I love the Pixel 11 Pro, but Google has 3 big problems to fix for the Pixel 12 Pro

The Google Pixel 11 Pro is one of the best Android phones I’ve used this year. 11 years into the Pixel saga, Google has nailed just about everything with its flagship smartphones — from excellent hardware to top-tier cameras and unmatched software.

However, as good as the Pixel 11 Pro may be, perfect it is not. In fact, it pretty clearly highlights three lingering issues that Google still hasn’t solved. These are things that regularly come up as complaints regarding Pixel phones, and on the Pixel 11 Pro, they’ve never been more obvious.

So, if Google is looking for advice on where to focus its efforts for next year’s Pixel 12 Pro, it needs to look no further than here.

Smooth, reliable gaming performance

There will always be people who write off Pixel phones just because they’re powered by Google Tensor chipsets. This has been the case since the Pixel 6 series with the Tensor G1, and it’ll likely continue for as long as Tensor chips exist. I’m not one of those people. So long as Tensor delivers fast, smooth, and reliable day-to-day performance for the vast majority of people, I’m OK with it benchmarking lower than the latest Qualcomm and MediaTek chips.

What’s not OK, however, is spending upwards of $1,099 on a flagship Android phone and not being able to trust it to deliver a smooth gaming experience. Unfortunately, that’s been the case for many Pixel 11 Pro owners already.

My colleague Rob recently dug into the Pixel 11 Pro’s gaming woes and, in doing so, discovered that the way the GPU renders games often causes significant microstutters and other performance issues. This is fundamentally a result of the Pixel 11 Pro’s GPU not natively supporting OpenGL ES, so it uses a system called ANGLE to translate OpenGL ES games to the Vulkan rendering system that Google uses as the default for the Pixel 11 series.

Rob’s findings are well worth reading, but at the end of the day, this ultimately means that many popular games run extremely poorly on the Pixel 11 Pro (and every Pixel 11 model for that matter). I don’t need Pixels to set new records for gaming performance, but we should be able to trust them to run titles like Genshin Impact without constant stutters and frame drops.

Whether Google makes a hard pivot with its native rendering system on the Pixel 12 Pro or fine-tunes ANGLE to avoid causing as many issues, this is something that has to be addressed on next year’s phones. It’s unacceptable for a flagship Google smartphone to offer such poor gaming performance, yet that’s the reality of the Pixel 11 Pro right now.

Silicon-carbon batteries

The 4,850mAh battery in the Pixel 11 Pro delivers very good endurance — almost shockingly so, given how small it is compared to other flagship Android phones. Even with fairly heavy use (including some gaming), I can comfortably get through a busy day with the Pixel 11 Pro and still have some battery life left in the tank.

This is a huge testament to just how efficient the Tensor G6 is, but as impressive as it may be, it’s also frustrating that Google is wasting that excellent chipset efficiency on such a lackluster battery capacity.

Android manufacturers have been using silicon-carbon batteries for over three years now, and the results have been nothing short of impressive. Motorola used silicon-carbon battery tech to cram a 6,000mAh battery inside the Razr Fold. The upcoming OnePlus 16 will have a ridiculously large 9,000mAh silicon-carbon battery. Hell, even Samsung started experimenting with silicon-carbon in the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Flip 8.

A comfortable full day of use from the Pixel 11 Pro’s battery is good, but imagine the kind of endurance a Pixel 12 Pro could offer with an even more efficient Tensor G7 and a 6,000mAh (or larger) silicon-carbon battery. The tech is there for Google to use, and if the Pixel series is supposed to represent Google’s vision of Android phones, it needs to catch up to the competition and make the Pixel 12 Pro a true multi-day smartphone.

Faster (and more streamlined) wired charging

It’s a similar situation with wired charging. Looking exclusively at the last few generations of Pixel flagships, you’d assume there haven’t been any major advancements in wired charging technology. In the five years since the Pixel 6 Pro launched with 23W wired charging speeds, Google has only crept up to 30W on the Pixel 11 Pro (and 45W on the larger Pixel 11 Pro XL).

Take one look outside the Google bubble, though, and it’s readily apparent that Google is dragging its feet. Motorola has been at the forefront of fast charging, offering 80W speeds on its flagship Razrs and even 60W on the mid-range Motorola Edge (2026). OnePlus has pushed things even further, with last year’s OnePlus 15 delivering up to 120W charging. Even Samsung, which has historically been just as bad as Google about this, stepped up to very respectable 60W charging on the Galaxy S26 Ultra this year.

What’s Google’s excuse for not making meaningful progress here? It certainly isn’t a good one. The company attempted to take a step in the right direction with this year’s “Extreme Charging Mode,” but it offers little to no benefit in our testing. Furthermore, to achieve the maximum 45W charging speed on the Pixel 11 Pro XL, Google requires a charger that meets the very specific 21V PPS standard. The whole thing is a mess.

I certainly don’t expect the Pixel 12 Pro to launch next year with 100W+ charging speeds, but Google needs to at least match Samsung’s 60W offering — and it needs to do so on both the Pixel 12 Pro and Pixel 12 Pro XL, ideally with broader charger support, too.

A few changes could go a long way

Asking for improved gaming performance, larger batteries, and faster charging is certainly a tall order — and all of these improvements are easier said than done. But none of them are far-fetched requests, either. And this is Google we’re talking about, a company with more than enough resources to solve problems like this.

I’d also argue that Google has already solved its hardest challenges with the Pixel 11 Pro. It’s delivered one of the best camera systems available on an Android phone. It has an extremely strong design foundation that doesn’t need any major changes. Its software experience is one of the best Android has to offer. Compared to all that, ironing out gaming hiccups, packing in a bigger battery, and cranking up wired charging should be relatively simple.

Of course, Google is a company that often does a great job of ignoring relatively simple problems, but I’d like to hold out hope that the Pixel 12 Pro is the phone to nip these things in the bud. If it does, it could automatically become the Android flagship to buy in 2027.