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Phones · Google Pixel

Google Pixel 9a

22owners with an opinion
47%of verdicts positive
8/9positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for ease of use and performance; criticized for display and reliability.

What owners wrote

Likes it
And again a useless camera with a bump forcing clients to use it with cover, otherwise it will wobble on a table.. As much as form factor is intriguing, I'd rather keep my 'old' pixel9a and wacom movink 14 combo. (Bonus points, not supporting Epstein crowd with my money)
Doesn’t like it
The Pixel 5 was an absolutely brilliant phone; everything about it was right: the texture, the size, and the battery was great too. It was the best phone I've ever had. It's a blueprint for creating a great phone, IMO. I've since moved onto a Pixel 9a and it just isn't as good, IMO. The screen seems so much... weaker? I used to drop the 5 quite a bit onto hard concrete floors, and it never sustained the damage that this one has (without as much abuse): the screen is cracked along the side. I'm still not sure how it came about. If it wasn't for GrapheneOS and the desire for a private and secure OS, I don't think I would stick with the Pixel line-up any longer.
Likes it
As someone that swapped from fairphone 5 to a pixel9a with graphene. I have to side with graphene. Fairphone is a cool concept, but its a expensive phone, early on i had problem with the speakers and mic. Security updates are extremely slow, support is extremely slow. Their missions is to make a fair phone, but is it fair if you are then forced to buy more ewaste because your phone breaks? Look at pixel software support, its really good, and eu made batteries replacement mandatory.
Doesn’t like it
> of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.
Doesn’t like it
I have 2 wired headphones. My main ones are Sony MDR-V6s which I've had for 10 years. They are the best headphones I've ever owned and they sound just as good today as they did a decade ago. They were originally made in 1985 and the wire never tangles. The other are crappy $8 earbuds / mic combo that are maybe 7 years old and work just fine. I have wireless earbuds that I occasionally use since the Pixel 9a has no 3.5mm jack. They are worse in every way that I care about. I have to babysit them to make sure they are charged. Sure the wired earbuds get tangled sometimes but it's not a big deal to address that. I also think wired is an advantage for portable usage. For example, for running or doing any activity the wire ensures if they fall out of your ear you won't lose them. They also don't need a case so you can stuff them anywhere without a bulge.
Doesn’t like it
Than you for Tiled Words. It quickly became a morning ritual to complete the daily puzzle. I wish there were more mobile games that are not obnoxious. The idea and the execution are top notch. My only concern is that there is a buzzing noise if the app is in the foreground and some audio is playing in the background. This is on pixel 9a
Likes it
I'll check out ydotool. I did a bunch of bullshit with shortcuts, too. I had one that would change my screen from grayscale to color when I opened the photos app. Of course it only worked, like, 80% of the time so that was great. I have a pixel 9a with Graphene right now and I'm very happy with it. Great hardware, great price, great software. The one blindspot is messaging, which is a big problem in the US. RCS doesn't work on Graphene, and SMS is basically the worst thing ever, so I use Signal as much as I can. I'm hoping one of these days RCS becomes an actual open standard with competing implementations but... I won't hold my breath.
Doesn’t like it
> The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising. It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways. I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google. A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a. Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the phone in my day to day. In 10 hours today I sent 3 text messages with Whatsapp and lost 60% of my battery in that time frame. Up until a few days ago, 60% would last me 3 days. I find it weirdly coincidental that the battery life went from amazing to worse than a 5 year old device I had prior to this just as they are releasing new phones. I've powered it down and given it a full discharge / charge too. It's still draining at an alarming rate.
Doesn’t like it
This UI is great but do you get this horrible thing where sometimes the browser is shows a white screen and you have to force stop the app? Happens all the time on the latest version for my Pixel 9a. And did on my Pixel 7 too before. It's really horrible and I can't pin down any rhythm or reason other than loosely seeming to happen more often when I'm in battery saver mode.
