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Why hardly anyone buys Google's Pixel phones

wired.co.uk

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Re: Why hardly anyone buys Google's Pixel phones

#21

Post by thiht »

cableshaft wrote: post #3

Can't speak for Pixel, but I had two Google Nexus phones that both got stuck in the Bootloop of Death state (you can't start the phone even with reboot tricks, it gets stuck in a boot state), and I heard of several other people (including coworkers) that had the same issues, so it turned me off buying Google phones in general, and I never even considered buying any Pixel phones because of it. Really liked my Nexus ph…

I had two Nexus 5x and ran into the same issue. It's a shame because it was a great smartphone. After that I bought a Pixel 3a and I like it too, it's the spiritual child of the 5x.

I'm annoyed with Google's behavior on... everything though, so I plan to switch to an iPhone for my next smartphone (in 1 or 2 years probably).

Re: Why hardly anyone buys Google's Pixel phones

#22

Post by jfengel »

I really like my Pixel 3XL. Most prominently I like the fact that it's running stock Android and gets updates quickly. On my prior phones, updates had to go through both the manufacturer AND Verizon before they'd update, which could be months or even years, especially as the device aged.

I'm sure I could get that by maintaining it myself, but I don't want to. I don't want my phone to be a job; I do enough debugging at work.

That probably means I should switch over to the iPhone, since the price and features are comparable. But I'm OK with being a slave to the Google ecosystem rather than the Apple ecosystem -- whichever one lets me most easily forget that there's an ecosystem at all and just use the device.

Re: Why hardly anyone buys Google's Pixel phones

#23

Post by sunstone »

Google doesn't really want to have a big market share in the Android ecosystem. If Google achieved that it would almost instantly be under anti-trust suspicion from the DOJ.

What Google does want is to provide provide clean excellent phones where the advertising budget is reduced and the money saved goes right into the quality of the phones.

Having said all that I've had a few Pixels and what I appreciate most is the low light performance of the cameras. I happen to be fond of this kind of photography and so it really works for me.

What I don't appreciate is having to disable both third party cookies in the Android Chrome browser and location tracking. These are both very creepy data scrappers that Google turns right around and sells to advertisers. No thank you.

Next phone though I'm likely to go with Apple just because they are much more privacy forward that Google. I don't appreciate Apple's walled garden approach and therefore I don't have any other Apple products but a standalone Apple phone will meet my needs.

Re: Why hardly anyone buys Google's Pixel phones

#25

Post by spbaar »

MockObject wrote: post #12
spbaar wrote: post #6

Google knows all this. I figured they're keeping the skeleton of a flagship, branding, marketing, and distribution as a countervailing threat to oems like Samsung that have played around with Tizen or thinking of going too propietary. If an OEM decides to drop play services or the play store then all google has to do is dump some money into their pixel org to make things move a little bigger and faster. Plus it helps…

What are telephony features?

OS level support for caller id, screening, redirection. stuff around enterprise, 5g https://developer.android.com/about/versions/10/features#q-t...
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