Android. When holding my phone up to me ear after answering a call, the screen won't switch off and random buttons will then get pressed because you know, I'm holding it against my ear. Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue. My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone. How can Android fail at the most fundamental task? The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me.…
These are generally simple sensors but they are sort of hard to quality control in the factory and tuning them generally takes some significant amount of work.
The problem for phones without a “notch” like what the iPhone does is that the OEMs tried to put the proximity sensor below the screen. It generally works - but the problem is that the IR pulses emitted by the sensor excite the display and will turn on pixels and create a grey or white spot over the sensor. Product managers later decided that they don’t like this spot, so engineers had to put in all sorts of software mitigation, mostly involving turning off the sensors and making them less sensitive.
An expensive phone generally has a larger team of engineers who will tune these sensors, work on the factory quality control problems and generally make things reliable. Apple, with their strong engineering culture has generally refused to deal with the white dot on screen thing entirely by putting the sensor on the notch.
Unfortunately with lower end phones, you can’t get the same quality that you will get with a $800 phone. There are people who work really really hard to make things better, but its mostly underfunded engineering teams trying to fix problems in software that honestly should be fixed in the sensor hardware by the vendors.