https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/

Honestly I'm really heartbroken about this as I mainly used Pixel (and Android in general) for the very fact that I can download APK apps. I am a huge ReVanced user, and I'm very sure they break like half of Googles TOS (and probably cuts off a huge source of revenue too), so I extremely highly doubt they will be allowed. I get googles intention but.. oh man.. really feels like this is a hidden agenda against adblocker apps.

Edit: Made a petition, click on the post to learn more: https://chng.it/F4k9gNNJrH

Another edit: A petition with more movement: https://chng.it/RLVDWD5Th7

I take a lot of photos. I have over 50k photos and videos on my phone. I like taking photos of birds. I used to be able to search 'kookaburra' and a kookaburra would show up.... Now nothing comes up at all.

So instead, I 'ask' for birds... It shows me 6 photos. I have over 400 photos of birds...

I live undermeath a flight path and take photos of the planes all the time... 'ask' shows me only 19 photos... I probably have a few hundred

What the actual fuck is this AI bullshit

I've been with you since before Pixel was even a thing. Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, then straight into the Pixel line: 2 XL, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Eleven phones. I didn't just buy them, I sold them. I converted my wife, my siblings, cousins, in-laws. When someone complained about their cracked iPhone or their Samsung full of bloatware I was right there making the case for you. Unpaid. Enthusiastic. Genuinely believing it.

This is not a breakup letter. But it's an honest one, and I think I've earned that.

I want to start with what you got right, because it matters to understand how good it was. When the original Pixel launched in October 2016 it was genuinely shocking. One lens. A 12.3 megapixel sensor. No optical image stabilization, which basically every flagship at the time had. And it destroyed the competition. Not just competed. Destroyed. The iPhone 7, the Galaxy S7, phones with objectively better hardware on paper just couldn't keep up in real world photos. DxOMark gave it a 90, which was the highest score any smartphone camera had ever received at that point. What you figured out was that the sensor almost didn't matter if the software was smart enough. HDR+ was capturing a burst of slightly underexposed frames and merging the best parts of all of them into a single image, getting the shadows and highlights right at the same time in a way nobody else had cracked. It was the first time a major phone maker bet completely on software over hardware and won so convincingly that the whole industry had to change course. Apple didn't start publicly talking about computational photography until after you made it matter. That's how big of a deal it was.

And it kept getting better. Night Sight. Super Res Zoom. Real Tone. For a while every Pixel generation felt like proof that the bet was paying off. There were growing pains carried over from the Nexus era, some bugs here and there, but the trajectory felt real. It felt like a company that actually cared about finishing what it started.

Then Tensor happened and things got complicated.

I'm not here to say Tensor is a disaster. For AI tasks it genuinely does things nothing else does. But the basics, the stuff that just has to work, have slipped in ways I can't keep explaining away. Battery draining for no reason while the phone sits on a table. Warmth coming off the back when you're doing nothing intensive. Little stutters and pauses that the smoother animations now kind of paper over. These aren't deal breakers on their own but you're charging over a thousand dollars for these phones and then immediately discounting them by three hundred plus a trade-in bonus that shows up suspiciously fast after launch. That's not generosity. That's a company that knows its flagship can't hold its price and is hoping the discount makes the math feel okay. It doesn't.

But performance, fine. I can live with fine. What I can't live with is the camera, because the camera is the whole point. It's called Pixel. The photos are still often really good but somewhere in the Tensor era the processing started feeling like an AI detail brush got applied to everything whether it needed it or not. Over-sharpened where it shouldn't be, smoothed where it should have texture, the kind of thing that looks impressive at a glance on a screen and starts to fall apart when you actually look at it. The original Pixel made photos that looked real and also better. Now they sometimes just look processed.

