Android

Quite happy user of Pixel 6a. The only few annoying things are:

• Under-the-screen fingerprint sensor works less than half of the time. At night and in bed, it blinds me.
• Battery, despite adaptive battery, still feels surprisingly draining fast from time to time. The battery merely just hold for the day whereas I don't even have that much screen time or background running apps.

Dont care for them. My Fairphone is made from fair components and 100% ungoogled.

I'm writing this on a Pixel 7 Pro

So my android journey started with the moto G4 plus when I decided I was tired of giving my iphones to my mom every time she broke hers.

I loved that device because it was really simple and bear bones. Stock android if you will, with just a few extra features that were really nice Quality of Life features. That's what set me on the path towards a pixel after a handful of different brands.

Pixel 4 XL was my first pixel. The big draw for me was the face unlock and the stock experience. At the time, the new spam blocking features from Google assistant were important to me as well. I switched to that after the essential phone brand was officially dead.

Absolutely loved it, so much so that I got my dad a 4a when it released. It was dead simple for him to learn at 60 coming from an iPhone 5. So much that when COVID happened and we switched to masks, I was petty enough to pick up the pixel 5 for the fingerprint scanner (which my dad now has).

I strayed for about a year. I picked up the Galaxy Fold 3 at launch and it was mostly nice. I had so many bad experiences with Samsung, but this was pleasant if not a bit bloated. But I missed the simplicity, I missed the themeing, I missed the Google features.

So around the 10 month mark, my fold inner screen popped off and after having it replaced I put it for sale and bought a Pixel 6 pro second hand. I was skeptical at first because of the bad reviews, but it was a fantastic device in the end. I gifted that to my girlfriend and switched her from iPhone and picked up the Pixel 7 pro.

I always come back to the simpler android, but the pixel flavor is just something special. I've never witnessed any of the issues that people suggest that they have in their reviews. It just flows so well in my experience. I'll be looking forward to trying out a pixel fold when they get to a 3rd generation or so.

I love the simplicity, I love the extra features that Google assistant packs in, most of them are now bundled into the apps as opposed to just being locked to a pixel phone. My favorite part is that they're affordable (Comparatively). I'm glad to see that in Android 14 the best of the Samsung features are being implemented.

I'm on my first non Google phone, starting with the Nexus 5. I currently have the Z Fold 3, bought used for about half MSRP. It has so many good things that Google failed to do, while also missing a lot of things I loved about the Google phones. The Pixel folder may bring me back if it gets cheap enough.

I've had my 4a 5g for 2 years now and have no issues with it. Uninstalled some of the G stuff I don't need, and with Greenify it lasts two full days with moderate usage. Would probably be even better with a custom ROM, but I go the other way and keep it stock android 11 with updates turned off. Rock stable with no frustrating unexpected changes, I went like 180 days without needing a reboot

Has a headphone jack and a decent camera, which are must-haves for me. I'm probably going to be keeping it for another 2-4 years like I did my last phone (LG G5) until it starts falling apart or becoming unreliable

I have one with grapheneos for privacy, and it's good.

I moved from HTC to Nexus, and stuck with Nexus until it died, then picked up a pixel and never looked back. Pixel is what I buy/use, and it's not been an issue for me, which is why I keep going back.

From Nexus: I owned the Nexus 4, 5, 6 (I still have this one), 7 LTE tablet, and 5X. On the pixel line, the pixel "1", 4, and now 7. Haven't owned a pixel "a" series. I skipped the pixel 5, since the processor was significantly less powerful than the 4, despite being a newer chip, and I skipped the 6, because it was the first gen tensor, and I wanted it to prove itself. Early pixel days didn't see a lot of improvement IMO between pixel 1/2/3, so I stuck with the 1, mainly because of the RAM: pixel 4 was the first pixel to have more than 4GB RAM.... (It had 6). I would have jumped from the P4 about a year after getting it, simply due to it not having a fingerprint reader, and the pandemic (specifically masks) making it impossible to use the face id or whatever they called it, but I didn't want to lose performance with the lower powered chip in the 5, and my 4 was good enough to not wager on whether the first tensor had any major hardware defects... So I'm on the 7 now, and I'm pretty happy.

I miss the fingerprint reader being on the back. I've found ways around the headphone jack problem: I have two devices for this.... A combo headphone jack/changing cable dongle, and a fiio BTR 5 (though other BTR units from fiio will work similarly), which allows me to use wired headphones over bt, while charging my phone and Bluetooth device (fiio), allowing for a near infinite amount of time where I can use my phone with headphones if I choose.

I'm not big on the optical fingerprint reader, but it's better than the face id stuff on the 4, so I guess I'm happier overall.

