Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Configuration Tips and Tricks ⭐

I love Pixel for all the obvious reasons. But I do have two related complaints, or perhaps observations. There are far too many options scattered all over the system, many of which are well hidden and not well understood. And many of these options are not configured optimally by default.

This is a creeping complexity that’s common to all personal computing platforms and is perhaps inevitable. If you want the platform to do more, and the platform makers and their customers seem to want that, then things have to evolve and grow. There’s just more in there now, and it’s difficult to keep track of it all.

I do similar work with Windows 11, of course, both for my own needs and for the books and how-to articles that come out of that. And it’s fair to say that I am much more familiar with what’s possible when it comes to customizing Windows than I am with any mobile platform. I just live in that world day in and day out.

And setting up three Pixel phones simultaneously, as I discussed in Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Completing Setup, First AI and Photo Experiences introduced some new (to me) challenges that required a rethink. I set up the first of the phones, the Pixel 10 Pro XL, the way I usually do, manually. And then I set up the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro using a wizard-like process in setup that copied over apps and many settings from the first phone.

This was relatively expedient, though I still needed to manually sign in to and configure all the apps I use. But I came to regret doing this, too. When I shifted to the Pixel 10 just before I wrote my Pixel 10 Pro XL review, I had trouble getting the Google Fi eSIM to work properly in the new phone. This happened during the weekend before we flew to Mexico (and then to Hawaii) and I actually had to go back to the Pixel 10 Pro XL temporarily so I could reset the Pixel 10 and try again. And this time around, I skipped past the part of setup that wanted to set up my apps and settings.

That worked, at least. And my theory is that the copy process included the eSIM data, and that something about that just wasn’t working correctly. But with my phone, messages, and data finally working on the Pixel 10, I had to decide whether to copy over the apps and settings, which you can do after the fact. In the end, I opted to just set up the Pixel 10 manually. And that is what led me to this post, though I’ve since reviewed the Pixel 10 and have moved on to the Pixel 10 Pro. I kept missing some of the features I had previously configured on a different Pixel. And in some cases, just finding those features was difficult.

So here are some of the settings changes I made across these three phones, starting with the obvious top-level interfaces we all use every day. Some have been around for a while. Some have been improved. And some are new to 2025.
Apps list
I’m starting here because this was the setting that kicked off the idea for this article.

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