Google phones are overrated
It is a relatively common belief that the vanilla Android experience is better, as it runs smoother. The Samsung Touchwiz is often blamed for making things slow and not more practical.
I have had a Nexus 6 for a couple of years and I noticed the slowdowns after each update, up to a point where it sometimes took a few seconds to open the phone app, or to display the keyboard. I freed up storage, removed some apps but this did not make any difference. This is more or less the same experience that people have with the Samsung devices if reddit comments are to be believed.
The other myth is that Google phones will be updated for a longer time. Prior to the Nexus 6, I had a Galaxy Nexus, which Google stopped supporting after less than 2 years. The Nexus 6 received security update until this October, that is nearly 2 years for me and 2.5 years for early buyers.
In comparison Apple updates its phones for much longer and a 4 years old iphone 5s still runs smoothly. Fortunately for Android phones, there are the alternative roms. Being desperate with the state of my Nexus phone, I installed paranoid android. I am surprised at how good it is. My phone feels like new again, and as good as any flagship I would purchase today. To my great surprise I did not find any clear step by step installation process for Paranoid Android. I just followed the detailed steps for LineageOS (CyanogenMod descendent), but with the paranoid android zip file instead of the LineageOS one. I have some trouble to understand how some open source ROM can be much nicer than the pure Google Android ROM, but it is. I have had no crash/reboot (which became more common as well with the years), plus it’s still updated regularly. Google does not set a good standard by not supporting its own devices better.
There is however one thing that Google does well, it’s the camera app. The HDR+ mode makes my Nexus 6 take great pictures, even compared to new android phones or iphones. I am often amazed at the pictures I manage to take, and others are also amazed at how good they look (especially since they look often better on the Nexus 6 screen than on a computer monitor). Initially I remember the camera to be not so great, but some update that came in 2016 transformed the phone into a fantastic shooter. It allowed me to take very nice pictures in difficult conditions, see for example this google photo gallery. Fortunately it’s still possible to install the app in the Google Play store on Paranoid Android. They should really make it open-source and easier to adapt it to other android phones.
