Google’s smartest Pixel 11 Pro has blown me away

I’ve only had the Pixel 11 Pro XL for a few days, and that’s been enough time to remind me why I’ve been leery of the Pixel all year. I’m really trying to give these phones a fair name. I’m looking for the good stuff, I’m excited for new features, and every time I hope it’s a Pixel that won’t make me question my life choices a few days later.

This time HiLight is doing the damage. And the annoying part is I love this idea. It reminds me of the notification LEDs we used to have. I was really excited to play with it on the Pixel 11 Pro XL, because honestly, I miss having something like this on a phone. Then I tried using HiLight.

A little customization turned into a jumble of menus, preferred contacts, disappearing options, and I kept wondering if I was doing something wrong. Spoiler: I wasn’t. HiLight is a great idea, but right now it’s an absolute mess.

First of all, my complaint about HiLight is simple: Why is something so simple so complicated? I thought I would spend a few minutes assigning different colors to my friends and family. Instead, Google somehow turned it into a treasure.

Naturally, I started in the Settings app. That’s where HiLight resides, and on my Pixel 11 Pro XL it’s turned on by default. Everything is fine I thought I would open it, see my contacts, select the people I want, select their colors and be done. That would make sense, right? Well, apparently not.

To customize a contact’s HiLight color, I have to go out of Settings, open the Contacts app, find that person, and adjust it from there. It certainly works, but why would I switch between two apps for something so simple? If I’m in HiLight settings, why can’t I just select a contact there and go about my day? This is what I really want. HiLight should show my contacts right there in Settings and let me choose who I want. Best of all, I don’t need instructions to figure out something as simple as color customization. Yes, I had to look it up before I could get it to work.

To make sure this wasn’t an issue for me, I gave the Pixel to my dad and asked him to set a custom color for one of the contacts. He knows the technique well, but he couldn’t understand it either. If we both need to look up directions, I’d say Google made it more difficult than it needed to be. This may not bother everyone, but it bothered me.

Anyway, the color selection isn’t even the part of HiLight that really annoys me. Even worse, one of HiLight’s coolest tricks stopped working on my Pixel 11 Pro XL.

At first I thought I messed up a setting somewhere. One of my colleagues faced the same issue and he fixed it by disabling and re-enabling the Gemini option and restarting the phone. Of course I tried the same thing. Unfortunately, my Pixel had other plans. It still refuses to work.

What makes it even weirder is that other colleagues using the Pixel 11 Pro don’t have this problem at all. So again, I wondered if my phone was the problem. I have a partnership. i met A Reddit user with a Pixel 11 Pro XL describes almost the same problem. HiLight still works for your favorite callers on your phone, but Gemini no longer activates it when you put the phone face down. They also tried changing the setting and restarting the phone with no luck.

According to the poster, Google support told them it might be a server-side sync issue. Another person in that thread reported even worse experience: neither Gemini nor HiLight for their favorite callers worked for them. So at least I know my Pixel isn’t trying to annoy me. I think this is convincing. So, there’s a definite inconsistency here, and while the usual toggle and restart tricks may fix it for some people, it didn’t do anything for me.

Despite all the complaints I’ve made so far, I don’t want this to sound like a hater of HiLight. I actually feel the opposite. Bringing back something that looks like an LED notification light from a few years ago is a great idea. Those little lights were useful back then, and I’d say they’re still useful today, especially for someone like me who keeps my phone down most of the time.

Maybe that’s why its limitations bother me as much as they do. I wish HiLight did more. It’s useful to see it light up when someone calls, and it sounds great when the Gemini is thinking or responding (though mine clearly missed that). But there are many obvious ways Google can take this further.

Let’s assign one color to WhatsApp and another to Instagram. Give text messages a different blinking pattern so I can tell what’s coming in without having to flip my phone. I’d even like to see the HiLight work with a camera timer, where the flashes act as a countdown so the person in front of the camera knows exactly when the photo will be taken. None of this makes much difference if the phone has a programmable light on the back.

Interestingly, I don’t have to imagine what a more capable HiLight would be like. The open-source HiLight Studio app takes the Pixel 11 Pro’s LED light much longer than Google. You can assign different colors to different apps and play with patterns like pulse, breath, wave, comet and even rainbow. Yes, it’s a lot closer to what I imagined when Google first showed off HiLight.

To be fair, Google has said that more functionality is coming, so HiLight isn’t a finished product yet. Honestly, that’s what makes its current limitations all the more frustrating, because I can see how useful this light could be eventually.

Right now, Google had a really interesting idea and stopped a few steps too early. The setup is more complicated than it needs to be, Gemini randomly stopped working with it on my phone, and a third-party app shows just how much HiLight can do. Please give me those customization options directly from Settings, make them simple enough for anyone to understand, and keep Gemini running smoothly.

Do this and HiLight can easily transition from a feature on the Pixel 11 Pro that really annoys me to one of the Pixel features that I’ll really miss if I switch phones.