Survey reveals huge vote of confidence for Pixel 11 months before launch

2025 is just about winding down, and my colleague Ryan Haines had a hot take: The Pixel 11 is already the best phone of 2026. The new year hasn’t even begun, and the Pixel 11 is still over nine months away — yet, it has been crowned the winner. As it turns out, many people share the sentiment, and I do too.

We asked our readers if they think the Pixel 11 will outperform its competitors next year, and a significant number of people believe it will.

Our poll received over 8,000 votes, making it one of the most popular polls we’ve run recently. Of these, over 2,750 people, representing 34% of total votes, do believe that the Pixel 11 will absolutely outperform its competitors. Another 1,400 people, representing 17.4% of the votes, believe that it probably will, giving Pixel 11 a vote of confidence by over 51% of the votes.

As Android Authority reader Luke Vesty points out, Google is also doing a great job of incorporating actually good AI features into its phones.

Notification Organizer is a good example of one such feature, one that competitors have not copied yet. It uses AI to tackle the spam notification menace, and it’s one of those thoughtful features that actually improves the user experience instead of tacking on yet another AI summary tool.

Only 10.8% of users, approximately 870 votes, strongly disagree with the sentiment. Another 19.3% with over 1,550 votes softly disagree with the sentiment. Pixel 11 doubters thus comprise only 30.1% of the total voters, and that’s a fair number given the wide variety of competition expected in 2026.

Wrapping up the statistics, over 1,500 people, representing 18.6% of the votes, are undecided, remaining unsure how the Pixel 11 will fare against its competitors.

It’s not to say that the Pixel 11 will be perfect. As reader toacaadrian notes, the Pixel experience is underpowered and buggy, but Google is also the only one doing the “clean software” experience that many have come to love.

Reader davidespagnolo995.ds is much more critical of the Pixel experience, going so far as to say that Google should revise its entire product; otherwise, it has no hope at all.

Pixel 11, not to be confused with the entire Pixel 11 series, is in a great spot compared to the competition, simply because some of its prime competitors appear to be lost in direction.

The base Galaxy S26 is expected to be the same as the Galaxy S25, which was similar to the S24, S23, and S22 before it — Samsung has been coasting for a long time now. OnePlus appears to have shifted its focus to gaming, choosing to settle on camera hardware over its own predecessor. This puts the Pixel 11 in a comfortable spot in the US Android market. Google is doing something right, for sure, and it has amassed a number of new fans in recent years, including reader beerdough1969:

For how much of a slam dunk the Pixel 10 was, the future looks nice and easy for the Pixel 11. Google will still need to make its typical set of year-over-year upgrades, bringing a performance boost with the Tensor G6 and new AI features powered by its updated models. But there’s not enough need for a rethink of the Pixel 11 from the ground up. As the popular programming saying goes, “If it works, don’t touch it.”