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Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

I bought my wife’s uncle a cheap Android phone after his old flip phone broke. At the time he needed to use Uber for his work commute, so a smartphone was in order. I helped him set up a google account, downloaded some important apps and showed him how to use them.

Fast forward 2 weeks and he’s complaining the battery only lasts a couple hours.

The Lock Screen was littered with gambling ads, there were all kinds of apps installed, and the phone was basically unusable.

He claimed to have no idea how it happened. I assumed he was just clicking on any/every pop up. Maybe he really downloaded 1 bad app which then self installed the rest of this crap?

Anyway, I went back to the store and bought him an iPhone SE. That was years ago now and haven’t heard a single complaint since.

I think android phones aren’t for the tech illiterate. It’s way too easy to screw them up.

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Apps can't just install other apps. You need system level permissions for something like that to happen.

It's possible malware somehow found its way to the phone, but the more likely scenario is that the phone was infected out of the factory.

The bottom of the barrel Android phones (no name brands, often phones <$200) feature system level adware that downloads and installs more crap as time goes on. It's one of the reasons these phones can be sold for that cheap.

I have to wonder what brand phone you got him. I've never seen this happen on brand phones, it's always the AliExpress/Amazon crap that's full of ads in seconds. Spend the same amount of money you'd spend on an iPhone SE and I highly doubt you'll get the same result.

I've owned several OnePlus phones, all bought straight from the company except the most recent one, which is T-Mobile branded and bought from the T-Mobile store. Unlike the previous ones, this one has strange behavior around app alerting permissions: I block all alerts from Starbucks or Prime Video, for example, and they're quiet for several days/weeks, then start alerting again. I thought I was misremembering at first, so I started taking a screenshot every time I turned off all alerts for an app and confirmed it's real behavior. I'm sure it's just a bug or something, but the conspiracy nut in me wonders if companies like those can slip T-Mobile some money under the table and get them to "fix" people's alerting preferences.

Android will retract permissions automatically if you haven't used apps for a while. It's possible that this mechanism is implemented wrong (i.e. they just reset the permissions regardless of whether they've been denied before).

I personally stopped trusting Oneplus a while ago. They once were the champions of open source Android phones with affordable models and clean ROMs, but they seem to have changed lanes to become your average Chinese smartphone manufacturer a while back, with expensive phones, questionable business practices, lacking update guarantees and support, and so on.

I've never trusted a carrier branded phone, that basically adds a layer of crap and problematic customization that I don't need. Carriers and ISPs are notoriously shit at providing useful services, that's why Apple become popular for refusing customized phones, and their incompetent and malicious layers on top of already mediocre Android implementations are just a recipe for disaster.

I realize these types of phones are much more common over in the USA, but there's a reason they're cheaper than when you buy the phone from a normal store and it's not because your carrier sympathizes with your financial situation and decides you deserve to save some money.

thats a fairly recent development.

This behavior drove me crazy enough to get an iPhone and I’ve never looked back. Respect my settings google.

I can't help but think that some sort of regulation here is overdue. You shouldn't need above average technical literacy just to avoid buying a product that actively and intentionally harms you.

The current status quo actually stifles competition, because the only way to reasonably avoid these products is to limit yourself to an oligopoly of established (and expensive) brands. Between the two extremes of reputable and adware-subsidized devices, no-name manufacturers that just want to compete on price with shitty hardware and limited support/updates have no real shot.

You either pay for the product or you are the product. No different than “free” software. Want a smart phone you’re going to pay for it one way or the other.

Not really sure what you're getting at. The devices we're discussing are cheap, not free.

> no name brands, often phones <$200

there are plenty of perfectly respectable phones available for less than 200 USD. At least they are in Norway, for instance, Moto, Nokia, Xiaomi. My Moto G30 (>6 inch display, 128 GB storage, 64 MP main camera) from Lenovo was only 120 USD a couple of years ago.

Can't imagine why anyone would buy a no name mobile at the same price.

Xiaomi have great hardware, but I can't trust their software one bit :(

If I need an inexpensive phone, I usually buy a refurbished or used phone from a good brand, like Sony or Samsung or Google.

Xiaomi makes it very easy to unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM. Of course you should trust the ROM makers and learning how to flash every device takes a little bit of time but I think is worth it.

Do they still require you to make an account with them and wait a few weeks, or am I thinking of a different manufacturer?

Actually thats a protection. Many frauds were found to custom unlock the phone and sell those phone with malware, so they decided to make unlocking process hard. Phone are unlocked by bad people, too, but I agree thats quite annoying.