My key factors for using and keeping with pixel are pretty basic: prior to me going Nexus/pixel, to remove the bs added to my phone (like it shipping with FB apps), I would need to load custom ROMs which was a massive pita. I enjoyed the custom ROMs, mainly the AOSP versions. I wanted clean, no frills android with Google services (which I use extensively). Everything else I could obtain from the Android app store, aka the play store. For the most part, the Nexus/pixel was the only device I could get that kind of thing going right out of the box, pretty much everything else would require a custom ROM. That's the root of why I switched and what keeps me on pixel. I know others have stepped up in this regard, but not many. I've already had success with pixel and to me, the historical experience with pixel keeps me coming back because so far, they've had what I want and nothing that I don't want. If that changes, I'll probably start considering other options.

As long as Google is using the pixel as a dev platform, bringing new features to pixel first, and eventually allowing third parties to use those features, I'm ok with what they're doing. Some get abandoned long before they get that far, and I understand that, but there's now a short list of features that the pixel has that other phones may never get where those features seem to be pixel exclusive, which is where my support of Google on this, starts to waiver.

Tensor had proven itself to be a decent platform, and the features of tensor, which are above and beyond the base RISC instructions, should be made available in some way to other manufacturing partners. Like having a tensor specific processing core that can be paired with a different ARM CPU to provide similar functionality to the full tensor CPU.... Like a coprocessor. The AI benefits to the Google camera, et al, being made available to third parties.

Instead of going with the Microsoft model, offering first party devices, but continuing to support all features on all devices, they're trending more towards the Apple model, where you use our hardware, or get fucked. Which, I'm not a fan of.... Many industries are taking that page from Apple and honestly IMO, it's anti-consumer activity. John Deere comes to mind....

I don't think Google is too far gone in this respect, not yet, they can choose to open things up for third parties as time goes on.

Build quality, at least on the devices I've owned has been good. Not excellent but good. Few, if any issues, and support is generally good. I'm happy for the most part. I don't subscribe to the brand wars, and I'll happily jump ship if that changes. For now, I don't have significant cause for concern.

I'll continue with pixel for a while and see how it goes. I'm constantly evaluating my stance to see if there's sufficient reason to consider other options. I almost got to that point over the headphone jack, but everyone else seemingly followed suit, and once I found a workable solution, I didn't really care anymore. Bluntly, with the headphone issue, unless a device can charge, and allow the phone to charge, while you're actively using it, it's not a solution; having to stop listening/enjoying content while waiting for your pixel buds (or airpods, or whatever) to charge in their case.... that's not a replacement for a headphone jack, since you can enjoy content with a headphone jack indefinitely while charging your phone. So unless it can satisfy the original use case, it's not a good solution. I have the wired charge/listen dongle for any situation where bt isn't viable (like a high RF noise environment, or any time bt needs to be off, like a plane, though many allow bt to be on now), and the fiio for everything else. If I have to choose either headphones or charging, I'm going to find another way.

I have bt headphones that won't play and charge, but I almost always have either the fiio or dongle with a set of IEMs as a backup. I use my phone for entertainment often enough that this can be a deal breaker for me.

That's just me POV. I like the line, for now, and if things change, that may change. I don't have any negative feelings towards new features being pixel only while they're still being tested and proven, as long as they eventually end up in everyone's hands in whatever form that takes.

After a decade of Samsung and other third party phones, I'm super keen on the Pixel 7 pro. Even with Samsung boosting huge MP counts for their phones, they always come across either blurry or low quality to me (especially selfies where it feels like they've cheaped out)

In comparison the software processing on the Pixel is amazing, things seems to always be in focus and correctly lit.

Google Pixels are the absolute best phones for custom roms and ones I feel best about when it comes to software support outlasting the hardware because of that. All the other phones might have better internals, but it's the growing animosity towards unlocking bootloaders and rise in prices of phones hitting laptop prices without the long term software support to match that makes it seem less appealing than pixels to me.

I like pixel from a price to hardware performance ratio, but fuck the software side. Need a custom launcher coz the official one forces google calender to cover a whole line in your homescreen, and google search takes up a whole line on EVERY PAGE ON YOUR APPS HOME (why the bloody hell do i need this google search icon? It opens up some weird browser that is even worse than chrome). A million and one google product "suggestions" are being thrown at you for the first month of usage, official music app is youtube music, so literally everytime you open ot you need to tell it "yes im sure i want to use my offline music and not subscribe to youtube music", the customizable shortcuts are basically "this can either activate google assistent or do nothing", the worst 3 button navigation bar i have ever seen - You cant even swap the back button from left to right and jt hides itself at random occasions, evetytime you open your SMS you need to tell it you dont want to use google's weird internet based sms feature (yes, it never stops suggesting it until you agree, 6 months already). The automatic adjustable brightness is terrible and already blinded me randomly when i tried to browse the internet before going to bed, the automatic screen wqkeup is junky at best, it has a weird feature that every time you.lay your phone over the screen it locks with no way to turn that off. Call recording apps barely work, closing all open apps it purposely innefficient (you have to scroll all the way left instead of it being immediatly available), the permission option of "ask every time" is broken because every third time it stops asking you to enable it and you have to enable the permission constantly and later remove it again.

Fuck google's OSes.