If I buy the best that either company has to offer (Pixel 8 pro or S23 Ultra)
Which one, in your opinion, would be the best Android experience and why? Would love to know your thoughts.
Pixel 8. No bloatware (except the Google bloat of course, but you can get rid of this easily), plus Google has now promised 7 years of updates - which is more than the iPhone. This would increase the resale value of the phone, and even if you don’t want to sell it, you could always give it to a family member or something after say 3-4 years of use, and they’d still get many years of official updates remaining. This is great for reducing e-waste whilst still maintaining a good security posture.
And if you’re privacy conscious, you could ditch the Google ecosystem completely and load GrapheneOS on it, and GrapheneOS is simple amazing in terms of privacy and security, and arguably has better battery life too (thanks to no Google bloatware running on it).
Yeah Pixel for similar reasons. Even when I paid for an expensive Samsung phone all the unremovable crap they’d loaded on made it feel like I was the product rather than the customer.
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Pixel 7 works perfectly for me. I like nearly all aspects of it. The camera is extremely good (I’ve recently made a comparison with iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone was far worse) and reliable. The battery life and performance is good. The phone feels smooth, without a lot of bugs. I don’t have a recent experience with Samsung, but I will stick with Pixel going forward.
If you care about your privacy, and you should, get a pixel and install GrapheneOS.
pixel for grapheneos
Samsung hardware is a lot higher quality, but the Pixel is cheaper. I’ve had to return a pixel to Google 5 times before so I don’t buy those any longer for myself.
Pixel 8 pro ! You will have stock Android, providing a better experience. Moreover it’s less expensive! I love Pixel phones. I recently got the Pixel tablet.
I have an S23 Ultra and it is a nice phone but I wouldn’t recommend Samsung to anyone because my last several Samsungs “mysteriously” got issues right before the 2 year plan ended. I won’t be getting another Samsung after this one. I really wanted the pen and it is great but I’m starting to care more about longevity.
Get a Pixel, install GrapheneOS.
Do apps requiring locked phones (Netflix, baking etc.) work?
Netflix you just can’t get from Google Play, but people report having no problem installing from Aurora (basically a Google Play store frontend).
I’m not sure how it works on Graphene as I personally just rooted my phone but didn’t take the plunge to Graphene, but there is a list of compatible banking apps here: https://privsec.dev/banking
I just installed Netflix directly from Google play, maybe it has changed 🤷♂️
It has changed yupyup. Used to be that you couldn’t do this, because play store and services wouldn’t run on the OS. Now you can.
Most do work, only apps that have stupid arbitrary Google SafetyNet requirements might have problems. It’s entirely the fault of Google though.
Can’t speak on the Pixel (I’ve heard great things), but I have an S23+ and it works pretty great for me. I don’t play a lot of games or anything if that’s what you’re looking for though
I’ve just recently switched from a Galaxy S10 to a Pixel 7 as I wanted to see the “vanilla” experience, as well as be closer to upstream for software updates. My S10 still works great, though the battery needs replacement (at the time, it had already broken the glue on the back glass and was still expanding – didn’t realize until I took it out of the case for cleaning)…
With my S10, I had to really fight to get it to let me use Google’s apps over the Samsung ones; which whole annoying is doable. So far, the only things I really miss from Samsung (and notably the UX):
- The sidebar/panel with an additional set of predefined apps
- Replaced with Panels
- The volume/silent switch in the notification shade
- The Bixby button (for custom actions)
- Physically smaller phone, but that’s not a huge deal
Overall, I’m happy with the experience so far; though I dunno if the “Pro” model of anything is really worth it.
- The sidebar/panel with an additional set of predefined apps
Never buy Samsung, full of proprietary trash bloat, and they crack down on people trying to get root access. Absolute no-go.
they don’t have much bloatware except preinstalled spotify, netflix and tiktok…
Too much at Spotify
And adds literally built into basic system components…
i don’t see any ads on my phone?! (a52s)
(galaxy store is a notable exception (has a bit more ads than google play), but who cares about fucking galaxy store?!)I answered on another comment regarding ads in this thread to clarify what I define as an ad with that comment.
Samsung is using by far the worst OEM Rom, Pixel has by far the best. Go for the Pixel
Pixel has by far the best.
And GrapheneOS is even better
The last time I tried a Samsung phone I returned it the same day I got it. The competing OS elements from Samsung’s ROM and the standard Android UI were really really off-putting to me. I can get an app having a unique style, but this was different OS elements looking and working differently.