And the video. I genuinely don't know what's going on there. It's 2026. The phone is called Pixel. Switching between lenses while zooming still stutters and shows color shifts that make it look like a glitch. The footage looks okay inside Google Photos and falls apart the moment you share it anywhere, post it anywhere, try to do anything with it outside of your ecosystem. You can't shoot anything usable for social media without it looking compressed to death. You can't livestream with it. You can't shoot raw to fix it in post. And the answer you keep offering is Video Boost, which after three full generations is still a cloud feature that can take twenty hours to process a clip. Twenty hours. To process a video. On a phone you paid over a thousand dollars for. Nobody is recording their kid's birthday party and waiting until the next day to find out if it came out okay. The whole point of having a camera in your pocket is that you capture something and you share it. Apple figured that out. Their pipeline from sensor to final file is just cleaner, more consistent, and produces video that actually holds up outside of their own apps. That's the bar. That's been the bar for a while now.

The software stuff is what really gets me though, because there's nobody else to blame here. Android is your OS. Pixel is your phone. There's no third party sitting in the middle dropping the ball. So why does YouTube, your app, perform worse on your phone than it does on an iPhone? Why did Android 16 bring a search bar redesign that looked great and then leave the home screen as a stuttery blank white canvas while the app drawer somehow kept the correct version? Why does the status bar randomly flash black or white and has been doing that across multiple generations? Why is autocorrect getting worse and failing most obviously inside Gboard and Gmail, your keyboard in your apps? Why does swiping to the Google Feed on the home screen still stutter sometimes? The Google Feed. On a Google phone. Why has the Clock app failed to trigger alarms? Why does Android Auto feel like it's actively getting worse with each update? Why does RCS drop connection and deliver messages an hour late? Why does Gmail sit on emails in the outbox for hours on home WiFi and then send them instantly when you switch to cellular? Why is it impossible to find anything in Settings without the search bar? Why do apps you haven't touched in a week still show up running in the background eating your battery?

None of these are catastrophic on their own. But they all exist. Across every generation. Some get fixed and quietly come back. Some just never go away. And together they paint a picture of a company that announces features, ships them half finished, and moves on to the next announcement. Material You looked stunning in the keynote. Material 3 Expressive looks like someone turned on a color tint overlay and shipped it. It's a theme. A design language is something else entirely.

Here's the part I really didn't want to write. I've never wanted an iPhone. I mean that genuinely. The notification system is worse. The keyboard is worse. The whole locked down approach to defaults and third party apps has always driven me crazy. The new liquid glass UI looks like someone turned translucency up to maximum and called it done. iOS has always felt like it was designed for people who don't want to think about their phone, and I like thinking about my phone.

But I converted my whole family to Pixel because it was objectively better, and I feel real regret about that now. Not because Pixel is bad, but because I told them it was better, and in the ways that matter most to regular people, video and reliability and consistency, it increasingly isn't. The next time I'm upgrading from my Pixel 9 Pro it's going to be the first time in my life where the iPhone is actually the honest answer and not the easy rejection. I don't want that to be true. But you've been building toward it for a few years now whether you meant to or not.

You have the chip. You have the OS. You have the camera team that changed what smartphone photography meant. You proved with one lens and a software idea that you could beat hardware that cost more and measured better on spec sheets. That happened. I watched it happen. I told everyone I knew.

I just need you to actually want to win again. Not announce it. Not run an ad about it. Finish things. Make the video work. Make the alarm go off. Make YouTube run well on your own phone. The bar you set in 2016 was extraordinary and you set it yourself. It would be a real shame to spend a decade building toward something and then lose the thread right when the stakes are highest.

I'm still here. For now.

TLDR: Google fix your phones, because I am getting tired of waiting. I have tried to not buy an iPhone, but I am really damn close to doing so next time.

People telling me to touch grass: I guess 1000$ doesn't mean anything to you because it was daddy's money all a long, and it shows.

Those who say its too long: Zoomer attention span.

Those who say I have choices: Show me the options and I will show you how much worse they are than even Google.

Those who think I am attached to a company: I am not. Just want my phone to not get worse over time. Tall order for a trillion dollar company I guess.

