Unfortunately there's no better option out there. If you had an iphone you'd have even less control over your phone.
I'm in the same boat, I have a Samsung at the moment because the hardware is nice, but I'm pretty dissatisfied with the bloatware and IMO Android in general is getting further and further away from satisfying the power users.
The default Gallery app is a UI abomination, and you can't completely replace it with something better (the Camera app will always use the Samsung Gallery App to review photos, there's no way to change it).
I'm absolutely irate at Samsung and Google/Android. Once again, the latter company is absolutely burning up goodwill it's engendered among technical users.
I'm keeping my eye on alternatives. There's a Spanish-made Ubuntu phone which might be suitable.
Otherwise, a small ultralight notebook could be useful, but from whom? I've run Thinkpads for nearly 20 years, but find current offerings abominable. I don't care for Apple hardware precisely because of keyboards and mouse/trackpad options.
Samsung's iron fist over apps is similarly pathological.
Background: highly experience Linux user. On a budget, and move, needed something for basic connectivity. Wanted a larger tablet.
9-10" Nexus devices nowhere to be found in brick-and-mortar stores (and hard to come by online as well). Almost always crippled by pathetically small storage.
My Samsung Tab A isn't rootable, flashable, had an absolutely useless userland installed (Termux has helped some with that), and now insists that the tools I've used to try enforcing my will are malware, and won't stop nagging me over this.
The default featureset is so pathetically poor that I could neither figure out where disk space was being used, or address moving things elsewhere, necessary for an OS upgrade. Which now fails on account of rooting attempts.
I'm pretty fucking pissed at Google, Android, and Samsung at this point.
And that's before getting to hardware issues.
Offering computers to the public at large is apparently an intractable problem.
(There's another set of gripes I could write about OS X. And I just commented on Debian's fucking up 20 year old mouse drivers.)