast. They had support for the Pixel Tablet in a day after release, which is crazy.
OEM manufacturers get early access to the codebase because they need to modify their kernels etc, so delaying an update that long is just bad.
I sometimes wonder how much Pixel hype is just inertia from when other manufacturers had terrible skins and Pixel was the only way for most to get a stock android experience.
Nowadays third party software has come a long way and from what I can see the pixel’s main selling point is it’s cameras.
It’s interesting, it’s because of such articles and comments about the various issues (mostly battery life, and sometimes connectivity) that I didn’t consider Pixel for my new phone.
It’s sad because they are supposed to be the Android top devices. Motorola seems decent nowadays, Asus Zenfone got a lot of backlash recently about the locked bootloader, but at least their phones are compact and have audio jacks. Even Xiaomi I could consider with DNS blocking to stop the trackers, their quality-price ratio is quite good, especially second hand.
Unfortunately, the next Zenfone is looking to be quite a lot larger. I’ve been using Nexus and Pixel for years, and while my uses have always been rather simple, I’ve never had any serious issues aside from the LG bootloop on my Nexus 5x. Motorola phones get practically no updates, and unfortunately Xiaomi is a non-starter for those of us in the US.
That said, I’ve also been using Graphene, because I no longer tolerate the tracking and other productization of me. That’s not just a Google thing, nor limited to their phones, but they’re certainly one of the worst offenders. It’s ironic that their own phones offer some of the most freedom to remove them from our lives.
Unfortunately, the next Zenfone is looking to be quite a lot larger.
Crap, that’s sad to hear.
Google Pixels suck.
The 4a did everything right. Plastic cover? Yeah you use a protective case anyways.
The 6a that I now have is worse. I sent back a 7pro because it was so horrible. I dont want a tablet, I want a phone.
the camera
is worse! I cant believe that but I compared pictures. At least the selfie Camera is absolute garbage.
size, shape, materials
- the phone is huge
- its rectangle size is worse to hold in the hand
- the 6a had some kind of plastic which is durable. The 7pro I had has a glass back? Wtf why?
fingerprint sensor
is so much worse. Why put it behind a display? I actually replaced one, so that is not the problem. But you cant unlock directly, they are waaay less reliable and you often need to create duplicate scans. Compare that to the damn 4a (and all other fingerprint sensors of that time) that just worked instantly.
No headphone jack
This is such a pain as an audiophile. I have awesome headphones and of course they are on a cable.
Bluetooth is factiually worse.
- It takes forever to connect (apple devices alway connect first for example).
- the controls for pause etc. take like a second to work
- you always broadcast your Bluetooth ID around
- you are attackable, like the iPhone DDOS attack
- you need more tiny battery powered devices for nothing
- headphones are always more expensive and often have worse audio quality
If you want to use normal headphones, the only good DACs are by Google and Samsung, and at least german electronic markets (!) dont have them.
And if you use a DAC, this works over USB. If you need to allow random USB devices all the time, this means you are also attackable through a cable.
My Pixel 4a is a bit slow, but the battery still lasts over a week in idle. I use it as an alarm clock now as its insecure.
I have not tested a Pixel 8, and the hardware for sure sounds appealing. But if Google continues this shitty path of useless “inventions” like the Fingerprint sensor behind the Glass, unnecessary huge and fragile phones, and purposeful decrease in security by needing Bluetooth all the time, while actively contributing to E-Waste, I will never recommend them.
This post strikes me as a little hyperbolic but I definitely agree that they’ve gone downhill in a lot of ways. I have a 3a and that genuinely feels better made than the more expensive 7a I tested recently. They had a good thing going with the size and feel of their older devices and they totally fucked it.
In that case, its not hyperbolic :D
I has a 7pro and it was so damn huge. Sent it back again.
What’s your next phone gonna be?
Pixel 8(a), until there is an alternative that meets GrapheneOS requirements. Poorly.
Does the Fairphone meet gOS’ requirements?
Edit: Apparently not, unfortunately. I’m probably gonna keep getting whatever Google comes up with next.
No, by far not.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/?q=fairphone 5
Basically:
- they are extremely late on Updates, like months behind
- they claim to have an update timespan they cannot have because certain parts will not be updated anymore and firmware vulnerabilities are a thing
- their hardware is not secure enough
- they dont meet the minimum requirements
That’s really unfortunate. Can’t have it all, it seems.
I have a moto g7 power. No complains here
It’s certainly more than a bit annoying that THIS is the product that Google keeps alive, while constantly killing other, much more useful products.
I’ve literally never met anyone with a Google Pixel. It’s just not on anyone’s radar when buying a new phone. I’m sure some like it, but it’s not exactly setting the world on fire.
I think this is rather location dependent. Here in Aus a lot of people I know use them. Just some more anecdotal evidence.
Australia does have some quirks, as many Australians like to point out :D
According to marketshare figures, last year Google had 3 percent marketshare in Australia. IPhone was 43.8 percent, followed by Samsung with 31.8, followed by Oppo (4.5) Lenovo (3.6), HDM (3) and finally: there’s Google with 3 percent.
https://appleworld.today/apples-iphone-now-has-46-5-of-the-australian-smartphone-market/amp/
In the US, iPhone and Samsung have bigger shares and Google is at about 4 percent (was 2 in 2022)
So at least from the statistics, Google isn’t doing particularly well in Australia either. But you certainly might run with a particular group of people who prefer them over other brands. People do like to conform to a group.
LOL like me and half my friends all have Pixels. We’re all FOSS nerds. I’ll also never consider another carrier other than Google Fi. I’ve yet to land in a foreign country and not have instant, unlimited cell service. Carrier bonding is also a blessing in the mountains.
I use Google Fi as well but I’ve questioned the purpose of carrier bonding/switching since T-Mobile and Sprint merged. As far as I know US cellular is the only other network that Fi uses. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Historically Sprint was a different type of network [CDMA] but I think with 5G it’s all coagulated together. However, US Cellular is the network I fall back on when I am in the mountains so it’s the one I’m thankful to be able to pop on whenever tmobile drops away.
Well yeah, if your group self-identifies as FOSS nerds, that’s about what I’d expect :D I bet a lot of them are also into Linux, right?
I love my Linux/FOSS brethren, but most people just buy an iPhone or some Samsung and are perfectly happy just using those as is.
Your experience is not universal. I think most people I know have a Pixel, even the non-nerds!
It really can depend on where you are. For example, in the US Google had a 4 percent marketshare in 2023. It actually doubled compared to 2022: that was 2 percent.
Buf if you happen to run with a group pf people who go against the grain and buy Pixels, it might very well feel like a dominant brand.
In our company for example, everyone has iPhones. So to me, they appear to have 100 percent marketshare, when reality is closer to 50-60 percent in most markets.