Doesn’t like it
> Best-in-class camera I own a Pixel 9a. It's the first phone I used that made me question how many of the pixels going out of the camera app are actually coming the sensor and how many from some AI model. Don't get me wrong. It will take front-cover magazine quality pics of that favorite turist hot spot, even in terrible light. But as soon as there's something in the frame that your average insta influencer won't typically shoot the results are weird. A green PCB on my workbench I want to document? Colors all wrong, can hardly pick out the traces. My 20 year Canon does a better job. A black-and-white hand drawn charcoal portrait? The face on the jpeg will have tan skin and pinkish cheeks. And there's no setting to turn this sort of processing off, unless you want to deal with the hassle of raw files.
Likes it
I use microsoft authenticator, in its own work profile for work. I also use fingerprint login for Nordea, the Proton Suite, my personal 2fa program. Biometric works great on the Pixel 9A, at least, and it was fine on the 8 Pro when I had it. The BankID thing is a SW quirk on their end, but generic fingerprint seems works great across the ecosystem.
Recommends it
> Smartphones are expected to get pricier for potentially years to come. "Smart" phones have ceased to be smart years ago. They are now instruments of mass surveillance, and the tech industry has convinced people that 1) you need one not to be a social outcast, 2) you need to upgrade it every year, 3) not having root access is for your own good. I'll stick to my Pixel 9a running Graphene for the forseeable future.
Neutral
Not for my Android phone, at least not by default (Pixel 9a a/ GrapheneOS). It leaves Bluetooth and WiFi on in airplane mode. I doubt this is specific to GrapheneOS and may say more about AOSP.
Neutral
On my Pixel 9a (also on GrapheneOS) the biggest limitation is it can't be set to higher than 1080p, and the upscaling algorithm with my 4K display (not sure where in the chain that happens, monitor or phone) was quite terrible to the point of text legibility being a concern. The usage experience otherwise is quite good, it's perhaps my preferred way to sync data to and from my phone, I have it all stored on a NAS so I connect to my Type-C display (which has keyboard, mouse, and ethernet connected to its switch), fire up a terminal, type in my rsync commands, and my pictures & music are synced ~instantly at LAN speeds.
Neutral
I had a perfectly functional Galaxy A71 this time last year, still had great battery life, etc. I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones. Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.
Neutral
As I mentioned in another post: By 2026, you'll need two phones. My current setup: 1) An unmodified iPhone SE (2022 model) with OS support until 2032. This runs all my authentication, banking, health, etc. It is in airplane mode 99% of the time unless I need it. 2) The second is a Pixel 9a with Graphene OS for daily use, routing and internet access. This is expensive, but I found it to be the only viable solution to this problem.
Likes it
I try to come at it with a pragmatic approach. If I feel pain, I upgrade and don't skimp out. ======== COMPUTER ======== I feel no pain yet. Browsing the web is fast enough where I'm not waiting around for pages to load. I never feel bound by limited tabs or anything like that. My Rails / Flask + background worker + Postgres + Redis + esbuild + Tailwind based web apps start in a few seconds with Docker Compose. When I make code changes, I see the results in less than 1 second in my browser. Tests run fast enough (seconds to tens of seconds) for the size of apps I develop. Programs open very quickly. Scripts I run within WSL 2 also run quickly. There's no input delay when typing or performance related nonsense that bugs me all day. Neovim runs buttery smooth with a bunch of plugins through the Windows Terminal. I have no lag when I'm editing 1080p videos even with a 4k display showing a very wide timeline. I also record my screen with OBS to make screencasts with a webcam and have live streamed without perceivable dropped frames, all while running programming workloads in the background. I can mostly play the games I want, but this is by far the weakest link. If I were more into gaming I would upgrade, no doubt about it. ======== PHONE ======== I had a Pixel 4a until Google busted the battery. It runs all of the apps (no games) I care about and Google Maps is fast. The camera was great. I recently upgraded to a Pixel 9a because the repair center who broke my 4a in a number of…
Doesn’t like it
Fun thing (?), I was excited on my last trip to Japan so I could test QZSS with my Pixel 9a, that supports it, and my GPS experience in urban canyons, specially in Shibuya, was terribly bad. Even when in GPS Test or GPS Lock tools it was showing better than 3 meter horizontal accuracy, and a multitude of locked satellites, including some QZSS, the location would usually be 30 to 50 meters away. The first days I though I had lost all my capacity to navigate Tokyo, then I noticed the GPS was gas-lightning me. I tried removing the phone case, changing GPS settings... and I had no luck.
