Well, if your OEM installed crapware in the system/vender/OEM partition, that's not really Android's problem. All other apps/services are very removable.

It is the customer’s problem, so it is jointly a problem for Android and the OEM. Google may try to abrogate responsibility here as usual, but it doesn’t make it any less their problem.

Dunno, the answer is generally if you don't want crapware, buy a pixel.

Motorola also ships ~no crapware.

But the pixels are (in my opinion) just such complete misses as phones. I’m not sure I’d want to use the latest Pixel if I got it for free, yet they charge an absurdly high price for it. I used to love my Nexus 4, and I liked my Nexus 5. It was absolutely amazing to have a real Google phone that I didn’t have to fight with in order to own for real at the lowest levels. But all the recent pixel phones have way too many trade-offs for me to use any of them as my daily driver. There are android phones out there which I like and would be happy to use as my daily driver, except on the software side they are way too locked down and I can’t root/flash them. I really wish phones worked the way computers do, I could just buy/build any hardware I want and run a fresh copy of Linux or windows on it under my complete control.

Why a complete mess? Sure Google is a popular target, much like apple, where a huge number of people chime in to complain. I've had every nexus and every pixel, all the way back to the HTC G1 on the first day it was for sale.

Sure choice of OS would be nice, but there's a huge number of man hours that go into making a nice touch UI. Something that experts don't tend to obsess over, unless paid.

The pixel's don't have a locked bootloader, and you could try one of the community builds, which I've done. But there's much less incentive lately. I used to root to tether, don't need to anymore.

Why is that possible on android but not iOS phones? Serious question - I assume it’s because of the way android is built but I don’t know How that works. Why is there preinstalled installed software on Android phones at all?

Edit: I’m not sure why this question is getting downvoted.

When a device manufacturer makes a phone that uses android they can do a lot of stuff with Android without any issues (beside UX), other than messing with APIs and legal things. iOS is exclusively made by Apple and nobody can release their own iOS, so they always have prevented others (even the carriers) from putting their own apps on the phone before the user gets the device.

Could google change the terms and say that device manufacturers can not preinstall custom specific types of apps or services?

Why would you buy an LG versus a Samsung? Too many android manufacturers to compete on just hardware alone. Even less so than Windows laptops and PCs. Customizing Android is the differentiator.

I personally hate it, but I understand why they do it. I just wish we could get a class leading vanilla Android phone. Pixel isn’t it.

They've made multiple attempts to do this.

Manufactures really hate the lack of flexibility and there is a small amount of justification: new hardware often does need new controls.

And of course many people like the flexibility of Android.

Because the comparable phone to iOS phones aren't "Android phones" but "Pixel phones". Phones where the OS vendor also builds the hardware and controls everything.

It's just a different model. Single corporation stack gives you more consistency and less bloatware and OEM based stack gives you more market choice and greater accessibility.

It is Android's problem because Apple has proven it's possible to tell vendors and OEMs that they can't do that shit.

It's not an Android problem, as you only have the issue if you buy from a shitty oem.

Get a device with stock Android ROM and there is no issue

Frankly, i think the ONLY thing worse than Android (which you correctly peg as terrible) would be a linux phone OS.

Worse in what sense?

Nothing working consistently?

Things breaking randomly?

Nothing looking consistent?

Aping all the bad parts of the MS ecosystem while missing most of the good (I firmly believe desktop linux peaking with KDE 2 and has been consistently downhill ever sense)

Are Apps on android sufficiently consistent or don't "break randomly"? I don't think I see much of material UI outside of Google's own apps (from the times I look at my friends' phones, I use iOS).

No, like I said, Android is terrible, I just think given history a random linux phone os would somehow manage to be worse.

I consider iOS to generally get the job done pretty well.

I've had all these issues on iOS and Android. I'm dreaming of Gentoo/Xfce on my phone.

I had an n900 and it was amazing to use. the only reason I switched to android was that nokia stopped delivering updates and bugfixes to maemo/meego and then of course there was never another good linux phone.

I sometimes dream of an Arch Linux Android OS. If only...

Already there are some linux phone, like Librem 5 and pinephone.

There have been Linux phones before, like the Nokia N900. But there hasn't been the combination of marketing push and, perhaps, polish required for them to succeed commercially against other platforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

Er, if you want pure android why don't you buy a pixel?

I guess because they are only available in a couple of countries, are expensive, and Google isn't any better than their OEMs keeping old devices updated.

Hadn't noticed the expensive side. They typically got half off within a month or two of announce. Got my Pixel 4XL 128GB for under $500 because of the Google Fi deal.

I still have a pixel 1 from 4 years ago that I think just stopped getting major upgrades. Not great, but not bad. My samsung note 4 was around a year behind on updates, and felt very slow because of all the crapware. I switched to a nexus 5, with a much lower spec and it felt MUCH better. Even simple things like hitting the home button had much less lag.

I did end up installing Cyanogen on the Note 4 which made it feel quite a bit snappier.

Android is so shitty it has zero chance to succeed as a mobile OS.

/s