More than 4 years of Android updates for the Google Pixel 8!

[RejZoR]

52 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

Yes I figured you would, which is why I asked which phone you had previously. That doesn't explain it tho. Your phone doesn't magically die the moment the 3 years are over, and as Lawlz mentioned, most updates now are delivered via play services and not system updates. 

Except they aren't. Especially not if you're not hooked into whole Google services thing which I'm not. Major OS updates are still what actually brings major new features and through a decade and a half of having Android phones, they were all literal shit in this regard. And even today, I have very little faith in GooglePlay delivering anything when even monthly security updates through it are delivered super inconsistent, I have to manually poke it to update and 3/4 of the time when I check for update, it asks for a total phone restart just to not actually update anything. Ugh?

[Senzelian]

13 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Except they aren't.

Except they are.

https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/11412553?hl=en#zippy=

 

And then there are also the Pixel Feature Drops.

 

13 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Especially not if you're not hooked into whole Google services thing which I'm not. Major OS updates are still what actually brings major new features and through a decade and a half of having Android phones, they were all literal shit in this regard. And even today, I have very little faith in GooglePlay delivering anything when even monthly security updates through it are delivered super inconsistent, I have to manually poke it to update and 3/4 of the time when I check for update, it asks for a total phone restart just to not actually update anything. Ugh?

TL;DR: You bought a Samsung.

Samsung =/= Android

[jagdtigger]

39 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

They're not EOL after 4 years. Where do you even get that idea from? 

Yeah sorry, i meant to write 5 years...... (because dont kid yourselves, no way in hell samsung or google will support a phone for 9 years, "you should go and buy a new one like a good consumer")....

[jagdtigger]

double toast.......

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Except they are.

https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/11412553?hl=en#zippy=

 

And then there are also the Pixel Feature Drops.

 

TL;DR: You bought a Samsung.

Samsung =/= Android

Then why Google does Pixel drops if GooglePlay is so magical (it's not)?

Also, no kidding? Samsung is not Android? Where did you manage to get that marvelous revelation? But they are using Android as foundation and that foundation is still dictated by Google because for the most part it's still Android in its stock form underneath with bunch of Samsung's own modifications on top.

[Senzelian]

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Then why Google does Pixel drops if GooglePlay is so magical (it's not)?

Exclusivity and marketing

 

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Also, no kidding? Samsung is not Android? Where did you manage to get that marvelous revelation?

 

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

But they are using Android as foundation and that foundation is still dictated by Google because for the most part it's still Android in its stock form underneath with bunch of Samsung's own modifications on top.

Samsung has far more control over Android on their phones than many realize. This is just now slowly changing with the release of recent Pixel devices, as Google is trying to break its bond with Samsung. 

[zampo]

I would be nice if they cloud extend the support for the Pixel 4a ....

[Dracarris]

18 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

I know I’m definitely an outlier here, in that after nearly four years of ownership, my phone (iPhone 11) is in excellent condition (no broken screen, nor dents or major scratches), and I’m even using the original charger and cable that came with it. Can definitely use a battery though. Device performance is holding strong, and I’ve zero desire to upgrade.
 

Yeah, keep those updates coming!

Not really an outlier, at least from what I hear from people around me and myself. No problem whatsoever to keep an iphone for 5-7years, typing this from a 2017 iphone X that works jolly fine on iOS 16.

 

So I hard disagree that a phone is generally beaten up and needs to be replaced after 4 years. Buy a quality (not flagship) phone and take good care of it.

 

Btw I keep hearing here that iphones get 5 years of updates but it‘s usually 6yrs and in the case of the 6S even 7. And that‘s full generational iOS upgrades with both features, UI and ofc security which even usually extends way past those 6-7yrs.

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 9/2/2023 at 9:08 PM, RejZoR said:

neat things like built in charge limiter that limits charging to 85% natively

Adaptive charging does the same thing on pixel btw

 

On 9/2/2023 at 5:36 PM, LAwLz said:

see that people are already mentioning Apple and iOS.

Exactly. My 5 year old OnePlus 6t still runs the latest versions of apps and it only has a slightly dated UI. It has a few of the goodies that were released post my end of software updates. I get the OS security patches improvement, but there to say that Androids become EOL after their update window ends like iphones do is disingenuous. 

