Flashback: A decade of Google Nexus / Pixel pricing and software updates

The Nexus 4 was a revolutionary phone, almost a flagship for $ 300. Okay, it had its quirks, for example no LTE support (although it wasn’t that important in 2012), storage was also limited. Instead of focusing on just one phone, we wanted to look at trends in Google’s range of phones.

We mentioned the price of the Nexus 4 and we’ll see what happened to the series ‘flagship killer’ status. This series is about exploring a well-known trait of a particular brand or series, and we believe software support is one of the defining features of the Nexus and Pixel phones.

Nexus phones were affordable at first, especially if you waited a few months. The Nexus 4 dropped as low as $ 200 at one point. The Nexus 5 also got price cuts. Then came the Nexus 6 – its $ 650 price point made many fans unhappy. It was still an excellent phone and it influenced Google’s approach to phones.

The following year, in 2015, the Nexus line was split into two models that we will call “base” and “pro” for consistency. That was also the last of the Nexus line, Google started all over again with Pixel phones.

Those have gradually increased in cost over the years, peaking in 2018 and 2019 with the Pixel 3 and 4 at $ 800 and the Pixel 3 XL and 4 XL at $ 900. After Google changed course and ultimately the price of the model. small dropped, dropping to $ 600 with the Pixel 6. The Pixel 6 Pro still costs $ 900, though.

Interestingly, the price hike hasn’t hurt the performance of Pixel phones in the market. The opposite, in fact, since Google’s shipments in 2019 exceeded previous years by a certain margin. Note that the image below shows the cumulative shipments of all Pixel phones, but it clearly looked like Google was on the right track. The company would have big plans for the Pixel 6 series as well, expecting to produce 7 million, more than any other series. However, Google isn’t one to talk about sales, so we don’t really know how well Series 6 did (we’ll have to wait for analysts to figure that out).

We’ll get back to pricing shortly as we haven’t covered the “Pixel a” series whose main goal is to offer a low-cost Google phone. How much would you pay for that fabulous Google software support? Actually, how good is that support?

We tried to convey it through a graphic. The red line shows the period in years that a generation of phones received OS updates (including minor ones). The blue line indicates the period during which the security patches were issued.

On average, Google offers 3 years of OS updates. The Nexus 6 stands out, but in reality it was an old update that arrived late: at the beginning of Android 7.1.1 Android Pay was being discontinued and it took Google some time to find a solution (in the meantime users have been downgraded to 7.0).

The Pixel 3 generation also stands out – it got 4 years of security patches instead of 3 years as originally intended. In fact, the latest update for the two 2018 phones was launched at the end of June this year (Android 12 arrived last year).

Please note that the Pixel 4, 5 and 6 series currently run Android 12. Pixel 4 and 4 XL will receive the latest guaranteed OS update in October of this year. Apparently, it will be long enough to install Android 13.

Starting with the Pixel 6 generation, Google has changed the strategy a bit. It still promises only 3 years of OS update (competitors like Apple and Samsung offer more), but it commits to 5 years of security patches. According to the Help Center, Pixel 6 and 6 Pro will receive the latest guaranteed OS update in October 2024 and the latest guaranteed security patch in October 2026. “Guaranteed” since, as you saw with Pixel 3, there are some exceptions.

Before we wrap up, let’s take a quick look at the Pixel phones a. We’ve grouped the Pixel 3a and 4a as relatively small phones and the Pixel 3a XL, 4a 5G, and 5a as larger phones (with 5G in the latest iterations). As you can see, the price is quite stable at around $ 400 for the first group and $ 500 for the second.

We didn’t plot software support on a graph as it would have been a boring graph: “a” phones get 3 years of OS updates and 3 years of security patches.

There is a Pixel 7 series coming later this year, but Google hasn’t revealed much about it yet. Considering the previous models, however, we can say that the phones are likely to receive 3 years of guaranteed OS updates and 5 years of security patches. And we wouldn’t be surprised if Google keeps starting prices at current levels.