Google Pixels are buggy poorly-made trash.
I’ve been using Google Pixel phones for a few years now.
I bought the Pixel 6A back in 2022, after coming off of an LG ThinQ that was intentionally slowed down in the name of planned obsolescence old and slow with age. Initially, I was impressed with the phone. It was sleek and fast, the camera was good, and the build seemed solid. I legitimately thought that the back of the phone was made of glass, and I only discovered just now that it’s actually not. By all accounts, the Pixel 6A had all the makings of a great phone.
Then the problems started.
It began, as usual, with the dogshit keyboard. I’ll spare you a third rant about touchscreen keyboards, you can read all about my absolute hatred for them here and here. The second article was written on my Pixel 6A, and gives you a small taste of the hell I’d often find myself going through to send messages or write articles. To make matters worse, I had neglected to buy a screen protector (the installation process for one of these warrants its own rant), so after a year the glass on the screen wore down in the keyboard area, making swipe-to-type even more torturous.
I use white noise to sleep at night. I have speakers next to my bed, and I would throw my phone onto the charger then play white noise on Spotify. No problem on my LG ThinQ. But then I “upgraded” to the Pixel 6A, and suddenly I began having an issue where the audio would stop playing at random times, and Spotify would crash. At first I thought it was just Spotify being its usual shitty self, so I created an 11 hour white noise sound file and played it through the phone’s default audio player. Same problem, the audio randomly stopped playing and whatever Google’s default audio player is (I think it’s just called “Files”) crashed.
The problem was completely random, and a Google search on the matter yielded a mix of irrelevant results and others saying “I’m having this problem too!!!”, with no solution. So I did some of my own experimenting and realized that the automatic app updates were a possible culprit. If something was updating in the middle of the night, then it was also shutting the audio off too for some reason. So I disabled auto-updates.
The audio stopped dropping in the middle of the night, which was good. Unfortunately, it was now randomly dropping out after half an hour. The whole thing was completely random, some nights it would stop, others it played just fine. I worked around it by starting the audio half an hour before bed, so I wouldn’t get jarred awake by the sudden sound of silence.
And speaking of updates, why do Google apps need to update every other day? Once I turned off the automatic updates, I began to get pestered constantly to update various apps, and almost every day without fail the list was full of Google apps, like Chrome, Drive, and Files. Firefox seemed to also require near daily updates. I get that some coder somewhere needs to justify their job, but this frequency of updates is ridiculous.
This is something the younger generation vehemently defends, saying that frequent updates are necessary because bugs and security holes are constantly being found. So your defense of frequent updates is that the devs are idiots with no concept of quality control? If you need to patch your software daily, it means you don’t know what you’re doing, and probably should find a new line of work more suited to your aptitude, like mopping the floor at Walmart. Read the patch notes, most of the updates are minor fixes and could easily be bundled and released every other week instead of every other day.
Between these problems and the typical slow down that usually comes after you’ve had a phone for a year or two, I decided it was time for a new phone. But because I’m a masochistic idiot, I decided to make that new phone a Google Pixel 8. Surely after a couple of models, Google would have fixed these issues, right?
Nope, the Pixel 8 has the same exact issues.
But not only did it have the same issues, it also had exciting new issues too, such as my headphones randomly dropping playback. I’d be listening to Spotify, and suddenly the music would stop playing. Spotify would show that the music was still going, but there was no sound. I found a couple of solutions that seemed to work, like going into the developer options and changing the Bluetooth version, but those created yet another issue, where the headphones would technically connect to the phone but music would still play from the speaker instead. I just can’t fucking win, can I? Then at some point the phone updated, and the issue with the sound dropping out returned. The problem seems to be only with my Anker Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro headphones, but they worked perfectly fine with my Pixel 6A so I’m not sure where the disconnect is here. These headphones are just over two years old, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy new headphones again so soon because Google can’t be bothered to make a phone that works correctly.
As usual, Gboard worked great… for about two days. Then it went to complete shit, this time even worse than it did on the Pixel 6A. I had enough, I decided to make the switch back to Swiftkey. Swiftkey sucked, but it was better than the garbage that Google was selling.
Swiftkey worked great in terms of accuracy, but there was just one little problem: It didn’t play nice with Firefox. While writing articles, I caught it randomly duplicating text. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of it, I’ve never seen anything like this. I’d be writing, and out of nowhere the text cursor would displace itself and begin randomly duplicating text found elsewhere in the article. What the fuck?! How did something like this make it past quality control? Does quality control even exist in software and app development? These aren’t obscure apps either, this was Firefox, Swiftkey, and WordPress, three very well-known and heavily-used apps and softwares, on one of Google’s flagship devices. There’s no fucking way this would have went unnoticed had anyone bothered to do any form of testing.
Whenever you try to seek help for any of these issues, everyone’s default solution is to do a factory reset on the phone. Audio issue? Try a factory reset. Keyboard suddenly shits itself? Factory reset your device. Spotify dropping out? Did you try a factory reset? Am I supposed to just factory reset my phone every week? Does Google just hire any retard off the street for their dev teams?
If you’re reading this looking for a solution to similar issues, I really don’t have anything for you (except, of course, doing a factory reset). I still haven’t solved the audio issues. The best I could do for Gboard was buy a stylus pen. I look like an asshole using this thing, but it seems to work a little better than my finger. I guess the Pixel’s touchscreen was built for tiny fingers, or maybe the calibration is off by just a bit. The stylus kind of works though, so try that if you’re having trouble swipe-typing.
Even the stylus isn’t that great though. After a couple of weeks using it, Gboard seemingly caught on to my little trick and adapted itself accordingly. My accuracy rate dropped from 10% to 4%. Which is still better than the default accuracy rate of 2%, I guess.
I just spent $400 on this phone, and I’m not about to buy yet another phone and take the gamble on whether or not it actually works. I have a drawer full of old phones that I’m not too sure what to do with. Everyone keeps telling me to recycle them or donate them to a women’s shelter, but fuck that, I paid for these things and I want to do something cool with them. If anyone has any ideas on fun things to do with old cellphones let me know.
I’m not sure what my next phone will be, but it sure as hell won’t be a Google Pixel. At this point I’d rather buy a Samsung, or, Allah forbid, an iPhone. The Google Pixel sucks so bad that I’m genuinely considering buying a damn iPhone. I never thought I’d write those words, but here we are.
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