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This week’s top stories: Google Home shows Nest Wifi usage, Pixel brand loyalty drops, more

Kyle Bradshaw | Mar 20 2021 - 11:00 am PT

In this week’s top stories: Google Home app adds Nest Wifi usage history, Pixel brand loyalty reportedly drops, OnePlus Watch won’t run Wear OS after all, and more.

Coinciding with the announcement of the second-gen Nest Hub, the Google Home app has been updated with increased functionality for the Nest Wifi family of devices. As of the update, you can now access a new “speed and usage” section in the Network info, with graphs for individual devices as well as the network as a whole.

These Nest Wifi usage graphs were previously a big omission for the Google Home app. That information was only available in the old Google Wifi client, which is now ripe for deprecation. Last year, Home added advanced Wifi settings and the ability to import existing networks.

A new report came out this week, suggesting that far fewer Pixel owners will buy a Pixel as their next phone, dropping from 84% down to 65.2%. By stark contrast, from the same report, 92% of iPhone owners surveyed said they would buy another iPhone as their next smartphone.

It’s honestly not all that hard to see why these numbers have dropped. Google’s Pixel lineup over the past two years have had some rocky points, with the very poor battery endurance of the Pixel 4 and the confusing lineup that is Pixel 4a, 4a 5G, and Pixel 5. With the company’s 2020 phones, we didn’t really have any major complaints on the quality of Google’s most recent phones, but the lack of larger XL models and a stagnating though still competitive camera are sure to have some users looking elsewhere.

One of the more anticipated wearables of this year is the OnePlus Watch, which at one point had been rumored to run on Google’s Wear OS platform. Instead, OnePlus’s Pete Lau detailed some aspects of the upcoming watch, including the fact that it would run on “RTOS” instead of Wear OS, for sake of battery life and more.

Lau further explains that the OnePlus Watch has a “stunning and burdenless design” as well as connectivity with OnePlus smartphones and TVs. A report from earlier today mentioned that the watch could be used as a remote for the Android-based TVs. Apparently, this will all come for an “affordable” price point too.

Android fans had much to look forward to this week, as Google launched the second Android 12 Developer Preview. We’ve carefully collected all of the changes, large and small, that can be found in the update, and also rounded up the most important ones into a video.

One of the more immediately noticeable changes about Android 12 on Pixel phones is that the dark theme is significantly lighter than before. On Android 11, the Google Pixel phones’ dark theme is an “AMOLED black,” but Android 12 is now using a medium grey that looks similar to the shade used in the dark mode of various Google apps.

Why the sudden change? We’re not entirely sure. Google proclaimed that even grey themes can save battery on OLED displays compared to white, so it stands to reason that a lighter grey would lessen battery savings. It’s an odd choice, but like I said, I dig the look of it.