I personally don't see the appeal of a premium product that includes bloatware when you can now get premium products without bloatware. I tolerated it in the early days of smartphones when there were fewer options and even fewer good options, but their "improvements" always felt gimmicky.

>Samsung annoy me with all the bloatware etc

This is why it never has been and will never be considered a premium android phone. Samsung's apps are awful.

It's amazing that all those other companies have not figured out that their apps are generally bloat, and they release all sorts of models to Apple's fairly tight lineup.

The winning example of tight product management is right there for them, but they continue to act like 'feature factories' without any concious 'whole product' design philosophy.

Probably many people within these organizations are aware, but they don't have the power to resist ingrained operational culture.

There is a possible winning strategy in trying to cover bases Apple isn’t interested in. Apple has shown that they’ll make phones that seem to be successful to some degree (the mini) but just aren’t successful enough by whatever internal metric Apple is using. And there are some things they just don’t have right now like foldable phones.

(I’m aware of the rumors)

That doesn’t mean you can’t go overboard. I don’t know Samsung’s current lineup, but I think we’ve all seen PC manufacturers who make 75 different models that are all just ever so slightly different for seemingly no reason.

They make them for channels, not consumers, and, it's partly 'an east Asian' supply chain business culture thing. They're not thinking about how the brand/product appears as simple form in consumers minds, but about deliveries, parts, channel customers, optimizations, national differentiations.

It takes an incredible amount of organizational discipline to do what Apple does and without that ingrained into culture it has zero chance of working.

And yes - they are trying to fill a lot of holes - all sorts of holes, in all sorts of different ways.

It may be true that this is actually an optimal 2cnd place strategy. Samsung may possibly be dong the right thing and consumer confusion is the price we pay for not paying a few extra $ for an iPhone.

Come on, don't you just love Bixby?

> This is why it never has been and will never be considered a premium android phone.

You are entitled to your opinion, but the S series is objectively considered a premium android phone by basically everyone. By your standard, the only possible contender is Google’s Pixel lineup, but I get the feeling you might consider Google’s forced 1st party apps as intrusive too.

gApps and its stipulations are forced on all downstream android partners too. That's just part of how the capital-A Android ecosystem works. Generally google's apps are decent though and people refer to their minimal distribution as being "not bloatware".

>the S series is objectively considered a premium android phone by basically everyone

Not by anyone I know

>I get the feeling you might consider Google’s forced 1st party apps as intrusive too.

You'd be incorrect

Which apps are the bloatware I keep hearing about? I use an S20 for several years, and the only custom (non-vanilla Android) apps I seem to be using are the camera, and the photo gallery in connection to it. Both are fine, do not require a Samsung account, etc.

The last Samsung phone I owned had a hardware button for launching Bixby. I've never wanted to use Bixby in my life. To this day I have no interest in learning what it actually does. You could not change the function of this button. It was just a button that I would press accidentally that would begin the apparently laborious process of starting up Bixby.

I'll probably never buy another Samsung.

Edit: Just thought of another one. I remember reading the news about how Android SMS was getting upgraded to have emojis or reactions or something. I don't remember the details. But it didn't work on my phone. A year later, I realized it was because I was using the Samsung messages app, instead of the Google one. I didn't even realize it.

I had a phone with a Bixby button too. I remapped it to other apps, and never used Bixby. I wish phones had more hardware buttons again.

The one I had didn't have any obvious way to remap the button. Across several years of ownership, I probably spent a total of an hour looking for such a capability. Certainly more than I did investigating what "Bixby" is.

Now I have a ulefone, a budget brand with no particular name recognition. It has a button in the same place, with an easy way to map it. And it cost a quarter of the Samsung. shrug

It's so bad that phones come with a "Samsung Global Goals" app to push the UN ideology.

>The Samsung Global Goals app is a, CSR initiative partnering with the UNDP to promote 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, fight inequality, and fix climate change by 2030.

>to push the UN ideology

I think you fell into the wrong rabbithole somewhere

Such virtue signaling by app is lame and hypocritical, but the UN is far too divided to be pushing anything.

