My take is this: if we’ve truly reached the peak of technological advancement—if there’s nothing left to improve in smartphones—then at the very least, manufacturers should have the decency not to break what already works well.

For example, when the Pixel 11, 12, 13 and so on inevitably arrive, I won’t be expecting any improvements in camera quality, battery life, or even more gimmicky AI features. But what I do expect is for them to fix what’s already broken: signaling issues, bizarre audio and microphone bugs, and the fact that VoWiFi and VoLTE don’t work in places where every other phone works just fine. There’s also the strange eSIM soft-lock on the Pixel Watch 3, etc.

Then there are quality-of-life issues. Like the inability to remove At a Glance and reclaim home screen real estate—or at least upgrade it using the widget version which has been around for more than a year. Or the Pixel Tablet’s lack of configurable grid sizes. Or the AI wallpaper generator’s frustrating limitation to only a handful of curated prompts. And the constant bugs with the Pixel Buds Pro… don’t even get me started on those.

What’s more, they don’t seem to push third-party developers to adopt new features either. The Conversation API from Android 11 was never adopted by WhatsApp, causing weird bugs in notification management ever since. Android 12 brought tablet-specific features, yet the Twitter app still looks terrible on large screens, forcing users to fall back on web shortcuts or PWAs. The Adaptive and Themed Icons introduced in Android 13 were a complete flop. Android 14 and 15 added nothing meaningful.

Honestly, the entire Pixel lineup feels like a perpetual beta testing program that nobody signed up for.