 

Also different people have different preferences. As someone who ran their phone near stock and uses the most normie apps imaginable, fewer security patches and updates, vs the performance downgrade that often came when the OS was updated way beyond 4 years on iOS was a fine trade off for me. Though with the new update policy, things do seem really enticing on the Android side. Maybe I'll pick up a pixel when my 12mini finally gives up.

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 9/2/2023 at 11:40 PM, Senzelian said:

You bought a Samsung.

Samsung =/= Android

Yeah, but not using gservices doesn't mean that they are using whatever crap samsung ships. I haven't seen most people prioritise samsung web over chrome(or bixby over assistant, or Samsung whateve over playstore etc). OneUI is still Android.

 

In desktop Linux terms, Kind of like saying that ubuntu KDE is not Ubuntu, because KDE has different stuff than gnome.

On 9/2/2023 at 9:08 PM, RejZoR said:

OneUI

Do you like it for the feature richness? I always felt that oneui vs stock was always a tradeoff between just the sheer mass of things that samsung had vs the clean but barren stock. 

 

iOS does strike a wonderful balance when it comes to this I think

 

[RejZoR]

8 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Adaptive charging does the same thing on pixel btw

 

Exactly. My 5 year old OnePlus 6t still runs the latest versions of apps and it only has a slightly dated UI. It has a few of the goodies that were released post my end of software updates. I get the OS security patches improvement, but there to say that Androids become EOL after their update window ends like iphones do is disingenuous. 

 

Also different people have different preferences. As someone who ran their phone near stock and uses the most normie apps imaginable, fewer security patches and updates, vs the performance downgrade that often came when the OS was updated way beyond 4 years on iOS was a fine trade off for me. Though with the new update policy, things do seem really enticing on the Android side. Maybe I'll pick up a pixel when my 12mini finally gives up.

I doubt it does. And neither does on iPhones. It's suppose to automatically adapt charging to your sleep and wake up schedules, but every time I observed it, it just charged to 100% straight away and then sat at 100% entire night.

[Dracarris]

8 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

but there to say that Androids become EOL after their update window ends like iphones do is disingenuous. 

It's disingenuous to say that about iphones, unless with "update window" you refer to the security update window, which ends somewhere at 8+ years after the phone was initially released.

That's usually when the latest iOS that you can still run on such a phone is 1-2 generations old, which is exactly how long most apps are still supported.

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 hour ago, Dracarris said:

hat's usually when the latest iOS that you can still run on such a phone is 1-2 generations old, which is exactly how long most apps are still supported.

I meant that Androids do have longer app update cycles after updates end, unlike iphones, which in my experience went EOL in 2-3 years post end of updates(though the iPhone I drove before this got only 4 years of updates I believe)

 

[Dracarris]

8 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

I meant that Androids do have longer app update cycles after updates end, unlike iphones, which in my experience went EOL in 2-3 years post end of updates(though the iPhone I drove before this got only 4 years of updates I believe)

 

But that would result in 8-9 years of total usable time for a given phone, still (6-7 iOS + 2-3 app/security updates on "EOL" iOS; if your phone really only got 4y iOS that's an outlier). Are (most) Android apps really that much longer supported? What's the incentive of all the various differnt app vendors to do that?

[Arika]

Google: “hey we’re supporting our phones for longer”
Those people: “Apple still does it longer!!!!!”

 

 

tribalism is bad m’kay?

I swear some people are incapable of acknowledging something is good if there’s someone else doing it “”better””

[RejZoR]

10 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Yeah, but not using gservices doesn't mean that they are using whatever crap samsung ships. I haven't seen most people prioritise samsung web over chrome(or bixby over assistant, or Samsung whateve over playstore etc). OneUI is still Android.

 

In desktop Linux terms, Kind of like saying that ubuntu KDE is not Ubuntu, because KDE has different stuff than gnome.

Do you like it for the feature richness? I always felt that oneui vs stock was always a tradeoff between just the sheer mass of things that samsung had vs the clean but barren stock. 

 

iOS does strike a wonderful balance when it comes to this I think

 

I like OneUI. It's really not overwhelming at all. It has the feature, but they are just kinda there and Samsung does good job at organizing them where they belong. Unlike Chinese phones where all the features constantly want to be in your face and phone constantly bugs you about all these cool features that end up being constantly broken. Everything on Samsung just works where on Xiaomi, almost everything was glitchy in some way. It was just always something not as it should be.

