Well I've made the switch to the 11. Honestly using the phone I can't see a difference in the screen considering the 2xl was 1440p.
I was pretty confident you would be happy enough with the screen despite your reservations about the drop in resolution. I think some people are too obsessed with specs and not enough about the real world benefits or lack thereof. Personally, I think 1440P is a waste of time on a phone, but thats just me.
As for the movements away from Google, I've been reading a lot about this on reddit, and have been pondering myself. I don't really like the direction google is going in at the moment:-
- This is going back a bit, but does anyone remember when Google Now (the page to the left of the main homescreen) used to actually be useful and relevant, and not full of spam and rubbish news sources? Yep me too. Have now disabled that screen. Finding out what was going on in Luton isn't very helpful when you live in Gateshead, and it seems even though you can curate the feed, it is easily messed up again by simply searching for something you don't normally.
- Also, I don't like the way they keep trying to push these news stories everywhere. They're now coming to the assistant, and also they've been putting the same rubbish feed in their new tab interface in chrome. Look, GOOGLE: I don't want news pushed in my face every 3 seconds. I am actually trying to reduce my consumption of it for my sanity. I will choose when I want to look at the news, thank you very much. And I will choose relevant sources, not the local news from a town 300 miles away.
- Googles propensity to shut down useful services. I didn't really use it but there was a lot of anger about Inbox closing down. They had a serviceable SMS client in Hangouts, but they have sort of forgotten about it now. And Google Play Music, well yeah, its on Youtube now, but full of adverts, it now lacks gapless playback and is generally seeming to be a step down from GPM.
- Even on google search itself, its main reason for existing, has gone downhill severely now in my opinion. Results are full of sponsored results and adverts, and they removed useful tools such as being able to specify the exact size of an image you're looking for.
- The direction google are going on their phones is questionable. The new P5 for example is a nice enough phone, but it once again lacks features people have been crying out for. The 2XL lacked a telephoto, which was annoying in 2017, yet they failed to deliver this until 2019 with the Pixel 4. Even then, it was a pathetic 1.7x. Now in 2020, they've removed it again, and replaced it with a rather pathetic 107deg FOV wide angle (I wont call it ultra wide as there's nothing ultra about it). Also the way they ditched Face ID and Soli on the 4. They seem to rely software smarts to compensate for poor hardware. As I say, it was somewhat annoying in 2017 but is damn right infuriating coming up to 2021. It's like they don't want people to buy their stuff.
Google does a lot of good stuff, so I doubt I'll entirely move away, and while I probably wont buy one [iphone] for a few reasons, I can certainly see why people are moving over to Apple now. At least they seem to be a lot more privacy focused, and while you can argue that iOS is lacking in quite a few areas compared with Android, when Apple does something they do at least, for the most part, seem to be focused on making it work and accessible to a non-techie. However, we'll see what the future holds.