I recently bought a Pixel 3a. My Nexus 5x kept shutting down and Black Friday was around. And with all the positive reviews I thought this would be a good replacement.

What I like about the device in short:

It is made of plastic. I’m not a fan of glas or metal bodies. It’s a thing I use every day and plastic worked great on the Nexus 5x.

It has an OLED screen. Meaning only the active/non-black pixels take up energy.

I don’t mind the bezels, it has a forehead and a neck. No notch. And the thumb reachability is quite good.

It has stock Android.

A great camera.

So far the battery live surpasses the Nexus 5x by a long shot. 7 hours screen on time and still enough power left so I can charge at night. Or two full days with about 2-3 hours screen on time.

Somewhat “small” so I can use it with one hand. Although it is quite slippery without a case.

Although I like the Pixel experience I am not a big fan of some of the Google integrations that are built in. Meaning some of the Google Services tend to annoy me. So here’s a short overview of what I did:

Make use of the OLED display Turn on dark theme and black wallpapers Night light in the evening Lock screen display

Gestures to improve handling Use the new gesture navigation Swipe fingerprint reader for notifications Double tab to wake Squeeze to snooze (off for assistant) Power button and up for silent mode

Optimize my flows Default USB configuration set to data transfer Turn Google stuff like Google Assistant, the recommendations and overview page off as well as app recommendations in the launcher Add useful widgets to home screen for Google Tasks and Google Calendar Create some extra widgets with Tasker to have quick timers



Make use of the OLED display

OLED displays give you more control as you can turn on and off black parts of the display. That’s why as a first step I did the following:

Turn on dark theme and black wallpapers

After my last smartphone the Nexus 5x was pretty poor in regards to battery live. That’s why I first turned on the darkmode theme on the Pixel 3a.

Although the dark theme doesn’t work in every app just yet it still works quite well. And you can also go into the developer options and force dark mode if possible.

Not all apps have a working dark theme but it’s a good start.

To turn on the dark theme just go into settings > display > dark theme and enable.

To force dark mode go to Settings > System > Advanced mode > Developer options > Override force-dark and enable.

If you can’t find the developer options you first need to enable them: Go to Settings > About phone > Build number and click on it several times. A small toast message will tell you how many more time you should click it. After this you’ll find the developer options in the menu.

After turning on the dark theme I went and changed the wallpaper to just show black. In order to do this go to your home screen.

Long press in an empty area and then select “Styles & wallpapers”.

Scroll down to “Solid colors” and select the one that is black.

Continue with “Set Wallpaper” and select “Home screen and lock screen” in the following dialog.



Left: Lock screen; Right: Home screen, the only one I use. No swiping left or right.

Night light in the evening

Next up this display can also turn off certain pixel elements. A pixel is usually made up of red, blue and green light elements. The night light turns off the blue pixel parts. This is supposedly better on your eyes at night and will let you sleep easier.

To turn it on every night automatically go to:

Settings > Display > Night Light and then I selected the following options

Schedule > Turns on at custom time

Start time at 10 in the evening until 7:30 in the morning

And set to full intensity

Lock screen display

This next step is not reducing battery usage but enhances my usability. I like seeing the time and possible notifications all the time. So my display or the part showing the clock is never off (unless in a pocket). And so the energy usage is not too high. Only a few pixels light up to show the information.

In order to do this you can go to :

Display > Advanced > Lock screen display

Under “when to show” select “Always on”

Pro tip you can also leave a “Lock screen message” – a good idea would be putting in contact details if the device is lost.

I’m not sure if that saves any battery or not. But I have no use for it on the lockscreen: You can turn off the “Now playing” option here as well. It would show you songs that are currently playing anywhere around you in the display. (You can still manually trigger this via Google Search.)

So these three options fall into the display optimization category. If you have more ideas leave them in the comments.

Gestures to improve handling

This phone comes with a few options you can enable to improve the handling of the device. I’ll go into the onces I use the next few paragraphs:

Use the new gesture navigation

Android used to have three buttons at the bottom of the screen: Back, Home and Recent Apps. But with the market changing this phone offers you three modes for navigation:

If you go into Settings > System > Gestures > System Navigation you’ll find three options:

Gesture navigation

2-button navigation

3-button navigation

I enabled the gesture navigation as the interaction feels more natural to me and the buttons at the bottom of the screen are not taking up any display space.

All the options are still there though: For going to the home screen you need to swipe up. In order to see recent apps swipe up slowly or just swipe left and right on the bottom to switch directly between apps. And if you swipe-in anywhere from the borders of the display you’ll go back.

Swipe fingerprint reader for notifications

A small feature that is quite useful for bigger screens. If this feature is enabled you are can open the notifications simply by swiping down on the fingerprint reader.