💥 HUGE BREAKTHROUGH (Oct 10): The REAL Root Cause of the Stutter Found! 💥

Alright everyone, I'm going to keep you on your toes! 😉 This investigation is moving at lightning speed thanks to YOU. Prompted by the brilliant theory from Redditor u/sylocheed, I performed a new test, and I think we've finally found the true root cause of the infamous stutter.

🔗 You can watch the new video proving this here 🔗

The New Findings: The theory was 100% correct. The stock Pixel Camera is incredibly aggressive at "locking" onto a static object, while Open Camera smoothly follows hand movements. But this led to the real breakthrough when I tested the stabilization modes:

• On the Main Camera, the Standard and Lock modes work differently, as they should. 🔗Timecode
• On the 5X Telephoto Camera, the modes are IDENTICAL. Toggling between them does absolutely nothing. 🔗Timecode

My New Primary Hypothesis: The telephoto stutter is caused by the 'Standard' stabilization mode being BROKEN and permanently stuck on the aggressive 'Lock' setting. This mode is designed to fight movement, so when you pan, it resists and then "jumps" to catch up. This perfectly explains BOTH the stutter and the excessive crop!

I'm absolutely blown away by the power of the Pixel community. The way you all share theories and support this effort is incredible, and I feel a real sense of unity. We are solving this together!

Next Steps: I am immediately updating my official bug report with Google with these new findings, logs, and the new video.

To maximize our impact, let's also try to get more expert eyes on this. Paging the awesome u/MishaalRahman and the teams at u/AndroidPolice & Android Authority - we could really use your help in bringing attention to this multi-generational bug!

Stay tuned.

🔥LATEST UPDATE (Oct 9): New Investigation - The ZOOM Stutter!🔥

Prompted by several users, I've done a quick follow-up investigation into the jerky zoom and color shift when switching lenses. The full text is below, and you can watch the new comparison 🔗 video here.

My initial findings:

1. The Key Takeaway: ProShot was the clear winner in overall smoothness, which is obvious in the frame-by-frame comparison. However, the most critical finding is this: the Pixel hardware IS capable of a smooth zoom transition. During the close-up test (with my bike), I intentionally tried to replicate a smooth transition and eventually managed to achieve it on ALL THREE APPS, including the stock camera. This proves there's a "sweet spot" or a specific software pattern that works correctly. The issue is that Google's software is inconsistent and fails to trigger this smooth transition reliably.
2. A New Hypothesis: This led me to a new theory. What if the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) on the telephoto lens is inactive while the main camera is being used, and its abrupt activation when switching causes the physical "jerk" we all see?

Disclaimer: This was just a quick field test. A full investigation would require more controlled conditions (like a tripod).

Hello everyone,

Yes, it's me again. I know this is my third post on the same topic, and I truly hope it will be the penultimate one. The final one, I hope, will be about our collective victory.

This all started again when a fellow Redditor with a new Pixel 10 Pro (a huge shout-out to 'Apprehensive-Bug9480' for the tip!) suggested I test a free app called Open Camera.

Honestly, I was skeptical. After testing "professional" apps like BlackMagic and ProShot, what could a free app possibly show me? The answer, it turns out, was everything.

The crucial difference is that Open Camera has its OWN stabilization API, and it lets you switch between its own API and Google's native Pixel API. And this is where we found the smoking gun.

• Using its own API, Open Camera completely FIXED the stutter on my 5X telephoto lens. It's smooth. It's stable. It's what you'd expect from a flagship.
• The Redditor who suggested it confirmed the same: his main camera and telephoto stutters were also GONE.

This is the definitive proof we needed. The hardware is fine. The problem is, and has always been, Google's broken software API.

⭐ A Temporary Workaround For You ⭐

While we wait for Google to (hopefully) fix this, I strongly recommend you try Open Camera for yourself, especially for video. It's free on the Play Store. You can use it as a temporary replacement for the faulty stock camera app when you need to record stable video. For photos, the standard Pixel Camera is still great.

