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
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.
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.
Makes me think about switching if alternative markets really do come to iOS and they get a real firefox
First, it essentially forces you to create both a Samsung account and a Google account, with numerous shady prompts for "improving services" and "allowing targeted ads."
Then it required nine system updates (apparently, it can only update incrementally), and worst of all, after a while, it automatically started downloading bloatware like "Kawai" and other questionable apps, and you cannot cancel the downloads.
I wonder how much Samsung gets paid to preinstall all that crap. The phone wasn't cheap, either. The company seems penny wise and pound foolish.
> Sales of the iPhone 17 series in the U.S. — including the iPhone Air — during the first four weeks after launch was 12% higher than that of the iPhone 16 series, excluding the iPhone 16e, the research firm said. In China, a critical market for Apple, sales of the iPhone 17 series during the same period were 18% higher than its predecessor.
So iPhone 17 is selling well. I think it's fair to call it a hit. Do they make another hit next year? Who knows (I'd bet against it), but they won this year's game I believe.
The day iPhone has a built-in EMR/AES stylus is the day I become a customer (despite being an Android lifer).
Don't think that will ever happen though, despite Apple shipping Pencil for iPads.
Samsung has definitely built a (small) moat being the only vendor with that offering.
The Object Eraser feature recently updated to have an "AI Object Eraser" and now a simple removal of a sign in my picture adds an "AI Generated" watermark onto it. They spam me every time I use the regular Object Eraser to try the AI one, it's really not impressive in any way and now adds a watermark even for the simplest modifications.
Definitely all around seems like Samsung is on a decline. I probably won't be buying a Samsung next time I need a phone, though I won't be buying Apple either.
Same here, used to have a Samsung, moved to Moto G which was the best phone I had so far, currently on a iPhone 12 Mini, and want none of these phones anymore. I just want something that doesn't get in your way, and actually have some well-thought UX, especially when connected to the car. CarPlay is a whole dumpster-fire of failed UX experiments it feels like, is actively dangerous, and iOS in general have so many hidden patterns I'm still discovering today (guessing they also add new gestures all the time) that it feels like I only understand 20% of the phone's features.
Someone recommended me Sony for Android + higher quality hardware, where the company also doesn't seem hellbent on screwing you over inside the phone OS itself. What do people here with Sony phones think about them?
Apple really is far from innocent. They just pull their customers over the table in such a smooth way that it feels like nest warmth to them.
- Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it.
- Notifications are extremely large and you have less control over what type of notifications you want to receive.
- You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
- Videos played in Safari don’t automatically rotate to landscape mode (nor there is a button to quickly do this) unless you disable portrait lock from control center. If you lock this again hoping it will stay in landscape it will switch back to portrait mode.
- You can’t set alarm on a certain date.
- You can only snooze the alarm for 9 minutes (I think you can configure this in iOS26, but this was unacceptable even 5 years ago)
- Apps get killed or stopped in background extremely frequently which means that if you have some long running task you need to keep the app open.
- Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable.
This is not even mentioning more technical things like sideloading, torrent client etc.
I have some alarms for specific dates, do you mean a single use alarm?
> - You can only snooze the alarm for 9 minutes (I think you can configure this in iOS26, but this was unacceptable even 5 years ago)
To this day I miss one alarm that LG phones had where it would make me do more work to even dismiss it, on purpose, because I am known to just turn it off and keep sleeping.
> - Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable.
I have not had this issue, though I did have the issue of not realizing that since I had bought my phone through Apple instead of through T-Mobile my data / hotspot plan was not the right one, I realized this after I left T-Mobile for Mint, but I rarely if ever use hotspot.
> - Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it.
I had the 12 Pro and now the 17 Pro, I rarely do swipe typing, voice to text is slightly more annoying, I would hope that in this world of AI that Apple would improve their voice to text, it just doesn't hear me at all half of the time.
> - You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
Apple has always been all about being on Apple, so yeah, though I have gotten my Linux to mount files from the iPhone before, doesn't look pretty at all mind you, but I can take a rough but full snapshot of all my images on my phone..
pareto?
So every quarter this year except the last quarter, Samsung outsold Apple. So they're predicting that Q42025 for Samsung will be miserable sales or Apple will have skyrocketed sales?
Edit: not forgetting tariffs and sanctions, of course.
I'm otherwise of opinion that the West's decisive counter measures are necessary against China's mercantile practices.
Additonally, that spike for Xiaomi and other Chinese OEMs also happened right when Chinese OEMs expanded their India business in 2015-17 [3][4][5]. On that note, notice how all those Chinese OEM saw sales dropped and then flatlined from 2021 onwards. While the pandemic did play a role, India began lawfare against Chinese companies following the Galwan Crisis in 2021 [6][7][8] with the Indian government de facto forcing Chinese firms to "indianize" [9] - which ironically is similar to how the Chinese government operated in the 2000s and 2010s with Western firms and what the Chinese government leveraged against Korea a decade previously.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-12/china-sai...
[1] - https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20181122001200320
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/s-korea-d...
[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/baxiabhishek/2017/09/12/the-ris...
[4] - https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
[5] - https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oppo-grew-...
[6] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-seizes-725-mln-xia...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-accuses-chinas-opp...
[8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-enforcement-direc...
[9] - https://etplay.com/business/why-chinese-cos-have-been-indian...
Not really. THAAD really plays no part in Samsung's fall in China. Samsung's smartphone sales in China was already down by -70% by the time THAAD broke out in 2016 from its peak in 2013 and still went down further to less than 1%. Samsung packed up and closed the last Chinese factory in 2019 -- went to Vietnam instead.
Patrick McGee recently released Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company: it better describes the anti-foreign political situation in China at the time and what it meant to the smartphone industry. And how Apple avoided Samsung's fate, but is now captured by it. See Chapter 26 "Despot" and on.
I've blacklisted them for hurting UX to show ads. Last device: my very high-end OLED TV has the worst menu navigation, just to take me back to the home screen where they hoped to show ads to me. Once I realized they are analysing my content, even when coming from an external device to send home for ADs, I just disconnected it from the internet.
I'll not buy anything again unless they change this and stay away from it long enough to repair the damage to trust.
Not buying an Apple device either, but for different reasons.
But they’re doing it. And it’s annoying.
Now they shipped the same camera on their most sold flagship phone 3 years in a row, same battery size for 5 years. Flip-flopping between Qualcomm CPUs as their own couldn't compete after years of trying. They don't deserve the spot they have for quite some time now.