Pixel 10 Phones

For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.

As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.

Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.

This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.

Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.

Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.

Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.

I gotta say Android is superior in a number of things like call and SMS spam.

Also typing on iOS is a frustrating experience. I type "Im" and the iOS keyboard won't offer "I'm" as a correction option. I've even tried using the Google Keyboard on iOS and the multilingual predictions are just not as good as on Android.

I would have preferred to get a Pixel but Google doesn't distribute their physical products where I live.

This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me. If I am backing up my pictures to a hard drive, there is no easy way to select just the pictures taken on my phone. Seems like such an oversight but I suspect it's a way to drive people to sign up for iCloud storage.

On Android I can use Firefox (with uBlock Origin, and the ability to play Youtube videos in the background or with the screen locked).

There, I corrected it for you.

iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.

I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.

The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.

1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).

2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.

3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.

4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.

I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.

Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.

The only exception I can see making for filesystem access is for PWAs explicitly installed by the user, and even then there should be restrictions in place like limiting access to scripts loaded from the installed PWA’s domain. The open web in a generalized browser like Chrome on the other hand is too untrustworthy.

As for camera bumps, they’re all equally awful and I’d rather they just disappear entirely, even if that means thicker devices.

On an android (latest samsung flagship), the keyboard shows up but is frozen for a second before you can type.

I feel this and I’m guessing iOS is a lot more closer to the hardware, while android runs on top of Java, so there is more to process. Maybe its just me.

The deciding factors were:

- The large, high-res screen was way prettier.

- It had access to the whole internet, including Flash.

- The kickstand was handy. (minor, but still a nudge)

Android also had 3rd party keyboards with swipe-typing years before Apple did. I think Android has always been the preferred platform for tinkerers.

1. Put pixel on a flat surface. 2. Half an hour later, discover that the the surface wasn't actually flat, as phone the phone crashes to the ground, having been slowly inching its way off the 'flat' surface by virtue of the magically friction free back case of the phone...

No joke, by far the slipperyest phone I have ever had, and the one I slapped a case on the fastest, but not fast enough to avoid many dents.

- iPhone wobble is real. Mostly mitigated by a proper case. Does the iPhone get a better camera in return? Usually in my experience.

- I don’t sort my photos. The semantic search has been sufficient, and I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim.

- Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use. The FS API does sound great though. Enviable given how annoying it is to do work on an iPhone sometimes.

I’m a Firefox guy myself and web apps are not something I care about for privacy reasons, but I agree that not having the option is a bummer.

The camera bump never really bothered me on the iPhone or the Pixel Fold I had before this iPhone. I just don’t notice it, but then again, I also didn’t notice the crease in the fold.

I miss Tachiyomi though. Panels is nice, but I had to built a whole OPDS-proxy to a manga website to have something close to Tachiyomi. Oh, and the ability to turn off network access on a per-application basis that came with GrapheneOS (plus the security of GrapheneOS itself).

While I prefer Android and Pixels (using GrapheneOS), I have switched my family to the Apple ecosystem to have a middle ground between privacy and features, so I’m not coming from an “I love Apple and everything else sucks” background, mind you.

Not every phone related post needs to become one.

That said, after Apple started drinking AI juice, I don't want to deal with it anymore. Another major annoyance with iPhones is that they ditched touch ID. Face ID just doesn't work with me at all, it's like 30% of success rate, absolutely terrible. My last phone was iPhone SE, but new models switched to this Face ID, and that's a real deal breaker for me. I even considered buying few iPhone SE phones, while they're still selling at the stores and keep them for later use, but that seems weird and they'll get obsolete with software updates anyway.

I switched to Arch on desktop and I'm going to switch to GrapheneOS on my Pixel (native Pixel Android is absolutely terrible experience, GrapheneOS is bad, but everything else is just worse).

1. I’m always going to have a case on my phone, so I don’t care about the camera bump.

2. You’re correct here. I mostly don’t care, but I want to have different hidden folders, which iOS doesn’t natively have. Otherwise I don’t care much.

3. Safari’s locked-down-ness is precisely why I use it.

But TBH, at this point, there’s minimal differences between iOS and Android.