[RejZoR]

40 minutes ago, Arika said:

Google: “hey we’re supporting our phones for longer”
Those people: “Apple still does it longer!!!!!”

 

 

tribalism is bad m’kay?

I swear some people are incapable of acknowledging something is good if there’s someone else doing it “”better””

It's because Pixel phones are first party Android devices and you kinda expect them to do much better than 3rd party vendors. That's why.

[WolframaticAlpha]

4 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Android

Speaking from personal experience, my dad was dailying a samsung from 2016 until this year. It still works for calls WhatsApp and videocalling, and the only reason he upgraded was because the camera was not very good nowadays. I have seen older iphones way more than older Androids, however that may also have to do with the fact that in my country apple is kind of a status symbol and people buy crappy old iphones instead of buying Androids that would work significantly better.(especially since apple has nearly 0 vendor lockin with iMessage and facetime in India)

[WolframaticAlpha]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I like OneUI. It's really not overwhelming at all. It has the feature, but they are just kinda there and Samsung does good job at organizing them where they belong. Unlike Chinese phones where all the features constantly want to be in your face and phone constantly bugs you about all these cool features that end up being constantly broken. Everything on Samsung just works where on Xiaomi, almost everything was glitchy in some way. It was just always something not as it should be.

Yeah, my opinion of samsung oses does seem to be highly biased by TouchWiz.

 

OneUI and stock are probably the only good skins nowadays. I liked my OnePlus but skipped the newer iterations because I despise BBK s/w and couldn't have used oppo skins over oxygenOS. Xiaomi stuff is just so hilariously bad, that I find it surprising that people still buy their phones.

[RejZoR]

31 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Yeah, my opinion of samsung oses does seem to be highly biased by TouchWiz.

 

OneUI and stock are probably the only good skins nowadays. I liked my OnePlus but skipped the newer iterations because I despise BBK s/w and couldn't have used oppo skins over oxygenOS. Xiaomi stuff is just so hilariously bad, that I find it surprising that people still buy their phones.

I don't know why people hate on TouchWiz so hard. Pretty much all Android customizations sucked back in that era. Had HTC and it was terrible, had Samsung and it was terrible, had Xiaomi and it was terrible. Nowadays, pretty much all are good. It's also that hardware is much more capable now, which back in the day just wasn't even on flagships. For example, Galaxy S2 wasn't even fast. It was fast compared to budget phones which were nearly unusable, but these days even budget phones are quite snappy.

[WolframaticAlpha]

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

TouchWiz

Idk, HTC really cleaned up their act post 2012-13 and by around 2013 there were really good skins on Android. Not to mention how slick BB10 and WP had gotten(ios 7 wasbt that bad). Post jellybean, stock has gotten really good, and TouchWiz just seemed really out of touch back then.

 

Xiaomi never really had a reputation for software. For as far as I remember, they have been building spec sheets and not phones. For BBK to get good software, they basically had to clone cyanogen for quite some time.

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

wasn't even fast.

Eh, disagree. I still have an old snapdragon s4 based thing in a drawer somewhere and it would still be pretty fast doing basic stuff like calls and messaging(non online stuff). Touchwiz really got better by the end, but the 2011-2014 era was just bad.

[GOTSpectrum]

I'm still annoyed they renamed the Android market to play 

[Senzelian]

On 9/4/2023 at 12:05 AM, WolframaticAlpha said:

Yeah, but not using gservices doesn't mean that they are using whatever crap samsung ships.

We were not talking about apps provided by Google. We were talking about a service called "Google Play Services" and the so called "System Updates" (not to be confused with Android Updates), which includes a bunch of updates that are offered via the Google Play app and the Android System itself. These can change system settings, app settings, UI elements and bring new features. The Pixel exclusive "Pixel Drop" for example is also pushed via this service.

 

And regarding those it is important to note that the manufacturer decides which updates will be pushed and when they will be pushed. This means that if you receive inconsistent updates, in most cases, the manufacturer is to blame and not the developer. So in this case, Samsung.

