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Comment by drpossum | Hacker News Reader

Samsung is just consistently frustrating. Their hardware for consumer electronics (not appliances) is generally pretty good in my experience, but the attitudes they take towards their customers via this planned obsolescence and software/dark pattern "shove it down your throat and you better like it" hostile crap.

I've fundamentally had to change how I work with my phone because of garbage like "just save all the clipboard history, too bad if you don't want that" and "here you'd better like a dedicated button to Bixby" and now "LOOK WE HAVE AI NOW ON YOUR PHONE" as well as being one of the most egregious in the TV data thieving.

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For people that don’t know about the TV data thing:

Samsung openly admits to taking screenshots of whatever is being displayed on your TV at regular intervals, collecting this to their data centres, and selling this to advertisers.

NEVER use any Samsung consumer electronics device for working with sensitive data such as using a TV as a monitor!

Vizio did this too.

I have a total ban on Samsung products due to what you describe plus their complete disregard for user privacy. They are labeled as user hostile the same way Windows is. It will take them years of flawless behavior to convince me to change my mind.

I switched from Samsung Galaxy (first S, then S3) to OnePlus years back, and I've been a happy camper.

I currently have an OnePlus 9, I've heard no so good (compared to previous) reviews of their newer models, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there. My current phone has been running great for multiple years, minimal bloatware, would recommend.

I have a recent OnePlus and it's been excellent. I like it even more than the older ones I had, which is directionally quite different than my experience with Apple and Samsung.

Yeah, I'm honestly afraid to buy a new phone with all the horror stories. I still have my OnePlus 6T, Oxygen is fine but it seems like the ROM scene isn't what it use to be.

I have the 10 pro and although the camera is definitely an improvement over the 5 I used to own, the overall performance is about the same. I still have my 5, and use it a lot for POS stuff and it's great still. I even have a OnePlus 1 around and it still works decently although it struggles a little with some apps. That's a TEN year old phone.

I bought a Motorola G73 5G a few months ago, paid $160 for the 256GB variant including 25% VAT.

Compared to my primary phone, Samsung S21, it's a ridiculous amount of phone for the money.

But I find the default Google apps to be quite limited compared to Samsungs offerings. Google's calculator app has no unit conversion and a very bare-bones "scientific" mode. Google's file app has no way to search for files containing special characters, while Samsung's can do that just fine by using \ to escape the character.

I don't have a SIM in the Motorola as I just use it around the house, other is "work phone", so haven't tested the phone and messaging parts yet, but I recall Samsung were better there too several years ago when my SO had a Sony or something phone.

But yeah, seriously considering getting something else next time around.

> Google's calculator app has no unit conversion and a very bare-bones "scientific" mode.

Surely there are untold many suitable calculator apps on Google Play or F-Droid?

But to find one which doesn't suck and has no ads? Possible, but I'd have to spend time on such a trivial thing.

This one

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.nickfine...

Making the power button a dedicated physical hotkey for Bixby is one of the most egregious things I've ever seen on a phone.

Side question, are Samsung Electronics and Samsung Appliances really like 2 different companies under a Samsung umbrella in SK or are they actually the same company with employees being able to be assigned / move from group to group? Same question for LG I suppose.

Samsung is a gigantic conglomerate of hundreds of companies. They also make cars, houses, entertainment, healthcare services, chemicals and of course, yes, shipbuilding.

In the occidental world, we only see a small portion of the iceberg.

So I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that employees are frequently assigned from group to group. Maybe it’s possible as a big career change but even that seems unlikely.

When I visited South Korea some years ago, I took a delightful photograph of bag of Samsung-branded kimchi.

I wonder if it would go well with some Volkswagen sausage.

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

You mean Bibigo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

A chaebol (UK: /ˈtʃeɪbəl, ˈtʃeɪbɒl/ CHAY-bəl, CHAY-bol, US: /ˈtʃeɪboʊl, ˈdʒɛbəl/ CHAY-bohl, JEB-əl;[3] Korean: 재벌 [tɕɛbʌɭ] ⓘ, lit. 'rich family' or 'financial clique') is a large industrial South Korean conglomerate run and controlled by an individual or family. A chaebol often consists of multiple diversified affiliates, controlled by a person or group. Several dozen large South Korean family-controlled corporate groups fall under this definition. The term first appeared in English text in 1972.