- 99% of people put a case on their phone

- the more thickness you have for the camera (sensor+lens), the better you can make the optical design. (bigger sensor, more range of focus, etc)

- the camera - especially wide angle lens - must be even with surface of case, not below it (otherwise the case occludes the edges of the photo)

2. There is a filter 'not in an album' which would do what you want. The library view is the equivalent of "All Mail" in Gmail. In newer versions, this is a distinct view - they are moving albums, automatically generated collections and search to be a primary interface.

3. Both WebKit and Mozilla have said they consider the local access variant of that API to be harmful, since they do not have an adequately prominent way to surface and manage that you've given a web application permanent access to sensitive directories and files, potentially in the background via service workers. Both do support the origin private filesystem variant. Are there productivity apps direct filesystem access would be useful for other than IDEs?

I was tired of my Android phone feeling like it was falling apart after a year.

I have enough things to think about, troubleshoot, and tinker with…I don’t need my phone to add to that list.

Somehow that manages to surprise and confuse me almost every day. In desktop operating systems, and, I belive, in iOS, there is no need for such thing? Opening a PDF from a mail application usually just opens the PDF viewer as its own application, or it is embedded in some nice way that does not make the entire mail app suddenly look like a PDF viewer app instead.

Unfortunately they can probably never fix that because app lifecycle and intents are connected to everything and a good fix for this would probably break everything.

> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.

I think most users would probably be better off without this proposal.

My experience with the Pixel 7 Pro is due to the very pronounced camera bump and the rounded edges, the phone would slide off tables with problematic frequency, to the point that mine just lives in its bike mount case full time now.

- iOS UI animations are significantly better

- access to iMessage

- Apple got around to adding their version of "always on display"

- I turn the vast majority of notifications off, so Android's better notification management stopped mattering to me

- It felt like Google kept bending Android towards iOS anyway (camera app, moving away from the 3 button navigation)

It should be illegal to put glass on the back of a phone.

I don't think most people care enough to put time into organizing their photos, but would rather the phone or backend AI just find the photo they want by searching for it.

I'm not sure if most users even have a strong conception of "file" or really understand what data is physically on their phone vs "the cloud".

(The symmetry thing though probably does bother a lot of people regardless of their level of technical expertise.)

With a bit of fiddling I can finally backup my whatsapp photos, but oh boy why aren't the default saner?

For Chrome, it's inconsistancies after inconsistancies. First, I couldn't read PDFs from there, now I can but I can't edit the URL when I edit a PDF, also no built-in app to read PDF, it's crazy.

Maybe android has changed but I made the swap, maybe a decade ago, because android had very weak boundaries on apps running in the background.

3: I actively don’t want this nor would I want anybody I care about to have to deal with this.

But props to you for having an argument for Android aside from the usual “I have more control”

Aside from that the fact that I can sideload apps. Run a VM. Work. All this with 16Gb of Ram.

And the list goes on and on.

Honestly having an iPhone these days feels more a punishment than something else.

That said, Apple's behaviour around locking out wearables from key system APIs does have me reconsidering. I found the inconsistent sync and notifications on my Fitbit to be a pretty big source of annoyance and if that continues on the new Pebble I would consider switching back to Android just for that.

This is exactly the sort of thing a lot of smartphone users (including Android users) won’t do.

The point of post-PC devices is to actually be post-PC. For many, futzing around with files isn’t the answer.

For instance I gave up doing this to my email years ago. It was very liberating. If I want something, I search. I can save searches I frequently perform.

iOS’s Photos app isn’t perfect but it allows me to find stuff just fine. I can search for places (“Seattle”), for things (“bicycle”) or even combinations (“plants Vancouver”). It’s pretty neat. And you can actually add stuff to folders (‘albums’) if you really want to.

> local files

iOS has them too. There are apps which allow you to access and manage local files — including the built in file manager. It’s not as laissez-faire as Android, though. Even the file manager has come a long way, and it’s improving further in iOS 26.

tl;dr — iOS isn’t for everyone, but it’s not like it’s not well-designed with a certain audience in mind.

