1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,920 What these guys are thinking? I can't hold to quickly uninstall apps? 2 00:00:03,920 --> 00:00:07,400 Linus. The search bar is where I want my time and weather to be. 3 00:00:07,400 --> 00:00:10,960 Linus. And I can't move the navigation buttons. Linus. 4 00:00:10,960 --> 00:00:14,280 What? Those are all stock Android features, man. 5 00:00:15,400 --> 00:00:18,520 Right. I guess I have been kind of faithful 6 00:00:18,520 --> 00:00:24,280 to the Samsung ecosystem for a while. Maybe I don't know what stock Android truly is. 7 00:00:24,280 --> 00:00:28,040 Quick. Somebody get me a phone with a stock AOSP image. 8 00:00:28,040 --> 00:00:32,680 Ah, perfect. A Pixel 8 Pro with GSI. 9 00:00:32,680 --> 00:00:37,720 I'm going to use this for a month and I'm going to come back here and talk about what I learned. 10 00:00:42,560 --> 00:00:47,280 That's it. I'm out. How can anyone use this? 11 00:00:47,280 --> 00:00:51,160 I don't know when or how this happened, but it happened. 12 00:00:51,160 --> 00:00:54,480 Crappy vendor skins, that's the good Android now. 13 00:00:54,480 --> 00:00:57,880 And stock Android, it's a broken mess. 14 00:00:57,880 --> 00:01:02,880 And wait, wait, wait, before you shoot the messenger, give me a chance to explain 15 00:01:02,880 --> 00:01:05,280 and a chance to tell you about our sponsor. 16 00:01:15,160 --> 00:01:18,560 My first game breaking issue hit me almost immediately. 17 00:01:18,560 --> 00:01:23,160 I wanted to take some pictures at one of my kid's birthday parties and I was like, oh, this is great timing. 18 00:01:23,160 --> 00:01:26,880 I can use the fancy Pixel camera instead of my old Note 9. 19 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:31,360 But then I launched the camera and I'm like, what even is this? 20 00:01:31,360 --> 00:01:37,160 Not only is the app shockingly bare bones. I'm talking timer, grid lines, flash, 21 00:01:37,160 --> 00:01:41,080 and you can switch to the front camera if you want to get fancy, 22 00:01:41,080 --> 00:01:45,200 but it's also super unintuitive. After I'd recorded some video, 23 00:01:45,200 --> 00:01:48,680 I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get back to photo mode 24 00:01:48,680 --> 00:01:52,520 without closing and completely restarting the app. 25 00:01:52,520 --> 00:01:55,480 I did eventually figure out that there's a gesture. 26 00:01:55,640 --> 00:01:58,640 Dang it, this is exactly what I'm talking about. There we go. 27 00:01:58,640 --> 00:02:02,600 There's a gesture to bring up the mode select or to see your gallery, 28 00:02:02,600 --> 00:02:07,040 but if you start that gesture anywhere near the edge of the phone, as you guys just saw, 29 00:02:07,040 --> 00:02:12,360 it just closes the app. And things like that just kept happening. 30 00:02:12,360 --> 00:02:15,720 Let's look at something even more basic, a phone call. 31 00:02:15,720 --> 00:02:21,000 I can start a call just fine, dial a number, bring up a contact, the wicks. 32 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:26,480 But once the call has started, I am completely at the mercy of whoever I called 33 00:02:26,480 --> 00:02:30,960 because for the life of me, I could not figure out how to hang up a phone call. 34 00:02:30,960 --> 00:02:34,960 There's no gesture, and even pressing the power button to end the call 35 00:02:34,960 --> 00:02:38,360 is not enabled by default. As it turns out, 36 00:02:38,360 --> 00:02:42,320 there isn't any default app configured for phone calls. 37 00:02:42,320 --> 00:02:47,680 So when you make or receive a call, you're initiating some kind of dark ritual then 38 00:02:47,680 --> 00:02:52,480 that links you directly to the phone's brainstem. And okay, sure, no one talks on the phone 39 00:02:52,480 --> 00:02:56,880 anymore Linus, you dinosaur, but come on. The app is there. 40 00:02:56,880 --> 00:03:00,480 Why aren't we using it? What else? Bluetooth was weird. 41 00:03:00,480 --> 00:03:04,960 I could pair devices pretty reliably, but then actually making audio playback 42 00:03:04,960 --> 00:03:07,120 go through my AirPods Pro 2s. 43 00:03:08,720 --> 00:03:12,360 Whole other story. And the Bluetooth settings even crashed pretty often 44 00:03:12,360 --> 00:03:18,680 when I tried to open them. While I was in the settings menu, I tried to switch the Wi-Fi hotspot to five gigahertz, 45 00:03:18,680 --> 00:03:22,080 and it would acknowledge I was touching the screen and even refresh the page, 46 00:03:22,080 --> 00:03:26,560 but would not register the change. 