samsung

My trusty but banged up samsung 10e began de-laminating its screen due to cracked edges, it was time to get a new one. Which one though? I truly have zero interest in phones. I need a browser, bankid and an ssh client. This is evidenced by the fact that I used the 10e for six years and felt zero need to upgrade until it started literally falling apart. In general I view phones the same way I view social media; useful tools to get work done but they must be treated like a source of low grade radiation. Use them in a controlled fashion, for limited amounts of time, then detox or even purge between each interval. I noticed the samsung A15 on sale for €150 and the specs truly surprised me. The RAM was less, yes, 4gb compared to 8gb but the ram was apparently much faster and newer versions of android turned out to be much better at juggling oom scenarios. The CPU had been drastically upgraded, neat, not that I really use it. But what truly shocked me was that it came with an amoled screen. Every budget phone I've seen had the type of god awful screens that usually forced me to go up in price. Maybe there as something wrong with it? It couldn't be as good as the one on the 10e, could it? It could. In fact I'd say it's even better. Shocking. Amoled used to be a killer feature reserved to the highest tier flagship phones. Now it's on the budget ones too. At this point I will admit annoyance at myself. I wanted to switch to a de-googled phone which required a truly unlocked device, samsung has grown every increasingly mad for power and had begun restricting what their customers could do with their own phones. But I didn't want any more pieces of glass falling off in my ear.. and.. I just didn't have the energy to do internet sleuthing to figure out what the heck I was supposed to buy to get even a baseline level of privacy. So it's post-poned until the next phone. Shame on me.

setup

The google portion of the setup procedure for new android phones is vastly improved. Less pointless questions, now allows me to pick a browser and search engine by default (thank you EU, you mess of a bloated beast you), in general a fairly smooth experience. It really, really wants me to allow it to track me though but now I can opt out right in the setup procedure instead of having to hunt through android menus (well, some things still have to be opted out of that way but the major ones are covered). All in all I'm ok with this experience. The samsung portion though.. good god.. The first major fuck-up is when it asked me to sign up for a samsung account. This is something I had totally ignored on all previous samsung phones because the chance of me using their appstore is zero. But this time it wouldn't let me continue setting up the phone. My choices were to register with my google account or an e-mail. I didn't want to do either, what madness was this? There was no way I'd give them my actual e-mail so fine, you can have my google details, it doesn't really surrender anything too vital about me by default, if an app wants more details it'll ask. And it did ask. In fact it refused to let me continue if I didn't surrender MORE details via my google account. Fuck that. You're not getting anything else. I go back go back to the menu. This cannot be legal, it cannot prevent me from using the device I bought without giving my personal information to samsung, could it? No, what I was in fact supposed to do was click "lost my login information". There I found a skip option. That's incredibly deceptive. Skipping should have been on the first screen where it let me choose how I'd let them invade my privacy. But fine, I supposed I should have clicked that (even though I hadn't lost my login information since I didn't have a bloody account). I'm certain samsung logged all the information google gave them. Utter bullshit, but let's proceed.

samsung..

At this point the setup is finally finished, or so I thought. Immediately upon getting into android I notice the phone starts installing applications through the google app store. I didn't ask for this, so surely it must just be upgrades for android components, yes? No. It's office365, teams and god knows what else samsung has sold out their customers for. Let them tertiary revenue sources rain, you greedy cunts. Fine. Whatever. I'll just.. I'll just nothing because now some app called "appcloud" starts up and tells me I have FREE apps to install. Ok, is appcloud some kind of samsung app to provide more benefits to their customers? Of course it isn't. It's garbage shovelware that has paid samsung to force itself upon their customers. But I didn't know that. So I click the single button there is that says FREE to see what apps they were.. but that didn't show me a list of the apps, that bloody started installing them in the background. Apps like bloody temu, candy crush and other privacy invasive, data harvesting malware. Jesus christ, it auto installed bloody temu, with its track record of hoovering up every single piece of personal information your phone has and sending it to the communist party of china. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Samsung.

samsung is garbage

Turns out it's even worse. There's more bloat- and malware installed than I'd care to count. Facebook that steals not just your information but that of your contacts. Keyboard from Microsoft that logs everything you type. Co-pilot.. are you serious? A ton of something called AR? Augmented reality? What absolute horseshit is this? It took me much longer to uninstall this privacy invasive garbage than it took to buy the phone. Much longer. I shouldn't have to uninstall anything, the phone should just be in working order ready for me to INSTALL what I want. How much of my data did all of these applications harvest before I had a chance to uninstall them? samsung truly doesn't care about its customers anymore. Remember when companies would license the best software available so they could provide it to their customers as an added benefit? Now they're selling their customers to other companies for profit, like cattle. Selling our privacy and security. To the highest bidders. I'm fully aware that this isn't some great revelation, the ever growing greed forces companies to push for more schemes like this to make their next quarterly report look better. But there are companies that doesn't behave like this. They're few and far between but they exist. samsung just isn't one of them anymore. We're like beaten dogs. We make fun of people who highlight how fucked this is. "are you so naive that you don't think this is common practice?" We shouldn't have to expect this. We shouldn't have to endure this. Not valuing your customers but just expecting them to be there is the ultimate sign of monopolistic end stage capitalism. Given sufficient time all money pools with one player at the poker table. It is not a possibility, it's an inevitability. Thus, samsung is a garbage company and you should avoid them at all costs. I will. From now on. This phone has outstanding hardware for its price, but nothing is worth this absolute clusterfuck of an experience.