Google Nexus

» see google.com/nexus as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The nexus phones were aimed at people like me and still arrived here on a delay. The Nexus 5 went on sale direct from google on 31 october 2013 at 349 dollars unlocked, and turkey came in the second wave of countries at the end of november. The retail listings landed in january 2014 at 1,399 lira, a long way above the dollar price once you converted it. That gap, between what google charged and what a phone cost in a shop in ankara, was most of my relationship with the line.

What Nexus actually was is google's reference hardware. Every year it contracted a manufacturer to build the device that android itself would be developed against. HTC did the first one, then Samsung, LG, Asus, Motorola and Huawei took their turns. The phone shipped with android and nothing else on it, got each new version on the day it existed rather than nine months later, and let you unlock the bootloader with one command instead of an exploit.

The first one did not go well. The Nexus One arrived on 5 january 2010 and google sold it only through its own web store, with no carrier deal and no shop to walk into. On 14 may 2010 google announced it was closing that store, and it shut in july. The stated reason was that people wanted to hold a phone before buying one. Google then spent six years selling through carriers before building the store back.

~ the dossier ~

~ the deal ~

The bargain fits in one line. You got the cleanest android available at close to cost, and in exchange you were google's test population, which meant a new release found its bugs on your device first and support ran for a fixed and fairly short window. There was no carrier to shout at when something broke. That suited a certain kind of owner and horrified everybody else.

The price is what people actually remember. The Nexus 4 in 2012 started at 299 dollars for the eight gigabyte model and the Nexus 5 at 349 the following year, both unlocked, both running flagship silicon. Nothing else in the market did that. It set an expectation that a good android phone should cost about half of an iphone, and the expectation outlived the phones by years.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nexus devices were the default target for everything the modding world built. CyanogenMod and the custom rom scene around it assumed a nexus, because a nexus was the one device whose manufacturer had agreed in advance that you would take it apart. When the line ended that assumption had nowhere to go. Pixel inherited the software but not the posture.

The cheap flagship went with it. Google spent 2012 and 2013 demonstrating that a 350 dollar phone could be as fast as a 650 dollar one, then walked away from its own demonstration. OnePlus picked the idea up almost immediately and built a company out of it, which tells you the demand had not gone anywhere.

~ what came after ~

The Nexus 6 in 2014 was the turn. It cost 649 dollars and it was enormous, and it broke the one promise the line had been keeping. The 5X and the 6P followed in september 2015 as the last two phones, and the Nexus Player was discontinued on 24 may 2016. On 4 october 2016 google announced the Pixel at its Made by Google event and priced it exactly where apple prices things. The company said there was no plan right now to do more nexus devices while declining to close the door completely, which is the standard sentence for a product already gone.

What google kept is the software promise, and it has honored that one. Pixels still get android first and still get it clean. What it dropped is the part that made nexus mean anything outside the united states, which was the price. A nexus was a phone you could argue was underpriced. Nobody has ever made that argument about a pixel.

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