Daily Hub is one of the worst Pixel features I’ve ever used

One of my favorite reasons for using a Google Pixel phone is the incredible suite of Pixel-exclusive software features. Whether it’s Now Playing automatically identifying songs or using the numerous Call Assist tools to make phone calls less of a headache, it’s these features that make using a Pixel so special.

Unfortunately, after using Daily Hub for over a week on the Pixel 10 Pro, I’m not impressed. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Daily Hub is one of the worst and most disappointing Pixel features I’ve ever used.

Right off the bat, Daily Hub makes a weird first impression. Rather than appearing in your app drawer, the main way to find Daily Hub is at the top of your Google Discover feed. It sometimes pops up in your At a Glance widget, but only once in the morning, afternoon, and evening. I don’t hate the idea of Daily Hub being a part of Discover, but that being the primary way to access the feature is bizarre.

Then there’s the content of Daily Hub. There are three permanent fixtures of Daily Hub — weather, entertainment recommendations, and topics of interest — and none of them are particularly good.

The weather appears at the top of my Daily Hub every time I open it, but I only see a single temperature for that current time of day. It’s so incredibly barebones that it’s not really helpful at all. Samsung’s Now Brief, by comparison, at least shows an hourly forecast, rain/snow updates, and more. Daily Hub has none of this.

The second staple of Daily Hub is video/podcast recommendations. These always show up below the weather, and they range from fine to terrible. These recommendations can come from any media app on your phone, and in my testing, I’ve seen recommendations from YouTube, Pocket Casts, and Peacock.

The podcast recommendations from Pocket Casts are fine and have all been shows I follow. The YouTube selections, though, have been all over the place. I’ve seen videos from channels I regularly watch and am subscribed to, but I’ve also seen plenty of garbage recommendations — including a video about the latest Honey Boo Boo updates hosted by an AI avatar. Seriously.

The third main part of Daily Hub is a row of “topics of interest,” as Google puts it. These are based on your interests/Google account, and they’re a mix of YouTube videos and Gemini answers about said topics.

These topics are sometimes related to things I am actually interested in, but they’re just so damn generic — such as “Analyze game engine capabilities” or “Enhance sleep with smartwatches.” Other times, the topics are totally out of left field, one of my favorites being “Perfect belly dance finger cymbals.” Very helpful, Google, thank you.

Combine that with text for these topics often getting cut off and bad AI artwork for each one, and there’s nothing appealing about this topics section. I can sort of see what Google was going for, but it’s a complete swing-and-a-miss in its current form.

And that’s not even mentioning what isn’t part of Daily Hub. Not only are the currently available functions disappointing, but there’s also so much that Daily Hub just doesn’t do.

Google’s press renders of Daily Hub show it surfacing content from Gmail and Google Messages, which would be great! Unfortunately, I’ve not seen anything like this, despite receiving package and flight-related emails that would have been perfect to see in Daily Hub.

There’s other content that you’d think would be obvious to include in Daily Hub, such as Google Keep notes, items in Google Tasks, Fitbit stats if you wear a Pixel Watch, etc. But none of this is here. Hell, Google Discover even shows things like stocks, sports scores, and movie releases, but you won’t find any of this in Daily Hub either. Daily Hub does surface Google Calendar events, but that’s the only extra bit of info I’ve seen outside of the weather, entertainment recommendations, and those useless topics.

What makes Daily Hub particularly frustrating is that this is a feature that should be perfect for Google. So much of my life is spent within Google services, whether that’s Gmail, Keep, Photos, YouTube/YouTube TV, Maps, and more. If Daily Hub were a singular place to see updates for everything I do on my Pixel 10 Pro and everything happening with my Google account, that’s a feature I’d use daily.

However, that’s very much not what Daily Hub is — at least not right now.

On the one hand, it’s not difficult to imagine what a well-executed version of Daily Hub could be like. If proper integrations were there, this could be a seriously killer app. And as with all new software features, Daily Hub is only bound to get better as time goes on.

But even if that’s true, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned with how half-baked Daily Hub currently is. There’s a good idea of a feature here, but there’s so much work Google needs to do before Daily Hub is worth using.

I sure hope Google puts in that work, because right now, Daily Hub is supremely disappointing.