WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.920 What these guys are thinking? I can't hold to quickly uninstall apps? 00:00:03.920 --> 00:00:07.400 Linus. The search bar is where I want my time and weather to be. 00:00:07.400 --> 00:00:10.960 Linus. And I can't move the navigation buttons. Linus. 00:00:10.960 --> 00:00:14.280 What? Those are all stock Android features, man. 00:00:15.400 --> 00:00:18.520 Right. I guess I have been kind of faithful 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. 00:00:24.280 --> 00:00:28.040 Quick. Somebody get me a phone with a stock AOSP image. 00:00:28.040 --> 00:00:32.680 Ah, perfect. A Pixel 8 Pro with GSI. 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. 00:00:42.560 --> 00:00:47.280 That's it. I'm out. How can anyone use this? 00:00:47.280 --> 00:00:51.160 I don't know when or how this happened, but it happened. 00:00:51.160 --> 00:00:54.480 Crappy vendor skins, that's the good Android now. 00:00:54.480 --> 00:00:57.880 And stock Android, it's a broken mess. 00:00:57.880 --> 00:01:02.880 And wait, wait, wait, before you shoot the messenger, give me a chance to explain 00:01:02.880 --> 00:01:05.280 and a chance to tell you about our sponsor. 00:01:15.160 --> 00:01:18.560 My first game breaking issue hit me almost immediately. 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. 00:01:23.160 --> 00:01:26.880 I can use the fancy Pixel camera instead of my old Note 9. 00:01:26.880 --> 00:01:31.360 But then I launched the camera and I'm like, what even is this? 00:01:31.360 --> 00:01:37.160 Not only is the app shockingly bare bones. I'm talking timer, grid lines, flash, 00:01:37.160 --> 00:01:41.080 and you can switch to the front camera if you want to get fancy, 00:01:41.080 --> 00:01:45.200 but it's also super unintuitive. After I'd recorded some video, 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 00:01:48.680 --> 00:01:52.520 without closing and completely restarting the app. 00:01:52.520 --> 00:01:55.480 I did eventually figure out that there's a gesture. 00:01:55.640 --> 00:01:58.640 Dang it, this is exactly what I'm talking about. There we go. 00:01:58.640 --> 00:02:02.600 There's a gesture to bring up the mode select or to see your gallery, 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, 00:02:07.040 --> 00:02:12.360 it just closes the app. And things like that just kept happening. 00:02:12.360 --> 00:02:15.720 Let's look at something even more basic, a phone call. 00:02:15.720 --> 00:02:21.000 I can start a call just fine, dial a number, bring up a contact, the wicks. 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:26.480 But once the call has started, I am completely at the mercy of whoever I called 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. 00:02:30.960 --> 00:02:34.960 There's no gesture, and even pressing the power button to end the call 00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:38.360 is not enabled by default. As it turns out, 00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:42.320 there isn't any default app configured for phone calls. 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 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 00:02:52.480 --> 00:02:56.880 anymore Linus, you dinosaur, but come on. The app is there. 00:02:56.880 --> 00:03:00.480 Why aren't we using it? What else? Bluetooth was weird. 00:03:00.480 --> 00:03:04.960 I could pair devices pretty reliably, but then actually making audio playback 00:03:04.960 --> 00:03:07.120 go through my AirPods Pro 2s. 00:03:08.720 --> 00:03:12.360 Whole other story. And the Bluetooth settings even crashed pretty often 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, 00:03:18.680 --> 00:03:22.080 and it would acknowledge I was touching the screen and even refresh the page, 00:03:22.080 --> 00:03:26.560 but would not register the change. 2.4 gigahertz worked fine though. 00:03:26.560 --> 00:03:29.640 Wireless emergency alerts appear to be totally missing. 00:03:29.640 --> 00:03:33.120 When you click the entry in the menu, it just drops you back a menu level. 00:03:33.120 --> 00:03:37.320 And screensaver was enabled, but without a screensaver selected, 00:03:37.320 --> 00:03:40.880 so my screen was not saved. Okay, that last one's pretty minor, 00:03:40.880 --> 00:03:45.240 but one that really irked me was needing to hit enter after my pin. 00:03:45.240 --> 00:03:49.320 I hear this is finally changeable on Pixel devices with Android 14, 00:03:49.320 --> 00:03:54.600 but it's not changeable on this one, which brings us to the surprising revelation 00:03:54.600 --> 00:04:01.360 that this experiment brought us to. There isn't really a functional stock Android anymore. 00:04:01.360 --> 00:04:05.240 There is stock Android, and getting it is pretty straightforward. 00:04:05.240 --> 00:04:09.160 We used a Pixel 8 Pro thinking, well, I mean, Google's own phone 00:04:09.160 --> 00:04:13.000 should surely be a good starting point for Google's own operating system, 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:16.440 and we downloaded a GSI or generic system image 00:04:16.440 --> 00:04:21.280 of Android 15 that's built from the Android open source project or AOSP. 00:04:21.280 --> 00:04:24.480 We picked up one with GMS or Google mobile services 00:04:24.480 --> 00:04:27.720 because I need Play Store apps, and that was it. 00:04:27.720 --> 00:04:31.600 We got stock Android, it just sucks. 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, 00:04:36.040 --> 00:04:39.700 we also loaded up a Pixel 8 non-pro with the same image 00:04:39.700 --> 00:04:43.200 so that the team could confirm that my problems were not user error 00:04:43.200 --> 00:04:46.440 without me having to give them my phone all the time. 