Google Pixel 7

The Pixel 4a was a fantastic phone for me. I bought it new from Google back in the fall of 2020 when it was a current model. The end of support date snuck up on me, had it already been 3 years? I noticed in October I hadn’t had a reboot (and thus a security patch) in quite some time. The 4a had a surprise extra update in November – but this was clearly the end of the line.

The 4a was a change for me, for the most part I’d bought gently used phones at around the $200 price point that were 2-3 years old, and then used them for a year and a bit. This gave me a new toy regularly, and was fairly cost effective. Still, I was probably spending about $500 over 3 years easily -this helped me justify the purchase of a new 4a. Little did I know how much I’d enjoy having the 4a and not doing the upgrade dance regularly.

In the first weeks of 2024, my Pixel 4a was still performing well. I’d generally only need to charge it every second day. Yes, over time the battery had gotten a little worse – but not by much. The camera continued to be amazing. And wrapped in a bumper case and screen protector the phone itself was in mint condition. If it was still getting regular security patches from Google I’d have no problem continuing to use it.

Of course, LineageOS is an option. Migrating to this would give me a community supported version of Android 13. A few worries kept from from this path. I use my phone for work, and have the mobile device management stuff installed, I wasn’t convinced this would work smoothly with LineageOS.. but it has in the past (honestly I think I was looking for reasons to upgrade). The migration of apps also seemed daunting. While most things have a ‘cloud’ story and are linked to various accounts etc, some of the games I have don’t have a backup/restore story. The other pain is the lack of SafetyNet support, practically this means only Netflix won’t work for me (again, I’m looking for an excuse).

Honestly, looking back, if I’d gone through the migration effort and moved to LineageOS it would have all worked out. I would have had my security updates but been stuck back on Android 13. The work device policy is good with support for devices back to Android 12 currently. There is also a good chance the WorkProfile is still properly supported in LineageOS (it was in the past). I would have lost state in a few games, but that is minor.

Post Black Friday and leading into Christmas and Boxing week there were some crazy sales on mobile plans in Canada. CostCo was apparently offering a plan that was very low and provided a Pixel 7 on a 2 year contract for $1/mo. This has the result of many BNIB phones showing up on the local used market.

The Pixel 7 still lists for $799 directly from Google. Many of the used market phones where listing between $350-$500 still with the security seal in place. Relative to Google the local pricing is lower for a BNIB or refurbished options from retail stores.

I found someone listing one for $300, and it check out as legit. He’d done a plan upgrade/renew back in October gotten a new Pixel 7 but already had one, so he had this sealed BNIB one to sell. I suspect he’d started at a much higher price, but the recent glut of new phones on the used market pushed his price down. There were other similar phones for $330 to be had. This price point made getting a phone upgrade a smart move for me as it still has 3+ years of support from Google.

There are plenty of phone comparison sites, but let me run down things that I see as trade offs.

• I’ll probably miss the back fingerprint sensor, the in screen optical one is “ok” but not nearly as reliable.
• The 4a has a 3.5mm headphone jack, this is a useful way to interrupt bluetooth connectivity nonsense with my car/ bluetooth headphones. I can use a USB-C adapter, but it’s not the same.
• The Pixel 7 is bigger, there are pros and cons to a larger phone.
• As stated above, the Pixel 7 is still currently supported. This is a big win.
• The camera is better in the Pixel 7, but the 4a certainly held it’s own. Very minor difference.

The Pixel 7 is a very pretty phone, I’m not a fan of the all glass back, but it is very sexy. Of course, the first thing is to buy a case and screen protector before I even take it out of the box. I grabbed a case very similar to the one I’ve had on my 4a from Amazon. I headed to eBay to get a screen protector from a seller I’ve used previously. This meant a few day wait, but that wasn’t a big deal.

All good – now it’s wrapped and ready to roll. The bumper case has these nice extended corners which add protection, but also give you something to grip onto. There is a subtle roughness on the sides too, making the phone less slick. The screen protector doesn’t have any cut-outs for the camera, this is similar to the one I had on my 4a and it had no negative impact for my use.

The phones are significantly different in size, with the Pixel 4a on the left and the Pixel 7 on the right. I’ll point at a comparison article if you want to look at the specifications side by side. I was interested in the in pocket weight, including the case. The 4a is 175g vs the 7 at 231g – yikes, 32% heavier. This is enough that you notice the difference, but I’ve gotten use to the added heft and size.

Now that the phone was ready to roll, it was time to migrate from one to another. I always feel like you have one chance to get this right. Google has a nice short URL for the process.

Following the directions, I power on the new phone then as instructed swap my nano-SIM card over. Next connect to my WiFi network. Continue to follow the prompts and connect the two phones using the USB-C cable included in the box. [Unlike the 4a, the Pixel 7 does not come with a charger].