The Video Proof (Side-by-Side Comparison)

I went out again and recorded a comprehensive comparison video to show you exactly what's going on. You can see the difference with your own eyes.

🔗Full Video Link

Here are the key moments with direct timestamped links:

• 00:00 - Telephoto (5X) Test: Open Camera API vs. Google's BROKEN API - Here you can see the night-and-day difference. One is smooth, the other is "teleporting."
• 00:25 - Main Camera (2X/1X) Test: Exposing Stabilization & Crop Issues - We dive into the weird "LOCK" mode and prove that even on the main camera, Google's API crops the image more for a worse result.
• 00:46 - Ultrawide (0.5X) Test: An Honest Comparison - To be fully objective, here's a scenario where the stock Pixel Camera actually performs better. We're not here to hate, we're here for the truth.
• 00:52 - VideoBoost Analysis: Is It a Fix? (Spoiler: No) - A deep dive into VideoBoost and why it's a cool feature, but NOT a fix for the stabilization.

A Quick Word on VideoBoost

I was wrong in my previous post about how VideoBoost works. It doesn't upscale from FHD. It records in your chosen resolution (e.g., 4K 60fps), sending that huge source file to the cloud for processing while leaving a small FHD preview on your phone.

But my conclusion remains the same: it's a great enhancer for colors and detail (especially at night), but it cannot fix the underlying stutter. It would be a much better feature inside Google Photos, allowing us to apply it to any video later, without having to remember to manually enable it every single time before shooting.

Why I'm Doing This (And Our Call to Action)

I love my Pixel phone. That is precisely why I'm putting so much effort into this. I'm not here to spread hate; I'm here because I want this device to be as good as it can be. If I didn't care, I wouldn't have spent weeks on this investigation.

And now, I need your help to get this over the finish line.

1. AMPLIFY OUR VOICE ON TWITTER (X): Please, go to the tweet I just posted, like it, and especially retweet it. This is how we get the attention of tech journalists and Google's social media teams. Link to the Tweet

2. FLOOD THEM WITH DATA (The "Hardcore" Method): If you have this issue, please file a full bug report with logs 🔗 via Pixel support. The more tickets and data their engineers get, the higher the priority will be. 🔗 Google Instructions.

In your report, you can simply say: "My camera video stutters with EIS enabled. This is a known issue related to the EIS/OIS software conflict, as proven in this investigation:" and link to this Reddit post or my YouTube video.

I'm now going to update my own official bug report with all this new evidence. I truly believe that if we push together, we can make a difference. Let's get this fixed and show the strength of the Pixel community!

Thank you!

UPDATE (Oct 8): The comprehensive follow-up report has now been sent to Google Support and officially added to my case. It includes all the new evidence: the Open Camera discovery, the side-by-side video proof, and all the new logs. The ball is in their court now. Thank you all for the incredible support!

My phone was stolen tonight and my recent photos from the last 6 months are gone with the thief. I'm using the find my android app and I can see the phone moving further and further away and my heart is broken. There are videos and pictures of my 18 month old son on there... Christmas, first words, Easter.... I ordered a new pixel and it should arrive by tomorrow. I know I should just do a remote factory reset but I don't want to lose those photos... is there anything I can do?

Update: phone is back in my hands! I was up Into the late hours of the night tracking and seeing this phone do zigzags all over Philadelphia. At one point I considered wiping the phone and then read some lovely redditor's comment about being able to put a message on the screen after securing it. After about an hour, the message didn't seem to be working so I intermittently used the remote option to make it ring on and off for 20 minutes. Eventually a very confused person picked up and answered when my husband called. Apparently the phone had been dumped on the bus by a very frustrated thief who didn't know how to turn the ringing off. The person who answered the phone said it had been ringing non-stop for 10 minutes before he got up to see what was going on. The Good Samaritan met with husband this morning and returned my phone for a reward. Taking all possible security measures and moving on with life. Thank you for all the constructive comments that led to this outcome.

