[Google Pixel 4a Questions & Answers] _a!:
I've had the Pixel 4a since tuesday and I like it. I've a few observations I thought I'd put here in case anyone else agrees; there's a fix/workaround etc:

1) The speaker isn't too loud and it's only in the last 20% or so of the volume bar that you can hear the difference. They should change the linearity such that there's more control over the sound difference of the last 20% of the range, if that makes sense. Not a big deal.

2) It's annoying that I can't swipe back (ie swipe left from the right edge of the screen) to get rid of the keyboard. Instead a large percentage (10?) of the bottom of the screen is black except for the arrow which closes the keyboard. Waste of space.

3) On a similar note, there's a white line near the bottom of the screen. I guess it's to show that you can swipe up, but I'm not sure. Why would anyone who wasn't sure if they could swipe up see a white line and go "ah - I bet I could swipe up here"? But that's my best guess. And this is on most screens. It's the worst, and the most noticeable, on chrome. You have a full screen site, curving nicely at the top of the screen, and at the bottom the screen starts to curve but then there's the black rectangle, which exists purely to highlight the mystery-white-line-which-might-mean-you-can-swipe-up-here, cuts in, ending the curve and wasting around 5% of the height of the screen. This line doesn't appear in 3 button mode. But isn't the point of gestures that you don't need to waste space on buttons. So...don't waste the space showing me you can swipe up then. There's no swipe down hint, or swiping left/right hint. I don't get it at all. It knows I know you can swipe up, because I've swiped up.

4) Nova launcher problem. It just doesn't stick. Every once in a while it stops being the default launcher and you have to run it again. This has happened on other phones and eventually they fix it. I guess I have to try nova launcher again every month or so. The stock launcher isn't too bad, but:

5) Stock launcher is quite unconfigurable. The 5 icons at the bottom of the screen are sort of like the nova launcher dock (which i always turn off) and are there on every screen.

6) There's a notification history, which is a great idea. If you swiped away a message but then forgot if it was an email, or which whatsapp contact it was, you can see quickly what the most recent message was. You access it via a button under the notification shade which you can press to get at it. But...get this: That button only exists if you currently have unread notifications. If you swiped the last one away, the history button vanishes. You now have to go into settings to read it (why settings? my photos aren't in settings). Why? Who thought that was a good idea? That's when you're most likely to want the history! Doh!

7) Aggressive app killer. This will never change - no matter what google says about ai and machine learning, there's something too complicated about "ok, there's a music player running, playing music, and there are headphones attached, and the headphones are playing music...but...oh, the screen is turned off, which apps can I kill to save battery...well, there's this music player nobody's looking at, that'll do" to ever fix. Really? You're not checking if an app gets reloaded immediately after it gets killed every time it's killed and learning "hmm... it's as if.....he was listening to music and didn't want the app killed?" I guess it's true what they say - most machine learning is just a regex, and this isn't something which can be solved with a regex, so... I've disabled the battery optimisation for this app; time will tell whether that does the trick.

8) Can't disable the sound it makes when taking a screenshot.

9) Google photos can't keep up with quickly deleting a number of photos. To be fair, this happens on the website too. It's odd - you'd think it would be easy. You're not actually doing anything other than marking the fact that a photo is deleted. You're just moving it to the bin; it still exists locally. It's an offline-operation. Why doesn't it just defer until later, or do asynchronously - whatever it's doing. On both web and phone it's so laggy and disorienting that it's easy to end up deleting the wrong photo, the only workaround being to delete literally one picture every 5 seconds. Annoying if you're been taking pics of kids and took a bunch so as to ensure you have at least one without a blur or closed eyes etc.

Well, sounds quite ranty I guess. It's a great phone though - highly recommended. I really bought it for the camera and the fact it's quite a small phone. I recommend the spigen tough armor (sic) case; nice and grippy and feels like it's going to keep it pretty safe.