> downloads and installs more crap as time goes on

That’s wild. Self replicating bloatware. How could this even be legislated against? I can’t figure out how to legally qualify something as “bloatware” vs something the user would want to automatically download/update.

With the amount of data this crapware collects, basic privacy regulations should do the job. Trojans and adware are already on the boundary between legal and illegal at best in many countries.

The problem is that nobody will go after the FWUWGFISA brand of phone on Amazon. They disappear next week and reappear as FUFWEIW. Either Amazon needs to get their crap together (I doubt that'll ever happen) or consumers need to make better purchasing decisions than "let's sort by price and pick the first one in the list".

Or the regulation could target amazon for selling sub par goods.

Easy on that one too: make the seller partly responsible for the shit they sell. Amazon is profiting from the situation, so make them responsible as well.

That'd be ideal, but that would also end sites like eBay and other points of sale for second hand items for good. You could make an exception for second hand sales, but then every shady foreign reseller will just list their item as refurbished.

I don't think there's a good way to solve this problem without massively impacting businesses that do deserve the benefit of the doubt. The driving force behind this crap is consumers preferring the slightly cheaper Amazon rates despite all the news about scams. Perhaps some public education campaign about the problems with resellers can help, and maybe some legislation forcing platforms to show the branding of the actual seller instead of their own, but I don't think placing the responsibility directly on the platform is a good solution to this problem.

On Android when installing from an unknown/unverified source, the installer can literally prompt you with a link to the correct settings page where you can enable installing from other sources, and once you click it opens the correct page, scrolls to the right toggle switch, and highlights it for you. So I totally believe OPs story.

If you enable that setting, your browser can install other apps. The app you're installing can't. There used to be a global toggle, but that's been removed for years. Sure, the app you've installed can prompt for installer permissions, but that's a second prompt you need to go through.

Even with this permission, you still need to manually verify every app you install. Background installation is reserved for apps part of the system image (i.e. Google Play, Samsung Store, Huawei Whatevertheycallit, etc.).

These apps don't just appear, they need to be confirmed every single time. For a dropper to get installed into the system and successfully install another app, you need to confirm four different security prompts. That also assumes Play Protect doesn't immediately get rid of the dropper; antivirus scanning, even for apps not part of the Play Store, has been built into Android system images for this reason.

I completely believe their story, I've seen these ad ridden crapdroids with my own eyes. But every single time they have come with malware preinstalled by some shady AliExpress/Amazon reseller.

Background installation for 3rd party apps was added in Android 12. You only have to complete the manual approval the first time

Or an OTA was pushed out with adware. Samsung and Xiaomi phones do this a lot.

I've never seen anything as aggressive as what the parent describes on either Samsung or Xiaomi.

Xiaomi is the worst, selling top spec phones for dirt cheap by subsidizing them with ads, but even they never ruin your battery life by spamming ads all over the place. Plus, you can turn them off during setup, but most people just hit next to get the annoying setup screens to disappear it seems.

I've bought used Samsung A50 few days ago as a spare phone. I had Windows Phones, iPhones previously but never got Android device for myself and I never saw anywhere (even in case of my mother's obscure low-end Android device) so many vendor apps being installed in such short time after enabling WiFi password.

The default choices for settings were terrible. Some components aren't even configurable at all - lots of Samsung's apps and default Android stuff can send notifications, sit in background all the time or report location if its enabled.

Kind of like windows 11

Worst is I’ve ever used. Absolute dog poop

Seriously - this machine crashes several times a day, FF in W11 takes WAY more resources than needed - and when I am browsing simple websites on a premier gaming laptop it thinks it needs to drop into 'top gaming performance mode'

and TABS! actually crash on this machine.

I go through at least 3 reboots a day just browsing the web.

Windows 11 is absolute dogshit.

And not to mention they are putting news and ads on my fucking start menu?

Also trying to get me to use microsoft outlook 365/whatever as my primary login initially...

F that. W11 is hands down the worst microsoft product ever made, that I am aware of.

Weird. I'm running Windows 11, and I reboot every week or two, if that. I have no problems with performance whatsoever. Mind you, I'm not a big fan of 11, but I certainly haven't seen the issues you're describing.

Honestly, my Windows machine needs no more attention than my Mac OSX machine. Technically, more, but I do a lot more heavy lifting on my Mac (so I need to reboot more often to free up memory and such).

Do you have a FW rule for blocking any and all ads/whatever connections whereby MSFT is slurping ads/news from?

