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Comment by codalan | Hacker News Reader

The stock Android dialer is a complete UX hellscape.

Every other time I need to dial a number, I will be randomly interrupted by some dialogue to enable a feature or to learn about X, when I'm urgently trying to make a call. It's so f-ing rude and intrusive. And it's designed to trick you into enabling shit without giving you time to think it over.

It's such a scummy thing to do, but hey, it's Google. Imagine having to make an emergency phone call, but you can't until you tap through all the prompts. Google basically broke core functionality to do this, and there's no way to disable this nonsense.

Seriously, I just want my phone to be a phone, not some feature riddled shit app that does everything (poorly).

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Are you sure that's Google and not your device manufacturer or your carrier? The dialer on my Android phone seems OK. I'm not going to claim it's the best UX ever, but it certainly doesn't interrupt me with dialogs about anything. Android phones are infamous for having carrier-required crap pre-loaded.

I switched from LG to a pixel. I don't regret the better hardware or more frequent updates, but so many tiny things were substantially better on the LG.

Biggest peeve: on the LG phones I had, you could use the volume buttons / menu to silence or turn down individual applications. On the pixel, out of the box you only get a global media volume control.

Also have experience with the stock phone dialler putting up prompts while I am in the middle of doing something else, which never happened on LG. The other big annoyance is the timer portion of the clock app is significantly harder to use.

All that said, I will happily take stock android on the pixel any day over any Samsung product.

Yea, I feel like there's a big cargo cult element to the claims of carrier skins being crapware by default. I remember the moment I realized that the moto x (first post-Google moto phone) and the contemporary galaxy s both had solid advantages over the pixel. Eg Samsung beat pixel to the quick settings menu by YEARS (and by extension iOS by even more years), and this is now an industry standard.

Notice how in this conversation, no precise program name or version was brought up. "The stock dialer on an LG", "the dialer on a Pixel"...

On a computer (a real computer), the first words would be something like "On Firefox 106.0.2 64-bit", but phones have such abysmal user control that most of the time we don't even know what programs we're running.

To be honest, I'd have to do some digging around to get exact versions of a fair amount of my software on my latop- much of it isn't immediately surfaced in the UI, and where it was installed from could be from several places.

In android, every app version is found in the exact same place on my phone:

Settings > Apps > (select an app) > very bottom has version number. App details takes you to the full details page in the play store, which shows the full name of the app and the publisher name.

Pixels are great as long as you don't need to call 911.

Pixel 7 Pro.

Right now, this is my only major gripe on an otherwise great phone.

I have strong suspicion you are not talking about Google's android dialer but some chinese ad-infested knock-off. When I used to have crappy Xiaomi, I had ads everywhere - settings, basic 'android' apps, most probably dialer too, definitely SMS sending app and so on. Threw it away and never looked back.

There are premium androids who give users completely different experience, be it Samsung, Sony, Google etc etc etc. Literally hundreds of models to pick your match. On my S22 ultra I never saw a single similar ad since I bought it. I wish people stopped bashing android just because they cheaped out and then found out that cheap phones are actually cheap to get revenue back in baked-in ads (there are other concerns coming from Google as creator but that's a different topic, since there is no saints among phone manufacturers and lure of ads revenue is too strong even for Apple)

Samsung phones were actually highly ad laden until they realised it was hurting their brand about a year or two before you bought yours. I'm expecting ads to slowly slip back in.

Huh? I've had numerous Galaxy phones since S8 and there's no issues with ads throughout the OS.

Same. I've had an s8 and and s20, neither have this ads issue described.

Xiaomi makes fine hardware with overly intrusive firmware installed on it which they sell for competitive prices. The solution is the same as with any other Android device: install one of the many AOSP-derived distributions on it and you have fine hardware with clean firmware offering OTA updates and more freedom than any vendor-supplied distribution offers, not to mention waaaay more freedom than the Apple/iOS combo offers.

Yeah but as father of small children, camera that is always in the pocket is hugely important for me. AFAIK Xiaomi camera app/drivers/whatever is the proper name is a signed blob that has no source available, so something more basic is used instead in those free distros. Thus photo quality suffers since its finely tuned for given sensors/lens/cpu combo. At least that's how I grokked it few years ago.

