IMO I just reviewed all the phones and the iPhone XR is the best phone for the price (~$750). Battery life is great, security is a plus, waterproof, great CPU, etc.

I rotated through the pixel, iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy, and 4 or 5 other flagship phones (was able to get amazing two week return policies)

Ended up with the XR simply because it was an excellent solid phone, cheaper than the other flagship phones. Admittedly I didn’t checkout the Xiaomi phone.

For reference, I had to replace my nexus 6p because the battery was so bad it was dying at 50% randomly. Plus google was no longer pushing updates.

If you want a top flagship, I agree Apple is a solid choice. What Xiaomi and Android does well in general is midrange. I've got a ~$150 phone (Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, now superseded) that has fantastic performance (never had any issues with tens of tabs in browsers, multitasking, games, etc), fingerprint sensor, battery lasts for 2/3 days, etc. You can tell it's not a flagship: the camera is just tolerable, it's got a plastic back (which doesn't break after repeated falls); but overall it's insane value/cost.

It's nice to surf the wonders of billion-scale device mass-manufacturing if you don't need the latest and greatest.

No 3D touch on the XR :( I didn't think I'd use it, but I do, every single day. It's also larger than the 8 I have, that was disappointing.

I was about to pull the trigger on an XR because of the colors, and then when I realized it didn't have 3D touch, space gray XS it was...

The xs is not cheaper than the pixel 3, and it's a worse phone.

Xiomi phones are horrid in terms of privacy. Their MIUI sucks, constantly pestering me to use their app store. Privacy policy of their other stock apps like file manager, galary etc includes sending filename and other data to chineese servers. Not to mention some of their misterious 'analytics' apps always running in background.

However, they're requiring an account and a wait to unlock the phone you already own.