One, it takes really good photos. Better than phones with supposedly better specs. This is big for me, I have a 3 year old, being able to snap photos that look great with no effort is huge.

Two, the Google integration is just really a gamechanger. My laptop is my "computing" device. So my phone is mostly for calling, navigating (I travel a lot), searching for businesses, that sort of thing. It's really effortless with Pixel devices, takes a tad more work with other brands.

All browsers are equal citizens. I use Vivaldi, it's nice it can be the default and work just as well with the phone as Chrome.

And finally, in all my dealings with big tech over my lifetime, Google has been the only one that I feel doesn't try to abuse users. With MS it's endless nagging and annoyances, plus their security sucks, with Apple they're very anti-consumer unless you do exactly what they want, all the time. Even Samsung annoyed me with bloatware and trying to make their apps default over and over. If I change something on a Pixel phone, it stays changed. I pay for some Google products so no ads for the most part. Their security is great. They prefer open formats and protocols and have done a ton for the open web. Just the best ecosystem I've bought into.

Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.

To me the biggest thing to reflect on is how depressing it is that we must all fit ourselves into one of two boxes. My kingdom for a flourishing mobile OS ecosystem where we can all find the exact combination that scratches our itches.

When I use a fingerprint scanner on other phones, it works.

When I used it on my last Pixel (6 or 7, I cant remember) it failed over half the time.

How does one screw up biometrics this badly? Lack of care/QA on a $1k device.

GL with your Pixel.

Note: I'm not an Apple fan boi. I swap every couple of years so I maintain skills in both OSes.

Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.

Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!

It's the most Apple thing.

I legitimately struggle to find anything better.

(Battery, perhaps?)

1. Mine sits flat too. It's in a rugged case.

2. You don't know how to use Photos properly. You create collections from the pool and name them. You can create folders as well. In fact it actually does that automatically now.

3. There's literally a files app and filesystem abstraction on iOS. I use it for moving stuff around all the time.

Add one gain:

1. All my photos are in real files in Photos.app on my desktop within seconds of me taking them. I do not have my files held ransom behind a web interface. Edits and folders are transparently replicated between both devices. When I back up my mac I have a copy of everything.

And a total loss:

Post processing on both devices for images is terrible so I use a dedicated camera.

Apple want you to use the apps they've curated , not web apps, not apps or games from 3rd party stores etc.

For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?

The thing is that web apps are always a worse experience if you have native apps. Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps. For Apple devices you can always find a top quality native app to use, so web apps aren't any concern. The only people I have met who want to use apps in their browser on MacOS are Linux refugees who were attracted by the "specs" of Apple devices. It's a bit like buying an electric car and lamenting the lack of a gearbox. You don't need it anymore.

That said, I think it's worth noting that #1 hardly bothers anyone because most people put their phone in a case, and that can quickly resolve this. #2 isn't a real problem, because you can absolutely sort your photos into folders, they're call albums though, and this is a first-class workflow in the Photos app since they switched from iPhoto to Photos about 6-7 years ago. For #3, I don't want my web browser having file system access via an API and I don't use Chrome.

So? Big deal...

As long as it's that, it's light years ahead of Android. Which is a vehicle for Google to spy on you so they can sell your data.

It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).

The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".

That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...

It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.

This is more popping up magically before you needed to ask.

Both are great (when they work).

Former user of 3a, I upgraded to 6 but it was way too big and heavy, and had a weird mass balance.

I'm now on 8 and it has perfect size and weight IMO (using it with a recommended Spigen case).

Looks like 10 is +17g heavier than 8 and 1-2 mm bigger. Not as big as 6 but almost as heavy.

https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13979&idPhone2=...

Unfortunately that goes for virtually any phone on the market... Sad.

I discovered that all the newer pant models that I purchased have bigger pockets, so that's not a problem anymore.

I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.

# Data that isn’t protected by the VPN

Not all network data from your device is protected by the VPN. Examples of data that aren’t protected by the VPN include:

- Tethering traffic

  - This includes USB and Wi-Fi hotspot.