The wrong rabbit hole of finding a pre installed app pushing politics to be icky.

I honestly don’t know what is political about saving resources and our planet. The details on how to do it are potentially politics, but that’s not what the SDGs are about.

It's a 42 day old account that complains about "UN ideology". Just flag and move on.

I don't know why you rightoids have fixated on the UN 2030 thing. I had to do endless projects about it (SDGs and similar) in college and it was just the most milquetoast, unrealistically hopeful thing ever.

I don't really know what the big deal is.

I disagree. Samsung Notes has always been more useful and better designed than Google Keep, especially the way it works with the S-pen. GoodLock makes it possible to customize your Galaxy phone in ways that are impossible even with developer mode on the Pixel series.

GoodLock is one of the best apps on Android. I wish it were part of the OS and available on every device.

Samsung had been kind of side grading their flagships and offering worse SOCs depending on location, paired with there plainly being more options for Android there'll be more variety spread out over the different manufacturers

To this day my S6 was the phone I was actually happiest with. Mostly just because of its durability, fit and feel (and the screen of course) rather than any particular tech spec.

I am stuck on the (still working) S7. The physical home, back and application view button just feel so nice, that and the size, it actually fits in my hand, and pants pocket too.

I loved the feel and size of the S3. The rounded and smooth back felt great in the hand and you could throw that thing around without a case and it took it like a champ. If anyone make a modern phone like that again I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Oh god. I had a S3 as a teenager. I didn't know how to handle my anger properly yet, so whenever I got pissed off I'd just chuck the phone at the nearest wall.

It somehow never got any damage worse than a fucked up chassis, but it was still fully functional up until it got lost a little while after it got replaced.

>>Samsung annoy me with all the bloatware etc but the hardware is decent

I used to buy every S Ultra phone every year, thinking the same - this year I bought the latest Oppo instead and wow, what a bubble I used to live in. The battery alone blows the Ultras out of the water, the chip is just as fast but stays cool, the camera and the screen are just better. The only thing that Samsung had over this was the anti reflective coating. Oh and it actually charges like a modern phone not something from 2015.

I used to buy Samsung from S1 to S21, then I got a pixel and now the Oppo Find X9 Pro and wow, I forget to charge it. I've had days when I go to sleep with almost 80% battery. The pixel lasted me half day

I've been a pixel guy since HTC was making them for google, and honestly jumping from the 6 to the 9 has made me think that pastures are greener someplace else.

Pixel 8 Pro was my only pixel and I've been very disappointed about it.

Anything keeping you from Graphene?

Yeah I had it for 2 months now and I haven't had a single day finished with less than 50%. My S24 Ultra I usually had to charge around 3-4pm or it would be going into power saving mode by 8-9pm

Samsung has really fallen behind the last couple years IMO. They use very different chips in different regions, and refuse for some reason to embrace bigger batteries.

Phones out of China these days are all sporting ~7000mah batteries, even in smaller form factors. Samsung's biggest phone only has 5000, and that's not a small difference in battery life.

Maybe they're still reeling from the Note 7 fiasco?

Samsung has really been dropping the ball and has basically reduced themselves to a "No kids, we have Apple at home" clones outside of their fold line ups. Their OneUI updates have borrowed heavily from liquid glass.

The S series have had the same camera hardware since the S22, and the upcoming S26 is no different. That's 5 years of the same exact hardware, and borderline the same display since the S21.

People like to give Apple shit for releasing the same phone year after year, but Samsung has literally been releasing the same exact phone for 4+ years now.

Now, they scrapped the edge late, brought back the plus, delayed the S26 because Apple forced them to put 256GB as the base storage instead of 128, and there's rumours of a wider aspect ratio fold on top of the regular fold. They're just throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to see what sticks.

Samsung has no vision.

> Samsung has no vision.

I entirely agree with you, and profoundly dislike them, but it's clearly working for them if their financials don't lie. While most other manufacturers bleed money, Samsung had healthy profits on smartphones last time I checked. It still puzzles me that anyone would buy them at all, but I've long accepted that I'm not a representative sample.