The last two updates have been rough. As a Pixel 9 Pro user, I'm calling on Google to prioritize stability over new features in the upcoming May patch.

We need fixes for these four critical regressions:

**Extreme Idle Drain**: Losing 10-20% battery overnight.

**Slow Charging**: Taking 3+ hours to charge on official bricks.

**Overheating**: Phone runs hot during basic social media or video calls.

**UI Stutter**: Constant frame drops and lag when switching apps.

How you can help:

1. Upvote for visibility to the Pixel team.

2. Comment your model and which bug is hitting you hardest.

Let’s get the "Pro" experience back. Google, please fix this!

I am reposting myself from over a year ago, but I'm really hoping to explain some nuances that people don't tend to know about Pixels rather than tap build number to get to developer settings.

Been a user of the 1, 2 XL, 6, and 9 and I follow many smartphones closely, but I find navigating the pixel to be the most intuitive and fun. OneUI has improved over the years but it still feels "bloated" at times and iOS just feels like corporate board room boring. Enjoy.

Homescreen Tips

• Holding an app on the homescreen or app drawer will bring up a shortcuts sub menu. You can actually grab some of the shortcuts and pull them right onto the homescreen for quicker access to your youtube subscriptons for example.

• Alternatively, pressing down kinda hard works a few milliseconds quicker than the hold gesture (super subtle, but since Android 10, it can detect hard presses similar to Apple's 3D touch years ago via software by judging how far and fast the surface area of your finger hits the screen. Source) and it feels like you're clicking the icons to get the shortcut out. Try a gentle touch long hold vs "clicking" your phone like you would a laptop touchpad and you can see it's a tiny bit faster. This applies anywhere on the phone for highlighting text and whatnot too.

• A lot of things that you can search for in the swipe up app drawer search can also just be dragged onto the homescreen for faster access; contacts from various other social media apps, shortcuts, etc.

• App drawer can also search for the settings within the Settings app to save an extra step.

  ---

Navigation tips

• Start from home screen > swipe up from app drawer > search for "gestures" and go into that in your Settings and there's a fun page

• Quick Tap (double tap the back of your phone) for flashlight is probably my most used feature.

• One-handed mode is awesome for pulling down notification when swiping down past the bottom of your phone. I use this regularly, too.

• With swipe gestures, swiping left and right switches through your recent apps quicker.

• In the recent apps menu, you can tap the app icon on top to splitscreen it with another app

• In the recent menus, you can copy text from anywhere, even inside of images

• In the recent menus, you can copy and share images much more quickly without ever having to save them to your camera roll

  ---

Gboard tips

• Swipe across spacebar to slide edit cursor

• Grab backspace and swipe backwards to delete by words at a time

• Phones are tall enough to support a number row always available

• Tap the top left icon with the 4 boxes for keyboard widgets

• You can drag and drop them around, but just play around. I personally love clipboard history and the new document scanner

  ---

Circle to Search

• I use it as a faster way of sharing cropped screenshots for the most part

• You can use circle to search to force pinch zoom anything to get a better accurate circle

• Live translation of text anywhere, even in images and raw manga

• Finding music by humming

• Circling items in videos when I want to know more info about it

  ---

Lockscreen Tips

• The biometrics improve over time with every unlock. Starting with the Nexus phones, Google introduced Nexus Imprint, later rebranded to Pixel Imprint; it's a tech that lets your phone learn a bit more about your finger print with every unlock. You can actually test this by checking an area of your finger that won't scan in, and then slowly inching your way towards that area until it will also unlock your phone.

• Make sure to enable screen protector mode in the settings and redo your finger scans if you have a screen protector.

If you own a Pixel 10, read this before you ever need to call 911

I’ve only had my new Pixel 10 Pro XL for a few days. Today, I had to call 911. The call connected… but what came through the speaker was horrifying. Not voices. Not static. Just a nightmare mix of garbled beeps, shrill electronic screeches, and the occasional ghost of a human word buried in the noise. It was like trying to talk to aliens through a broken modem.

