Google Nexus 5X

I was a Nexus/Pixel user for 10+ years. Majority of the phones I owned during that time had some quirks or issues. The worst examples were Nexus 5X and Pixel 5 – both just suddenly froze one day, shut down, and never turned back on again. After that Pixel 5 surprise I grudgingly switched to iPhone 12 mini. I still think Google’s Android UI is the best one out there for me, and I despise a lot in the iPhone UX (such as the keyboard) but I just need a phone that works and I can get repaired or replaced easily if I need to. At least in Finland, Google’s customer service has been abysmal over the years.

Yes wow, because it’s not the norm. Before I switched to an iPhone, I needed to change my Android phone every 2 years or so (sometimes less) because they became completely unusable, from hardware issues (broken connectors) to software issues (I had 2 Nexus 5x that died because of a bootloop issue, unacknowledged by Google). Android also becomes extremely slow pretty quickly for some reason. For comparison I’ve had my iPhone 12 for 3,5 years and it shows no sign of slowness or battery issues or whatever, and I intend to keep it for at least 1 or 2 more years. When OP say it stays functional for several years, they mean it stays as functional as the first day for several years, with no degradation.

Dogfooding there was historically kind of a joke. I had severe issues with my Nexus hardware as a Googler and none of them ever got fixed. When they offered to give us all free Nexus phones as a Christmas gift one year I refused because I wasn't about to subject myself to another one. I'd wager money that dogfooders caught this issue and reported it, and nothing was done because it either fell through the cracks or wasn't reported enough to pass the "care about it" bar. Don't interpret this as a slam on the individual developers from the Android team, though. They're determined to fix stuff and some of them worked with me to troubleshoot issues. At the end of the day though it was organizational priorities preventing fixes, or high level decisions resulting in trainwrecks down the road. My favorite example is that the Nexus 5x phone I owned (bought out-of-pocket) had horrible thermal characteristics. The second-hand explanation I got was that late in the design process, they decided to put a fingerprint reader on the housing such that it sat directly on top of the main CPU package, and it turns out fingerprint readers don't work terribly well as heat sinks. The people who knew enough to protest about this decision were, it seems, overruled. I can attest that the stupid thing overheated constantly, causing the CPUs to throttle. I had to stop using the official (also purchased from Google) case because the case further impaired heat dissipation. That was my second Google hand…

I get this, but honestly it's more important for me to have a phone that works... I can deal with inexplicable software changes, I make some of my own. At one point I had the same iPhone for 4 years. When I tried Android I couldn't get the same device to stick around for more than a year. After my 5X bootloop fiasco I tried another manufacturer and found out I couldn't even upgrade my software to patch a security issue because I had to wait on the vendor to add their crapware before releasing the update. I waited 6 months after Google released their update and then gave up... I don't know how Android users deal with the update nonsense.

> I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains... It was the same for me. But when Google seriously started botching the Nexus line and I bought three almost unusable products in a row (Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X), I was fed up and left.