2.4 gigahertz worked fine though. 47 00:03:26,560 --> 00:03:29,640 Wireless emergency alerts appear to be totally missing. 48 00:03:29,640 --> 00:03:33,120 When you click the entry in the menu, it just drops you back a menu level. 49 00:03:33,120 --> 00:03:37,320 And screensaver was enabled, but without a screensaver selected, 50 00:03:37,320 --> 00:03:40,880 so my screen was not saved. Okay, that last one's pretty minor, 51 00:03:40,880 --> 00:03:45,240 but one that really irked me was needing to hit enter after my pin. 52 00:03:45,240 --> 00:03:49,320 I hear this is finally changeable on Pixel devices with Android 14, 53 00:03:49,320 --> 00:03:54,600 but it's not changeable on this one, which brings us to the surprising revelation 54 00:03:54,600 --> 00:04:01,360 that this experiment brought us to. There isn't really a functional stock Android anymore. 55 00:04:01,360 --> 00:04:05,240 There is stock Android, and getting it is pretty straightforward. 56 00:04:05,240 --> 00:04:09,160 We used a Pixel 8 Pro thinking, well, I mean, Google's own phone 57 00:04:09,160 --> 00:04:13,000 should surely be a good starting point for Google's own operating system, 58 00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:16,440 and we downloaded a GSI or generic system image 59 00:04:16,440 --> 00:04:21,280 of Android 15 that's built from the Android open source project or AOSP. 60 00:04:21,280 --> 00:04:24,480 We picked up one with GMS or Google mobile services 61 00:04:24,480 --> 00:04:27,720 because I need Play Store apps, and that was it. 62 00:04:27,720 --> 00:04:31,600 We got stock Android, it just sucks. 63 00:04:31,600 --> 00:04:36,040 So much that we kind of didn't even trust the results. So as a sanity check, 64 00:04:36,040 --> 00:04:39,700 we also loaded up a Pixel 8 non-pro with the same image 65 00:04:39,700 --> 00:04:43,200 so that the team could confirm that my problems were not user error 66 00:04:43,200 --> 00:04:46,440 without me having to give them my phone all the time. 67 00:04:46,440 --> 00:04:51,140 And they weren't. I'm speaking of pixels, by the way. Have you checked out our dead pixel collection? 68 00:04:51,140 --> 00:04:54,820 lttstore.com. But hold on a second, let's back up. 69 00:04:54,820 --> 00:05:00,940 AOSP is the fundamental code that all manufacturers of Android phones build upon. 70 00:05:00,940 --> 00:05:04,780 It's a pillar of open source purity. How could it be bad? 71 00:05:05,700 --> 00:05:11,860 Well, whatever it may have been in the past, these days AOSP is less of an operating system 72 00:05:11,860 --> 00:05:18,020 and it's more of a starting point. All manufacturers, yes, even Google themselves 73 00:05:18,020 --> 00:05:23,980 adds their own drivers, UI customizations, and apps that give their devices a unique flavor. 74 00:05:23,980 --> 00:05:28,380 And as this practice has become more common, it's clear that less and less effort 75 00:05:28,380 --> 00:05:33,220 has gone into maintaining stock apps and functions that no one's gonna use anyway. 76 00:05:33,220 --> 00:05:37,980 Now, I've mostly been a Samsung boy in recent years, so I'm most familiar with their One UI 77 00:05:37,980 --> 00:05:44,340 and I've seen your comments that it's clear that Linus sees One UI as kind of a baseline for Android. 78 00:05:44,340 --> 00:05:50,020 And you know what? There's probably some truth to that. Maybe you have used Sony's Xperia UI for years 79 00:05:50,020 --> 00:05:53,820 and you think of that as normal. We're both wrong. 80 00:05:53,820 --> 00:05:58,580 There is no normal Android. Even the Android that you get with a Pixel device 81 00:05:58,580 --> 00:06:02,960 is not stock. Google's Pixel UI may be their vision 82 00:06:02,960 --> 00:06:07,420 for what Android should be, but there's no money in porting all of their 83 00:06:07,420 --> 00:06:11,080 Pixel exclusive visions back into AOSP. 84 00:06:11,080 --> 00:06:14,300 Though, of course, in some cases, that could be considered a good thing. 