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Comment by hibikir | Hacker News Reader

As far as the phone hardware goes, Google isn't much of a giant worldwide: Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei and probably a few more outsell Google. The pixel is downright rare outside of the US.

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They don't even sell Pixels in most places, the Pixel 9 series is launching in 32 countries, except the Pixel 9 Fold which is only launching in 19. Believe it or not that's a significant improvement from the Pixel 8 series and first Fold which debuted in only 20 and 4 countries respectively.

Pixels were the best selling android smartphone of 2023 in Japan. It's gained a lot of popularity recently here in Japan.

This might be misleading. I've got a Japanese model Pixel -- except that I bought it in Chile, from a Chilean supplier. (Had to root and tinker with some hidden partition just to disable the camera shutter sound.)

I thought that was illegal, but I guess not. https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/w...

(For what it's worth, Chile has no such law anyway, so I felt free to do all this.)

> Pixels were the best selling android smartphone of 2023 in Japan. It's gained a lot of popularity recently here in Japan.

Whilst true, it's a bit misleading in the sense it's only best selling by a very slim margin. It's iphone and then everything else (by a huge margin).

Also Samsung has been innovating with hardware. I'm not the hugest fan of their flavor of Android but I absolutely love my flip phone and would not consider switching back to iOS or pure Android unless Apple or Google were to make a flip.

Samsung + Universal Android Debloater rocks. You get great hardware and you can remove as much or as little of the Samsung\Google nonsense as you like.

https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...

It's rare in the US too. Less rare than outside it, but still < 5% market share.

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