It is unclear if this has anything to do with the Android Pie update because according to Android Police’s Artem Russakovskii and tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, both of them have uploaded separate videos in which they demonstrate how sluggish the performance on the Pixel 2 XLs are.
In Russakovskii’s video, he shows that opening the Google Camera app takes a whopping 10 seconds via the power button double-tap gesture. During that period, it also shows how the phone is frozen and that touch and swipes are not registered. Now you could attribute this to wear and tear, but for a phone that is about a year old, it seems rather unacceptable.
Like we said it is unclear as to what might be causing the problem and if it could be a hardware or software issue, but according to 9to5Google’s Stephen Hall, it seems that it could be an issue in which hardware would need to be replaced. This is actually not the first time that Google has come under fire for shipping Pixel phones that have not been properly QC, but hopefully this isn’t one of those instances.