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I agree, Samsung doesn't deserve our money. I boycotted Samsung after they destroyed my perfectly good Galaxy s5 with software updates. Sadly, the Pixel I got n

I agree, Samsung doesn't deserve our money. I boycotted Samsung after they destroyed my perfectly good Galaxy s5 with software updates. Sadly, the Pixel I got next wasn't much better. They dominate certain RAM markets though, and that's kind of unfortunate.

kowbell 7y ago
I had an S5 too, and actually still have it in case I ever need a backup (e.g. last week when _my_ Pixel started getting caught in an infinite boot loop!) Though I hadn't noticed the S5 being destroyed by software updates - the only reason I stopped using it is because they stopped updating it and it was locked from custom ROMs, which was a sad conclusion because it had still decent hardware. Could you elaborate on the villainous updates you encountered?
- hvindin 7y ago
  My personal S5 experience leads me to believe that there was some trickery afoot from Samsung's end. When I realised that my S5 was starting to get a little bit dodgy (having owned it from April 2011 until around December 2018) I went and bought 8 of them. Surprisingly, they were still available for purchase on the Samsung website over 7 years after they were originally released, although they quickly ran out of stock and I needed to go trawling through mobile phone stores asking them to check their store rooms. From here I noticed that every time I updated my phone to the latest software version, deleted all the extraneous bloatware that actually made no sense to have pre-installed, and go to using a device: it would start to behave weirdly within weeks. Apps that had previously run just fine (like, as an example, google maps) were laggy and constantly crashed. After going through 6 of the 8 phones in just over 3 months (the rate of failure seemed to have more to do with the fact that they were S5's in 2019 than anything I was doing to them) I eventually just gave up and bought an S10+ (because I honestly just wanted to see what the hell one would do with a terabyte of Storage on their phone - turns out it's absolutely nothing, but the possibilities initially intrigued me, but I guess I'm not really creative enough to come up with something worth doing with all that storage space). Now I'm still bitterly using the aforementioned S10+ waiting for someone to release a phone that I perceive to be as good as the S5.... So no hard data, just my experience with a large amount of S5's that all seemed to become unusable based on the date rather than actually being broken....
  - skylanh 7y ago
    There are recent updates from LineageOS for the S5 (multiple variants). https://download.lineageos.org/ https://download.lineageos.org/
  - trashface 7y ago
    Anecdata, but my S5 is still working after...6-7 years I guess. My brother also has one and his works. My charging port broke so I have to remove the battery to charge it, but I have three batteries that I rotate between so this isn't a big deal. However it hasn't received a software update since 2017 (I am on T Mobile), so there are probably all kinds of security issues lurking. It will, however, be the last Samsung phone I buy.
  - DrScump 7y ago
    Unless you got an exceptional price for those GS5s, I'm missing why you prioritized that particular model, which was five generations old by 2018. I had two. One bought new, one bought off Ebay. Never had trouble with either, but I had abandoned them by 2016ish. I rooted one (to get around mobile hotspot limits), later unrooting it when Tmobile stopped treating tethering/hotspot punitively. The GS5 was the last of the line with removable battery. The GS6 was the last with an IR port. One impressive aspect of the Galaxy S has, for me, been reliability. Mine have dropped to hard surfaces many, many times with no damage (aside from cracked glass, with which it still performs fine).
  - mikelward 7y ago
    I had the same happen on my Nexus 7, after aggressively disabling apps, including things like the Google app.
  - MikusR 7y ago
    It's the Google services that do the slowing down.
deleted 7y ago
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kowbell 7y ago

I had an S5 too, and actually still have it in case I ever need a backup (e.g. last week when _my_ Pixel started getting caught in an infinite boot loop!) Though I hadn't noticed the S5 being destroyed by software updates - the only reason I stopped using it is because they stopped updating it and it was locked from custom ROMs, which was a sad conclusion because it had still decent hardware. Could you elaborate on the villainous updates you encountered?

hvindin 7y ago
My personal S5 experience leads me to believe that there was some trickery afoot from Samsung's end. When I realised that my S5 was starting to get a little bit dodgy (having owned it from April 2011 until around December 2018) I went and bought 8 of them. Surprisingly, they were still available for purchase on the Samsung website over 7 years after they were originally released, although they quickly ran out of stock and I needed to go trawling through mobile phone stores asking them to check their store rooms. From here I noticed that every time I updated my phone to the latest software version, deleted all the extraneous bloatware that actually made no sense to have pre-installed, and go to using a device: it would start to behave weirdly within weeks. Apps that had previously run just fine (like, as an example, google maps) were laggy and constantly crashed. After going through 6 of the 8 phones in just over 3 months (the rate of failure seemed to have more to do with the fact that they were S5's in 2019 than anything I was doing to them) I eventually just gave up and bought an S10+ (because I honestly just wanted to see what the hell one would do with a terabyte of Storage on their phone - turns out it's absolutely nothing, but the possibilities initially intrigued me, but I guess I'm not really creative enough to come up with something worth doing with all that storage space). Now I'm still bitterly using the aforementioned S10+ waiting for someone to release a phone that I perceive to be as good as the S5.... So no hard data, just my experience with a large amount of S5's that all seemed to become unusable based on the date rather than actually being broken....
- skylanh 7y ago
  There are recent updates from LineageOS for the S5 (multiple variants). https://download.lineageos.org/ https://download.lineageos.org/
- trashface 7y ago
  Anecdata, but my S5 is still working after...6-7 years I guess. My brother also has one and his works. My charging port broke so I have to remove the battery to charge it, but I have three batteries that I rotate between so this isn't a big deal. However it hasn't received a software update since 2017 (I am on T Mobile), so there are probably all kinds of security issues lurking. It will, however, be the last Samsung phone I buy.
- DrScump 7y ago
  Unless you got an exceptional price for those GS5s, I'm missing why you prioritized that particular model, which was five generations old by 2018. I had two. One bought new, one bought off Ebay. Never had trouble with either, but I had abandoned them by 2016ish. I rooted one (to get around mobile hotspot limits), later unrooting it when Tmobile stopped treating tethering/hotspot punitively. The GS5 was the last of the line with removable battery. The GS6 was the last with an IR port. One impressive aspect of the Galaxy S has, for me, been reliability. Mine have dropped to hard surfaces many, many times with no damage (aside from cracked glass, with which it still performs fine).
- mikelward 7y ago
  I had the same happen on my Nexus 7, after aggressively disabling apps, including things like the Google app.
- MikusR 7y ago
  It's the Google services that do the slowing down.

deleted 7y ago

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