What these guys are thinking? I can't hold to quickly uninstall apps?
Linus. The search bar is where I want my time and weather to be.
Linus. And I can't move the navigation buttons. Linus.
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 Pixel 8 Pro with GSI.
I'm going to use this for a month and 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 to tell you about our sponsor.
My first game breaking issue hit me almost immediately.
I wanted to take some pictures at one of my kid's 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 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.
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 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 wicks.
But once the call has 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 brainstem. And okay, sure, no one talks on the phone
anymore Linus, you dinosaur, but come on. The app is there.
Why aren't we using it? What else? Bluetooth was weird.
I could pair devices pretty reliably, but then actually making audio playback
go through my AirPods Pro 2s.
Whole other story. And the Bluetooth settings even crashed pretty often
when I tried to open them. While I was in the settings menu, I tried to switch the Wi-Fi hotspot to five gigahertz,
and it would acknowledge I was touching the screen and even refresh the page,
but would not register the change. 2.4 gigahertz worked fine though.
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 screensaver was enabled, but without a screensaver 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 non-pro with the same image
so that the team could confirm that my problems were not user error
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?
lttstore.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 gonna use anyway.
Now, I've mostly been a Samsung boy in recent years, so I'm most familiar with their One UI
and I've seen your comments that it's clear that Linus sees One UI as kind of a baseline for Android.
And you know what? There's probably some truth to that. Maybe you have used Sony's Xperia UI for years
and you think of that as 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 in porting 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 microSD 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, and 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 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 manufacturer's 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.
Some of the notable examples of custom ROMs include LineageOS, which is lightly customized,
quite stable and often used as a base for other custom ROMs.
PixelOS is one that aims to bring a pixel-like experience
to devices from non-Google manufacturers. GraphinOS and CalyxOS both aim 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 gonna leave it out so you can be the one to write it in the comments
and collect your precious uploads. 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 Fairphone 5,
the phone I wanted, and then going through this bloody mess,
I still don't have a new phone. So you know what?
F*** it. I'm getting an iPhone. Yes, finally.
But man, they're expensive. How am I gonna afford one?
Maybe with some help from our sponsor. 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?
We're gonna link a playlist down below.