When I was prompted to select what to copy, I left the default ‘all’. So far so good, things seem to be working fine. You can continue to follow the on screen prompts while your data is copying in the background. I complete the ‘Wizard’ and land on the home screen, but it’s clear that the phone is still doing things like downloading apps and cleaning up from the install. This was where I had to tell myself to be patient to let everything finish.

Nice, the Android 14 update is available for this phone.. but I still need to wait to initiate that as it’s clear apps are still downloading and installing. The copy of data is done, so it’s safe for me to disconnect the two phones.

Interesting that the Home Screen moved over nicely..  I have the same familiar layout but a bunch of the icons are flashing.. (I assume this is them being installed) even my background image moved, but that’ll have to change – as it’s the X-ray of the P4a.

Finally the application installations are complete, and I get a message indicating that it is done. I also have an error:

“Downloading English (US) Update
Download failed”

What? Thanks Google, one of the system things didn’t migrate. Not a great user experience, but it doesn’t seem like a problem so I’m going to ignore it.

None of the work profile moved over, this isn’t a huge surprise but it does leave a gap in my phone setup I will need to fix. Aside from the error that seems safe to ignore, almost all my apps made it over, SMS messages with history are all there and my photo library moved too. Hooray! Migration worked.

Let’s look at the apps that didn’t make it over

• Couch to 5k (weird, was still in Play Store and a manual install worked fine)
• Flashlight (appears to no longer be in the Play Store, oh well)
• SimpleSSHD (also not in the Play store anymore)

I did get a ‘free’ MyBell app installed? Uh, thanks I guess? This is likely some weird Google / Bell agreement jamming the app in because I’m using a Bell SIM card.

While I’m not complete setup yet, now seems like a good time to trigger the Android 14 update. This took a surprisingly long time, about an hour, but I again was patient and it worked fine – my new phone is now on Android 14.

Now let me work through the missing apps. Installing the work stuff was easy, the only small downside is I needed to manually pick the specific apps I wanted to have installed but I only run a few so that didn’t take long.

I use SimpleSSHD as my backup solution. With SSH on the phone, one of my servers can remotely log in and perform an rsync backup every night. This is pretty slick as it means I get a full backup of my user data while I sleep. I’ve even set up my script to pull data over a wireguard connection, so if I’m away and I leave my phone running wireguard overnight – a backup will happen. Backups mean you worry less about total loss of the device.

While SimpleSSHD isn’t in the Play Store, you can still find the website hosted by the developer. The source code is also available. Version 27 is the most recent version, and is what my 4a had installed so that’s the version I picked. Installing a raw .apk file is easy, thank goodness Google allows for side-loading applications.

Now I just need to run through all of the installed apps and make sure that I’ve logged in and configured them as needed.

• Bitwarden is first, this gets me all my passwords.
• K9Mail I need to export my config from the 4a, use Nearby Share to send the file over and import the config.
• Signal has an easy migration process with good documentation. This moved 30,000+ messages, and as a bonus the desktop app also migrated things over and kept my message history (I didn’t expect that). The old phone Signal data is now inaccessible, nice.
• WhatsApp has a phone to phone migration process, but at one point it wanted to connect to my google drive and I picked the wrong option – then it was impossible to fix, and my message history is just gone. Boo, but non-critical for me.
• Photosync sadly thinks all of my photos are ‘new’ – oh well.

A bunch of apps, just magically moved as part of the Google migration.

• Wallabag my settings and logged in status moved
• Stocard magically moved all of my cards
• Mastodon appears to just work
• Pocketcasts moved too, hooray!
• Google Authenticator moved my tokens
• Scrabble moved my ‘user’
• Sudoku also remembered my state
• Alto kept my progress

Overall the Google migration process worked really well for me this time. It hasn’t always delivered such a seamless move from one device to another.

Above is a side by side comparison of my home screen on both phones. The 4a screen is slightly fewer pixels. I started around 10:20am, and finished up around 2pm.

I’ve moved to a new background on the Pixel 7, an xray of the 7Pro as I couldn’t locate a good version of the 7 itself. From tear downs etc, it appears the layouts are nearly identical.

Last words (if you’ve made it this far). The decision to buy a BNIB Pixel 7 on the used market was a very good one for me. I’ve got a fully Google supported device until October 2027. The hardware is better (8GB RAM!) and the camera continues to be spectacular. I got a smoking deal: $300 cash is better than 60% off and that’s ignoring tax. Oh, and the migration process worked well this time.

Similar to my Pixel 4a post, I’ll likely comment on this one over time to report back how things work out.