[StevePerkins]

It's crazy that I'm the first person in this sub-thread to mention Samsung, when they are by far the market leader in Android phones. They have decent options at pretty much every price point.

For some reason, HN and Reddit just hates this company, and I don't understand why. People talk about "bloat", because Samsung ships with their own apps for things like phone, clock, calculator, etc. But it's trivial to uninstall those, and/or set the Google stock Android counterparts as your system defaults.

People get all weird about One UI, but my son has a Pixel and I have a Galaxy and I honestly don't see much meaningful difference between the two (other than his phone getting hot as hell because Google's own Tensor silicon sucks). I just recently switched back to Android from Apple, perhaps these UI skins were further apart in the past?

I think a lot of contrarians just hate Samsung because it's the market leader, simple as that.

[__MatrixMan__]

They switched the home and back buttons... why? I can only assume it was to make competing android phones feel awkward such that those who step foot outside of Samsung quickly run back to "safety".

[StevePerkins]

This?

https://i.imgur.com/9uUJLaz.jpeg

I've never seen any kind of UI where the "Home" button wouldn't be in the center. And you have the option of placing the "Back" button on the left and the "Open Apps" button on the right, or vice-versa.

[__MatrixMan__]

Agreed, home is always in the center. My comment is regarding whether "back" is left or right of home. Samsung defaults it on the right side, everybody else puts it on the left: https://www.androidcentral.com/how-switch-position-navigatio...

Recent android versions have put more of this in the the hands of the app, for better or worse. So it's not especially material nowadays.

My point is just that it's an example of Samsung making design decisions which leverage the fragmentation to create confusion among the users.

I noticed it when my boss said that non-galaxy devices feel awkward. I ended up using his phone later and realized why: vendor lock in through muscle memory. It's the kind of monopolistic move that only the largest fragment can benefit from--anyone else puts themselves at a disadvantage by departing from Android defaults. But Samsung, since they control the majority, can bias the market in a way that makes the defaults feel weird. It's rather Apple-like if you ask me.

... which is why I use a Pixel. I hate Google, but they're what I'm stuck with, so I might as well not be messed with by anyone else.

[StevePerkins]

I'm sorry, but this is absolutely nonsensical. I literally just posted a screenshot showing that this is configurable on a Samsung.

In fact, when I first setup this phone, I had to specifically choose to make the home bar visible at all. Because the current default setting on Samsungs is to use "gestures" only. The same as the default setting on a Pixel now. All Android manufacturers seem united in pushing this, to ape iOS.

There are plenty of reasons to choose a Google Pixel. And I wouldn't quibble with any of them. But it's absolutely bizarre to point to a default setting as a reason, when they are configurable and when both brands use the same default setting anyway.

So many of these discussion threads are like this. It's perfectly fine to prefer a Pixel over a Galaxy. But people so often seem to take umbrage against Samsung for some reason, and when you poke at a little it rarely makes much sense.

[__MatrixMan__]

The umbrage comes from having spent a few years supporting these devices (or rather, failing to support them). I don't know how many times I've had to sit there and get yelled at because I abandoned a troubleshooting workflow once I realized that the user was in some kind of Samsungified experience that was 95% identical to the default Android one (and was therefore out of my scope of support here in the carrier call center, go call Samsung).

Once they got their yelling out, they would sometimes ask me why Samsung would bother recreating all of the Google stuff if it was indeed 95% identical. What's in that 5%, they'd ask.

How do you answer that question without seeing Google's influence on the software as a necessary evil and Samsung's as an unnecessary evil?