The best Android phones can be anything you need. Whether you want cutting edge technology, the most stylish design, or just a reliable and affordable performer, you’ll find what you need in the world of Android, and more. There are more choices when you opt for an Android phone, from the top of the line to the most affordable bottom, inside and out.
Do you want a powerful, stylish, customizable camera phone? The Google Pixel 9 Pro fits the bill as my new favorite Android phone, and so does the Pixel 9 Pro XL. That’s because Google didn’t give the bigger phone an advantage, other than the larger screen and battery. If you want a smaller Pro Pixel, you get the same cameras, the same performance, and all the same features whether you buy the Pro or the Pro XL. I hope other Android phone makers follow suit in the year to come.
Would you rather have an affordable phone with amazing battery life? I’ve got you covered with the OnePlus 12R, which lasted longer in my battery testing than any other phone. How about a durable mid-range phone that you can rely upon for years? Check out the Google Pixel 8a, one of the best Android phones I reviewed this year. Or do you just want an amazing phone that does literally everything? Don’t worry, there are plenty of Samsung phones on this list.
If you want to see how these Android phones stack up when I throw the iPhone into the mix, you can check out my definitive list of the best phones. I’ve also got the list of the best Android phones with bendable displays in best foldable phones. If you want to save some money, check out our guide to the best cheap phones. Now, read on for the best Android phones you can buy today.
Quick List
1. Google Pixel 9 Pro & Pro XL
The Google Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL bring an all-new look to the Pixel family, with premium materials and cool color options. They also have fun AI features, with more on the way, and the best cameras I’ve used on a Pixel phone. These phones also just got the Android 15 update.
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2. Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
A titanium design, new 50MP 5x telephoto camera, a flat screen and a whole lot of AI, makes the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra the very best Android phone money can buy right now.
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3. Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus
The Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus is the best premium Android phone, with all of the great features you need and nothing you don’t. You can spend more, but the S24 Plus offers more than enough.
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The Google Pixel 9 is a great starting point if you love the new Pixel look and you want those great Pixel photos. You don’t get the free year of premium AI, but the color options are brighter, and maybe AI isn’t your thing.
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The OnePlus 12R is a OnePlus bargain phone, but don’t let that fool you. It has a super fast processor, great cameras, and, oh, also the best battery life we’ve seen on a smartphone in years.
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Google’s newest phone, the Google Pixel 8a, started at a great price, and you can find it even cheaper now. It also gets seven years of Android updates, starting with the latest Android 15, and it has most of the same AI features you’ll find on the Pixel 9.
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The best Android phone in 2024
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Below, you’ll find full write-ups for each of the best Android phones in our list. We’ve tested each model extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.
The best Android phone
The Google Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro Xl introduced a fresh design to the Pixel, with a sleek camera pill that replaces the bar. Despite this makeover, I still enjoyed using these phones with their signature Pixel strengths: innovative AI, impressive cameras, and a vibrant display that outshines the competition in brightness and color.
Google continues its display reign with the Pixel 9 Pro’s Super Actua screen, which I found to be exceptionally bright, and I appreciated the adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate. This display is truly great, even in bright sunlight, making it ideal for outdoor photography.
The Pixel 9 Pro delivers fantastic photos and AI-enhanced video with Video Boost, though I found the camera controls to be a bit fidgety. It produced some of the best photos among all of the best camera phones I’ve tested, and it’s probably my second-favorite camera after the iPhone 16 Pro family. Google Photos AI editing beats the current state of iPhone Photos editing by a wide margin.
Performance-wise, the Pixel 9 Pro lags behind its rivals. Despite the promise of seven years of Android updates, my real-world use revealed noticeable slowdowns and stuttering when multitasking, a stark contrast to the seamless performance of phones like the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Battery life was solid in my tests, offering a full day of use, but faster charging would be a welcome improvement, even on the slightly-faster Pixel 9 Pro XL. While the price tag might seem steep, especially given the performance limitations, the inclusion of a free year of Google One AI Premium with 2TB of cloud storage adds significant value.
