Weeks before the expected launch of the Pixel 4a, a new report says that Google's Pixel team has lost a couple of major employees.
Marc Levoy, a chief engineer working on Google's Pixel camera, recently left the company. A report from The Information says that he exited Google in March, two months after Pixel general manager Mario Queiroz also left Google. Levoy had been with Google since 2014.
Google's Pixel phones have often been praised as having some of the best smartphone cameras on the market, and so the exit of Levoy is a big deal for Google and the Pixel phones. Levoy certainly wasn't the only person working on the Pixel's cameras, but as one of the masterminds behind them, this loss is a big one for Google.
Queiroz joined Google way back in 2005 and had not only helped launch the HTC Dream, the first Android phone, but he had also been working as the Pixel general manager since the start of Pixel series.
Today's report also reveals that Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh had been critical of the Pixel 4 shortly before the device's launch. At an all-hands hardware team meeting last fall, Osterloh reportedly said that he didn't agree with some of the choices that'd been made about the Pixel 4 and that he was disappointed in its battery performance.
It's said that the Pixel 4 shipped around 2 million units in the first six months of availability. To compare, the Pixel 3 shipped around 3.5 million units in the same amount of time, while the Pixel 3a shipped nearly 3 million units.
The Pixel 4a is close to launch, with reports saying it could arrive early next month, and so it may not be heavily impacted by these departures. With the Pixel 5 not expected until October, though, there's going to be even more attention paid to details like its camera and battery performance.