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? 00:04:51.140 --> 00:04:54.820 lttstore.com. But hold on a second, let's back up. 00:04:54.820 --> 00:05:00.940 AOSP is the fundamental code that all manufacturers of Android phones build upon. 00:05:00.940 --> 00:05:04.780 It's a pillar of open source purity. How could it be bad? 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 00:05:11.860 --> 00:05:18.020 and it's more of a starting point. All manufacturers, yes, even Google themselves 00:05:18.020 --> 00:05:23.980 adds their own drivers, UI customizations, and apps that give their devices a unique flavor. 00:05:23.980 --> 00:05:28.380 And as this practice has become more common, it's clear that less and less effort 00:05:28.380 --> 00:05:33.220 has gone into maintaining stock apps and functions that no one's gonna use anyway. 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 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. 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 00:05:50.020 --> 00:05:53.820 and you think of that as normal. We're both wrong. 00:05:53.820 --> 00:05:58.580 There is no normal Android. Even the Android that you get with a Pixel device 00:05:58.580 --> 00:06:02.960 is not stock. Google's Pixel UI may be their vision 00:06:02.960 --> 00:06:07.420 for what Android should be, but there's no money in porting all of their 00:06:07.420 --> 00:06:11.080 Pixel exclusive visions back into AOSP. 00:06:11.080 --> 00:06:14.300 Though, of course, in some cases, that could be considered a good thing. 00:06:14.300 --> 00:06:17.300 Google does not generally include microSD slots 00:06:17.300 --> 00:06:23.980 for expanded storage in their devices, but Android still has support for external storage in AOSP. 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 00:06:28.460 --> 00:06:33.220 the stock Android experience, it's actually been dead for a lot longer 00:06:33.220 --> 00:06:36.460 than most people realize. Even Google's older Nexus line of phones 00:06:36.460 --> 00:06:40.060 got progressively less stock as time went on 00:06:40.060 --> 00:06:44.900 with apps for things like calendar, messages, and web browsing gradually being replaced 00:06:44.900 --> 00:06:49.660 with similar Google apps. And they even started using their own custom launcher 00:06:49.660 --> 00:06:54.260 that wasn't available for other phones. Luckily though, if you're not happy 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. 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. 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, 00:07:08.840 --> 00:07:11.860 but if your device is no longer supported, 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 00:07:17.620 --> 00:07:22.540 and help keep an old phone viable well past the manufacturer's end of support. 00:07:22.540 --> 00:07:27.020 Before you get too excited though, you will need a device with an unlockable bootloader 00:07:27.020 --> 00:07:31.080 in order to do this. Thankfully these days, that's many devices 00:07:31.080 --> 00:07:35.820 with some notable exceptions like ASUS where there isn't currently an official unlock method. 00:07:35.820 --> 00:07:39.460 And it's worth noting that even if your phone works, 00:07:39.460 --> 00:07:46.260 certain features like Samsung's S Pen for example, or especially secure features like NFC payments 00:07:46.260 --> 00:07:50.340 and bank apps might not work the way you would expect out of the box. 00:07:50.340 --> 00:07:53.660 Once you've got your bootloader unlocked though, you can choose a custom ROM, 00:07:53.660 --> 00:07:57.660 none of which are stock Android. And if anything gives me more appreciation 00:07:57.660 --> 00:08:00.940 for the incredible work that these teams have done over the years, 00:08:00.940 --> 00:08:04.540 it is the experience of using stock Android. 00:08:04.540 --> 00:08:09.220 Some of the notable examples of custom ROMs include LineageOS, which is lightly customized, 00:08:09.220 --> 00:08:13.260 quite stable and often used as a base for other custom ROMs. 00:08:13.260 --> 00:08:16.420 PixelOS is one that aims to bring a pixel-like experience 00:08:16.420 --> 00:08:21.860 to devices from non-Google manufacturers. GraphinOS and CalyxOS both aim to prevent Google 00:08:21.860 --> 00:08:26.340 from tracking your location and other data, but take kind of different approaches. 00:08:26.340 --> 00:08:30.620 Paranoid Android has been around almost forever and I think is pretty self-explanatory. 00:08:30.620 --> 00:08:34.180 And of course, there's that one that you're screaming at your screen right now 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. 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 00:08:42.700 --> 00:08:45.940 and collect your precious uploads. You're welcome. 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 00:08:49.660 --> 00:08:53.740 and after letting you guys pick one, attempting unsuccessfully to switch to the Fairphone 5, 00:08:53.740 --> 00:08:56.820 the phone I wanted, and then going through this bloody mess, 00:08:56.820 --> 00:09:00.220 I still don't have a new phone. So you know what? 00:09:00.220 --> 00:09:04.340 F*** it. I'm getting an iPhone. Yes, finally. 00:09:04.340 --> 00:09:08.500 But man, they're expensive. How am I gonna afford one? 00:09:08.500 --> 00:09:11.740 Maybe with some help from our sponsor. If you guys liked this video, 00:09:11.740 --> 00:09:15.700 why not relive how we got here from dunking the phone in the pool 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? 00:09:20.940 --> 00:09:23.140 We're gonna link a playlist down below.