85 00:06:14,300 --> 00:06:17,300 Google does not generally include microSD slots 86 00:06:17,300 --> 00:06:23,980 for expanded storage in their devices, but Android still has support for external storage in AOSP. 87 00:06:23,980 --> 00:06:28,460 I think the funniest thing about this for me is that while we still see people evangelizing 88 00:06:28,460 --> 00:06:33,220 the stock Android experience, it's actually been dead for a lot longer 89 00:06:33,220 --> 00:06:36,460 than most people realize. Even Google's older Nexus line of phones 90 00:06:36,460 --> 00:06:40,060 got progressively less stock as time went on 91 00:06:40,060 --> 00:06:44,900 with apps for things like calendar, messages, and web browsing gradually being replaced 92 00:06:44,900 --> 00:06:49,660 with similar Google apps. And they even started using their own custom launcher 93 00:06:49,660 --> 00:06:54,260 that wasn't available for other phones. Luckily though, if you're not happy 94 00:06:54,260 --> 00:06:57,800 with the skin used on your phone, you might be able to switch it up with a custom ROM. 95 00:06:57,800 --> 00:07:03,700 That is a version of Android that's made by someone other than one of the major phone manufacturers. 96 00:07:03,700 --> 00:07:08,840 I wouldn't really recommend this on a device that's still being supported by the manufacturer, 97 00:07:08,840 --> 00:07:11,860 but if your device is no longer supported, 98 00:07:11,860 --> 00:07:17,620 custom ROMs can give you access to the latest security patches or even entirely new versions of Android 99 00:07:17,620 --> 00:07:22,540 and help keep an old phone viable well past the manufacturer's end of support. 100 00:07:22,540 --> 00:07:27,020 Before you get too excited though, you will need a device with an unlockable bootloader 101 00:07:27,020 --> 00:07:31,080 in order to do this. Thankfully these days, that's many devices 102 00:07:31,080 --> 00:07:35,820 with some notable exceptions like ASUS where there isn't currently an official unlock method. 103 00:07:35,820 --> 00:07:39,460 And it's worth noting that even if your phone works, 104 00:07:39,460 --> 00:07:46,260 certain features like Samsung's S Pen for example, or especially secure features like NFC payments 105 00:07:46,260 --> 00:07:50,340 and bank apps might not work the way you would expect out of the box. 106 00:07:50,340 --> 00:07:53,660 Once you've got your bootloader unlocked though, you can choose a custom ROM, 107 00:07:53,660 --> 00:07:57,660 none of which are stock Android. And if anything gives me more appreciation 108 00:07:57,660 --> 00:08:00,940 for the incredible work that these teams have done over the years, 109 00:08:00,940 --> 00:08:04,540 it is the experience of using stock Android. 110 00:08:04,540 --> 00:08:09,220 Some of the notable examples of custom ROMs include LineageOS, which is lightly customized, 111 00:08:09,220 --> 00:08:13,260 quite stable and often used as a base for other custom ROMs. 112 00:08:13,260 --> 00:08:16,420 PixelOS is one that aims to bring a pixel-like experience 113 00:08:16,420 --> 00:08:21,860 to devices from non-Google manufacturers. GraphinOS and CalyxOS both aim to prevent Google 114 00:08:21,860 --> 00:08:26,340 from tracking your location and other data, but take kind of different approaches. 115 00:08:26,340 --> 00:08:30,620 Paranoid Android has been around almost forever and I think is pretty self-explanatory. 116 00:08:30,620 --> 00:08:34,180 And of course, there's that one that you're screaming at your screen right now 117 00:08:34,180 --> 00:08:38,380 because I'm a terrible, terrible person who's ignoring what is clearly the best custom ROM. 118 00:08:38,380 --> 00:08:42,700 So I'll tell you what, I'm gonna leave it out so you can be the one to write it in the comments 119 00:08:42,700 --> 00:08:45,940 and collect your precious uploads. You're welcome. 120 00:08:45,940 --> 00:08:49,660 With that out of the way, I dropped my fold in the pool almost a year ago 121 00:08:49,660 --> 00:08:53,740 and after letting you guys pick one, attempting unsuccessfully to switch to the Fairphone 5, 122 00:08:53,740 --> 00:08:56,820 the phone I wanted, and then going through this bloody mess, 123 00:08:56,820 --> 00:09:00,220 I still don't have a new phone. So you know what? 124 00:09:00,220 --> 00:09:04,340 F*** it. I'm getting an iPhone. Yes, finally. 125 00:09:04,340 --> 00:09:08,500 But man, they're expensive. How am I gonna afford one? 126 00:09:08,500 --> 00:09:11,740 Maybe with some help from our sponsor. If you guys liked this video, 127 00:09:11,740 --> 00:09:15,700 why not relive how we got here from dunking the phone in the pool 128 00:09:15,700 --> 00:09:20,940 to getting trolled by Reddit and the disappointment of a phone I wanted so badly to love? 129 00:09:20,940 --> 00:09:23,140 We're gonna link a playlist down below.