First swipe will show the notifications and the second swipe will show the quick tiles where you can toggle wlan, bluetooth and the like directly.

You can also close the notifications again by swiping up.

Although I like the feature I open the notifications every now and then by accident but that’s fine for me.

To enable this option to into Settings > System > Gestures > Swipe fingerprint for notifications

Double tab to wake

Go to Settings > System > Gestures > Double-tap to check phone to enable this option. It’ll let you double tap on the lock screen display and brings up the unlock option.

Why I like it? Because this way I can interact with the phone without picking it up or pressing the power button. A quick double tap and I can unlock it via the pattern and use the phone even if it is flat on the table.

Squeeze to snooze (off for assistant)

Did you know you can squeeze your Pixel 3a? Just push both sides at the lower end and the phone will recognize the input.

There are only two options for this input: It can open up the assistant and it can snooze your alarm.

I found the snoozing function quite practical. No need to look up or swipe in a certain direction. All you need to do is squeeze both sides and wait for the alarm to ring later.

Here’s how: Settings > System > Gestures > Active Edge > Squeere for silence enable this and you are good to go. You can also adjust the sensitivity to you liking.

Power button and up for silent mode

The audio settings changed in the latest Android versions. You can now control the different audio streams easier.

These are the volume options:

Media volume

Call volume

Ring volume

Alarm volume

The volume up and down buttons usually control the media volume. Above the slider you can then change the ring volume from on to off to vibrate.

If you are in a call the volume buttons control the call volume. If you are in the alarm settings it changes the alarm volume.

This is a great improvement. People usually turn volume on or off and hardly ever change the actual ring volume.

Instead of hitting the option in the screen above the slider to change the ring volume you can enable the following option and all you need to do is: Press power + volume up to mute your device or set it to vibrate. Quick and easy.

To enable it go to: Settings > System > Gestures > Prevent ringing and chose the option you like.

Optimizing my flow

Now that we are done with the gestures it’s time to optimize my personal flows.

Default USB configuration set to data transfer

Whenever I plug my phone into the computer I usually want to transfer something. Usually you have to find the USB notification and select “transfer files” or something like that.

I don’t like this extra step as I usually use it for data transfer so I like to change the default to “File transfer/Android Auto”.

To enable go to: Settings > System > Advanced mode > Developer options > Default USB configuration and select the option you like best.

Turn Google stuff like Google Assistant, the recommendations and overview page off as well as app recommendations in the launcher

I’ll make it quick. I don’t usually need a lot of the services apart from Google Search. Therefore I did the following.

Open up the Google app > on the bottom right tap “More” > Then “Settings” > “Google Assistant” > Open the “Assistant” tab > Scroll down to “Assistant Devices” > Select “Smartphone” > And finally toggle the “Google Assistant” off.

And as a second step you can deactivate the assistent shortcut: Go to Apps and notifications > Default apps > Assist app > None.

Don’t like the notifications that tells you to activate the assistant: For Voice input select not Google but “Basic Google recognition”. Although this seems to reset every time the phone is startet again.

Next up the Google page on the left of the launcher: I don’t like to go there by accident from the home screen. So I turn it off – if I need it I still can open the Google app.

Again in: Apps and notifications > Default apps > Home app > Gear next to it > Disable “Display Google app”.

If you are already here you can also turn off the “Suggestions” on top of your app overview page. Apps and notifications > Default apps > Home app > Suggestions > Disable “Apps”.

That should be it. Now everything is nice and clean again. And I feel in control for what is happening when.

Add useful widgets to home screen for Google Tasks and Google Calendar

This part is mostly a personal preference. On my home screen I have the following elements:

Google date widget on top and Google search on the bottom. Can’t be change in the Pixel Launcher. Install a different one if you like to change more.

The very bottom is reserved for my most used apps: Google Photos, Chrome, a collection of useful apps, messenger apps and the phone app.

Above it I have two Google Tasks widgets with different lists. (No longer in the app store but I still have an old version running.)

Above that is the Simple Calendar Widget.

And to the right: The Clock app. And my three most used alarm settings made with Tasker. Read on to learn a bit more about Tasker.

Create some extra widgets with Tasker to have quick timers

Finally I used Tasker to create some shortcuts to my most used alarm settings. I often just need an alarm for 10, 15 or 30 minutes. And I like as few clicks as possible.

This is where Tasker comes in handy. You can create many different things with this app. Apart from these shortcuts I used it to create a weight tracker, a work timer and some other tools that help me.

Initially I created the option to long press the alarm app and the shortcuts would show these timers but that turned out too annoying to use. Now it is just a simple click and your alarm is set.

I hope you liked my setup and could take away some useful settings for yourself.