Doesn’t like it
My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong). I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
Pixel 9a and earlier were officially sold as Android Open Source Project reference devices. Google made a commitment to providing 7 years of updates from launch for 8th/9th gen Pixels. Google then arbitrarily declared they were no longer AOSP reference devices with the release of Android 16 and stopped providing those updates. Many people bought Pixels due to this and it wasn't fulfilled. GrapheneOS has been able to continue support with a massive amount of work including reverse engineering, but other operating systems haven't been as successful and mostly haven't even moved to Android 17 yet or supported 10th gen Pixels. There are currently around 400k to 600k active Pixels with GrapheneOS. There have been far more than that when including the past devices our users have purchased. Pixels are a small segment of the overall market and that's substantial. If you add in people on other operating systems such as LineageOS then there are even more people using Pixels with another OS. A significant portion of people who bought Pixels did so because they were AOSP reference devices. Samsung provides 7 years of support with monthly updates for their flagship devices. Unlike the Pixel OS, Samsung ships a lot of the security preview patches early. Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. The upcoming successor to it is the first non-Pixel meeting all of the update and hardware security feature requirements for GrapheneOS. Pixel 11 currently doesn't meet our security requirem…
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
Pixel 10a is the most recently released recommended device. It has the same SoC as the 9th generation Pixels with a far better cellular radio than the Pixel 9a. Pixel 9 to Pixel 10 had a bigger incremental CPU upgrade than the Pixel 10 to Pixel 11. GPU was initially a downgrade due to poor drivers but that was resolved already. Pixel 10 has various small but significant security advantages over the Pixel 9. Pixel 11 would similarly have small security advantages if they hadn't ruined the overall security by removing MTE. We definitely do want better CPU, GPU and radio performance for flagship devices and haven't been happy with those on Pixels. It doesn't outweigh security updates and security features but it matters to us. We're going to be a lot happier with a next gen flagship Snapdragon SoC for many reasons.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
I feel the votes and excitement in this thread aren't from people with a Fairphone 6 or PMOS. From the PMOS wiki: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_(Gen._6)_(fairp... : > No internal speakers or microphones are currently working. Media sound (not calls) is working if connecting a Bluetooth or USB audio device. I got a Fairphone 6 last year, after having a OnePlus 7 Pro which I bought in 2019 and still worked flawlessly, apart from not having received an update in several years. The Fairphone 6 works. It's slower and more buggy than a 7 year old flagship though. I'll probably use it until it dies in however many years time, but my overall experience with Fairphone has been that I've paid a huge amount for a below standard, poorly supported, but apparently fair phone. The Fairphone forums are a trainwreck too. I really, really wish Fairphone was better, but the entire company experience is so janky for how expensive the products are. A prime example: I thought I lost a few eclipse pictures because they weren't showing in the gallery after I took them. I'm pretty certain it's this same bug from over a year ago: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-6-camera-pictures-mi... Me and my partner both got our oneplus 7 pros at the same time, and hers also lasted. She upgraded at same time and just wanted/needed a phone that works for work, so she opted for the Pixel 9a instead. It's cheaper, faster, more reliable and better supported. Sorry to rant - it distresses me a…
Likes itHasn’t owned it
I have had a mixed experience. Bought my Mom a Pixel 9a. It seems to be running fine with no issues. Bought a Pixel 10 Pro XL for myself and had to return it. Connectivity issues (WiFi connected, but no internet), screen losing colors (white would turn gray), ghosting issues (scrolled/hidden content would stay on screen for a period of time).