6 ms·

The Samsung-branded Android is horrible, though. I really think Google's permissiveness in allowing vendors to bundle their crapware really kills any prestige

• jon-wood 12y ago
  I'm always amazed at the crap that people put up with on Android phones. My Moto G is half as powerful as my wife's Samsung, and feels massively more responsive, and I don't have to put up with their god awful UI "enhancements".
  • nkoren 12y ago
    This. When my Galaxy S3 went for a swim, I "downgraded" to a first-generation Moto G. The lack of crapware and Samsung "enhancements" makes it a far better phone -- for less than half the price. Unless their OS philosophy changes, there's no way I'd buy Samsung again.
• WatchDog 12y ago
  > literal dogshit that Samsung puts on their phones Since when do Samsung literally put dogshit on their phones?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    • ghshephard 12y ago
      He was commenting on the (mis)use of "literal", which, in the english language, has shifted it's meaning from "taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory" - to it's new (recent) sense which is used to "emphasize strongly this metaphor/allegory."
      • monort 12y ago
        Not very recent. Dickens used "literally" in this meaning in the middle of 19th century.
• slowmotiony 12y ago
  Google isn't exactly setting a high standard with their buggy OS updates and crappy apps like hangouts.
  • Mikeb85 12y ago
    > crappy apps like hangouts. What's wrong with Hangouts? I quite like having an all-in-one text message + internet message + phone and video call app that I can use from my phone and computer web browser seamlessly...
    • x0x0 12y ago
      messages that don't send people that never appear online, even when you appear online to them the ui disaster, and how I had to google to figure out how to sign out of it my phone staying signed in and eating messages that I would much rather have had delivered to my laptop where I was actively conversing all of this on a nexus running stock 4.4.latest
    • 72deluxe 12y ago
      I prefer NOT to have it take over SMS messaging because I want to know that the person will receive the message. If I wanted to get in touch with you, there is a conscious decision as to whether I instant message you, ring you, video call you, send an SMS, visit you in person or send you a letter. This shouldn't be removed or hidden - the reliability of the transport medium is important! Half of my contacts never get messages from me in Hangouts. This makes it unreliable, and therefore useless. Additionally, if I video call someone (eg my wife sat the other side of the room), Hangouts informs me that she is not available for a video call. But she has zero notifications or alerts or ringing or ANYTHING. The inability to see if someone is online/offline also makes it useless. If I am having a conversation with someone sat next to me, I would like to know if they're sat next to me else I'll be talking to a wall. Chatting with people on Hangouts is like talking to a wall. It truly is bad. EDIT: I noticed the INSTANT downvote after writing this. Are you disagreeing with me on Hangouts or something? Or are you saying that I made all of this up or something? Hangouts does not work for me, full stop. I have used Android since 1.5 and Talk was far superior. The lack of proper UI (screen-width listview for contacts????) and behaviour on Hangouts (I am using a tablet) does not encourage decent applications. Compare the quality of Hangouts to GMail on a tablet for reference.
• M8 12y ago
  Google is on the forefront of bundling crapware. Why do I need freaking Cloud Print, Google Docs and other crap I did not ask for explicitly? I did not ask for it. Only expect two things by default: the store app and Chrome.
  • saiya-jin 12y ago
    honestly, I am underwhelmed by android chrome, switched to mobile firefox (with adblock plus) and removed chrome icon. On desktops, I don't get the appeal of chrome at all... too resource-hungry for my taste. The more somebody thinks he know whats better for me than myself, and pushes stuff down my throat, the more I resist, regardless of added value. same for school, same for these things
    • bsaul 12y ago
      slightly off-topic, but i'm looking really forward to having firefox released on iOS. Ads really are killing the whole mobile web experience..
      • arm 12y ago
        You can get rid of ads on iOS now by using something like Weblock¹ (or use your own proxy server). ―――――― ¹ — https://www.weblockapp.com/ https://www.weblockapp.com/
        • 0942v8653 12y ago
          Not sure if I trust weblock, but my Raspberry Pi functions as a DNS server with a few ad domain lists and it works 99% of the time. No need for a proxy server.
• rorykoehler 12y ago
  To be fair Apple have a load of crapware too. The whole ecosystem runs off of iTunes. This alone is enough to ensure I will never buy an iOS device. I agree wholeheartedly that the Samsung Android is really annoying too. There is nothing worse than having a bunch of apps you can't uninstall but also have no interest in using. Now they want to even bundle facebook! Pointless.
  • kaolinite 12y ago
    It hasn't really run off iTunes for 3-4 years now. I can't remember the last time I had to launch it. Besides, whilst iTunes isn't great, if most crapware was even as good as iTunes then there wouldn't be much of a problem.
