[Google Pixel] Improve video quality and sharing pipeline

I've been with you since before Pixel was even a thing. Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, then straight into the Pixel line: 2 XL, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Eleven phones. I didn't just buy them, I sold them. I converted my wife, my siblings, cousins, in-laws. When someone complained about their cracked iPhone or their Samsung full of bloatware I was right there making the case for you. Unpaid. Enthusiastic. Genuinely believing it. This is not a breakup letter. But it's an honest one, and I think I've earned that. I want to start with what you got right, because it matters to understand how good it was. When the original Pixel launched in October 2016 it was genuinely shocking. One lens. A 12.3 megapixel sensor. No optical image stabilization, which basically every flagship at the time had. And it destroyed the competition. Not just competed. Destroyed. The iPhone 7, the Galaxy S7, phones with objectively better hardware on paper just couldn't keep up in real world photos. DxOMark gave it a 90, which was the highest score any smartphone camera had ever received at that point. What you figured out was that the sensor almost didn't matter if the software was smart enough. HDR+ was capturing a burst of slightly underexposed frames and merging the best parts of all of them into a single image, getting the shadows and highlights right at the same time in a way nobody else had cracked. It was the first time a major phone maker bet completely on software over hardware and won so convincingly that the whole industry had to change course. Apple didn't start publicly talking about computational photography until after you made it matter. That's how big of a deal it was. And it kept getting better. Night Sight. Super Res Zoom. Real Tone. For a while every Pixel generation felt like proof that the bet was paying off. There were growing pains carried over from the Nexus era, some bugs here and there, but the trajectory felt real. It felt like a company that actually cared about finishing what it started. Then Tensor happened and things got complicated. I'm not here to say Tensor is a disaster. For AI tasks it genuinely does things nothing else does. But the basics, the stuff that just has to work, have slipped in ways I can't keep explaining away. Battery draining for no reason while the phone sits on a table. Warmth coming off the back when you're doing nothing intensive. Little stutters and pauses that the smoother animations now kind of paper over. These aren't deal breakers on their own but you're charging over a thousand dollars for these phones and then immediately discounting them by three hundred plus a trade-in bonus that shows up suspiciously fast after launch. That's not generosity. That's a company that knows its flagship can't hold its price and is hoping the discount makes the math feel okay. It doesn't. But performance, fine. I can live with fine. What I can't live with is the camera, because the camera is the whole point. It's called Pixel. The photos are still often really good but somewhere in the Tensor era the processing started feeling like an AI detail brush got applied to everything whether it needed it or not. Over-sharpened where it shouldn't be, smoothed where it should have texture, the kind of thing that looks impressive at a glance on a screen and starts to fall apart when you actually look at it. The original Pixel made photos that looked real and also better. Now they sometimes just look processed. And the video. I genuinely don't know what's going on there. It's 2026. The phone is called Pixel. Switching between lenses while zooming still stutters and shows color shifts that make it look like a glitch. The footage looks okay inside Google Photos and falls apart the moment you share it anywhere, post it anywhere, try to do anything with it outside of your ecosystem. You can't shoot anything usable for social media without it looking compressed to death. You can't livestream with it. You can't shoot raw to fix it in post. And the answer you keep offering is Video Boost, which after three full generations is still a cloud feature that can take twenty hours to process a clip. Twenty hours. To process a video. On a phone you paid over a thousand dollars for. Nobody is recording their kid's birthday party and waiting until the next day to find out if it came out okay. The whole point of having a camera in your pocket is that you capture something and you share it. Apple figured that out. Their pipeline from sensor to final file is just cleaner, more consistent, and produces video that actually holds up outside of their own apps. That's the bar. That's been the bar for a while now. The software stuff is what really gets me though, because there's nobody else to blame here. Android is your OS. Pixel is your phone. There's no third party sitting in the middle dropping the ball. So why does YouTube, your app, perform worse on your phone than it does on an iPhone? Why did Android 16 bring a search bar redesign that looked great and then leave the home screen as a stuttery blank white canvas while the app drawer somehow kept the correct version? Why does the status bar randomly flash black or white and has been doing that across multiple generations? Why is autocorrect getting worse and failing most obviously inside Gboard and Gmail, your keyboard in your apps? Why does swiping to the Google Feed on the home screen still stutter sometimes? The Google Feed. On a Google phone. Why has the Clock app failed to trigger alarms? Why does Android Auto feel like it's actively getting worse with each update? Why does RCS drop connection and deliver messages an hour late? Why does Gmail sit on emails in the outbox for hours on home WiFi and then send them instantly when you switch to cellular? Why is it impossible to find anything in Settings without the search bar? Why do apps you haven't touched in a week still show up running in the background eating your battery? None of these are catastrophic on their own. But they all exist. Across every generation. Some get fixed and quietly come back. Some just never go away. And together they paint a picture of a company that announces features, ships them half finished, and moves on to the next announcement. Material You looked stunning in the keynote. Material 3 Expressive looks like someone turned on a color tint overlay and shipped it. It's a theme. A design language is something else entirely. Here's the part I really didn't want to write. I've never wanted an iPhone. I mean that genuinely. The notification system is worse. The keyboard is worse. The whole locked down approach to defaults and third party apps has always driven me crazy. The new liquid glass UI looks like someone turned translucency up to maximum and called it done. iOS has always felt like it was designed for people who don't want to think about their phone, and I like thinking about my phone. But I converted my whole family to Pixel because it was objectively better, and I feel real regret about that now. Not because Pixel is bad, but because I told them it was better, and in the ways that matter most to regular people, video and reliability and consistency, it increasingly isn't. The next time I'm upgrading from my Pixel 9 Pro it's going to be the first time in my life where the iPhone is actually the honest answer and not the easy rejection. I don't want that to be true. But you've been building toward it for a few years now whether you meant to or not. You have the chip. You have the OS. You have the camera team that changed what smartphone photography meant. You proved with one lens and a software idea that you could beat hardware that cost more and measured better on spec sheets. That happened. I watched it happen. I told everyone I knew. I just need you to actually want to win again. Not announce it. Not run an ad about it. Finish things. Make the video work. Make the alarm go off. Make YouTube run well on your own phone. The bar you set in 2016 was extraordinary and you set it yourself. It would be a real shame to spend a decade building toward something and then lose the thread right when the stakes are highest. I'm still here. For now. TLDR: Google fix your phones, because I am getting tired of waiting. I have tried to not buy an iPhone, but I am really damn close to doing so next time. People telling me to touch grass: I guess 1000$ doesn't mean anything to you because it was daddy's money all a long, and it shows. Those who say its too long: Zoomer attention span. Those who say I have choices: Show me the options and I will show you how much worse they are than even Google. Those who think I am attached to a company: I am not. Just want my phone to not get worse over time. Tall order for a trillion dollar company I guess.