Read our full Google Pixel 9 Pro review and our Google Pixel 9 Pro XL review
The best Android camera
You won’t find a phone that does more than the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but where this phone really pulls away from the pack is in its camera capabilities. If it only had the big 200MP sensor and maybe a single zoom lens, that would be a great camera phone, but the Ultra does more. So. Much. More.
In addition to the big sensor, the Ultra offers a 5X optical zoom. That may seem a step down from the 10X optical zoom on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, but the S24 Ultra uses a much larger sensor on that zoom lens than its predecessor, and the images it produces are higher quality. Whether you’re shooting for the moon or just taking shots of your kids on the field, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is up to the task.
In fact, it’s up to every task, because it has such an extensive array of lenses. The 5X zoom uses a 50MP sensor, but there is also a 3X zoom lens that uses its own 10MP sensor. There’s also a 12MP sensor for ultra wide shots and super steady videography.
Samsung isn’t letting Google have all the fun with AI editing features, but Samsung also builds AI directly into the camera app. The camera will try to recognize the scene and optimize accordingly. It isn’t just the moon that looks better, you’ll notice that food shots, monuments, portraits, and tons of other scenes look great when you shoot them with the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review
The best premium Android
The Galaxy S24 Plus is no longer the ignorable middle child of the Galaxy S family. This time around, the Galaxy S24 Plus is a big step up from the Galaxy S24 in all the right ways. Plus, it has all the top performance of the Galaxy S24 Ultra, without all the features you don’t need.
Do you really need a pen with your phone? The Galaxy S24 Ultra was our previous best overall phone, but most people don’t need that much. The Ultra is a bigger, heavier, and more expensive phone than the Galaxy S24 Plus, without much added benefit.
The Galaxy S24 Plus has the same sharp display resolution as the S24 Ultra, and the screen is only a hair smaller, literally 0.1-inch. It has the same processor and RAM, and it starts with 256GB, twice the storage of the Galaxy S24.
The camera specs come close to matching the iPhone 15 Pro, but fall a bit short of the Ultra. That’s fine, because it’s Samsung’s shooting modes and software that make its camera great, not the specs. The Galaxy S24 Plus is a winner any way you look at it, and if you really need more, the Ultra is next on the list.
The best Android for everybody
The Google Pixel 9 is a delightful phone and the easiest Android phone for me to recommend to everybody, especially folks who say ‘I just want a phone that works.’ The Pixel 9 arrives in Google’s striking new Pixel look, with even better color options than the Pro model (hey, Peony!). It takes photos that could be mistaken for Pro, and it has the same Google Tensor G4 processor inside.
The biggest difference between the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro isn’t the zoom camera on the Pro. The Pixel 9 takes great photos that are even better for sharing, since the phone keeps things to a scant 12MP. Videos also look great. The color quality on the photos I took with the Pixel 9 was excellent, and nearly identical to my Pixel 9 Pro shots.
The big difference is the year of premium AI that you’ll get with the Pixel 9 Pro. That originally meant no Gemini Live for the Pixel 9 (unless you pay up), but Google has made its conversational AI available on every Pixel 9 device for free, so that’s not a problem any more.
Google also updated this phone with Android 15, making it one of the first Android phones to get the new system, as it should be. This phone has seven years of updates ahead, presumably taking us to Android 21, so it could get even better with time.
Read our full Google Pixel 9 review
The best Android battery life
When we first saw the OnePlus 12R, it was hard to pick out a standout feature on this bargain phone that would make it a true flagship killer. Was it the incredibly bright display? Was it the exceptional camera setup? Was it the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor? After we got the phone back from Future Labs, we knew it was the battery. The OnePlus 12R has the best battery life of any Android phone and any smartphone we’ve tested in years.
We achieved almost 18 hours of battery life in our rundown tests. The iPhone 15 Pro Max only lasted 14 hours in the same endurance test. Samsung’s best phones fell 15 minutes shy of 17 hours. The OnePlus 12R beat them all, though the OnePlus 12 came closest.