Since then I've realized phone is by far the most important device in my life, so not cheaping out on it anymore and seeing the difference in every photo.

That must be the Google Dialer app. The one in LineageOS which I guess comes from AOSP is perfectly fine and never bothers me about anything. Come to the dark side! ;-)

I am using stock Google dialer and don't have such experience either.

Anyway, OP can always pick the one that works for him. There's lots of options.

What about iOS where you cant copy in a number and then edit it? Every time I want to call a foreign number and need to add a country code I need to make a new contact and then edit that.

This one drives me crazy in all iOS phone number entry type situations. once you've dialed in the the 10 numbers, it makes it into whatever that little bubble is called that makes it no longer editable. you have to delete the whole bubble of 10 digits, and start typing the whole number again instead of being able to edit the probably single digit that needs correcting.

However, I'm old enough to remember the pain of recognizing a mis-dialed number from rotary phones. Old enough to remember only needing to dial 5 digits. Then the pain of having to dial the full prefix going to 7 digits, growing to full horror going to full 10 digit. luckily by 10 digit, touch tone was in place.

My parents technically don't have a four digit local number any more, but it's the same† national number as it was back then. BT moved two digits from the exchange code to the local part when they digitised the exchange.

†: All UK national numbers gained an extra '1' after the leading '0'; I'm asserting that change doesn't count.

Ohh. And if you think you're so clever and type that prefix before Paste-ing, it doesn't just paste, but replaces all digits you have typed. I also love it when sites omit a country code in their numbers like "(xxx) xxx-xxxx". Well, at least it's not a jpeg.

This!! Why the hell cant you move the cursor thingy and edit the number?? We are on iOS 15 or whatever and they cant get this feature right??

What phone are you using? That sounds like a terrible experience, I'll need to make sure I avoid it.

For what it's worth, you can install a new dialer from the Play Store. Or you can grab an open source one from F-Droid. The Simple apps are quite popular because they just do one thing and do it well, i.e. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.dialer/

Or just use an iPhone.

This is the problem with Stockholm Syndrome. You think you're on the right side the entire time.

The things two prisoners whisper through the gates...

No thanks, I'd rather shoot myself in the eye than have to use Safari.

You can use any browser on iPhone.

You can use any browser skin on an iphone. They're all the same web view.

Right, but the underlying engine doesn’t matter much practically speaking. I don’t think I’ve ever run into a situation where the browser on iOS limited me from doing things I would want to do on mobile.

I use FireFox on iOS because it syncs with FireFox on my laptop.

I disagree, plenty of posts here that start with "doesn't work on my iPhone".

Apple forces you to adjust to their terrible browser engine by taking away your users' ability to install another browser. Many websites put in the effort to make their stuff work on Apple devices but that's far from a given.

The browser engine is exactly why I don't want to use Safari.

And instead of option to pick dialer, be stuck with the crappy one provided by Apple(lack of spam detection, lack of business directory), with no option to change. Great idea.

That's a great dialer, but unfortunately one cannot choose a default phone number for a contact with it. So for contacts with multiple phone numbers (and that's most of my important contacts, your use case might be different) one must choose with number to dial each time that person is called.

Pixel 7 Pro, but I wouldn't avoid it because their dialer sucks. It's still a really good phone when compared to the iPhone/Samsung Galaxy/etc., and it's the only Android phone series I'd consider in the future.

When I had a Samsung Galaxy, I installed the full suite of Simple apps onto it because the included apps sucked so bad. Simple gets it mostly right from a UI/UX perspective, and I was happy to support the author by purchasing the apps in the Play store.

You're probably talking about some chinese dialer on top of android, Google one is clean and essential.

One thing I always struggle with is that phone becomes painfully slow and heats up like crazy on a call. The one thing it should do without effort seems like the heavier one on the hardware. Wonder how they managed to do phone calls 20-30 years ago if it's such a compute intensive task.

To be fair, a good chunk of Android in total is a UX hellscape. This coming from a lifelong Android user. One of Android's greatest strengths (customization) is also it's greatest weakness.

Why do these bullshit comments always seem to end up on top?

“Engagement”

I've literally never experienced this with the Google dialer app.

I have literally never experienced this on my Galaxy S10, or any Android before it. Is this new?

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