Comment Re:Samsung apps are all like this (Score 1) 56
This actually drove me back to Pixels. I felt like I was constantly fighting against all of Samsung's crap. They IMHO made the messages app look deceptively similar to the actual Google app, same with contacts. I felt for years Google and Samsung were in a low key war to own my contacts. And eventually you reach a detente- you have all the bloat in check... and then a big update comes and its alll back again. And then one time I had these random terrible games just appear- and the cause was another helpful Samsung update that somehow installed some kind of backdoor to install these games. The same went for the UI- nearly every departure they did from stock android IMHO made things worse, and I was constantly trying to tone it down- I couldn't get the clutter of notification icons to go away without having to do pretty invasive mods that again often undid themselves when updates came.
The hardware was better from the POV of a specsheet, and that's what kept me on Samsung for a bunch of years. However, when the Pixel 6 came out I decided to give it a go. And it was just a huge addition by subtraction in terms of experience. I hardly tweaked a thing- the OS just stayed out of my way. The hardware, for whatever it lacks on a spec sheet or benchmark, has never felt sluggish to me. Whatever flaws in the optics are more than made up for by the software. I feel like I own the phone again.
There was just so much underhanded crap that Samsung tried to pull, I just felt like I spent way too much time managing the phone. The tradeoff for "lesser" hardware is 1000x worth it IMHO, even if I lost a bunch of features that I rarely used (example: split screen view- which was recently-ish added to PIxels). I am long past the point where I want to mod my phone with roms, I just want it to work and stay out of my way.