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Comment by m1keil | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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