Google has never shown competency in building hardware.

I loved my Nexus 5 phone. It’s still my favorite phone as far as aesthetics goes. It was a great value and much cheaper than comparable phones at the time. It bricked itself with a boot loop issue 2 weeks out of warranty. Google was nice enough to replace it with another one that promptly ended up boot looping as well.

I also loved my Nexus 7 tablet. Beautiful device that was so far ahead of its time in terms of looks. It had an issue with absolutely terrible storage that made it so sluggish past its initial release (I believe the issue was the chip itself was degrading and it was a widespread issue). Updating to a higher version of Android made it completely unusable.

I’ve not owned any, but I keep hearing about issues of reliability in both software and hardware with Pixel phones as well.

My best phone for Android has been the Samsung Galaxy S6. Every iPhone i’ve had has been almost entirely problem-free. At this point, I don’t see any reason to buy Google anything.

I completely agree with you. I tried updating my Nexus 5 with CyanogenMod for a while. I was very impressed with how well CyanogenMod worked but eventually I wanted manufacturer support instead of having to put the OS on an SD card and try to boot from it so I could install the OS. And worrying that the one volunteer doing my phone would get tired of updating the OS.

The Nexus 7 was a nice form factor for reading web pages because it was long and thin in portrait mode. The combination of hardware issues reported by other people and again lack of supported upgrades led me to eBay it.

Hard agree that the Nexus 5 was Google's best device. It was perfect, and it was cheap.