what these guys are thinking I can't hold to quickly uninstall apps the
search bar is where I want my time and weather to be and I can't move the
navigation buttons what those are all stock Android
features man right I guess I have been kind of
faithful to the Samsung ecosystem for a while maybe I don't know what stock
Android truly is quick somebody get me a
phone with a stock AOSP image ah perfect
a pi pixel 8 Pro with GSI I'm going to
use this for a month then I'm going to come back here and talk about what I
learned that's it I'm out how can anyone
use this I don't know when or how this happened but it happened crappy vendor
skins that's the good Android now and stock Android it's a broken mess and
wait wait wait before you shoot the messenger give me a chance to explain and a chance
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my first gamebreaking issue hit me almost immediately I wanted to take some
pictures at one of my kids birthday parties and I was like oh this is great
timing I can use the fancy pixel camera instead of my old note 9 but then I
launched the camera and I'm like what even is this not only is the app
shockingly Bare Bones I'm talking timer grid lines Flash and O you can switch to
the front camera if you want to get fancy but it's also super unintuitive
after I'd recorded some video I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get
back to photo mode without closing and completely restarting the app I did
eventually figure out that there's a gesture a dang it this is exactly what
I'm talking about there we go there's a gesture to bring up the mode select or
to see your gallery but if you start that gesture anywhere near the edge of
the phone as you guys just saw it it just closes the app and things like that
just kept happening let's look at something even more basic a phone call I
can start a call just fine dial a number bring up a contact the Wes but once the
call is started I am completely at the mercy of whoever I called because for
the life of me I could not figure out how to hang up a phone call there's no
gesture and even pressing the power button to end the call is not enabled by
default as it turns out there isn't any
default app configured for phone calls so when you make or receive a call
you're initiating some kind of dark ritual then that links you directly to
the phone's brain stem and okay sure no one talks on the phone anymore lus you
dinosaur but come on the app is there
why aren't we using it uh what else Bluetooth was weird I could pair devices
pretty reliably but then actually making audio playback go through my airpods Pro
twos whole other story and the Bluetooth settings even crashed pretty often when
I tried to open them uh while I was in the settings menu I tried to switch the
Wi-Fi hotspot to 5 GHz and it would
acknowledge I was touching the screen and even refresh the page but would not
register the change 2.4 GHz worked fine though uh wireless emergency alerts
appear to be totally missing when you click the entry in the menu it just
drops you back a menu level and screen saver was enabled but without a screen
saver selected so my screen was not saved okay that last one's pretty minor
but one that really irked me was needing to hit enter after my pin I hear this is
finally changeable on Pixel devices with Android 14 but it's not changeable on
this one which brings us to the surprising Revelation that this
experiment brought us to there isn't really a functional stock Android
anymore there is stock Android and
getting it is pretty straightforward we used a pixel 8 Pro thinking well I mean
Google's own phone should surely be a good starting point for Google's own
operating system and we downloaded a GSI or generic system image of Android 15
that's built from the Android open source project or AOSP we picked up one
with GMS or Google mobile services because I need Play store apps and that
was it we got stock Android it just
sucks so much that we kind of didn't even trust the results so as a sanity
check we also loaded up a pixel 8 nonpr with the same image so that the team
could confirm that my problems were not user ER without me having to give them
my phone all the time and they weren't
I'm speaking of pixels by the way have you checked out our dead pixel collection LTT Store.com but hold on a
second let's back up AOSP is the fundamental code that all manufacturers
of Android phones build upon it's a pillar of open- source Purity how could
it be bad well whatever it may have been in
the past these days AOSP is less of an
operating system and it's more of a starting point all manufacturers yes
even Google themselves adds their own drivers UI customizations and apps that
give their devices a unique flavor and as this practice has become more common
it's clear that less and less effort has gone into maintaining stock apps and
functions that no one's going to use anyway now I've mostly been a Samsung
boy in recent years so I'm most familiar with their oneui and I've seen your
comments that it's clear that lius CES one UI as kind of a base line for
Android and you know what there's probably some truth to that maybe you
have used Sony's xeria UI for years and you think of that is normal we're both
wrong there is no normal Android even
the Android that you get with a pixel device is not stock Google's pixel UI
may be their vision for what Android should be but there's no money importing
all of their pixel exclusive Visions back into AOSP though of course in some
cases that could be considered a good thing Google does not generally include
micro SD slots for expanded storage in their devices but Android still has
support for external storage in AOSP I
think the funniest thing about this for me is that while we still see people
evangelizing the stock Android experience it's actually been dead for a
lot longer than most people realize even Google's older Nexus line of phones got
progressively less stock as time went on
with apps for things like calendar messages web browsing gradually being
replaced with similar Google Apps and
they even started using their own custom launcher that wasn't available for other
phones luckily though if you're not happy with the skin used on your phone
you might be able to switch it up with a custom rom that is a version of Android
that's made by someone other than one of the major phone
manufacturers I wouldn't really recommend this on a device that's still
being supported by the manufacturer but if your device is no longer supported
custom roms can get give you access to the latest security patches or even
entirely new versions of Android and help keep an old phone viable well past
the manufacturers end of support before you get too excited though you will need
a device with an unlockable bootloader in order to do this thankfully these
days that's many devices with some notable exceptions like ASUS where there
isn't currently an official unlock method and it's worth noting that even
if your phone works certain features like Samsung's S Pen for example or
especially secure features like NFC payments and Bank apps might not work
the way you would expect out of the box once you've got your bootloader unlocked
though you can choose a custom rom none of which are stock Android and if
anything gives me more appreciation for the incredible work that these teams
have done over the years it is the experience of using stock Android uh
some of the notable examples of custom roms include lineage OS which is lightly
customized quite stable and often used as a base for other custom roms a pixel
OS is one that aims to bring a pixel likee experience to devices from
non-google manufacturers graphine OS and calx Os both aimed to prevent Google
from tracking your location and other data but take kind of different
approaches Paranoid Android has been around almost forever and I think is
pretty self-explanatory and of course there's that one that you're screaming
at your screen right now because I'm a terrible terrible person who's ignoring what is clearly the best custom ROM so
I'll tell you what I'm going to leave it out so you can be the one to write it in
the comments and collect your precious up votes you're welcome with that out of
the way I dropped my fold in the pool almost a year ago and after letting you
guys pick one attempting unsuccessfully to switch to the fair phone 5 the phone
I wanted and then going through this bloody mess I still don't have a new
phone so you know what [ __ ] it I'm
getting an iPhone yes finally but man
they're expensive how am I going to afford one
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with premium if you guys liked this video why not relive how we got here
from dunking the phone in the pool to getting trolled by Reddit and the
disappointment of a phone I wanted so badly to love uh we're going to link a
playlist down below