This is a laudable effort, but maybe the Pixel team should first focus on feature updates not completely messing up their phones for months at a time?
Owning a Pixel 4a has been great until the first major Android update, which made the "Adaptive battery" feature discharge the phone within two hours in standby. The fix didn't come for more then a year (!). A very similar thing then repeated with the next major update. One would think buying a phone from the main developer of the OS would come with more stability, reliability, and attention to detail, considering the argument of "oh, but it has to support a hundreds of thousands of phone models, not just 3 a year like Apple" is moot.
What good does 8 years of support do if the phone is borked after 3?
Occasionally I flash a pixel device back to an old firmware.
Every time, I am surprised how speedy and lag-free it feels.
I would really like a 'security updates only, no other updates' phone, because I value speed over some UI redesign or whatever is in the next android update.
I realize my experiences are anecdotal to the two Pixel 4a phones in my family, but the numerous reddit threads about the Adaptive Battery issue (4a) and the later unexplained stand-by battery drain (4a & 7) seem to show that I have at least not been the only one experiencing this.
Android has been having battery drain issues since forever. All it takes is some random app, library, system service or driver to get into an infinite loop waiting for something that will never happen, and suddenly battery life is cut down from multiple days to just a few hours.
Owning a Pixel 4a has been great until the first major Android update, which made the "Adaptive battery" feature discharge the phone within two hours in standby. The fix didn't come for more then a year (!). A very similar thing then repeated with the next major update. One would think buying a phone from the main developer of the OS would come with more stability, reliability, and attention to detail, considering the argument of "oh, but it has to support a hundreds of thousands of phone models, not just 3 a year like Apple" is moot.
What good does 8 years of support do if the phone is borked after 3?