[dotnet00]

That reputation was why I had stuck to brands which stayed closer to a more vanilla Android experience.

My experience with their latest stuff has been that they do still have a lot of bloat and duplicated functionality, but the base experience is much closer to stock Android than what I remembered from their older phones. To put it differently, it looks and feels similar to the near stock Xperia 1 ii I switched from but has all sorts of little differences.

I actually find myself using a lot of the functionality too, so it feels a bit less "bloated" to me.

I haven't really noticed ads though. They do recommend stuff, eg their camera app has a bunch of modes and the "Expert RAW" mode was shown in the app but required a download from their app store. I don't really count those since they're somewhat more relevant than say, Windows advertising candy crush on the start menu.