I swear, google’s quality control on the pixels is just bad. I had a Pixel 5a, when I got it, the phone was a year old. Out of the box it was slow, I tried so many things to get it working correctly and it just never did. Then 7 months in it just died.
After a ton of back and forth with support and them trying to tell me I had water damage when I didn’t, I finally got another Pixel 5a. That one works super well in comparison. I didn’t use it much because I was so fed up with the whole debacle with Google that I switched to an Asus Zenfone 9. But the little I did use it, it was faster than the other 5a ever was.
My first pixel 5a almost never picked up my "ok Google"s whereas my Asus Zenfone 9 works while it’s playing music full volume, or while I’m playing music in the car, and a ton of other situations where my pixel and my galaxy s9 I had before never did. It’s so odd.
That being said, the Zenfone is way worse at shazaming things for some reason. I definitely think it’s not only a per phone model basis but also a per singular phone basis thing.