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Comment by pranau | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of the features advertised here will make it onto the Android 10 release of other OEMs. In Android 9 for example, the ability to select text via OCR in the recent apps screen was limited to only the Pixel devices for some strange reason even though all Android devices had access to that feature prior to the release of Google Assistant via the Google app.

In a similar vein, Digital Wellbeing was officially limited to Pixel devices and Android One devices although it could be sideloaded onto other phones (where it ran perfectly fine) running Android 9+.

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Most of them are choice of the OEMs - e.g. Samsung held back Digital Wellbeing on their S9 phone updates so it could market their own reimplementation on S10 series.

Everything marketed here is available to all OEMs - Pixel specific features are marketed on Pixel marketing pages.

... We're getting more and more into an age where mobile hardware doesn't matter anymore, because it's become so fungible. And Samsung will do very badly, because they're hardware is good, but their software sucks so bad.

Regular consumers appear to have other opinion about bare bones AOSP UI.

I find it quite ugly from design point of view, loaded with an amount of blinding white colour.

Comparing Samsung's OneUI and stock Android, I would pick OneUI without blinking.

I used to hate Touchwiz.

It more comes down to the permanently installed crap software they bundle like it’s a 1998 emachine. And the lame Samsung account requirement. And Bixby. There’s that weird rewards program thing where you earn xp for using different features on the phone. The updates are slow. It feels more like spyware than standard google stuff. The whole thing is a pretty terrible experience.

I couldnt agree more, it has taken a lot of painful configuration to limit Samsung from butting I to every aspect of usage of my phone, and having damn near every update break that.

The bixby button is an endless pain, thankfully I found bxaction that helps stop it.

So, if some apps are bothering you, disable them? I routinely disable everything I won't use, and it's not only the vendor crap, but Google crap too.

It works perfectly fine without Samsung account. I couldn't be bothered to make one, and I'm not missing anything. If you do not have Samsung account, Bixby won't bother you either. Just because there was a step to make one in the OOBE, doesn't mean you have to make one, you can skip it.

Updates are there at the beginning of every month, I have no idea why you think they are slow (and for some reason, S8 updates are there day or two in advance to S10 updates... go figure). Samsung doesn't insist on using cloud services, unlike Google, where Google Photos nag the user to enable upload to cloud, even if the user never intends to do so. Google apps do not know the answer "no", Samsung (or Sony) apps do.

It's not just a question of design philosophy. Samsung software is often riddled with bugs, things don't work, features removed relative to stock android, forcing inferior version on us (like their keyboard...), then on top of it all the crapware, the fake android store, the lack of updates, etc. etc.

Samsung does either monthly updates for their newer models, or quarterly for the older. Galaxy S7 still receives security updates, for example.

It also has features, that will show in the next Android version. The dark mode, for example, has been there since they introduced Pie version. The only one feature that I noticed they removed, is the SIP client, which most users do not use anyway.

They do ship their keyboard, but you can still choose you own, the Android mechanism for that works. I also do not have any problem with it, it is on par with the Sony one, for example.

What I do appreciate though, is that their software doesn't push me into cloud services. Their gallery is perfectly fine with working just on device, without asking me to upload my photos somewhere, unlike Google Photos, which doesn't know the answer "No, thank you, don't bother me again". Samsung account is entirely optional, I still didn't create mine and it works perfectly well without it.

As the cherry on the top, the esthetic of OneUI is nicer than Google's. It makes somewhat softer impression, where Google apps are unnecessarily harsh.

I wouldn't be so sure to blame the OEM. Read this article [0]. Google dismissed a support ticket claiming that the OCR text selection feature was available only to Pixel devices released after 2017.

The Android Pie page [1] advertises the feature here as a standard Android feature under the system usability enhancements section.

This feature was actually available to all devices before the Google Assistant was released via a feature called Google Now on Tap.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/07/05/text-selection-android-p-o...

[1] https://www.android.com/versions/pie-9-0/

Another one: Motorola removed Android's native SIP support for VOIP from the Moto Gs user interface.

I recently found out that Samsung did the same.

Wait, Android has native SIP support? How did I not know about this?

Sadly the crazy useful feature of OCR selection was removed from my Pixel 2 XL which really unnerved me.

Question your OEM. Google actually prefers the phones have a standard set of features but the OEMs want to differentiate.

it's available in every platform as google lens app.

OCR text selection is available via Google Lens. What I'm talking about specifically is the ability to select out text from app pages where text selection is not usually possible. For example, say an app had button text or an embedded image, it is not possible to select these unless the app developer made those selectable. In Pixel devices, it's possible to go to the recent apps menu, and select these unselectable texts via OCR. This feature was previously available to all devices via Google Now On Tap but has since been limited.

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