The intensity and extent of market concentration became evident as 80% of the country's GDP is derived from chaebols. The largest of the group, Samsung, exports 20% of South Korea's goods and services alone. Although no longer financially supported by the government, these firms have attained economies of scale on such a massive level that it is extremely difficult for a startup or small or medium enterprise (SME) to surmount the high barriers to entry.

Similar to LG, is that correct?

I have no clue that's why I'm asking.

Yep. It's a Chaebol.

Antitrust really isn't a thing in Asia, so horizontal and vertical integration is extremely common.

Most Asian countries based their corporate structures on Japan's Zaibatsus and Keiretsus.

LG and Samsung are separate chaebols.

Ik. OP asked if it's "similar" to LG and I explained why - because it's a Chaebol like LG, Lotte, CJ (used to be part of Samsung), Hyundai, etc.

Similar =/= Same

Ah, I misread it because it's a common misconception. My apologies!

No worries! Kinda surprised that people would assume LG and Samsung are the same company

It's common enough to be asked often enough:

https://www.quora.com/Is-LG-a-part-of-Samsung

I think people are mixing up the Hyundai/Kia situation (where the former does own a significant portion of the latter) via second-hand recall.

No, they are both competitive chaebols (a Korean form of conglomerate).

Yes with "similar" I did not mean that they were part of one entity.

I was just thinking about them being large and strongly present in many different business sectors.

So a conglomerate I guess. Thanks

Yeah, I misread it. My apologies.

Interesting, I'd never heard the word `chaebols` and instantly was reminded of the word `cabal`. Turns out, completely different etymologies.

> They also make cars

Not anymore, Samsung Motors is now a part of Renault. Samsung retains a minority share of the operation.

I was on the Samsung Bixby team as part of Samsung Electronics / Samsung Research America and we did work with the various appliance teams. I've never noticed a difference between "companies" when I was working with the teams at the Korean HQ (and some of them also visited us in the bay area as well). Not sure if the appliance teams were part of Samsung Electronics or not.

Exactly the same. I had to install a script which overwrites my clipboard completely twice a day. I just hate having all the stuff I copied there forever...

And I went ahead and deleted any unwanted apps via adb, at least that was smoother than I expected.

After that the phone is actually nicely usable.

> I had to install a script which overwrites my clipboard completely twice a day.

Would you have any tips you could share on how to do that?

Sure, I use "Macro Droid" and I have a single macro with 12h interval (trigger).

The macro is set as follows:

1. Repeat 35 times

2. Fill Clipboard with [second][system_time]

3. Wait 1 second

4. End loop

Let me know if that helps!

I stopped buying Samsung phones a while ago when they made them impossible to unlock and install custom roms.

You can still remove all the Samsung crap, install your favorite launcher, and use Fdroid. This is what I do and couldn't be happier with a debloated Note.

https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater

This is exactly why I have a Pixel now

My impression is this is gradually going by the wayside for all brands, and that's not just on the manufacturer support side but also the breadth of custom roms available to different brands/models. The exception is if you get a Pixel which has 'top tier' support for custom roms and then there's a sharp falloff. Past that point you're into "your mileage may vary" territory with how much feature support is retained or degraded by the rom, and if you're bothered if banking apps require a phone with play integrity or playing hide and seek to pretend it's unaltered.

This is likely just my perspective, but it seems that there's less to be gained from custom roms in recent years anyway as smartphones have matured and the rated of change has slowed. Plus there has been a trend among some brands to offer longer OS support lifecycles, of which Samsung seems to be one of the best for android.

Smartphones in my life are gradually going by the wayside at a similar rate. I don't have time for computers that fight me by design.

> My impression is this is gradually going by the wayside for all brands

That's my impression as well, and is precisely why my current smartphone will be my last smartphone.

OnePlus used to be the king for custom roms, then they just completely abandoned allowing them. Even if the community was small, I really do think the halo effect of the power users attracted to their brand was more important than they gave credit to it, which is why I think they are not doing so well anymore.

Only in the US it seems. Non-US models usually have no issue with bootloader unlocking and the custom ROM scene is usually pretty active.

