I know we're going through rough times, where no one is spending their precious USD. But hypothetically speaking, if you own a 2018-2019 flagship Android phone. What would you upgrade to this year or the next? It's something that I've been thinking about a lot the past year, as new phones started rolling out.

I personally became a One Plus fan when I purchased my 3T. It was the perfect phone back then: It had the fastest fingerprint sensor out there in the Android market (security updates sort of nerfed that though), it had a great battery life, really good display, the fastest CPU available back then, etc... for 400$

One plus also kept updating the OS, it was unheard of. My One plus came with Android M, but got updated to N, O, P, Q. That's 5 OS updates on and Android phone!

I also used it for Android development at work. It was too good a device, where a lot of features would work flawlessly on it, then break on Huaweis and Samsungs (terrible OEMs who don't follow Android specs and break everything)

I thought it was pretty clear what the next phone would be. One Plus 7 or 8... but... One plus no longer are "flagship killer at half the price". Why would I pay 800~900$ for a sort of flagship phone?

Luckily, Google had an amazing offer on Pixel 3, 3a and 3XL shortly before releasing the Pixel 4. For 300$, you get the best CPU from the previous gen, Google's great camera and camera software.

A year and a half of owning a Pixel 3, it's really a very well rounded phone. The Android OS matured greatly, and so did the Google ecosystem: Google play, pay, photos, etc... The phone makes it pretty easy to jump from one task to the other, with very subtle but useful features.

The only bad things I could say about Pixel 3 are the bottom speaker buzz at high volumes, and the not so great battery life: it lasts a day, but nothing impressive.

So again, I found a great brand to go with, right? No. Pixel 4 was an absolute failure. The improvement over Pixel 3 is negligible. Screen bezels in 2020, useless radar sensor. It's really not worth at all upgrading from pixel 3, for 700$!

Pixel 5 releases are no longer flagship phones with the best CPU out there, or so I've read.

So what would a Pixel 3 owner upgrade to?

Here's my take on it. I bought One Plus 3T and Pixel 3 because they are flagship phones with either vanilla Android experience, or as close to vanilla as possible: One Plus Oxygen OS is mostly theming, they don't change much with the Android OS.

Here's my thoughts on other brands:

Huawei: Terrible OS, terrible UI, very unstable phone. I work in Android development, just take my word for it. We get the most crashes and instability issues with Huawei.

Xiaomi: an iOS wannabe

Asus, LG: Gimmicky phones: vibrating screens as speakers, bloated OS, rugged phone cases, etc... They feel more like toys than phones

Samsung: Overly expensive fragile all glass phones. Bloated OS.

Sony: Sony Xperia just kept going downhill after the Xperia Z2

As you can see, it doesn't seem clear what a Pixel 3/One plus 3t/6T owner can upgrade to. Nowadays I don't look at any Android phone and be like ... I want that! They don't feel as an upgrade at all. And no I will not go to iPhone. Tried them before, just don't like them.

What are your thoughts?