    • Lio 12y ago
      I agree. IMHO iTune is definitely a poor excuse for something that would be better run with tabs in a browser but I'm more concerned with things like the Apple Watch application or The Weather Channel that I can't remove from my iPhone. The non-removable Apple apps on iOS that exist only to up-sell other Apple "value add" services like Newsstand, Apple Watch, iBooks, Game Centre even iCloud to lesser extent are far more annoying to me.
      • Alphasite_ 12y ago
        You can probably disable them from the child lock section, which just outright hides the app.
  • threeseed 12y ago
    What ? (a) The whole ecosystem doesn't run off iTunes. You can setup, manage, buy etc without needing it. It's needed on OSX for buying music/movies/books but that's hardly surprising. (b) There has never been any talk of or intention to bundle Facebook. It would actually be a pretty bad move for Facebook since it could be seen to be a pretty anticompetitive move.
• on_and_off 12y ago
  To be fair, most OEMs have tuned down their customizations compared to the 2.x era. The Moto G runs a relatively clean version of Android but even in that case some of the additions of Motorola made me cringe. It generates 'help' messages in the first days of usage that I have found very confusing for new smartphone users. I wish that Google would control its software more tightly, OEMs just can't be left to their own devices, they will always feel the need to make their phones stand apart by any mean necessary. I would like to be wrong, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon, Google would lose way too much marketshare with such a move.
  • castell 12y ago
    It doesn't make sense to mention "Moto G". Google owned Motorola during that era. In the meanwhile Google sold Motorola again and recent models come with a new customized UI. Most companies like Samsung, HTC, Sony, Motorola, etc. customize Android. Some more (Samsung), some less (Sony, Motorola). Plain Android are on Google and Chinese devices.
    • on_and_off 11y ago
      AFAIK, Motorola started lightening their custom skin before Google bought them and continues to ship lightly skinned devices.
• jmngomes 12y ago
  "Samsung's insistence on bundling crapware is killing Android." Sadly, the same thing applies to all smartphone manufacturers, Nexus being the exception. The amount of useless apps that hog scarce resources and that the everyday user can't uninstall end up compromising the user experience.
• _nedR 12y ago
  To give a counter-opinion in favour of Samsung, I am using a Galaxy Tab S 8.4, and I find useful some of their custom ROM features like Power Saving mode (which restricts background data and runs in black-and-white mode), the split screen mode (very useful when say comparing excerpts from 2 book, or say running a calculator and another app. Yes, they do try to bundle a few additional third-party apps like Flipboard, Evernote, and Dropbox. I wouldn't call these bloatware as these are high quality apps that most people would actually like and find useful, but I am mildly annoyed at the imposition. They also have a few of their own google-like apps and services like S Voice, S Planner and S Finder. These are basically attempts by Samsung to pull a Google (which frankly, they don't have the chops for). On the whole, i would say these additions are only mildly annoying since performance hasn't been much impacted, probably because of the hardware(but this may change with time and updates).
  • mark_l_watson 12y ago
    After buying each of my Samsung phones from Verizon, I spent about an hour researching which apps I could safely remove. I wanted to buy a Google phone, but I was told that there were problems using unlocked phones on Verizon. Is this true?
• soylentcola 12y ago
  I see it a lot like Windows PC OEMs. Microsoft makes Windows. You can install it on anything that will run it. On its own, it has its strengths and weaknesses but it is a generally capable PC operating system. But anyone who has dealt with Windows PCs for the past decade or two are familiar with the concept of doing a wipe and a fresh install on some poor chump's laptop or desktop because it came loaded with so much garbage from Dell or Gateway or HP that the thing ran like utter shit. Thankfully, with a desktop OS, you can do that but on mobile, since the OS needs to be built with all sorts of proprietary drivers "baked in" it's not a matter of just installing base Android and running an update process to install the drivers for chipset and radios and other stuff. It was bad enough when cheap PCs gave the entire platform a bad name because in theory you could fix that with an hour or two of work. But with something like a phone, it can be damn near impossible to get hold of "stock" Android properly ported to your device. Even when a factory image exists, it may require more tweaking and bypassing than most people are comfortable with to get the thing installed. This does indeed reflect poorly on the OS as a whole but since OEMs only see Android as the solution to a "we need an OS for our hardware" problem, they don't seem to have much stake in the overall impression of Android. After having a couple of HTC phones and a Samsung phone, I just started buying Nexus or Nexus-like devices (like the Moto X) because, like you, I actually enjoy using Android when my devices aren't kept on outdated versions and loaded with unwanted addons.
• pkaye 12y ago
  I hate how every 2 months I get some random app automatically installed by Samsung on my Galaxy S4.
• Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
  The blame is also with the customers that insist on buying Samsung (to then complain about their phones being crap) instead of giving other manufacturers a try. The UI of HTC phones has consistently been very good (I prefer it to stock Android by a mile) and the Sony one is quite decent. It's mainly Samsung TouchWiz that sucks, and it's a pity because that's all the Android most people see.