So given that, I don't see why they would bother coming up with a vision after all this time.

I managed to purge myself of Apple as of a couple of years back by getting an s24 ultra.

Main things that stand out over apple:

- Much higher resolution camera w/ pretty incredible zoom. Though overall picture quality is a far closer comparison.

- S-pen, mostly used for its remote capability, shame they dropped that for the s25...

- Samsung Dex. I use my phone as my laptop daily, I've also used it as a dumb terminal for remote gaming while travelling which works exceptionally well

- Access to alternative browsers, ad blocking, alternate stores, side loading apps etc

While Google is no angel Apple actively works against open systems and control of your own devices, I'm glad to be out of that ecosystem.

Samsung seems to be targetting a sweet spot. "Costs less than Apple, superficially looks like an iPhone, product lineup includes smaller form factors, good enough."

It doesn't work for me, but that's because I courageously use my headphone jack.

I've owned the SII, Note 4 (and a few Pixels in between) and now the S24. The S24 is by far the worst Android phone I've used. Massive battery drain on stand-by, even with AOD off. It has about half the battery live of a Pixel 5. Many accidental touches when in your pocket which will screw up all sorts of settings. Annoying push for their AI. Sub-par fingerprint sensor. The only reason I bought this phone was because it is one of the last compact phones around.

That "bloatware" is just alternatives to Google's software and systems, and much of it isn't bad, if not better.

I prefer the Gallery app over Google Photos, the Samsung My Files app is cleaner than Google Files, Studio is a decent video editor, Samsung Notes is a capable rich text editor with pen support, Dex is a usable desktop shell, and more. Anything I don't like - like Bixby, Store, Keyboard, Wallet, Pass and Internet - I can easily replace and even hide them in the Settings. Combined they take up minimal storage.

I'm not sure what people expect Samsung to do, just use whatever Google says to use and not try to innovate?

> I'm not sure what people expect Samsung to do, just use whatever Google says to use and not try to innovate?

To me, the benefit of the S series was "Android on decent hardware". I would have preferred as close to stock Android as possible. I mostly use F-Droid stuff anyway, though of course that means I am far from the average consumer.

They are primarily a hardware company - it seems reasonable to expect them to innovate there, and leave innovation in software to the software companies.

Can you really be "just" a hardware company and still compete with Apple, which is both a software and hardware company? Samsung has its own ecosystem of products and services to manage and unify.

If I'm Samsung and I'm trying to compete in the market against Apple, I want to provide as much as possible to my customers, without needing to rely completely on a third party.

Also, when the OS or app on a Samsung has problems, customers don't blame Google, they blame the company that sold them the phone. If I worked there as a product manager, I'd make the same choices to help the company maintain as much control as possible.

No I think when people speak of bloatware, they think more about, for instance, the 3 preinstalled Facebook app. Of which 2 of them are systemized, effectively hidden and can’t be uninstalled.

Huh! I had no idea about those services. I just checked my S21 Ultra and yep, they were there. It took like 20 seconds to force stop and disable them, though I'm sure they'll be re-enabled during the next update.

Honestly, I'm not sure I care enough to worry about it. If I've never noticed in the past 5 years, then they weren't adding much "bloat".

When I think of that sort of useless software, I imagine all the OEM crap that Windows laptops come with that usually cause instability and hog resources.

Sure, they weren’t annoying and aren’t taking much space.

It’s more about privacy, when you launch a firewall like pcapdroid and notice all the data these apps send in the background… that’s insane.

Plus, I just gave you 3 apps but there are dozens if not hundreds of them on any third party rom. The list is never complete because it keeps changing with each update. Some can’t be disabled or uninstalled because they break the phone.

Once you get in this rabbit hole, it’s maddening and you start to appreciate stock rom like iOS or pixel.

The Samsung A-series are way too good for the price. I'm not surprised people aren't willing to pay twice the price (a Galaxy S) for incredibly marginal gains.

If you're not trying to use your phone as a gaming PC, or taking pictures in the dark, cheap Android phones are all you need.