"white wash" on wallpaper - Pixel Launcher?

Joltcola1234

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Hello all,

I've had my Pixel 2 XL for a couple of weeks now and I love it. I haven't really noticed any bugs or had any complaints at all about it.

One thing I have noticed though is a "white wash" effect on the wallpaper of the phone. It's very apparent on the bottom of the screen around the navigation area with lighter colored wallpapers (light theme on pixel launcher). You can see these in many of the screenshots in the gallery on this forum (show us your homescreen post), where it's almost like a faint white glow around the bottom of the screen in the navagation area. On black or very dark wallpapers this seems to disappear completely and it's just totally dark.

I've also noticed this effect at the top of the screen as well. You can notice it on lighter wallpapers, and feint glow exists if you have a dark wallpaper and you increase the brightness to maximum.

This only seems to be the case on the home screen though. When you launch an app, you are looking at photos, in the drawer, whatever you might doing the effect isn't there. I'm wondering if this is some kind of design choice by Google or just something that's been there and they haven't bothered to correct. Below is an example:

Screenshot_20180419-201257.jpg

You can clearly notice the effect on the bottom portion of the screen in this shot.

Screenshot_20180421-063752.jpg

Comparatively with this dark wallpaper the effect is gone completely.

The glow at the top is much less pronounced and isn't really visible in the screenshots and is only observed at max brightness on dark wallpapers.

It's only a small grip, but anyone else notice this??

edit: Also, it seems to directly tied to the Pixel Launcher itself and not the phone or the screen from what I can tell.
 

anon(10092459)

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Primarily, I use a dark theme (the one you posted above as a matter of fact), but I tried a couple of lighter themes and couldn't see anything straight away. If you not seeing it all over, then I'm sure it's built into the Pixel launcher by design.
 

Mike Dee

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Yeah, I figured as much. Wonder why they decided to go that route though. It would look nicer without the effect. Perhaps it has some purpose related to "burn in" or efficiency or something.

I think it allows the bottom navigation keys, dock and search to stand out more
 

TraderGary

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I use the Nova Prime launcher isntead of the stock Android launcher.
Nova Prime allow you to turn that feature ON and OFF for better readability.
Here is my current home page (my house with dogwoods in bloom) with the feature ON
Screenshot_20180419-152525.jpg
And here is the same screen with the feature OFF.
Screenshot_20180421-194026.jpg
 

MarkMN

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I've had my 2 XL for 3 weeks now. I tried the stock launcher, and it lasted 2 hours because of the same thing you are talking about. Not one of Googles better ideas. I switched to Nova Prime like I've had with my last 2 phones. I also didn't like that I couldn't remove the Google search bar wit the stock launcher. Overall I like the phone, but the stock launcher was way to restrictive and had to go.
 

Joltcola1234

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I've used Nova for a number of years, but honestly...I'm a little bored with it. It offers great customization of course, but I'm just not into all the "tinkering" anymore like I once was. I like how smooth and simple Pixel Launcher is, it works perfectly if you aren't into resizing the desktop, adjusting the dock, custom icon sets, that sort of thing. Plus, it honestly feels like launchers like Nova and Action are constantly trying to keep up with the features Google adds to the Pixel Launcher - style of the search bar, long pressing the apps for quick actions, the Pixel weather/calendar widget, Google Now, etc. This the first phone in a number of years where I've felt no desire to use Nova.

The "white wash" thing here is just a minor gripe, I was more wondering what the thought process behind it was. You can clearly see from using Nova in the example above that the wallpaper looks much better without it.
 

TraderGary

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I tried staying with the stock launcher but my major gripe was not being able to get rid of that ugly, space taking Search Bar.
 

Joltcola1234

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I'm also fine with the search bar, I use it a ton. I pretty much never open Chrome directly. I probably hit that search bar dozens of times a day, every day, heh.
 

TraderGary

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That's the beauty of Android. We have many different options to do what we want! Instead of the search bar, I'm using "squeeze" and then voice commands to do what I want. We get the same results with different methods. Squeeze and Voice is particularly useful when driving! :)
 

TraderGary

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For me using voice really started with the Google Home Mini that I got when I bought my Pixel 2 XL. We liked the Mini so well we bought two more! Of course the only way to use them is to talk to them and we use them all the time. Wanting to do the same with my Android phone was for me only natural.
 

Joltcola1234

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sure, except for some reason it won't let me add photos from my phone using the Android central (this app is complete crap honestly). have to wait until I get access to my PC