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Phones · Google Pixel

Google Pixel 8 Pro

58owners with an opinion
49%of verdicts positive
23/25positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and display; criticized for software and battery.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 1.5 years
Been running GrapheneOS for about 18 months now on a Pixel 8 Pro. The banking app situation is genuinely better than the article implies. Sandboxed Play Services handles most major apps fine, including N26 and Revolut which I use daily for fintech work. The main friction is not apps but convenience features like auto-fill across profiles breaking if you use the separate work/personal profile setup. What most people miss: the real value of GrapheneOS is not just escaping Google surveillance but the per-app network and sensor permission toggles. Being able to cut network access to apps that have no business phoning home changes how you think about every install. That alone is worth the switch.
Doesn’t like it
Besides a mix of older Pixels and other phones, in the past few years I went OnePlus 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and currently OnePlus 13. I was completely underwhelmed by the 8 Pro. If felt like a marginal improvement over the OnePlus 8 for a premium price. The back cracked, water got in, and it stopped working. The OnePlus 13 feels like a significantly better phone in every way.
Likes it
I was on Pixels since the first generation, and only I recently switched from the Pixel 8 Pro to the OnePlus 15, so I was very late to the game here and missed the peak OnePlus days. But even so, I've been way happier with the OnePlus than the Pixel. Only thing I miss is the camera quality of the Pixel. Bummed that I won't have the option next time.
Doesn’t like it
I have a Pixel 8 pro, last year I went to NYC with a friend who had an iPhone. We went to some of the museums and as we were taking pics, the difference in color accuracy were dismal. The Google phone was much, much, worse. I think google used to be known for their good photography and I was very happy with my earlier pixel 6. But something happened. I'm sorry to say, but when it comes to photos and videos I think the iphone is now much better than the pixel phones. Not only that but theres a lot of things that are easier to do when you're inside the apple ecosystem. Particularly in countries with high iphone usage. I think Google has dropped the ball hard, and yeah, people working in android use iphones, people working in the google watch use apple watch.
Likes it
Interesting, I also have a pixel 8 pro, and my photos often look better to me than my friend's iPhone. Not sure what phone he has though, it might be an older one (though P8Pro isn't exactly bleeding edge anymore either).
Neutral
I don't use microSD cards anymore, but they had been in my feature phone as well as my Raspberry Pi. I ran into so, so many problems with the Raspberry Pi related to storage. It would lock up at the drop of a hat. It would often have major trouble reading/writing the sdcard, especially at startup. My phone, for its part, would complain about a corrupted filesystem, or couldn't access files, immediately after I replaced the sdcard in its slot. Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit. These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.
Doesn’t like it
I was trying to upload a 300mb video via the local police's web interface, a very important matter. I had to set my phone screen to stay on for 30 minutes and then leave the web browser open without touching it. Disabling all power saving measures makes not difference. This was the only way I could get it to finish uploading. I'm on a pixel 8 pro with grapheneos. Same thing in both Firefox and vanadium. I don't think it runs out of ram, the system is just too trigger happy. The battery still doesn't last all day anyway.
Doesn’t like it
Maybe I just expect too much battery life, but I find that I get quite low or even run out when I limit charging to 80%. My feeling is that the coulomb counting on the Pixel 8 Pro is just not very accurate, so the phone thinks it's at 80%, but is really at 60% or 40%. I still use the feature, but now I have to top up during the day every so often. I suppose rationally I should just charge to 100% rather than take a medicine that causes the same side effect as the disease its meant to treat, but I'm not that rational.
Neutral
I had a Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and picked it over the contemporary Pixel 4. At the time, I was extremely unimpressed with the offerings from Google or Samsung (I've always been on Android so didn't consider the iPhone) and started looking to Chinese OEMs. They had a wide variety of features and build quality. Some were cheap but some, like the one I chose, felt quite premium, had all the latest features (in some cases better than the Pixel), etc. It eventually got replaced by a Pixel 8 Pro but I would try it again. I don't think I'm saying every Chinese OEM makes phones on par with iPhone or Pixel, but as with any market with multiple options, some are good, some are not so good. There also seems to be this weird anti-China sentiment that appears whenever these phones come up and I think it'd be a more interesting discussion if we focused on the hardware/software instead of country of origin (not saying that that's the case here, it's just been my experience in the past).
