Can you imagine THIS being the reason to be done with Google lmfao

sounds like a good thing to me

Saw that article. What a wild reason to switch platforms — except, I doubt they will. They didn’t mention anything about leaving Android Police. So, what, they go to Samsung, they go to someone else, but they’re not switching to iPhone. They’re not done with Google, they’re done with Pixel, but Google will continue to make money off of them. You can switch to iPhone, you can stop using Google services, and we can argue all day about whether that is good or not, but if you leave one Android OEM for another, you’re not leaving Google; that’s a fact. And they’re not going to iPhone either since their grievance is over AI and Apple Intelligence/Siri is dead last in the AI race (and maybe that’s intentional?).

And that’s really a problem. If you don’t like iPhones for whatever reason, you really can’t break up with Google. You’re either gonna do one of two things: You’re gonna pay iPhone money for a Pixel that is ~5 years behind the iPhone in terms of performance, and you’re gonna put GrapheneOS on it, and now you’re in a rat race with the banking apps, to root, to hide root, to hide that you’re hiding root, and you don’t get AI. Or you buy a Galaxy phone, you’re competing with the iPhone in terms of performance — the Galaxy S25 gets a bit faster than my iPhone 16 Pro Max, but when they throttle, the Galaxy throttles more, so the iPhone ends up more performant. I still give the win to Galaxy because I don’t play the kind of games that throttle my phone in the first place. Anyway, you’re not giving Google money for hardware, but they still get your data via Google Play Services. They win either way.

That’s why we need a third option. There are Linux phones, but aside from them not being Pixels, it’s otherwise the same answer as using GrapheneOS. You’re using a weaker phone and you’re getting fewer options. And you’re not gonna go Linux or iPhone or Graphene if AI is what you want.

Seems to me the article writer is just going to suck it up and buy the Pixel 11 when it comes out, they just won’t be happy about it.

LOL I would love to have a phone without Gemini or Galaxy AI personally…Sounds like a blessing to me! Slop tools aren’t that useful, and often can provide very misleading information. I have them disabled on my device, but can’t remove it because corporations hate it when people want to exercise their right to choose.

I no longer trust Google

For recent years, I used to believe that paying a premium for a flagship would guarantee years of strong software and AI support. That belief has been shattered.

Hasn’t Google done this forever? When I was on a Pixel 4 Pro (or whatever it was called), I seem to recall a bunch of fancy new Pixel 5 and 6 features that were never back-ported. I think that included Call Screen, but it was a while ago.

If these features were expected to provide a tonne of advantage to Google, they’d be back-ported, as we see with the Pixel Watch. I’m guessing that these aren’t seen as key differentiators, so Google is tossing them at the wall with minimal effort to see what sticks.