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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
