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.