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Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

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Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#241

Post by all2 »

agent008t wrote: post #117
djaychela wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say pretty much exactly that. I've been on a series of moto G phones, from the 5 to my current G83. Good value, the moto app actually adds functionality without being a drag (or even mandatory to use). Cameras are always sub-par (partner has pixels, and I'm light years behind), although the latest is the least bad in comparison with her current phone. Current one has survived most of me building a home e…

Just want to mention that the moto camera is made FAR worse by the software. E.g. video on my moto would always be blurry due to bad de-noising settings used by stock software. mcpro24fps allowed me to take dramatically better videos. The difference was HUGE. Same with photos. Custom gcam roms, after a long time of trying different ones and tweaking, gave me dramatically higher quality photos. Again, night and day di…

Can you provide more details about your current setup? Firmware versions, diffs, settings, etc? Maybe tutorials you used to get your camera into good shape?

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#242

Post by OJFord »

RankingMember wrote: post #151
jqpabc123 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all money. They don't want you keeping a phone for 5 years. Yes. Hardware vendors love Open Source. It essentially cedes all control of the market to them. They spend minimal time/money/effort on software development and updates because surprise, surprise --- it doesn't produce profits, it consumes them. Hardware is where they make all their money. The only realistic way to get long term software support on Andr…

How's the camera? For me, the camera is more important than anything else on a phone, and thus far I've been stuck with Pixels because, despite the shorter support period (and absolutely mind-bogglingly bad customer service), that software does amazing things with old camera hardware .

Genuine question: why give yourself the headache of coupling having a great camera to choosong a phone then, if it's important to you? Why not have a compact camera as well as whatever phone, and carry that when quality matters?

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#243

Post by scarface_74 »

OJFord wrote: post #242
RankingMember wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's the camera? For me, the camera is more important than anything else on a phone, and thus far I've been stuck with Pixels because, despite the shorter support period (and absolutely mind-bogglingly bad customer service), that software does amazing things with old camera hardware .

Genuine question: why give yourself the headache of coupling having a great camera to choosong a phone then, if it's important to you? Why not have a compact camera as well as whatever phone, and carry that when quality matters?

You’re right, we should also carry around a separate GPS device, MP3 player, one of those portable TV players, and everything else like it’s 2005.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#244

Post by axus »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #102
Daegalus wrote: post #10

The Pixel is the closest. The reason you don't see long term support on Android is because of Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants manufacturers to build on new chips, so they deprecate older chips and stop support. Most manufacturers don't want to hire kernel and hardware devs. Samsung can pull off longer support because of Exynos and they have a lot of inhouse expertise to extend support on old Qualcomm chips. It's all money.…

It's all money. They don't want you keeping a phone for 5 years. Yes. Hardware vendors love Open Source. It essentially cedes all control of the market to them. They spend minimal time/money/effort on software development and updates because surprise, surprise --- it doesn't produce profits, it consumes them. Hardware is where they make all their money. The only realistic way to get long term software support on Andr…

I've the same phone, and stock it is pretty bloat-free. Main complaint is the charging; no wireless and the USB-C is not secure and will pop out in most orientations.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#245

Post by roumenguha »

mrweasel wrote: post #220
richliss wrote: post #52

Get a Fairphone or old Pixel and stick Calyxos on it :-)

Can you install pretty much any app on CalyxOS, without involving Google?

It depends. Are there any apps you want to know about specifically? I'm running CalyxOS right now and can try.

My banking apps work fine, surprisingly. And some Google (Gmail, Phone, and Fi) apps too, surprisingly, but not all (eg Meet, Messages, and Fit)

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#246

Post by mrweasel »

roumenguha wrote: post #245
mrweasel wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you install pretty much any app on CalyxOS, without involving Google?

