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Comment by midoridensha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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