It was stuff like this that made me switch to iPhone. The notable ones were the December bug and them breaking SMS. What sort of testing they use is beyond me.
Maybe in a few years when the EU has managed to force universal compliance for the DMA...
https://9to5google.com/2017/04/18/google-pixel-xl-ota-dogfoo...
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 handset and the last time I will ever personally buy one.
My current employer did buy me a Pixel 4a for work use but I don't have anything positive to say about it other than "it only makes me angry some of the time".
Let's look at it from a different perspective. Google is unable to properly launch a phone worldwide and the decisions are incomprehensible to a thinking human. They support Pixel 8 in Ireland (5 million population), Norway (5.4 million), Denmark (5.9) but they don't in Poland (38 million, part of European Union for 20 years) where they bought one of the largest offices for over $600 million USD to support 2,500 employees. Poles consider Pixel's price a fair price, not an expensive one. Not to mention lack of Pixel presence in at least some Asian countries with at least several hundred millions of potential customers.
As for the technicalities, they even did not enter all radio frequencies and countries in their version of Android, so that 5G or some Wi-Fi bands don't work in some countries. When you roam from supported country to an unsupported one, you may loose part or all connectivity. They did the same in Chromecast. Multiple layoffs confirm it's all about money at Google, so why they don't reach for an easy money from smartphone market? Lack of vision, lack of knowledge, name it however you want.
There’s issues with software which affect a function then there’s issues that ruin the whole phone…