One unpleasant surprise switching from an old budget Moto phone to a Pixel Pro

Tech Talk Android
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I just nabbed a used Pixel 7 Pro for $200. The only flaw is a little bit of bubbling under the screen at the top, and it doesn’t obscure anything, so I’m counting myself very lucky. It’s certainly exciting to finally get to use a flagship phone, even if it is two years old! This quibble doesn’t lessen that. It’s just really surprising and interesting.

My Moto G Power 2020 had multi-volume, i.e. the ability to set volume per app and even automatically mute specified apps. (The feature had one flaw: some muted apps would still duck other apps’ audio. For example, if I had music playing while using Duolingo, and I had Duolingo muted, the music would still cut out every time Duolingo inaudibly played a sentence read, word pronunciation, etc., and then the music would come back.)

For some reason, I was under the impression that that was a stock Android feature that came with Android 11 or 10. But it turns out this feature doesn’t exist on Pixel phones and, as far as I can tell, can’t easily be added with a third-party app. Apps I’ve looked at that claim to provide per-app volume control just change global system volume when a specified app is opened.

Go figure.

(P.S.
In my excitement over this phone, I’ve been having a lot of fun listening to 2022/2023 TWiT episodes that talk about it.)

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I have been a pixel user for a long time and I have not come across a setting like this I am afraid.

Must be specific to the Moto.

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This was a pleasant surprise I found when I switched over to my Razr 40. Props to Motorola for leaving Android alone for the most part, and adding small improvements like this.

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