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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Samsung has good hardware, but their software is really mediocre, at best. Many of their devices are laggy and slow down further after some updates.

This is the case even on high-end devices. Our 12-month-old Galaxy Tab is slower than a 7-year-old Pixel. Hard to understand.

Plus, they make really odd tweaks to the UI, such as adding a permanent button overlay that clashes with most hamburger icons in websites and apps. This drives novice users insane.

If you wanna ship a custom Android, at least get it right. Otherwise, just stick to stock. Sony does this really well: https://developerworld.wpp.developer.sony.com/open-source

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Samsung makes a lot of cheap and mid-tier devices with little RAM and not so powerful SoCs. Google also uses slow SoCs, but at least they compensate in hardware.

If you just buy a high-end phone, Samsung is generally fine. If you buy anything cheaper than that, or god forbid buy a phone through a carrier that pumps it full of crap, you're gonna have a terrible time when apps get slower and bulkier and shittier and the hardware shows its age.

Odd. I've had the Z Fold 5 and now 7 and the last few years' worth of Samsung firmware has been excellent for me. Perhaps they build 'for' their flagships and let devices that perhaps have lower tier chipsets run slowly?

I have the Z Fold 4 (EU) and it performs well to this day. It even got the Android 16 upgrade.

Z Fold 3 here, going happily on 4-5 years.

Samsung has nice hardware quality, but no sense of UX, and that goes for their software and hardware.

Similarly for TVs - i got a samsung oled few years ago, and while the hardware seems great, I do wish I had gone with LG as their TVs seem more open to install custom firmware. (I do pretty much just use appleTV and fireTV devices plugged in to the Samsung, but still, the main TV ui is pretty abysmal)

Samsung hardware is not what it used to be.

They have been shipping the same camera block for something like three or four models. Compared to what Chinese competitors like Xiaomi or Oppo offer, it doesn't look that great anymore.

The poor software is just the cherry on top.

On top of buggy software they just have user hostile design choices. Like forcing agreements to sell health data if you want a step counter, or shoving ads in your face that you can't disable without hamstringing functionality.

Makes me think about switching if alternative markets really do come to iOS and they get a real firefox

Well Samsung was overtaken by Xiaomi and Xiaomi software is even worse...?

The status bar icons on the top right of One UI (Samsung's firmware skin) aren't even aligned or the same size. It's only just been fixed in One UI 8.5, years from the problem first happening.

You're welcome if you can't unsee it now.

It's nothing major, but it's one example of how inconsistent and disorganised their software is, there's so much low hanging fruit that you'd think their software division was under duress, along with year long delays to software updates.

And on top of that, you can't unlock One UI 8 and above.

As much as I wish it wasn't the case, not being able to bootloader unlock is not a cause of any meaningful reduction in sales. The Android ROM community has been on life support for a few years now.

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