 

My gripe with this is that often people don't know about this (I don't blame them) and therefor assume that any Android phone, especially Samsung's, are on the same level of quality as any other Android phone. This is especially not true when compared to Google's Pixel. (Which of course also has its own flaws)

[Quackers101]

On 9/2/2023 at 9:56 AM, Senzelian said:

Why wouldn't you know that? They're pretty clear about it.

If one says its x amount of years since release of phone maybe so. else to search for what your phone can support and where it exactly ends and if one could be able to push more updates on your phone after the fact? not so great and it could be messaged to your phone that this is the final update.

On 9/2/2023 at 8:10 PM, Senzelian said:

TL;DR: You bought a Samsung.

 

Samsung =/= Android

On 9/3/2023 at 8:29 AM, Senzelian said:

Samsung has far more control over Android on their phones than many realize. This is just now slowly changing with the release of recent Pixel devices, as Google is trying to break its bond with Samsung. 

Well some of this is what I have waited 5-ish years for, as google trying to make android more "standardized" and not specialized for each OEM with various own issues unlike iphones, for better or worse. Having the layer more detached and modular, so one can update and for longer in the android layer and important features/upgrades/security. More so when we need this for phones, and I wouldn't exactly celebrate that we would want lack of support like not giving support to ryzen 2 or 3 PC chips or as long like previous windows OS's. I would want the phone standard to meet 6-10 years of support, like security which would likely be easier for apple and their market of less phones to handle, even if phones have gone through major changes to the digital wallets they are today (if having the features to be one). As the phone platforms become more stable, we should see longer support be added as a minimum.

 

As now we only talk about 1 side of an small % of android phones being the pixel, which google handles both android and the pixel, so yeah not going to celebrate for the bare minimum even if one could see some being a "small victory", and when they did wrong with other pixel phones too with even less support. Also to android/iphone versions becoming more like small updates to push out later phones instead of supporting major OS changes or updates. Also for iphone isn't always better as we have seen with their cutting of older phones, like using more battery or try to make the phones unusable if its "too old" even if it gets "support", forcing an end of life.

 

but I do forget how it was for the GPU market can be with their support for "old" cards. then you have batteries with the phones and how long they think the phone would last with just the battery too.

[Kisai]

On 9/4/2023 at 1:10 AM, Arika said:

Google: “hey we’re supporting our phones for longer”
Those people: “Apple still does it longer!!!!!”

 

 

tribalism is bad m’kay?

I swear some people are incapable of acknowledging something is good if there’s someone else doing it “”better””

If I'm going to buy a flagship phone, I want it to last as long as possible and not be forced to replace it before the actual hardware "requires" a change. Such as going from 3G to 4G LTE to 5G NR.

 

 

This phone was released in 2018. So 5 years And it still has 81% of it's original battery capacity. Do I feel any urgency to replace it? No. Does my criteria for an upgrade apply? 

- 5G NR, mmWave

- USB-C

 

Sure, but is mmWave in Canada? If it isn't and Apple isn't putting it on the iPhone 15's then maybe I'll wait another year. I know I can make the XS last another year even if Apple decides to discontinue major iOS updates for it. But would I buy an Android phone? the answer is likely "never" because flagship phones don't last as long as iPhones and the decision to make a phone last is pretty much at the mercy of the manufacturer not being scum and deciding not to.

 

Google, itself must be criticized any time it puts out a flagship device that doesn't meet or exceed what Apple puts in their flagship phones on the main selling points:

- Battery Life (12 hours when charged, 5 years)

- Camera

- OS update cycle (5+ years)

 

Google (Pixel) only offers 10 hours when charged, and lasts 18 months, with an OS update cycle of 2 major updates. By all accounts the Pixel is still far worse, and you'd have to replace it twice in the same time span of a flagship iPhone. So no, I doubt anything Google puts out would convince me to switch to it, as it seems the only people who are foolish enough to buy hardware from google are people who have been tricked into thinking it's a cheaper device. Pixel 7 Pro, $1179. iPhone 14 Pro Max $1549. Gee, saving 400$ but have to replace it twice. No thanks.

 

For all intents, know how you want to use a phone. If you prefer replacing the phone every 1-2 years for style reasons, then you can do that with either, but doing that with an iPhone is needlessly replacing a device that will last you 5+ years, and even then you can replace the battery when it hits 80% and get another 5 years out of it if you just need the phone functionality.