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Comment by NathanCollins | Hacker News Reader

It's not a toggle, but Google Pixel phones (or at least the one I owned a few years ago) come with very few if any bloatware type apps, since the default Android apps are the Google apps anyway. Contrast with Samsung that duplicates a bunch of core apps/functionality.

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Motorola is also super minimal/mostly Google. I think the only bloatware on my newest was an app to control 'moto actions', which I find gimmicky but some tend to like.

Yeah, my previous Samsung I had to spend a half hour with adb to get all their junk disabled.

Not sure what you mean by default Android apps but Google Pixel apps != AOSP's stock apps. AFAIK most apps can now be disabled in Settings on recent Samsung phones, I'm not a fan but I don't think they're that worse compared to Pixels, especially on the flagship devices.

Switching from stock to grapheneos more than doubled the battery life of my pixel 6 pro.

They install plenty of bloatware on google devices, but since it’s all background surveillance stuff, it doesn’t clutter the UI.

Sony’s phones also come with minimally modified Android. They still have 3-4 bloatware apps to remove with ADB but it’s pretty manageable. I picked up an Xperia 1 V on discount to take the position of “flagship phone” in my Android app dev testing lineup and if I were switch my daily driver away from iOS, it would be in my list of considerations.

In my experience Samsung's flagship phones are top notch hardware with superb build quality. According to user reports on the internet the latest Google Pixel can't even manage to connect to the cellular networks reliably and without overheating. I wish Samsung would step their security game up to GrapheneOS standards because I just can't trust Google not to fuck the phones up.

Pixels come only with bloatware.

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