Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kuinox | Hacker News Reader

Since 7 years I hear that Samsung apps are "quite nice theses days".

I never found it to be true.

I owned a Samsung S7, it was atrocious, people said it was great, the bloatware was painful, the gesture to open the apps drawer was conflicted with the gesture to open Samsung pay (which didn't worked with my bank), you can't disable Samsung pay, if you switch the launcher, it's still there. Searching the settings took literally 10 seconds. It's default behavior is to stay on while charging, the whole screen have the lock screen burned in now.

My mom own a Samsung 10e, people also said "Samsung software isn't ad now", they rewrote their own clock app. It doesn't support having multiple timers?!? Worse, asking Google assistant to add a timer, reset the previous one. This is due to Samsung bloatware, the stock android clock doesn't have this issue.

View on HN

>Since 7 years I hear that Samsung apps are "quite nice theses days". I never found it to be true. I owned a Samsung S7

To be fair that S7 from 2016 doesn't count as being from "these days" anymore, so your opinion is not up to date, as Samsung made pretty big strides in the last few years past 2020 compared to how it was when you last remember it with the nasty Touchwiz.

Totally. My S21 Ultra 512 with OneUI 6 with Android 14 is a very, very nice UI experience; got the update around the new year.

I'm in love with the new drop down settings screen especially.

Yeah TouchWiz was horrible. OneUI is lovely and way better than native Google IMO. My S8 really became a much better phone with that update. Unfortunately it was also its last :'(

For browser I'm Firefox all the way though!

They are industry leading in Android for quite some time. They often have innovations first that then Google generalizes in Android itself. For example, lock screen customization, secure folder, even work profile was first available on Samsung devices. Samsung literally contributed work profile (Knox) to AOSP.

What do you call "lock screen customisation" ?

> even work profile was first available on Samsung devices

Work profiles are available since Android 5.

Your experience is well out of date

People also said this to me when I had a S7, my mom then got a S10e a year after it's release. It's UI was only slightly less worse than the S7.

Many people in the Android ecosystem, me including, prefer OEM customization than whatever Material something gets thought out at the Googleplex.

And I have owned several S generation phones.

While I might one day leave Samsung for the lack of Bluetooth codecs, in 2024 the UI is really very nice and I would miss it on many other "more stock" Android devices.

What would you miss in the "more stock" android devices ?

Too many to list, but it's small things such as seeing how long a charge will take. Stock Android is certainly less refined.

> such as seeing how long a charge will take

This is a stock Android feature. I just plugged in my Pixel 6 and it indicated in the lockscreen it will be fully recharged in 21 minutes.

I had similar feeling about Samsung in the past but I think it is quite better nowadays. But there definitely is some AOSP/Samsung duality you cannot escape. My current gripes with existing s23+ is usually one of following:

1. Some of their features are being offloaded to unknown 3rd party vendors (e.g call spam detection). 2. They really want you to install some sort of McAfee AV on your phone to get the "secure" tick. 3. They are usually about a month behind when it comes to Android security patches. 4. Phone comes pre-installed with crap.

Agree with 1,2 and 4. Too much privacy-invading external crap.

But they're not really behind. I already got the 1 January Android security update a few days ago on my S23.

Considering they need to do testing and possible modifications I don't think this is very slow.

I am still on the 1 November 2023 security update on my AU S22 Ultra.

Weird. Even my A52s which is both older and much cheaper (like a quarter of the price!) than your S22 Ultra is on 1 January 2024. It still gets timely monthly updates.

I wonder if it's your provider being difficult here. The problem with branded (or sometimes even sold with contract) phones is that the carrier wants to meddle in the updates because they're afraid of issues on their network or something. And this can cause huge delays.

I always buy my phones separately, mainly because I hate contracts so I'm on prepay always but having unrestricted updates is another big benefit.

Hmm, maybe I was too harsh. I got the change log here: https://doc.samsungmobile.com/SM-S916B/XSA/doc.html

Seems like anywhere between one to three weeks. I think the auto update is a bit lazy. Had to force update on mine just now to make it get January update.

Yeah and the 3 week one coincided with the Android 14 / OneUI 6 upgrade so it's kinda understandable because there was a lot more testing.

It's not perfect but I like it now (In the TouchWiz days Samsung was really bad at updates, they've improved a lot)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com