Here’s a confession: Over the past week, I’ve been mostly neglecting the AI features on Google’s Pixel 9 series.
As before, those features range from marginally useful to superfluous to just plain awkward. In day-to-day use, it’s easy to forget that they even exist. Instead, I’ve been marveling at how great the Pixels 9 are in every other way—in particular how refreshingly simple Google’s Android software has become.
By comparison, the iPhone has become bloated, with new layers of complexity that Apple seems to add with every iOS update. Android has a reputation for being the more complicated operating system, one that caters to hypernerds who obsess over customization, but over the years the roles have reversed. If you’re looking for the simplest smartphone operating system, you’ll find it on a Pixel phone.
The Pixel’s refreshing simplicity
Remember when the iPhone home screen was just a grid of app icons, with a swipe down for notifications and a swipe up for quick controls? Those days are long gone as Apple has layered on a complex array of conflicting features.
For instance, the iPhone now has three separate widget systems to manage. There are lock screen widgets, home screen widgets, and the “Today View” widgets that appear in two places (left of the home screen, and left of the Notification Center). The selection of lock screen widgets also differs from the home screen and Today View options, so you may not be able to add the same controls in each place.
Google’s Pixel phones have home screen widgets, and that’s it.
With iOS, swiping down on the home screen does three or four different things. A top-right swipe leads to the Control Center, but swiping anywhere else on the top edge leads to the Notification Center—except on the iPad, where a swipe at dead center brings up a split-screen app selector (which looks like the home screen, but isn’t). Swiping from anywhere below the top edge on the home screen leads to Spotlight search instead.
