Resupply8986 Your understanding of this is not correct. There are 2 specific Pixel models which had faulty batteries, the Pixel 4a and Pixel 6a. Both have a free battery replacement program with cash or credit as alternatives. It was dealt with through that replacement program, not crippling them. People are supposed to get the battery replaced if they get notified theirs is impacted. Unlike Samsung, Google dealt with this well and there are not reports of widespread incidents because it was handled well.
Pixels do not have an abnormal amount of hardware issues and other devices including Samsung Galaxy devices and iPhones have had plenty of severe hardware issues including battery issues.
Pixel 4a had this identified and dealt with long after it was end-of-life so we didn't do anything about it. For the Pixel 6a, we shipped the standard kernel driver detection of the faulty subset of batteries as part of the Android 16 QPR1 kernel updates in September 2025. Stock OS shipped a special kernel variant for the Pixel 6a in July 2025 which we obtained but didn't use because we didn't want it using a separate kernel due to the already high workload, so we waited until September 2025. We recently added a user-facing notification, notice in battery settings and Dead battery status display to match the way the stock OS handles it. It was harder than it should have been since they were meant to push at least a lot of the code for this but haven't yet, so we had to do it ourselves. Not every Pixel 4a or Pixel 6a was impacted by this, only a specific battery vendor out of the vendors they used for each and it might be the same vendor. The best thing to do on both is taking the free battery replacement.
I am considering trying out Graphene on my Pixel 7a, which is one of the phones that has the habit of blowing up.
None of the devices had any significant issues with fires/explosions and it was the Pixel 4a and 6a with the potential for it, not the Pixel 7a.