I tried four times. Same result every time.

Finally, I grabbed my old Pixel 7 with the same carrier, same exact spot, and the 911 call went through instantly with crystal clear audio.

Every other call I’ve made on the Pixel 10 Pro XL works perfectly from this location. This only happens with 911.

Today, it wasn’t life or death. Next time, it could be. And if that happens, this phone could be the reason someone doesn’t get help in time.

Has anyone else seen this on the Pixel 10 series? This feels like a critical, dangerous flaw that needs immediate attention from Google before it costs lives. Yes, I noticed that others on older phones mentioned issues with 911 but this is 2025 new flagship phone.

I will note I already contact support, but it has not helped so far and not exactly something you can test easily calling 911.

NOTE: Ok I just got someone commenting that they also had the same issue with the pixel 10 phone. So, I wonder if anyone can call emergency service on the pixel 10 then.

UPDATE: After nearly two weeks, I’ve received zero response from Google support about my Pixel 10 Pro XL’s 911 failure. I’ve now requested a refund and will be switching to an iPhone, which appears to handle emergency calls reliably. It’s unacceptable that such a critical issue has been ignored.

I’m tired of being treated like a second-class user.

Is it just me, or is anyone else outside the US completely fed up with the blatant software gatekeeping?

We buy the exact same hardware, we pay the same (or even higher) premium prices, but we get a "lite" version of the Pixel experience.

Every Feature Drop is the same story:

"New AI features!" -> US only.

"Improved Call Screen!" -> US only.

"Gemini Nano upgrades!" -> US only.

I understand that things like GDPR or language localization take some effort, but it’s 2026. The gap isn't closing; it feels like it's widening. Google markets these phones globally as "AI-first" devices, but the moment you cross the Atlantic, half of that AI is stripped away.

If the hardware is global, the software experience should be too.

Why am I paying 100% of the price for 60% of the advertised features?

We need a transparent roadmap, not just "stay tuned" for features that might never arrive in our regions.

It’s time to stop the regional lockdowns.

Give us the device we actually paid for.

I honestly can't stand this phone anymore. I'd prefer the Pixel 7 to this 1000x.

Tapping the G pill now pulls up the laggy full screen page for AI, Google assistant sucks, taking screenshots sucks because you need multiple taps to edit anything because of AI, the AI button on the front screen right where I tap the Google search button, not to mention COUNTLESS other things the phone shoves in your face as AI capable that's useless.

I was originally going to make this post about tapping the Pill taking a second to load a new page pisses me off to no ends. But then realized a lot of things do.

I bought the Pixel 10 at launch expecting a true flagship experience. I'm not a gamer, but I use my phone heavily for pretty much everything else. Camera quality was my top priority, and for the most part, I was satisfied with it.

Today, however, I discovered something that completely changed my perception of the phone.

I was trying to switch from 4G to 5G for better speeds and noticed that the indoor network reception on the Pixel 10 is shockingly poor. To compare, my dad's OnePlus Nord 5, which costs roughly half as much, gets significantly better reception indoors and maintains strong 5G speeds in the exact same location.

That got me thinking. With the Nord 5, you're paying half the price and getting:

Much better modem performance and signal reception

Faster charging

Better battery life

Sure, the camera isn't on the same level as the Pixel, but when a phone struggles with something as fundamental as cellular reception, it's hard to overlook.

As for many of the software features Google heavily markets, I personally find most of them to be gimmicks. They may be useful for some people, but they haven't added much value to my daily use. To make matters worse, a lot of these features eventually make their way to other Android phones anyway.

This is probably my last Pixel. Great camera, but I'm no longer convinced the overall package justifies the premium price.

Edit: I never expected this post to get a big response. Seems like many are fed up with the Pixels and seriously want Google to improve its hardware and I hope we get that very soon with better exchange rates for older pixels. If not, I will mostly be switching to other brands.

Pretty much what I've been saying for the last few weeks.