EDIT: Rather ; can anyone help everyone with a write-up for locking MSFT ads out and keeping normal function?

Anyone 'wireshark' this bitch?

When something ubiquitously used breaks that often you should stop to consider if maybe your experience is not normal, and so seek to find what's wrong with it.

Hint, there's likely a problem with your hardware.

That's not normal at all. I have a healthy amount of hatred for Windows 11 myself, with its awful push to Microsoft accounts and the preinstalled crapware, but full system crashes are very rare in my experience. That sounds like a hardware issue (bad RAM?) or a broken driver to me. Gaming mode being triggered by browsing tabs does make it sound like some preinstalled tool by the laptop vendor is messing up.

Strange. Check your RAM maybe. I can't remember the last time Windows crashed on me.

More likely not enough swap space.

Windows doesn't overcommit and in GPU-accelerated apps these days the driver commits never-used main memory to back GPU memory.

Result is some users will have tabs and apps crash from out of memory even with 16 GiB of main memory if swap is disabled or very small.

I think this may be the answer... Ill investigate.

When you say "check your ram" do you mean consumption, or quality?

Run the memory test that comes with windows. It takes like an hour or something, and will tell you if the memory is malfunctioning - that would explain all the mysterious crashes.

I've had this problem out of nowhere one day (computer would not stop crashing randomly) and it turned out to be a defective memory stick. All good after replacing it.

Sometimes bad quality ram chips, or set with the wrong timing in UEFI, or just not properly seated ram, can cause problems similar to what you've described. Anecdotally I have W11 installed on 5 different machines and none of them have the issues you're describing.

It's' been a few years since I used an Android phone daily. But one of the nice things about iOS is the granularity of permissions. For Android app permissions are asked once during install and you take it or leave it. iOS is constantly renewing requests for location permissions and other things. And it reinforces that you are in control of your device. If you don't want an app or site to have location data you don't have to give it.

> For Android app permissions are asked once during install and you take it or leave it

I hasn't been like this for at least 5 years (maybe more), your knowledge is out of date.

Android permissions are asked whenever needed, granular and regularly expire automatically.

The same is true on Android today. You are asked for permissions the first time the app needs them, not at installation time. And various things require various permissions, you don't get asked in bulk.

Android also reaps permissions that haven't been used recently. In the case of location, Android prompts for renewal even if it has been used recently.

Are you comparing the permission system iOS has today with the one Android had a decade ago?

> For Android app permissions are asked once during install and you take it or leave it.

This is not correct. In fact the permissions paradigm for both systems is basically identical.

This is an irrational comparison. You are comparing an expensive brand phone to a cheap no name Android phone. If anything, you should compare the iPhone SE to a device by Samsung or similar which costs as much as the iPhone SE. I highly doubt you would get any malware there.

The article also mentions that the problem is not with Android, but with some unknown phone brands.

The comment is talking about installation of adware, which you can install on any Android device, including the flagships.

The Apple App Store does have shady apps (see for example the recent ChatGPT clones) but the problem there is much less severe. Whether it stays that way with alternative app stores proposed in the EU is an interesting prospect, and a separate question though.

Adware can also be installed on any Mac or Windows device, no matter the price. Apple fans always gesture at a supposed threat of breaking the AppStore monopoly, yet they conveniently ignore that such a monopoly already doesn't exist on their beloved Macs.

This sort of comment makes sense if you think phones = computers.

But a lot of people including myself think of them more as consoles or appliances.

And so it makes perfectly logical sense that we want the flexibility and freedom on our Mac but not on our phones.

No, it doesn't make sense, people want freedom on their appliances as well (hint: printer catridges)

Do you not remember how much of a problem malware was on windows just a few years ago? It's why the AV industry is a thing now It's gotten a bit better but still a valid concern

Evolution. Operating systems, and more specifically, security have been constantly evolving.

Bad actors have exploited vulnerabilities and because of that there has been a bigger emphasis on security, even down to the hardware level.

One could argue that the sandbox model used in iOS and other operating systems is a response to that era of malware. And we’re more secure because of it.

I don't think it's much of an issue anymore on Windows. A smartphone OS is also more locked down in terms of user rights.

Ironically, the only device I ever had to fix adware was on an iphone. Don't know if it's still possible but all the calendar got infested with ads which notified the user in loops.

For awhile people realized that if you spam calendar invites they appear on your phone. Not sure how rot was solved.

