Edit: Hmm, I'm getting a 404 on one of Google's development pages for it. I'm wondering if they killed it already in less than 4 years... It wouldn't surprise me, unfortunately.
Is there anything about that phone in particular, or is google just device-locking features to differentiate their devices? (or subsidizing something that runs on their server)
It's just a differentiator. It's actually tied to the Phone by Google app, but some features only work on Pixels (and maybe other phones that have it pre-installed as the default dialer, but I don't know which those are). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
It does work well though. I get a lot of spam calls and texts a month (the result of my political donations, which I didn't realize were public info and easily harvested by spammers, sigh... fucking NGP Van). The Pixel filters out the overwhelming majority of them, thankfully. The call screening works exceptionally well for spam calls, since most just hang up.
The Pixel is a perfectly generic phone, IMO, but the spam blocking is amazing. I switched to an iPhone for a few months, but the spam (even with several third party apps) made it unusable and I eventually got another Pixel instead. About the only thing it consistently does better.
Does any of you know how to force-enable this feature on a Pixel 4a, preferably without tripping SafetyNet? And does it support languages other than English?
Edit: Hmm, I'm getting a 404 on one of Google's development pages for it. I'm wondering if they killed it already in less than 4 years... It wouldn't surprise me, unfortunately.