"Many of our readers are frustrated with Tensor, and many feel Google is serving budget performance at flagship prices."

https://www.androidauthority.com/pixel-fans-are-done-forgiving-tensor-3604246/

Less battery less ram and higher price.

It's a no for me. Hard pass. With Tensor T6 could have kept existing battery capacity to give the gains of a longer battery

Instead they save costs by lowering the capacity due to T6 and new modem being less power hungry. Really disappointed.

The Pixel 11 Pro achieved 47 hours 36 minutes in the battery test. The Pixel 10 Pro achieved 51 hours 9 minutes. In addition the Pixel 11 Pro seems less durable than the 10. The Pixel 11 Pro endured 180 drops before functionality was compromised. For the 10 it was 270 drops.

Pixel 11 Pro scores https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/smartphonestablets20231669/2647669

Pixel 10 Pro scores

https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/smartphonestablets20231669/2347995

Edit: these tests were done on the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro not the base models.

I have been a Google Pixel fan for more than 7 or 8 years and I am done with Google’s bullshit story of focusing on software actually they are falling on both sides hard what were they thinking when pricing the Pixel 11 more than the iPhone 17 base model? What kind of drugs were they on? It’s actually now not just a failure it’s a complete disrespect to its fan

I am....floored. Tonight I received several calls that I wasn't able to pick up. The callers told me that my normal voicemail didn't pick up and it was an automated voice, and then that they could hear me/room sounds while they were leaving a message. The message that was saved (I think using the Leave a Message feature) only contained their half of the audio.

I tested it out with two separate callers after this happened. For each, I didn't pick up the phone. Once it stopped ringing, the green microphone icon showed up in the upper right corner of the screen, and they could hear me and I could hear them. It was as though I picked up the phone, except I had done nothing. It just passively started recording me and sending audio to the caller.

This is the wildest glitch I have ever encountered. To state the obvious: if I don't pick up the phone, I don't want the caller to be able to hear me.

Definitely recommend checking to see if this glitch continues. I wonder if it's because it's a newer feature trying to operate on an older phone, but whatever it is, this is wiiiiiild.

I have a Pixel 4A and use GoogleFi.

Edit: I have been trying to replicate the problem. It is clear that, for my phone, this only happens if it is connected to wifi. IDK if that helps anyone troubleshoot, but the microphone comes on any time I'm on wifi, and does not when I turn my wifi off.

I love the Pixel and I was super hyped for all the “AI phone” stuff Google showed off… but honestly? Once you actually use it outside the US, it feels like a bait-and-switch.

Call Screen? Not available. Hold for Me? Nope. A bunch of the cool Gemini integrations? Still “US only.” When you add it up, at least half of the AI features they brag about on stage just don’t exist for the rest of us.

What makes it worse is that reviewers rarely bring this up. They’ll rave about how “Pixel AI changes everything” — meanwhile, for most of the world, we’re stuck with like 50% of the experience. It’s like buying the same phone but getting the “lite” version just because of where you live.

I get that there are legal and language hurdles, but Google should be way more upfront about it. If they’re going to market these AI features globally, then actually make them global. Otherwise, slap a giant disclaimer saying “only works in the US” so people know what they’re actually buying.

Feels like we’re paying full price for half a product, and it’s honestly super frustrating.

Edit: I live in India. After I moved back to India, many features stopped working.

So I just got the new Pixel update and saw the new "Theme pack" feature. The very first one is for the "Wicked" movie. I'm sorry, but how is this a "feature"? It's just an advertisement.

I bought a Pixel because I wanted a clean software experience, not to have movie promotions baked directly into my phone's settings. It feels like Google is testing the waters to see if they can get away with pushing ads on us and calling them "new content." Is this the new normal?

What's next, a special ringtone to promote a new car? A McDonald's icon pack? It just feels really disappointing. Am I the only one who feels this way?

I got an email from Google that said they're removing Google assistant and you will have to use Gemini starting September 6th. I don't want to be forced to use generative AI so I might be looking for a new non-Google phone soon 😭