It depends. Are there any apps you want to know about specifically? I'm running CalyxOS right now and can try. My banking apps work fine, surprisingly. And some Google (Gmail, Phone, and Fi) apps too, surprisingly, but not all (eg Meet, Messages, and Fit)

Mostly just Signal, and a good maps app. TOPT apps I'd assume is readily available. The only other app I regularly use otherwise is ErgData from Concept2, but they offer the APK file for download.

I do have a local payment app, which would be nice to not lose, but it's not a hard requirement. The number of apps I use these days are surprisingly low.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#247

Post by jklinger410 »

dpedu wrote: post #233
jklinger410 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it has limited updates and proprietary software for things like the camera It gets as many updates as other Android phones, and there is no blotware whatsoever. Not sure what your comments here are about the camera app. It's just an improved version to use the features of the pixel camera.

Google play services is arguably bloatware.

I hate this website sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#248

Post by wiseowise »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #133
wiseowise wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud sync that works across all of my devices in a centralized manner. Zero bloatware, adware OS that works out of the box and doesn’t change every year. Consistent experience across devices. iOS, specifically, all of what I listed there and really nice, fluent system compared to Androids that have frame drops even on top end devices.

> Zero bloatware, adware OS that works out of the box and doesn’t change every year. Now that’s just blatantly bullshit. The OS takes up at least 9GB. There are many Linux distros that take half of that. Not to mention the OS is preloaded with a lot of Apple’s proprietary apps, most of which are designed to pull you into some kind of sales pitch. Fitness+, Apple Music, iCloud, the entire OS is an ad designed to sell…

> Now that’s just blatantly bullshit. The OS takes up at least 9GB. There are many Linux distros that take half of that.

Don’t care about that.

> Not to mention the OS is preloaded with a lot of Apple’s proprietary apps, most of which are designed to pull you into some kind of sales pitch. Fitness+, Apple Music, iCloud, the entire OS is an ad designed to sell you on their ecosystem.

I’ve been iOS user for almost two years now. The only sales pitch I saw, was at the start about 3 months of free Apple Music. The rest I haven’t saw, as I don’t use fitness app or any other things.

The only thing that I’ve bought so far, was €1 iCloud subscription to increase iCloud storage to 50GB. And I didn’t even see any “ad” for it.

> The most egregious statement, however, is that the OS “doesn’t change every year”. You say this right after the iOS 16 update completely changed a large portion of the OS, and in some very user unintuitive ways.

The only thing I noticed after upgrading to iOS 16 was a slightly degraded battery life and performance which was eventually fixed. The rest stayed majorly the same.

Compare that to mayhem that is Android where it’s Material 1 then Material 2 with apps still lagging behind on Material 1 then it’s material You, now it’s material 3 or whatever.

> Not to mention iOS is a glitchy mess even on the latest hardware. Frequently the OS stalls on wakeup, stalls when trying to swap apps, randomly drops wifi when my laptop doesn’t, the keyboard will get stuck on screen, it’ll even skip inputs entirely and freeze for a few seconds.

Haven’t seen any of the behavior that you’re mentioning.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#249

Post by LinuxBender »

Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

I've not seen any. There are growing collections of debloat scripts that use adb and do not require rooting the phone but it's hit and miss per model as to completeness and not breaking the OS startup. Some vendors lock down their bloat so that rooting is required and in my opinion those should get returned / refunded and the product reviews on sites such as Amazon should warn others rather than rooting the phone. I've returned a few. My uleFone had the least cruft on it and the least lockdown but still uses upwards of 4GB ram after my first pass so I still have a long way to go.

Re: Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

#250

Post by all2 »

swah wrote: post #106
fomine3 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, Stock Android still isn't great. Samsung sometimes makes it better.

Yeah, I feel like I have only one complain (camera lag) otherwise a S-line Samsung is awesome (and better than iOS for me, though I'm using an iPhone at the moment because the camera is awesome). People seem to forget how ugly it was in the Samsung S5 times...

How laggy is lag? On my S9+ the camera app typically starts up in under 1 second, though sometimes it can take longer.
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