It may trip an e-fuse though, causing some features to be disabled forever. But unfortunately that's the direction Android has taken over the years. Getting stuff like banking to work on a non-stock phone is getting more and more annoying, even for the most hacker-friendly phones. I have stopped with custom ROMs, too much hassle for a daily driver, smartphones are not fun anymore, they are more like appliances than general purpose computers.

I left Android for Apple precisely because I could not stop myself from playing with custom ROMs. I had too many better things to do with my life. Android was fine, but iOS is less distracting.

As someone that prefers Android, it really is hard to pick a new phone...

* Apple: You're getting iOS. Take it or leave it.

* Google: OK hardware (maybe that's being generous). iFixit parts available. Hopefully you can make 911 calls in an emergency [1].

* Samsung: Great hardware. Good luck getting something repaired if you need it though. OK software.

* Everyone else: You get maybe two years of security updates.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579

I basically seem to waffle back and forth between Pixel or Galaxy phones depending on the year.

I wanted to like iPhone bit I tried it for a 2y period and it was just too different and I ended up going back to Android.

I switched back and forth for a few generations and came to the opposite conclusion. I bought a Samsung phone because I thought it had a better camera than the matching generation of iPhones. Turned out the camera app itself was inferior and I didn’t like the processing of the photos. I also hated the duplicate Samsung/Google apps and that it forced horrific things like having a Facebook app and other carrier-installed things onto my phone.

> * Everyone else: You get maybe two years of security updates.

Fairphone attempts to deliver (also security) updates for quite a long time.

Bought a Fairphone very recently, it's a bit thick, but other than that, it's supported for a long time and repairable. And it seems to work just fine :-)

Or ditch the smartphone entirely, get some variety of robust dumbphone, and work that out in your life.

I have a Sonim XP3+, running Android 11 Go, I think, but it's just a rugged dumbphone. Waterproof, drop resistant up to some very reasonable distance, and "generally indestructible" for most reasonable and quite a few unreasonable values of that term.

It's good for calls, and texting. And the occasional hotspot use. I carry a decade old laptop for other stuff I need, and use the car's GPS if needed, though since giving up on smartphone maps some while ago, my internal navigation is way better than it used to be.

Irritatingly, US carriers all went to VoLTE at about the same time, turning quite a few perfectly good older devices into ewaste, but I'm hopeful VoLTE works for a long while, and I have a decade or so before I have to think about a cell phone again.

And, yes, I know that "I couldn't possibly do that for..." reason lists are long. Try it. If nobody resists "having a modern smartphone and being willing to install any random app someplace demands you install," that will be the future we get. I can't even scan QR codes. Life is good!

I've never met an in-car GPS navigation system that was half as good as what I get with Google or Apple Maps through CarPlay.

And these days car manufacturers are starting to charge a subscription service for it. GM is even going as far as to take CarPlay out of their new cars just to push customers to that subscription.

I honestly don't really care. I don't use it much. I'm far more likely to bring a (paper) notebook with directions, and that's been working well for me with overview maps beforehand. Yes, it's exercising mental stuff I hadn't used in a while, but it's been worth the effort and occasional "... wait, where am I?" to regain those skills, I think.

I've considered pretty hard picking up a standalone TomTom unit to have newer maps on - the car's maps are a decade old and this is at least occasionally a problem finding newer subdivisions, but I can get close to where I need to be and follow my hand-written directions the rest of the way.

New cars are... a problem. I don't want (rather, "won't buy") a "connected car" sort of thing unless I can disable the cell modem entirely before I leave the lot. I do not want a cell phone on wheels, and this is unfortunately what the automakers seem to have decided to ship, complete with "Buggy? Don't worry, we'll patch it later!"

I'm probably good for about a decade on the current fleet before this becomes a pressing issue, and at that point, hopefully either the absurdity will have subsided, or I'll just do my own work on older vehicles or an EV conversion on some classic chassis. Toyota, at least, seems to have a path for "Seriously, turn off the cell modem..." and a few other cars have a fuse you can pull to kill the cell modem and a few other things. I don't mind if I kill Bluetooth, as long as there's an aux-in I can hook something up to (even if that's a little standalone BT receiver as I have in the car now).

So what do you do when your plans change mid-trip, and you need to go somewhere else you've never been to and didn't know to look up directions for ahead of time?