The 5,500 mAh battery cell inside the OnePlus 12R is usually a capacity that we see on obnoxiously-large gaming phones. Even premium flagship phones don’t ship with batteries quite so big: the Galaxy S24 Ultra has a 5,000 mAh display, just like the past few Ultra phones before it.
What’s even more wild is how fast the OnePlus 12R charges. Using the special OnePlus charger, included with the phone, you can charge up to a whopping 80W in the US and 100W internationally.
To compare, the Galaxy S24 Ultra charges at 45W, and after 30 minutes it’s about 65% charged. In the same time, your OnePlus 12R will be 96% charged, with only a few minutes until it’s full.
The best budget Android
The newest phone on this list, the Google Pixel 8a gives us everything we want in an Android phone for less than $500 / £500 / AU$850. We get the best performance Google offers, since it uses the same Tensor G3 chipset as the Pixel 8 Pro. That also means it gets the same promise from Google for seven years of Android OS updates from the time it launched, in May 2024.
The Pixel 8 has a smaller display and it’s a joy to hold and behold. It comes in a couple of flashy colors, including Google’s favorite new Bay blue and a bright Aloe green, and it’s more rounded and curvy than previous Pixel A-series phones.
Sadly, it has the same battery troubles as past Google bargain phones, but that’s Google’s compromise. You don’t lose out on the best AI features on this phone, and it has the same Google Gemini LLM and Magic Editor features in Google Photos that you’ll find on the Google Pixel 8 Pro, our new pick for the best AI phone.
The best thing about Google’s A-series may be the discounts they get throughout the year, but this phone feels worth its price right now. It takes great photos that look remarkably similar to the shots we took with our Pixel 8 Pro, and it performs well in every way we’d expect from a Pixel phone.
FAQs
What is the best Android phone?
The best Android phone for most people is the Pixel 8, because it’s an affordable way to get all of Google’s best new AI features and Google’s refined Pixel interface and software.
The best premium Android phone is the Galaxy S24 Plus, because it offers incredible performance, an amazingly sharp and bright display, and great battery life, without a lot of features (like a pen) that you don’t want.
Which Android phone is the best value for money?
The best Android phone for people on a budget is the Pixel 8a, which costs $499 / £499 / AU$849. The Pixel A-series phones are a popular discount item when Amazon puts smartphones on sale, so keep an eye on TechRadar for the latest deals. The Pixel 7a often went on sale for as low as $349 in the US, for instance.
If you want to spend less than that, the Samsung Galaxy A35 is the best value. It gives you a great display and Samsung’s feature-packed Android software, plus 5G networking and good performance for the price.
Which Android phone brand is the best?
Google invented Android, so it’s version of Android is considered the gold standard. But Samsung perfected Android, so if you want to try the most advanced Android features, you need a Samsung phone. Other phone makers like OnePlus, Motorola, Oppo, Xiaomi and more all have benefits as well. Competition is one of the reasons Android has become such a great mobile OS.
Is Android or iOS better?
Android and Apple’s iOS each have their fans, and there is very little that iOS can do that Android cannot. There are many more options, features, and oddities available on Android devices than iOS has ever seen, so Android has a reputation for being more complicated and experimental, while also allowing for more customization and more powerful overall features.
How we test
I’ve only included phones on this list that have been thoroughly tested in Future Labs and in the real world by our expert review editors. I test every feature on a phone, then we dive deeper to discover all of the hidden goodies.
I test phones rigorously for battery life and charging times, processor speed and performance, and especially for camera and video recording capabilities. I make sure that phones deliver on the promises and claims they make. If Samsung says a phone charges in 30 minutes, I time it to make sure.
I’ve seen every phone you can buy, so I know how each model stacks up against one another. I use both iPhone and Android phones all the time, so I know what I’m saying about the phones you buy, no matter what you pay. I make sure the phones deliver what I’d expect for the price.
Once I’m done, I never stop. I update our reviews as the phones are updated. Our reviews are always fresh, so check again before you buy to make sure you’re getting the latest review on the best phones you’ll find.
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