- Wi-Fi calling and other IMS services

- Work profile app traffic

  - This applies if a work profile is configured on your device.

All of which make sense to me except push notifications. My guess is they might mean syncing notifications to e.g. a watch.

I like my phone more, but battery life on hers is way better to the point I regret buying mine, it barely lasted a day out when on vacations, and I'm not a super heavy phone user, but look for restaurants, open maps, take pictures, ask Gemini stuff and I'd be at 50% by the time she was at 75.

I can't speak to exactly what data doesn't go through their VPN but I know carrier apps tend to not play nice with VPNs, especially the Google Fi app (as it relies on its connection and what IP its on to coordinate switching between their various carrier contracts and that seems to break under a VPN).

And also seemingly Wi-fi calling has been problematic over VPN for as long as I can remember so that's usually a safe bet for exclusion.

How long until someone gets arrested because an AI invented a face that looks like theirs? Hopefully lawyers will be know to throw out evidence like that, but the social media hivemind will happily ruin someone's life based on AI hallucinations.

More like "Interpolation" with a pinch of hallucination. I can see this becoming a thing though, it is after all the mythical 'zoom & enhance' from csi...

Then don't take pictures with phones because it's been like that since more than half a decade at this point even on midrange phones.

At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.

I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].

Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.

[0] https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.

>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(

OpenEUICC works fine

[1] https://developer.android.com/identity/data/testingbackup

* the AI integration on google phones is just amazing

* the folding phone has insane screen estate on-demand anywhere any time, I wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen

If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.

If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.

I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.

How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?

Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.

As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.

With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.

The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.

Sounds like you're thinking of the stock Pixel 10. Google worked with Samsung to bring the Dex experience to upstream Android, and their Linux VM work is almost fully baked in Android 15. Running VSCode and ssh can be done today with a Pixel phone plugged into a USB-C hub, keyboard, mouse and a monitor. I don't know why Google isn't promoting this capability yet,

100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.

It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.

Perhaps they really wanted to show a good looking widget and I suppose flight info was the best candidate.

I have had some calls with family or friends about an upcoming flight where this could've saved a few seconds.

Would I want to save a few seconds in exchange for their processing of my whole conversation even if offline? That's another story.

This sounds like a huge waste of time for the dispatch operators if everyone starts to do such tests regularly.

On a similar note, it would be great (especially for these tests) if carriers provided a non-emergency / echo number that gets treated the same way as an emergency call (works w/o SIM card, gets preferential treatment, ...)

Obviously genai upscaling. The details are not there on the original photo.

The deceptive part is using AI to creatively fill in gaps in the picture, and saying "recover and refine intricate details" when the details are actually hallucinated, making that blue car look like a drawing of a toy.

But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.

So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!

Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.

More details at: https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight....

However it is nuts how they just can't be bothered supporting so many countries.

My partner got a Pixel 9a and it's nice that they went completely flat on that one, though it's obviously almost a straight rip-off of the recent non-pro iPhones aesthetically (not a bad thing imo).

That bump is more than 1/4 of the phone's total thickness. This is becoming comical.

The pixels could be amazing phones if Google could fix their crappy QC and invest in some actual customer support.

People like Apple - you can go to a physical store and get support. You can get AppleCare+ and have accidental damage replacements, battery replacements, etc just take it to the store.

Google doesn't have that, they don't have a physical presence, and it's nearly impossible to get a human and if you do, they are really stingy about RMAs.

They're not releasing them on your personal upgrade schedule

Plus AI upscaling. Fuck no.

I've been using Nova Launcher for so long I couldn't tell you what the normal homescreen looks like right now.

Amazing how good my mental adblocker is for things I've been looking at every day for 2 years.

If you switched to a different phone, it is using a different launcher. If your only complaint is the launcher, it doesn't make sense to change the whole phone.

So basically the trend now is to stop actually improving things and have AI make shit up to fill the gaps and pretend we're improving things.

That's the only thing I found on there. Doesn't even say if it lasts longer than the previous generation.

Maybe I'm old but no two phones today seem as different as e.g. Nokia 8800 was from Motorola Razr

I feel your pain.

* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically

Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.