Android is struggling to keep its market share in the United States, as Apple continues to take over in the market. But, despite Android as a whole losing ground, Google Pixel phones are becoming a bigger slice of the US market.
Counterpoint Research reports that, in Q2 2023, US smartphone shipments dropped by 24% year-over-year. That includes both iPhones and Android phones, and virtually every brand saw a drop in shipments. Samsung saw US shipments drop by 37% while Motorola saw a 17% drop. TCL saw the biggest decline at just shy of 70% year-over-year, and even Apple saw a 6% drop.
I use a pixel and I have a hard time justifying a different phone.
Maybe things have changed but the last Samsung I had was an S7 and I didn’t like it. It suffered from bloat and didn’t last all that long. Battery issues and the screen started to lose sensitivity.
I’ve used iphones and they aren’t bad, but I really dislike apple’s app store and effort to control everything on my phone. Also everytime a new phone came out my old phone became next to unusable for a month.
I got a pixel 3 and loved it, now I have a pixel 6 and don’t see changing my phone any time soon or going to a non-pixel phone. They last a long time, they work well with everything and the camera is excellent.
I have a hard time justifying a different phone
A pixel doesn’t have SD card slot or 3.5 mm jack. My Xperia 1V has both. There. Justified.
I mean most consumers don’t care about those 🤷♀️
most consumers have shit taste 🤷♀️
Or those features just aren’t that useful in modern phones…
I’ve used https://shop.fairphone.com/ for a while now, a bit less slick and more expensive, but I’m very satisfied. I already degoogled completely, can’t have a Google phone now :D
What does Fairphone offer for the car infortainment interface, or are you stuck without one?
I don’t own a car, no idea.
Is there an Android phone that supports dual boot? I would like to have that so can use Lineage or something similar and only boot into Google android when I need to use banking app or government ID that requires the safetynet antifeture. This would free me from carrying two phones. But I suppose a locked down bootloader can not support dual boot and an unlocked will not support the safetynet antifeature.
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Use Magisk, it bypasses SafetyNet. No need for dual boot https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk
You must install the Universal SafetyNet Fix afterwards https://github.com/kdrag0n/safetynet-fix
I got a pixel 7a about 6 months ago. It’s a brilliant phone, once you remove all the google shit / bloat and block all the trackers.
it’s hard to recommend the pixels when my own 7Pro has dust on the selfie camera but also it’s under the screen!!
I also suggested the phone to my friend when I got mine and she constantly keeps complaining about the battery. I should had told her to stick with the iPhone and be done. Thanks Google for the shitty hardware! and thanks to the Government for keeping Huawei, ZTE and Xiaomi out of the US market.
Yuck why do people continue to buy Apple products?
My Android phone fucking blows. The one I had prior was great but I lost it. I hate the constant alerts from the apps I can’t delete, I can’t take up close photos anymore without it looking like shit and not focusing, the screen will flip horizontal at random times when it’s got the lock screen option turned on. I don’t want a Google phone, though.
Anyone have opinions on the OnePlus phones?
Apps you can’t delete? Gotta be Samsung?
I used to have a Samsung Galaxy S6, I rooted it so I could remove the facebook app… turned out they built a custom circuit in a little chip that permanently breaks NFC if you rooted it. Ridiculous.
I feel like Google really hit their stride with the Pixel 6/7 series. The 7 series especially is just such a nice phone to use and doesn’t feel as cheap as previous iterations of the Pixel. It’s also great value for the money. I went with the Pro and would recommend against it honestly, because while I like the extra camera and the bigger screen it really doesn’t fit great in the average persons hand and the features don’t really justify the cost. If I had to do it over again I would get the 7 or 7a.
I honestly think the Pixel 5 is the best phone I have ever used. I have the P7 and I kind of wish I had stuck with the P5.
I love the size and feel of the 7a. It was an adjustment to get used to a small screen again but honestly, so happy with that element of the phone.
The battery life, on the other hand, feels worse than my 4 year old OnePlus 7 Pro’s is. I am not sure if it’s a me problem or a Pixel problem, but that aspect has me seriously worried about the longevity of the device. I guess you get what you pay for, but I’d expect a bit better for a mid-range phone.
It’s, unfortunately, a Pixel problem. The Tensor G2 is notoriously bad with battery life, and the fact that every manufacturer thinks we want paper thin phones doesn’t help.
