Samsung is hurting Android

All of them are just poorly-designed, cheap imitations of Blackberry and Apple UI design. The Smart TV interface is a disaster. It's a mess; nothing works and the supposedly "smart" touchpad integrated into the remote constantly misses what I want to select.

The camera is decent; but it's only a camera, so not very much going on there.

The phone I used to own (a feature phone by the name of SGH-A867) was also okay with regards to UI. It was fairly intuitive and worked well; although AT&T probably designed most of the software for the phone. It was, however, on the hardware front poorly designed. The touch screen stopped responding after a year of light use. Unacceptable.

The GS3 that my friend owned really seemed promising. But the polycarbonate construction left a lot to be desired and the UI felt like a hobbled-together, piecemeal catastrophe.

I bought a Nexus 4 and am enamored by it. It's perfect.

The hardware button didn't make sense to me because it made the back and menu buttons much closer to the edge, which lead to accidental presses of those buttons and there was also less space to hold the phone with. I disabled the hardware buttons and had on-screen buttons like the Nexus 4's. The multitasking button made me much faster at switching apps.

The plastic got greasy fast, that's my major complaint. As for thinness, I found an Otterboxed iPhone 5 easier to hold because of the depth. I don't understand this race to thinness because at some point (we may have already hit it), thinner phones are just harder to hold (my opinion). I also wish that phones could be a bit thicker with a bigger battery.

The notification widget is possibly the dumbest thing Samsung did with TouchWiz. No matter what position you were at in the widget (left, middle, far right, whatever), the widget would start to the right and then scroll back to the furthest left. Not only is this annoying, it was completely unnecessary and happened every single time you pulled down the notification shade. Stock Android also has this widget, by the way. It's called Quick Settings and has more toggles than Samsung (at least in the S3. haven't played with S4 yet) and is customizable. It was also easily accessible by pulling down on the user-specified part of the screen (may have been CM10.1 specific).

Notifications in stock Android can also be easily swiped away, same as S3. I don't see how anyone can't figure out which ones are swipable or not. Use your phone, swipe, if it doesn't swipe, then it won't swipe in the future. It's usually things like voicemail or persistent processes that you started.

Stock Android should have burst mode as well for the camera.

If some of these features don't exist, I apologize. The Cyanogen team may have implemented some of these features on their own, but even so, I hated TouchWiz with every fiber of my being. A refreshed interface comes along with the release of Android 4.0 and Samsung decides to keep the look dated with a Gingerbread-era settings menu. Or the menu button, which should be extinct by now.

I'm testing iOS right now, but when I come back to Android, it will be either an HTC running CyanogenMod or Nexus phone for me.

Even the gripes other are claiming about graphic incompatibilities are generally untrue, since 2.2 and above supports OpenGL ES 2.0. As someone else mentioned, audio still leaves something to desired. Graphics are not anywhere close to that being an issue from my experiences, but I suppose that all has to do with how far one goes down the rabbit hole for optimizations and tuning to a specific GPU. I don't doubt that OEMs screw around with things, but I'm not a GPU development guru by any means so I cannot say it won't be in every use case.

The only real compatibility issue I've had to deal with was working around in the radio interface layer for Android in a small open source app I maintain[1][2] as a personal side project for reading/analyzing some of the hidden network readings that Android does not normally expose to the user. Biggest issue with that is that some OEMs (Samsung being one) do whatever they feel like with the data here (sometimes tying some areas into the radio firmware and other times not [as well as sometimes deviating from what the functionality says it should do in the Android API]).

Since Android 4.0, it's been pretty sane across the board in the radio interface layer, but I still get an occasional 2.3 or 2.2 device that sends me a stacktrace after crashing for some silly reason. If it's not too much trouble, I'll try to work around it, but otherwise (short of a user going out their way to help me pin down the issue personally) I just let it go. I've mostly abstracted out any of the issues to make the old readings compatible with Android 4.0 now so it's not too much of a big deal for me anymore.

[1] https://github.com/yareally/SignalInfo

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cc.signali...