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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>I have used Pixels for a long time and never felt the issues you're talking about.

Without specifying exactly which pixels, that statement is largely irrelevant since if one generation of Pixels was good that doesn't translate to the next generations as well.

The problem with Google is that it's not a consistent HW manufacturer across generations like Apple. I've been following the Pixel series since the 6, 7 and now the 8, and they all have tonnes of complaints about HW issues related to signal reception, battery life, glass kracking, which Google refuses to acknowledge, to SW bugs, plus hit or miss services in case of repairs.

Currently, their Samsung modems are still far inferior to Quallcom flagships and call signal reception is the most important thing for me.

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I mean, sure, but I've been using Pixel phones since the beginning and the worst thing I've seen is shitty reception in a parking garage.

On the other hand, I could buy two Pixel phones for the price of a new iPhone which has been reported to have overheating issues and won't let me do basic shit like install a different browser or sideload an app.

Yeah, the hardware is better, but it doesn't really matter to me if the phone is too locked down for me to use it.

>I mean, sure, but I've been using Pixel phones since the beginning and the worst thing I've seen is shitty reception in a parking garage.

But that doesn't mean the current Pixel model for sale, is also good just because you had a good older mode in the past. Google is just not consistent at building quality phones over the years and fluctuates a lot between hits and misses in various areas with each model they release. They just suck at building HW and supporting their products.

>the worst thing I've seen is shitty reception in a parking garage

You see, that's a massive problem for me and a lot of people who see our phones as devices that should reliably make calls in all challenging situations as it could mean a matter of life and death, not necessarily in a parking lot, but hiking, camping, traveling, driving, etc, etc.

The fact that my phone has reception issue in some cases, is an instant deal breaker no matter how fancy Google's AI photo tech is.

Oh, and cherry on top, last week I had the immense "pleasure" when I launched the Google phone dialer to make an urgent call to my doctor, instead of being allowed to instantly dial a number, I was greeted by a prompt on top asking me how many start I rate their dialer app before I could dial. I wish I was making this up. Who the F at Google thought this was an acceptable UX to be pushed to production?

> Oh, and cherry on top, last week I had the immense "pleasure" when I launched the Google phone dialer to make an urgent call to my doctor, instead of being allowed to instantly dial a number, I was greeted by a prompt on top asking me how many start I rate their dialer app before I could dial. I wish I was making this up. Who the F at Google thought this was an acceptable UX to be pushed to production?

I find that I rarely ever type a number into the dialpad these days - I start most of my calls by voice command, or by pressing a phone icon on a search result.

It sounds like what you want is the modern version of an old-fashioned "dumb" phone. I value things like "can run browsers other than Safari" and "tries to ID callers using Google's database" over being able to make phone calls from the middle of the wilderness or underground, since I bought my phone for the ~330 days a year when I'm not in a reception-challenging situation.

For more bad phone UX, I get calls from "potential spam call" with, as far as I can tell, no way at all to get more information. No indication of what "potential spam call" means (bad STIR/SHAKEN data? Google blacklists? Who knows!). I don't know how to turn off their filter either.

Of course they also have those notorious problems with 911 calls not working.

Does Google just do metrics driven development with no user studies or something? And no one there has actually used a phone for phone calls?

Yeah, the reception issue is a serious problem, I went from years of the galaxy line to a pixel 6 and then to a pixel 8, and both pixels have terrible reception, though I suspect it's a software issue because for about 8 months into the pixel 6 I had never had a single reception issue, now I have them constantly, even with full bars I'll lose connectivity about a dozen times a day. I'll be going back to a Galaxy for my next phone.

I mean most people live in cities where reception is a none issue no matter what chip you use, now the question is outside of cities is there such a big difference between a Samsung and a Qualcomm one?

I had a pixel 4a and currently have a 5a and never had any issues

I got a pixel 6a after the 4a's power button started going wonky for no reason (it'd randomly think it was being pressed and bring up the power menu with the emergency call button, which is not great when you're using the phone and might tap that button on accident). The 6a had a bug for the first month or two where the brightness slider control was offset from where it appeared on the screen (so you had to slide your finger somewhere else to get it to work). It also constantly crashes the entire phone with Firefox if you have the URL bar on top, which as far as I know is still not fixed after over a year. There's some multitude of permissions that have to all be set correctly to get e.g. Pagerduty calls to come through during bedtime mode, and even with the permissions + adding PD to contacts, I missed a call. I can't remember whether it was because I hadn't starred them, or whether my volume was set to silent. In any case, you have to search online to have any hope if finding the correct settings to make it work (the app used to max it out and turn off silent mode and everything just worked with 1 slider. I presume that if that stopped working sensibly, it's because of Android changes). Honestly all of the Pixels I've owned have left me pretty unimpressed with Google's engineers, and the UIs get worse each year.

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