The 7a is not a thin phone though, it’s noticeably thicker than my S9+, I think the 7a has a 4385mAh battery? A phone with such a large battery capacity should be better. You can tell the inefficient SoC is to blame because it gets hot easily.
Just makes me appreciate how amazing the S9+ was for it’s time that the 7a doesn’t completely blow it away when it’s much newer and nearly as expensive.
GrapheneOS is what keeps me from switching from Pixel.
Watch the Louis Rossman video on YouTube about Graphene OS developer.
You should watch it again. He said that GrapheneOS is great, but the Developer isn’t.
One of the Lemmy developers appears to be a militant communist who denies the Uyghur genocide, yet here we are. Quite a few open source developers are insane and trying to avoid software with problematic contributors is an easy path to follow them into madness. It might stop me from donating money or getting heavily involved with development, but it’s not going to stop me from using the software.
I didn’t immediately reformat my ReiserFS partitions when Hans Reiser was arrested for murdering his wife either.
Google keeps locking tons of Android features away behind their own privatized software stack.
Better for Google, but they are cutting their nose to spite their face here, as Android as a whole suffers for it.
Stuff like call screening in the android dialer would be possible on any brand of device. But no, pixel only.
The pixels have the very best android experience. It comes close to iPhone. But pixels aren’t the whole market. Overall Google is trying to claw back control of the entire platform and I hate it.
Stuff like call screening in the android dialer would be possible on any brand of device. But no, pixel only.
Other OEMs also have their own features that are exclusive to their own phones. They can also implement them into AOSP, but they don’t. Instead, they keep the features to their own devices. A lot of times when there’s a new feature on Android in general, more often than not you’ll see comments like “Samsung had this since years ago”.
So if other OEMs are allowed to have platform specific features, Google is allowed to have theirs too. Or in other words, if you want to hold Google responsible for holding back Android, you have to also hold other OEMs responsible too.
Google owns the platform. You’re not really comparing like to like.
It’s like saying since Google can modify some files in Windows that Microsoft doesn’t control the platform.
Sony upstreams many of its changes, but you’re right that Samsung does not. This is both because of differentiation, but also because often the changes are in defiance of the “official” Google spec in android and merging is refused.
One plus for example offers further customization on gesture input that is missing in Android 13, allowing corner bottom swipes, hiding the little nav line, etc. But this cannot merge.
Google has decided a “solution”, to hell with if your features are better. I would love to see these features in android mainline. But Google won’t allow it. Sony made a theme system years ago, but Android wouldn’t fully merge it, and took another 5 or so years to make something.
It’s like saying since Google can modify some files in Windows that Microsoft doesn’t control the platform.
You complain that I’m not comparing like to like, yet you’re taking Windows, a closed sourced operating system, as an analog to AOSP, an open sourced one?
This is both because of differentiation
But why are other OEMs allowed to differentiate, and Google is not?
Yes, Google has the “official control” of how Android should be, and not all OEM changes are in line with that. But contributing upstream is not the only way to make the Android ecosystem open.
Take for example, Galaxy Watch with WearOS. There are multiple features that the watch can do, ONLY IF ITS PAIRED WITH A GALAXY PHONE. I have a Galaxy Watch 4. It has ECG and Blood Pressure sensors. But I can’t use it (officially), because I don’t have a Galaxy phone. Why? Because Samsung is keeping that exclusive with a software lock that totally doesn’t have to be there. Measuring ECG and Blood Pressure doesn’t need anything from my phone, it’s all on the watch.
Another example also regarding using Galaxy Watch with a non Galaxy phone, which is even more absurd, is that if you’re using a Galaxy Watch with Galaxy phone, they will sync DND status between them, but if you’re not using a Galaxy phone, it’ll not sync. They literally added codes for it to not work on non Galaxy phone.
Also, the example you used in your original comment, the call screening feature, uses language models that Google paid for the development and trained. I think it’s fair for them to uses that technology that they invested in to help boost their own profit instead of just giving out for free.
As someone who switched to a Pixel from an iPhone, I’ll tell ya that I think the Pixel is a better phone. The only things iOS has going for it that are better is tap to scroll up, swipe to go forward, and a slightly better camera. Everything else works better on my Pixel.