It wasn't even an invite, it was a calendar source (not sure of the exact name) which kept spwning more and more events as you go.

iirc there was a time where spamers would send calender invites to random gmail's

Samsung has their own malware.

My mom has done this to every device she's owned. My Christmas visit starts by me asking her why she has four or five weather apps installed, every app for every local news station, apps for "coupons", and everything else I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. On her iPad, her lock screen has a CVS receipt of garbage notifications.

Frankly, the problem is the ubiquity of native apps. You don't need a native app to get the weather. It shouldn't have any permissions. This is the whole premise of the web. The web has its own problems, but it can't ruin a device like poorly-considered native apps can.

iOS penalizes apps that abuse background privileges (running too frequently, running too long, being too resource hungry), so their background tasks get run less and less frequently over time.

So at least on iOS, the impact of native junkware is limited to notification spam and can't run battery life into the ground as badly. It's not much worse than PWAs can do with webworkers and push notification permissions (and if someone has been granting every app push permissions, you can be sure they'll do the same for PWA push permissions).

Against all odds, she hasn't enabled notifications for a single website. She knows she doesn't like getting notifications and usually always declines.

This also exposes a strange design decision involving the entire app system. Why do they need to be installed? you don't go to the manufacturers web store then explicitly install a web page so that you can then use a web app.

Apps are a remininent of the personal computer experience of installing software. but for better or worse that ecosystem does not really exist on phones. apps exist in a sandbox environment with a fine grain permission for device access. really they should just transparently install and run and uninstall. It should behave like a web page with a saner execution environment. the main reason the app ecosystem exists the way it does is so the os manufacturer can seek rent on the device.

This is why I am so thankful the internet and the web were developed in an academic environment rather than a commercial environment. centralized rent seeking was not a design goal of the internet.

He wasn't making it up. I work with a nonprofit and we needed 40 cheap tablets to run some custom app that we wrote. I had tight control over what was installed and clicked on.

After 9 months of using the tablets, they all would have an ad pop-up on the lock screen. I'm guessing that they came with malware that activated after X months of use.

Anyway, we wiped the tablets and reinstalled our app from scratch. It wasn't too hard because the tablets were single-purpose, but if those tablets were personal tablets with all of my favorite things, it would suck.

>cheap tablets

Those things are the bane of my existence. I support / develop some tablet / phone business apps. Some customers cheap out up front on tablets and then I have listen to them complain that leopards ate their face (the tablets come with pre-installed garbage, one of them demands you log in to at least 3 different services on every reboot, strangely slow / unpredictable OS response times to simple API calls...).

It's horrible, I own a couple of the customer's tablets to provide better support and +90% of the time the issue is "you cheaped out and bought a crappy tablet".

These folks save sub $10K or even way less than that up front and then these crappy tablets and their crap-ware eats up their productivity endlessly. Sometimes they have compliance issues with their own people because they tried rebooting and it takes FOREVER for the cheap tablet to actually be usable so their employees don't do the thing with the app at all...

I just tell them all they should have bought iPads / we recommend buying an iPad.

At this point I'm quietly lobbying that we stop supporting Android "unofficially" and push anyone new to use iPads. Android support will be there for the sake of saying we support it... but only as an alternative / best effort just because the ecosystem is full of such bad products / eats up our time with "not the application" / "your people didn't do the thing because they hate their tablet / it didn't work" issues.

There are tolerable (minimal crapware) cheapish Android tablets out there, but you're looking at ~$200US minimum to get those and they're still going to have terrible performance and won't be able to even handle homescreen animations without dropping frames. At that point you might as well spend that extra ~$100 for an iPad for even less crapware and a SoC that won't struggle with trivial things.

For a single-purpose device running custom software you wrote, I would consider Linux which is not an Android. Couple years ago, I wanted something similar on a smartphone, and postmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ worked rather well for me. The OS is based on Alpine Linux.

> cheap tablets

What brand?

> I think android phones aren’t for the tech illiterate.

As an Android user, I think I'm on-board with this sentiment. Anecdotally, most of the people I know with Android phones are in IT; specifically software engineers.

I once had to transfer files that were downloaded on my phone to a work laptop that couldn't access the external internet and no access to external storage. I installed Termux on my Android phone, dropped to the linux terminal, installed http-server and spun up a server on the local network. I was then able to download the files I needed off of my phone.

Quirky scenarios like the one I mentioned where I can "MacGyver" my Android phone is why I really like the platform. And then there's F-Droid so I don't have to deal with those pesky apps from the Google Play store.

