After 10 months with the Pixel 10 Pro, I can’t stand these 3 issues

I’ve been using the Pixel 10 Pro for nearly ten months now, and there’s a lot about it that I genuinely love. The interface feels lively and interactive, the cameras are fantastic, the editing tools are among the best I’ve used, and day-to-day performance has rarely let me down. For a long time, these strengths were enough to keep me happy.

But living with a phone every day is about more than just the highlights. Over the past few months, the Pixel 10 Pro has also given me its fair share of frustrations — enough to slowly overshadow everything I like about it. As much as I’ve enjoyed parts of the experience, I’ve reached a point where the compromises no longer feel worth it. So, after nearly ten months together, I’ve decided it’s finally time to say goodbye.

The biggest problem, by far, has been network connectivity. It’s not something that has started happening recently, either — I’ve been dealing with it for months. Calls randomly drop, some never come through at all, and on WhatsApp, I’ve nearly stopped trusting the Pixel 10 Pro. The situation has become so predictable that I now instinctively stand next to my Wi-Fi router whenever I’m on an important WhatsApp call, just to avoid the usual interruptions.

A big reason for that lack of trust is the Pixel’s seemingly endless struggle to stay connected to the right network. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched my phone bounce between Wi-Fi and mobile data, seemingly trying to figure out which connection it wants to use. At this point, I’m not entirely convinced it has figured it out yet.

If you’re wondering whether I tried disabling Adaptive Connectivity or tweaking a few settings, the answer is yes. I’ve been down that road. I’m probably the last person who would give up on my phone without exhausting every possible fix first. I’ve reset network preferences, tested different configurations, and tried every workaround I could find. Some of them helped for a while, but none solved the problem permanently.

Eventually, it became frustrating enough that I logged into WhatsApp on a secondary Android phone because that’s where most of my calls happen. The irony is that my secondary phone often starts ringing the moment someone calls, while my Pixel is still figuring out what’s going on. There have been countless moments when the backup phone felt more reliable than the device that’s supposed to be my daily driver.

And that’s really where the problem lies. Once you start questioning whether you’ll receive an important call or message, the relationship changes completely. After months of dealing with the same issue over and over again, I’ve reached a point where I simply can’t rely on my Pixel anymore — and that’s the one thing I never want to lose in a phone I depend on every single day.

But as frustrating as the network issues have been, they’re not the only reason I’ve decided to move on. If anything, they were just the beginning.

The other problem that kept showing up throughout my time with the Pixel was heat. And not the kind of warmth you expect after gaming for an hour or recording a bunch of videos outdoors. I’m talking about those moments when you pick up your phone and immediately think, “Why is this so hot?”

That’s what made it so annoying. There wasn’t always a clear trigger — sometimes it would happen while the Pixel 10 Pro was charging, and sometimes I was doing nothing more than scrolling through Instagram or replying to messages from the comfort of my home. And every now and then, the phone would get so hot that I’d put it down for a while and let it cool off.

To be fair, I live in India, where the weather can be brutal for both people and gadgets. I’m not pretending that doesn’t play a role. But the reason I struggle to blame everything on the climate is that I’ve experienced the same thing indoors, in air-conditioned rooms, and during completely ordinary use. After a while, it became harder and harder to chalk it up to the weather alone.

What bothered me most wasn’t even the heat itself; it was the uncertainty that came with it. Every time the phone got unusually hot, I wondered what was causing it. Was an app misbehaving? Was something running in the background? Was the phone struggling with a task it should have handled easily? Most of the time, I didn’t have an answer. It just sat there, warm and silent, like it knew something I didn’t.

Maybe that’s an irrational concern, but when a device you hold every day feels hotter than it should, it’s hard not to think about it. A smartphone shouldn’t make you pause and wonder whether it’s having a bad day; it should just work. And after months of dealing with the same thing, that lingering uncertainty became yet another compromise I was tired of making.

If reliability was a recurring theme throughout my time with the Pixel, battery life and charging certainly didn’t help change that. Over time, I found myself becoming strangely conscious of when and how I charged the phone. Not because I wanted to, but because the Pixel often got uncomfortably hot while plugged in. It reached a point where I actively avoided using the phone while it was charging because I didn’t enjoy how warm it got.

The problem is that life doesn’t always wait for your phone to cool down. I needed to reply to messages, there were a few important calls to answer, and my work wouldn’t magically pause because my phone was having a moment. Yet there were times when charging the Pixel felt like managing a device that was struggling to keep itself comfortable.

The charging speeds could be equally unpredictable. Most of us have had that reassuring moment of plugging in a phone, glancing at the estimated charging time, and moving on with our day. With the Pixel, I occasionally had the opposite experience. I vividly remember one instance when the phone was particularly hot and took nearly four hours to fully charge. Four hours! I remember staring at the screen, wondering what on earth it was doing. Soon after, it seemed to give up entirely, barely adding any charge despite remaining connected.

And once the charger came off, a different kind of uncertainty kicked in. Battery life was never catastrophically bad, but it was inconsistent enough that I stopped fully trusting it. That lack of confidence slowly changed my habits. Instead of grabbing my phone and heading out the door without a second thought, I started carrying a backup device more frequently. At first, it felt excessive, then it became routine.

Looking back, that’s probably the biggest red flag of all. A phone shouldn’t make you plan around its battery, carry a backup, or think twice before leaving the house. It should do its job in the background. Unfortunately, my Pixel never quite reached that point.

It wasn’t one bad day, one disastrous update, or one issue that finally pushed me over the edge. It was the slow accumulation of frustrations that kept showing up, day after day, until they became impossible to ignore. That’s what makes this decision so difficult.

There’s still so much about the Pixel 10 Pro that I genuinely love — the cameras are excellent, the software experience is uniquely Google, and there are moments when it reminds me exactly why I picked it in the first place. But over time, I found myself spending more energy working around the phone than enjoying it. And eventually, the compromises started taking up more space than the things I loved.

The best phones are invisible in the best possible way. They don’t make you think about signal strength, charging speeds, battery percentages, or overheating. They just show up, do their job, and let you get on with yours. And that’s exactly what settled it for me. After nearly ten months, I’m ready to move on.