> And, yes, I know that "I couldn't possibly do that for..." reason lists are long. Try it.

I've tried it for a burner phone for international travel, and it turns out that even though I'm a very light user of phone messaging, I find T9 texting exceptionally unpleasant to use. (I never used T9 in its heyday, and find smartphone virtual keyboards unpleasant in the best of cases.) I already do 99% of my messaging at my PC, but sometimes need to message someone on the go.

Now I've just been using my previous primary phone for international travel.

Though I'd probably be okay with a dumb phone with a slider keyboard.

Xiaomi claims five years of security updates for upper range models that came out last year. Specifically I am thinking about Xiaomi 13T which a couple of my friends use. Their newer phones no longer allow unlocking the bootloader, though.

I've been using a five year old hand-me-down 9T and it was recently updated to Android 14 with security patch from May this year. (Thanks to Lineage, of course — the official support ended in 2021).

Xiaomi ran an obvious wiretap on the phone's network activity when I last looked [start of 2022].

Google:

/storage/emulated/0/MIUI/debug_log/common/tcpdump

I'm stuck on Pixels because of GrapheneOS. Storage/contact scopes, sensors permission, network permission, hardening, auto-reboot, scrambled PIN entry... everything about GrapheneOS screams "WE LOVE AND RESPECT YOU, DEAR USER! GOD SPEED ON YOUR VOYAGE!"

The OEM Android images out there just scream "GIMMIE GIMMIE GIMMIE!" to me like they see my data and wallet as natural resources to pump and mine!

›› "just save all the clipboard history, too bad if you don't want that"

I feel your pain. If you accept a bandaid: change the samsung keyboard to a FOSS keyboard without internet connectivity. The clipboard still exists, at least you can't see it.

A better bandaid would be tasker to flush the keyboard everytime you copy something

That's mostly what I did, yes. This is helpful advice. Password managers like Android Keepass also have non-clipboard functionality in keyboards they provide.

Do newer models not let you remap the "Bixby button" to something else? On my Note 10 I changed it to open the camera, but... it's a Note 10 from 2020, so that may have changed since.

S23 ultra here

You can totally remap it

You can use another keyboard

You have to look very hard to find the AI (the only use i have for it is delete some objects from a photo and that takes a few tries)

You can literally solve everything in a few minutes

What if I don't want to deal with these problems in the first place

Buy another phone?

Buy an iPhone and you don't have to ever wonder if you CAN change something

Yup. Don’t like siri? Go kick rocks.

You can disable Siri entirely, as far as the voice interface.

You have to enable Siri for carplay, which is really obnoxious.

Does this comment mean to say that you can change anything or that you can't? IIRC there are quite a few things locked down on an iPhone that require you to jailbreak it if you want to customize it, but I haven't been in the iPhone space for a long time now so please forgive my naivety.

Yes, that's what i meant.

"With an Android if you have a shitty "feature" usually you can just change it"

I have a samsung and everything is custom, nothing but the setting menu is Samsung at this point on my phone.

And my choice was dictated only by the hardware in the Android ecosystem (i wanted the S pen)

On an iPhone you can customize very little, the homepage alone would make me furious.

They're not problems. It's a customizable device to this extent, and you have preferences, so just change the settings. The alternative is that you cannot do anything about it.

Glad to know they didn't remove the customizable button then :) I plan on squeezing as much life out of my Note 10 as I can but I know its number will come soon enough.

Two other data points: I had the note 9, and the button wasn't customizable (you could disable the app and tweak some other things to keep the button from doing anything, but you couldn't remap it, that was new in the note 10.) And having upgraded to the S24 ultra... there's no button any more, just power + volume. (As shipped, the power button does some bixby nonsense, but it's a couple of clicks to make it do power again, and camera on double-click, like it did on all of the previous models.)

S24 doesn't have the bixby button at all.

My Note 9 screen just broke.... :(

I want a flagship with headphone jack please.

Samsung's skin for android is actually incredibly customizable (to the point you can individually pick color for each UI element separately), as well as including quite a few QoL upgrades that are missing on stock android.

But ye, you have to deal with some sub-optimal 'out-of-the-box' experience and privacy isn't really there (though let's be honest, on stock android google also look at your hands constantly)

You can change that buttons behavior.

Not that it's a good feature, just an FYI

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