> I once had to transfer files that were downloaded on my phone to a work laptop that couldn't access the external internet and no access to external storage. I installed Termux on my Android phone, dropped to the linux terminal, installed http-server and spun up a server on the local network. I was then able to download the files I needed off of my phone.

I don't get it, why didn't you plug in a USB cable?

Android file transfer is implemented via the terrible ancient standard MTP[0] which has spotty support anywhere but Windows.

I wish Android devices instead worked like iPods, which had a partition that mounted as a plain old USB/Firewire disk when plugged into a computer.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

It's so mondbogglibg what we still use it. With every phone becoming a camera phone, it's unusual NOT to have hungreds or even thousands of 2-3MB photos on your phone. But try to copy your Camera folder on a PC, - and Win Explorer acts like it has a heart attack! And it hasn't improved in entire freaking decade!

Actually, old HTC and Samsung Android phones used to register as USB Mass Storage device, but Android changed that to MTP in version 5 or so.

even remember a time when my galaxy s4 mini would ask me how it should represent itself when connected via usb; also drivedroid to emulate a cdrom drive with an downloaded .iso in order to boot older computers that don't know how to usb.

maybe i have been spoiled by the real computer in my pocket experience of custom rom's.

> I went back to the store and bought him an iPhone SE. That was years ago now and haven’t heard a single complaint since.

I would assert that the iPhone SE is the best smartphone bang for the buck, especially for users in your family with a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot and need your assistance.

The $399 iPhone SE from 2016 got six years of OS updates and just got another security update last month. That's about $57 per supported year.

bought a 1st gen SE in 2017, dropped daily, nothing broke to this day. what a phone!

I've moved away from the Android ecosystem long ago, so I don't know if this is still maintained, but there's the Addons Detector app[1] which can be used to locate adware applications.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?hl=en&id=com.denp...

There are loads of tools available to fix Android phones. The problem is that most people just use whatever is setup preinstalled. It would be a fun experiment for someone to document and post here: Buy the cheapest most bloated phone you can find and then: 1. Run the universal android debloater found on Github to disable all the crap. 2. Install some apps such as InviZible Pro to firewall the apps.

Just search the Play store for “antivirus” and install all of them.

/s that’s probably the problem with an unsafe OS by default.

>that’s probably the problem with an unsafe OS by default.

Considering how absolutely dreadful iOS has been when it comes to CVEs allowing arbitrary code executions with kernel level privileges, I don't really think anyone gets to talk about iOS being "secure" by default. Secure for your grandfather maybe. There's a reason Zerodium values iOS zero days less than Android ones too [0], which is quite telling of the amount of them they already have in stock. See also Pegasus, which literally had multiple no-interaction RCEs for iPhones through iMessage (because Apple keeps parsing files through horribly vulnerable parsers). [1]

Apple gets to pretend that iOS is secure because they control the app store, which is the only official point of entry, and iOS is closed source.

[0] https://zerodium.com/program.html

[1] https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...

> There's a reason Zerodium values iOS zero days less than Android ones too [0], which is quite telling of the amount of them they already have in stock.

You could be right, but I don't think it's a given that the latter follows the former. The reason that Zerodium values iOS zero-days less than Androids is more likely because the US and European governments that purchase these exploits from Zerodium value iOS less than Android, which itself could be attributed to there simply being more Android phones used by adversarial countries than iOS.

Nope. Case in point, Pegasus was used to attack the French Minister of Armies on her iPhone. Hard to attack someone more valuable than that. Zerodium doesn't blow zero days on showing ads to you, they are used for nation-state level attacks.

> There's a reason Zerodium values iOS zero days less than Android ones too

iirc it was the other way around for some time

This is a joke, right?

Many of these so called "antiviruses" are malware themselves.

In case you really don't know, the "/s" stands for "the preceding text was meant sarcastically".

I’m pretty sure it stands for “I was being sarcastic but my sarcasm wasn’t funny enough to read as sarcasm”.

It's a reddit thing which is why it doesn't land here on HN as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Ignoring under the hood OS and Subsystem. The Android UX started as a pocket pc, while iOS started as an Appliance. Even today that is more of less the same, although the both converge in the between as they look more and more alike.

I have a somewhat increasingly constrain opinion on HN. May be Steve Jobs's original model was right / better. Only First Party and extremely selected third party Native Apps. And everything else being Web / HTML 5 Apps.

The only good Android devices are the official Google Pixel series. Every other brand comes loaded with bloatware.

Nokia's Android phones are decent.

