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Is Android increasingly inconsistent? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I feel like I'm encountering weird little tics and problems with my android devices, and those of family and friends. Just simple things where settings don't seem to be consistently applied, or the os switches something back repeatedly. For example, my apps are set to auto update, to use data as well as WiFi, etc, but every month or so I go into Play and see that some random app hasn't been updated in weeks.

Or my friend only gets Signal notifications when they open the app, despite giving full background data use, turning off adaptive battery, etc. My mother uses an alarm app that needs to display over the screen for a feature, but despite me setting that permission repeatedly Android keeps turning it off.

Is this just anecdotal bad luck? Or is all the work to preserve battery life, control background usage, etc led to an OS where the user can't control things reliably? It starting to feel a lot like MS Windows!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

That varies wildly between manufacturers and ROMs. AOSP and consequently LineageOS have consistently been pretty clean. I have apps running in the background for literal weeks at a time. KDE Connect never fails, Linphone is solid on one of my devices and also stays connected for weeks at a time.

Then there's Xiaomi and Samsung which seems to be competing for who's got the worst software imaginable. People keep saying it's better and the TouchWiz days are over but I've yet to pick up a Samsung and not go "ewww" at it.

Pixels are okay but there's nothing like a bloatware free custom ROM. No AI garbage, just plain basic Android.

The problem is essentially, most people don't buy phones for the specs, they buy them for the fancy stupid features the manufacturers keep pushing to distinguish themselves. For 99% of the people, that's effectively all bloat. Samsung in particular seems to do everything possible to pretend it's not really Google's Android but Samsung's Android. Everything is different for the sake of looking different. Developers despise Samsung because their apps works well on every phone except Samsung because it's "special".