Google's best budget phone has been officially discontinued

All good things must come to an end, and this week marks the end of arguably one of the best budget smartphones of all time: the Google Pixel 4a.

Although it's less than two years old, the Pixel 4a has been officially de-listed from Google Store's website this week. You can no longer buy it anywhere, as Google clears the shelves to make way for the upcoming Google Pixel 6a.

The end of the Pixel 4a isn't coming completely out of the blue, as Google has been claiming low stock reserves on many of its products for months already. If anything was going to be cut out, it made sense for Google to go for one of the cheaper releases which it ultimately means to replace in the coming months. The older Pixel 3a, for the record, was discontinued way back in July of 2020.

The Pixel 4a was great while it lasted, and it offered a whole lot for its $350 price tag. It featured Qualcomm's Snapdragon 730 chipset, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage, which was double of what the Pixel 3a offered—for a price that was $50 cheaper. Its camera was nothing to scoff at, either, with very impressive image quality for the price, and a 4k camera capable of shooting at 30 FPS. 

The Google Pixel 5a, released in August of 2021, is still available to buy for $450 on the Google Store, and it remains to be seen whether it will last as long as its predecessor.

In the end, though, it's still a case of "in with the new, out with the old." And we're currently awaiting the imminent release of the Google Pixel 6a, which promises to be everything the Google Pixel 4a and 5a were, as well as everything they weren't. 

The Pixel 6a is expected to be released in May this year—much sooner than we thought—and we hope its price tag won't be too far above the $450 that the Pixel 5a launched for.