I have in high regard more Nvidia Shield Pro, to this day still bring updates since the last model 2019 and gives supports almost as Apple, shame it is unknown a new release version of this device.

The basic Motorola "G" phones were also fine for many years as far as bloatware/adware, but hardly get any security updates.

I can't speak to bloatware on their latest versions, because I switched to a Pixel due to the update policy.

Pretty much I loved the Nexus lineup and used the first Pixels but stopped buying them when the prices started approaching that of laptops.

Is the natural order of a public company to lower product quality and increase price?

What?

Haven't been following much (since I'm not interested in paying close to $1k for a phone) but from what I gather the Pixels are still excellent devices.

The brand-new Pixel 7A was priced $499 at launch with ~$125 freebies included in that price (free Pixel Buds or $100 off Pixel Buds Pro, basic case they priced at $25).

You absolutely get adware on iOS, I remember at least the calendar ad infestation as an example, and I had my fair share of broken icloud account to fix for my tech illiterate father as well. Don't know what they are doing on that aspect but even as a software developer, it was very hard to fix

I think it's ads in free apps. I kept telling my mom to stop installing free apps on Android. She really wanted this one card game. She swears she never clicked on an ad, but she constantly had malware.

I pretty much forced her to go to iOS and she's been happen ever since. She really resisted me, though, and complained for a few months, but now agrees it's better.

I switched in Jan 2020. I got so sick of having to upgrade phones every 2 years to get updates. I understand that's changed now (Pixel phones gets updates for 3 or 4 years?), but for more than a decade I bought a new phone every 2 years. I've had the same iPhone (11) since 1/20 and I will keep it for as long as it has updates and/or the battery lasts. So far, it feels like the day I got it.

Cheap android phones coming from some countries manufacturing them (you know which one-s) often have pre-installed shady apps disguised as regular bloat/admin process apps that can't be uninstalled, which deploys all kinds of attacks once the phone get configured and online. Same thing can be said of any smartphone (and pc os's), with the difference being you get spooked / polluted by knowned corps and so-called friendlies when you get Korean or US brands.

Nothing new, this has been going on since the early days of android / ios. Good hygiene: deactivate/uninstall any/all apps you can at first boot, reboot, then install anew all the apps you really use. Takes a few minutes/hours, worth it most of the time. YMMV.

It seems to me that targeting phones with built-in spying should be a higher priority for the USA than targeting TikTok.

It probably was the phone OS shipping with malware, but there is a different route that effects all phones, including iOS.

It's happens the authors loose interest in maintaining their apps. Malware authors then purchase their developer keys, issue an update (but change nothing else), and you find yourself being woken up at 2AM in the morning by some screeching Casino ad. Or at least that's what my wifes phone did to her, and of course it was immediately my problem.

I don't know if Android has an Update History for apps now, but back then it didn't. You don't know what app it is, because all the normal functional is untouched so it works as before. In my case there were two of them - which was worse because my technique was to uninstall one by one, then re-install if the problem continued. After a week or two of experimenting I found the right combination of apps to uninstall and my nights became peaceful again.

The Play store cleaned them out after a while of course, but it was painful at the time.

Android is the new Windows 95.

New Windows is bloated with the stuff I don’t want to see as well.

A bloated setup provided by the store or carrier might be an apt analogy, but a phone running AOSP or a fork of it such as Graphene is better compared to Linux.

How many smart TVs have you seen running AOSP? Zero? Yeah, me too.

I was speaking about handsets. You can install AOSP on an SBC connected to your TV which is what I would do rather than use whatever is built into a TV.

Yeah, I always ignore the TV’s smart interface and just use a set top box. Haven’t tried rolling my pan with AOSP yet, Apple TV is good enough.

I would switch to Windows 95 If I could.

Fast, user-respecting, and liberating?

Reminds me of my own comment, some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314868

I completely agree with your last sentence. The protected garden Apple creates is a blessing for most tech illiterate users.

At the same time, would you say they're therefore the better phone for the tech literate?

Make and model?

>downloaded some important apps

Why did you need to download anything besides Uber? You said that was the only thing he needed a smartphone for.

For the stuff the flip phone used to do. Soemtimes OEM androids can replace normal features with their own garbage. A better media player and safer browser is a good idea too.

It really doesn't matter to the point of the story though.

What is safer browser? And also, safer than what?

A browser that's not a years out of date chrome re-skin is a safer browser. Pretty much anything that gets updated regularly is good enough vs that.

I prefer firefox with a few addons because I generally know what I want, but opera and brave have good defaults out of the box from what I hear.

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