Eulogy for the Pixel 5

★★★★★

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

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 more than Google was willing to support it), it got worse in two 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 themal 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.

That second one 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

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.

In theory I could buy a replacement battery from iFixit or take it to a repair shop. But 6 years is a long time for a phone, and it wouldn’t fix the RAM problem. I’m not sure at this point what I’d want to use it for anyway. LineageOS still runs on it, but PostmarketOS doesn’t boot.

Or it may just be time to take the battery (still wrapped in phone hardware) to the fire station for proper disposal.