Eulogy(?) for the Pixel 5

★★★★★

A black and white view of the back of a smartphone, angled so that its shadow falls toward us. There's a G at one end, a depressed circle near the other, and a rounded glass square in one of the corners that hints a camera lenses behind it.I’m tired of replacing devices that still work fine for my use cases. So I stuck with my Google Pixel 5 for, well, longer than was probably advisable, since Android system updates were discontinued after only 3 years. To give you an idea of how long I’ve had this phone, when I went to the carrier to activate it, we stayed outside, because COVID-19 protocols meant they couldn’t have customers inside the store.

So yeah, I used the Pixel 5 from fall 2020 all the way through summer 2026. It’s a good size for reading, holding in one hand, or putting in my pocket. The display’s bright (but not diagonally polarized like the Galaxy S4), the touchscreen’s responsive, and it still handled (almost) everything I threw at it as late as 2026.

I can’t think of anything that really slowed it down that wasn’t either network latency or an application problem, until toward the end when it started overheating more often. It didn’t start running low on storage until near the end, either.

Camera

Back of a smartphone, gray plastic with a depressed circle in the middle. A rounded glass square sits in one corner, with two camera lenses, an LED and another sensor looking sort of like the Southern Cross constellation. The camera’s better than any of the phones I had in the 2010s. It has decent post-processing for low-light and night photos, seamlessly shifts between the regular and wide-angle lenses, and its machine learning is old enough that it doesn’t use today’s “AI” to hallucinate features, or paste in an image of the moon, or transform one bird into another and mess up iNaturalist observations. It might not capture everything in front of the lens, but at least it was capturing only what was in front of the lens. (iNat now has guidelines for flagging generated or misleadingly edited) photos.)

Slowing Down

After around 5 years (still longer than Google was willing to support it), it got worse in a few specific ways:

  1. The battery runs out faster and runs hotter (which occasionally triggers performance throttling).
  2. Some apps need enough memory now that I can’t just switch away and switch back.
  3. Eventually Nextcloud stopped reliably auto-uploading photos, which I assumed was a new bug in the app or a problem with the server…but it’s working correctly on the new phone. So now I think it was another symptom of the thermal throttling.
  4. The proximity sensor that locks the screen when you lift the phone to your ear during a call stopped working reliably. It would lock the screen, but it wouldn’t always unlock it, which meant I couldn’t get back to a keypad for menus, or switch to speaker, etc. By the time the battery went, it was affecting almost every single call.

The memory crunch got really annoying when I wanted to combine Pokémon Go, mapping for OpenStreetMap, and collecting observations for iNaturalist. I used to be able to just switch between PoGo, StreetComplete and the camera as I walked around. Sometimes with the Canon camera app or Vespucci (or both!) recording GPS traces in the background. Eventually it got to the point where I’d close everything except PoGo, switch to the camera to take a single photo, then close the camera and switch back…and it was a 50/50 chance whether it would have already unloaded the game in those 3 seconds.

The End

Edge-on view of the phone showing that the glass screen is splitting away from the plastic case. Toward the end of July I noticed that the phone was running even hotter than usual. I didn’t notice that the battery was swelling until last week, when it pushed against the back of the display and a bright line appeared onscreen. I turned it off and hastily pressed another phone into service. Yesterday, after ensuring that everything on the new phone was working properly, I wiped the Pixel 5.

I considered buying a replacement battery from iFixIt. I also considered just taking it down to the fire station to dispose of the battery. Six years is a long time for a phone, after all. Android no longer supports it, and PostmarketOS – I mean Nura – won’t boot.

Or Is It?

Still, the camera’s better than the FP4, and my thumb actually reaches all the way across the display, and it’s just noticeably faster. I figured it was worth taking it to a repair shop to get the battery replaced.

It runs great again! The new battery still runs a little hot, but not as bad as the old one had gotten. I haven’t seen any problems with the Nextcloud photo upload. I put /e/OS on it so I’d have a more current system (upstream LineageOS should work too), even though that meant giving up ARCore for PoGo and any proprietary features in Google’s camera app.

I’ve been carrying both the Fairphone 4 and the Pixel 5 around, comparing the cameras, switching between them to compare how the apps I actually use run on each. Once I bumped up the camera settings, photos are better than the FP4, if not up to the level of Google’s Pixel Camera app.

Here’s the island at Alondra Park, first with the Pixel 5, and then with the Fairphone 4. I’ve increased the saturation and contrast on both, but didn’t make any other changes.

A small island in a lake, thick with palm trees and a few sprawling pines, in front of a blue sky with fluffy, patchy clouds. The island and sky are reflected in the lake, and where the island reflects, the water looks a deep green. The same view, except everything is slightly too reddish, and the green patches on the water are less distinct, more yellowish and just look sickly.

Unfortunately, the proximity sensor is still broken. The FP4 is good enough for most of what I need, and almost good enough for the rest, which is a lot better than not working as a phone.