These 8 features on my Pixel secretly boost my daily productivity

Android is a treasure trove of features — Pixels even more so. The deeper you dig, the more you find. Our own Mishaal Rahman can probably vouch for that, considering he manages to unearth more features than Google even advertises. And that says a lot about a platform most of us rely on daily, on our primary devices, our phones.

After spending years immersed in the bright and colorful world of Android, I’ve naturally developed a few personal favorites; features that remain underrated despite being incredibly useful. Sure, Mishaal may know about all of them, but I’d bet many of us forget they even exist after discovering them once via an obscure Reddit comment.

These features — some exclusive to Pixel, others available across Android — have become part of my daily routine.

This one’s basic but wildly underrated. When I hand my phone to someone, say to pick up a contact or scan a QR code at a movie theatre, I pin the app by selecting the Pin option from the Overview screen (you must first enable app pinning in your phone’s Security and privacy settings). That way, they can’t swipe into another app, whether accidentally or intentionally.

I can’t stop friends and family from mindlessly swiping through my gallery when I show them a single photo, but I can stop them from going over to Messages or Keep. It’s especially useful when my little niece or nephew borrows my phone to play games, and I don’t want them to delete random notes or rearrange apps.

While this feature is often touted for large-screen phones and foldables, I find it just as handy on smaller devices, too. I frequently use it — again from the Overview screen — to run tools like the calculator alongside other apps, so I don’t have to constantly switch back and forth.

I’ll admit, I sometimes forget it’s there, but the moment I find myself toggling between apps too often, I arrange them into split-screen and save myself the trouble.

Pixel phones come with this fantastic gesture: a double-tap on the back of the phone to trigger shortcuts. It’s officially called Quick Tap in Settings app, and I’ve set mine to pull down the notification shade, which I probably do a thousand times a day, whether it’s to obsessively check for a message or dismiss an avalanche of Instagram DMs.

It’s so much easier than stretching your thumb all the way to the top of the screen, especially when using an app. My index finger naturally rests there anyway; all it takes is two light taps to see who’s pinged me and then get right back to work ignoring them. Simple.

I have developed a reflex to sometimes swipe away notifications from a certain app without thinking — only to realize I actually needed that one. While digging into the Notifications section of the Settings app to get to notification history isn’t the most intuitive process, just knowing that those messages aren’t lost forever feels like a big relief to my anxious mind.

Who would’ve thought that saving one extra tap could feel like such a win? On Pixel phones, you can long-press text in the app overview screen and copy it, without having to go back into the app itself.

It might not seem like a big deal at first. But if you’re copying details one by one, say from WhatsApp to fill in a form elsewhere while double-checking everything for accuracy, those saved taps really add up. It’s a small touch that saves me a lot of friction and frustration.

Android’s native screen recorder doesn’t just capture the screen; it also records internal audio, not just mic input. It lets you pick the audio source each time you select the option from the Quick Settings menu.

The feature is handy for sending how-tos to friends and family, but I also use it for more fun (and functional) things. You can capture livestream segments from YouTube with clean audio, record buggy app behavior to report issues (and claim massive bug bounties, just saying), or save synced lyrics from music apps to share with someone when a song just hits!

All of this happens without any noise picked up from the mic. And you sure don’t need any third-party shady tools for this.

I genuinely don’t know how I to live without this anymore. I use Gboard’s clipboard manager constantly for saving text snippets, URLs, parcel tracking numbers, and even Instagram captions I’m still workshopping. And it sits just a tap away under Gboard’s menu options.

The ability to pin items so they don’t vanish after an hour is underrated genius. It also saves me when filling those nasty forms that love to refresh the moment I switch apps. Having long responses backed up in the clipboard has saved my sanity more than once.

Quick Share is known for quick file transfers between devices, but I use it less for others and more for myself.

My work requires me to move a lot of screenshots and photos from my Pixel to my Mac. With a third-party utility installed on macOS, I can send files in seconds — as fast and seamless as AirDrop. And if you’re on Windows, you’re even luckier as Google’s first-party Quick Share app works like a charm there.

If I dig further, I’m sure I’d find a dozen more such gems buried inside Android and Pixel’s interface. But these are the ones I use every single day on my Pixel. Take away even one of them, and my flow and my sanity both would be completely thrown off.

What about you? What’s that one underrated Android feature you use that no one else talks about — the one that makes you feel smug when showing it to friends? Drop it in the comments.