Google has notoriously awful customer support.
That's going to be a problem for Google. Google is used to the advertiser being the customer, and they have a big staff to hand-hold big advertisers. End users, not so much. Amazon is reasonably good at customer service, and has a culture of keeping the customer happy even if it costs them something.
Google sells the Nexus phone. For a good time, go to the support page for the device (https://support.google.com/nexus/?hl=en#topic=3424348) and follow the steps for "My phone won't turn on". See what you have to go through before you can even communicate with support. For warranties, they refer you to Samsung, unless you bought the thing through Google Play. They'd probably like to send those problems to Samsung, too, but in the US they run into the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which says the retailer can't do that.
I've had problems twice with a 2012 Nexus 7 that wouldn't charge any more. Both times Google replaced it under warranty with a refurbished model.
On another occasion - related actually, as I had to set up Wallet to get the refurbished unit shipped (they make a charge up front, but it doesn't go through if you ship the old unit back) - my son spent 40€ on virtual clams (sigh), and when I contacted support they refunded the money. This is just a couple of anecdotes, but in my experience the support was good.
Having just gone through this for my Nexus 5 (defective GPS), you're wrong.
- I was on a live-chat with a rep within minutes.
- They shipped me a new Nexus 5 next-day air.
- I made sure I had all my data off the old phone.
- I shipped the old one back with the free shipping label.
The thing is a lot of bug fix and iteration ideas can come from customer support logging (see recent Wufoo talk for example). With PPoor customer support they're missing out on that valuable feedback, which might explain Googles lack of customer market fit even through multiple generations.
Google has great customer support... if you spend thousands of dollars in ad buys with them. We had weekly conference calls with google back when our ad buy was in the 40k+ a month range. They won't give you the time of day unless you spend a lot of money with them though, which means 95% of their customers get little or no support at all.
Google sells the Nexus phone. For a good time, go to the support page for the device (https://support.google.com/nexus/?hl=en#topic=3424348) and follow the steps for "My phone won't turn on". See what you have to go through before you can even communicate with support. For warranties, they refer you to Samsung, unless you bought the thing through Google Play. They'd probably like to send those problems to Samsung, too, but in the US they run into the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which says the retailer can't do that.