Doesn’t like it
I have an 8 pro. A month or so ago I went to NYC, I visited some of the museums. Although I managed to get some great pictures, framing wise and sharpness wise. The color resolution was absolutely ridiculously bad. I couldn't figure out a way in that moment to fix the issue, but seriously, the colors were so far off it kinda ruined this phone for me. My friend had an iphone, we took the same pictures of the same paintings and his photos looked much closer to life than mine. Huge disappointment. In the iphone its very easy to shoot raw and the camera app has a lot of very good intuitive controls. Not to even begin talking about video. At some point I think Google did make really good photography phones but it seems to me like they've basically stopped trying to stay ahead of the competition whereas apple is always trying to improve. Thats my impression anyway.
Likes it
Well, for one I do a lot of Photography with my phone because I enjoy the flexibility and portability of it. I do have a good camera but when you're out and about its still too big for my liking. Most importantly, phones now a days come with a roughly 100mm equivalent and thats kind of my favorite lens for street photography (weird, I know, I enjoy taking close up photos of buildings, signs, cars). Another reason why i like phone photography is how quickly i can share my pictures with the people i care. I don't really care for posting my photos on social media that much I want to send good photos of my travel/life to my friends through chatrooms. So a good camera on a phone is essential to me. Particularly a good telephoto and a good main camera (so like 30-100mm). With that in mind my range of possible phones is drastically reduced. Of course, I enjoy side loading apps and so as of now I've been relatively happy with something like the pixel 8 pro that I've had for a while. But I recently compared it to the iphone 16 pro and that one is better when it comes to the casual photography/videography experience by a lot. So I was already wavering and with these changes it feels like the final nail in the coffin to me.
Doesn’t like it
IIRC my 2019 Bolt had android auto but required the USB cable be plugged-in. My aftermarket, China-special head unit in the old car I've been driving lately has wireless Android Auto and while it's cool, it's still effectively wired due to how quickly it drains my Pixel 8 Pro's battery.
Doesn’t like it
I'm still "clinging" to my Pixel 6 Pro. I have an unboxed pixel 8 pro from 2 years ago. My corporate contract subsidizes a new phone every two years from the time of contract renewal. I really think the phone update cycle needs to be lengthened, and that updates are so slightly incremental. I would like to dip my toes into the fold phone pond, but that seems excessive. In November, Vodafone will call me and ask me which phone I want. It all seems ridiculous. I haven't noticed a difference in photo quality nor performance for years now have I felt the need to upgrade to the two-generations-later sitting in a drawer just meters way from me. The only comment/complaint I have about newer software updates is the f*king voice which kicked in while taking a photo. "One pet cropped, move phone slightly down".
Doesn’t like it
For me it was "want camera", and I chose the top SKU (P8 Pro) because I wanted maximum camera. "Buy a camera" doesn't work because (a) I don't want to pocket two devices, (b) most point-and-shoot dedicated cameras that are actually better are more bulky, too, (c) even entry-level good digital cameras are >$500 (e.g. a ZV-1F or something), so even the combo with a midrange phone often comes out more expensive and (d) a seperate camera makes it really annoying to send photos anywhere on the go. That said: I came away fairly unhappy with the Pixel 8 Pro camera, which my book has a too editorialized post-processing look that I simply don't like. In retrospect, I think I should have gone for the Xperia in that generation, which appears to have been the last phone with high-end smartphone camera gear that took neutral-looking shots. My S21, despite having a worse sensor and optics, took subjectively nicer photos. I've now updated my definition of "maximum phone camera" to be more choosy ...
Likes it
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus. I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether. For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas. For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage. Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years. My FitBit Versa is really…
Likes it
>with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that. I have done exactly that with my Pixel 8 Pro. Worked great.
Doesn’t like it
Going from a phone with a Snapdragon SoC to a Pixel with the Tensor SoC was a big downgrade for me. It gets hotter quicker when doing more demanding tasks, battery drains faster if network conditions are not perfect, etc. We've been having some warm weather (~30ºC) around here and the other day my Pixel 8 Pro started warning me about the phone being too hot when I tried to record a video. I like Google's Android skin and their long support periods, but Tensor holds these newer Pixels back.
Doesn’t like it
Any improvements to battery life? I feel like my pixel 8 pro battery is dying a lot faster now. I would like to trade it in for a pixel 9 pro xl, but it's kinda hard/impossible to do in Brazil. I got a good deal from best buy but you need to have a US issued document to trade your phone in, bummer. Any plans to ever sell it in Brazil?