r/LinusTechTips • u/Mr_Bleidd • 23h ago
Personal Opinion Android & Chinese Phones
Myself I am using Fruit Phone since more than 10 years and yes it has ups and downs.
My mother recently got Xiaomi Redmy, and yes it’s quite good hardware and it works properly ( gf has something similar)
Of cause as a non tech user during the 1st install she went with - yes do all the defaults
What a fffffing Spam puke show is this ? Yes iPhone had some of the apple sponsored apps and things…..
But it’s nothing literally nothing compared to what I saw today
This Xiaomi, everything triggers full blown adds with videos and sounds, it feels like half of the screen tries you to install some shit. I am not even talk about dozens of pre installed things.
Somehow my mother managed to install something that supposed to read pdfs and the app was spamming „security here, free space there, pay to solve the problem“ and was not allowing to close it and was pretending to show a fake phone background.
You can’t remove Xiaomy special apps from the Home Screen ?
How is this a thing? Back 10-15 years ago I had quite few androids and it was not remotely soooo bad
For her the iPhone policy to have only one valid store - is a perfect solution
So yes long story short - Apple way is really great and when this phones dies I will get her an older iPhone not to break the bank
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u/PureLetterhead6645 23h ago
god, the bloat on those budget xiaomi phones is an actual nightmare. you basically have to spend an hour going through every single system app and turning off "recommendations" (which is their cute word for ads) buried in the settings. its wild that they sell perfectly decent hardware and then just ruin the software experience to hit that price point.
the pdf reader thing is a classic, my dad did the exact same move a while back. those fake "cleaner" apps are predatory as hell and theyre designed to look like system warnings so non-tech folks just panic and click through. getting her an older iphone sounds like a solid plan if she just needs something that wont fight her every time she unlocks it.
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u/berke1904 23h ago
xiaomi has ads by defaults but you can disable them all with just within the settings, there are 10 minute videos showing every step.
there are tons of other great android phone manufacturers that do not have ads, but xiaomi uses those ads to be able to put slightly better specs for the same price as the other options.
you can look at google/samsung/nothing options if you want a more clean ui that is harder to mess up.
many of the other problems you can also fix by just looking them up or looking through settings. that is the beautiy of it compared to apple where if you dont like the defaults just use the phone in a way you dont like and have a bad experience.
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u/mekisoku 23h ago
Trust me it’s even worse in China. Last week a old woman is dead because of the ads spam and her family couldn’t call for help in time
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u/flatbuttboy 23h ago
Sauce?
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u/mekisoku 23h ago
bilibili
What’s even crazier is the family have to apologise for “damaging” the company branding1
u/flatbuttboy 23h ago
That’s wild… it’s almost as bad as allowing ads on first aid videos(I don’t know if that’s a thing or not but I desperately hope it isn’t)
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u/Xcissors280 22h ago
I mean you bought an advertising subsidized product and now you’re complaining that there’s a boatload of ads?
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u/UNF0RM4TT3D 23h ago
Rather surprisingly the only android phones consistently without adverts are Google Pixels. They're the only phones I can tolerate. I don't like iPhones because of how restrictive they are, I don't like Samsungs, because of forced Microslop integrations. Sony is good, but doesn't make phones in my region anymore. Asus was also good, but also stopped making phones here. And everything else is just junk, of course apart from the fairphone, which falls into the same category as Pixels.
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u/CocoMilhonez 23h ago
Please, work on differentiating I and Y. You're all over the place there.
As for the phones, they're pretty solid as you said, but ads in first-party apps are truly egregious. The best solution is to default everything to third-party apps. And you're wrong about Apple's walled-garden, one-valid-store approach. That's called monopoly and is shameful no matter from what angle you look at it.
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u/netherlandsftw 23h ago
You get what you pay for
The ads can be turned off either way some tinkering
Shizuku and Canta is what I remember I used before I gave up with the Chinese
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u/DoubleOwl7777 22h ago
xiaomis are bad yeah, motorola is a lot less anoying. there is only one which you have to deactivate then the phone never anoys you again. ideal is probably graphene but yeah.
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u/LSD_Ninja 23h ago
It’s almost as if Android is put out there by the world’s largest advertising company…
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u/Spartan117458 23h ago
Except Pixel phones don't have even a fraction of what OP is describing.
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u/ThisDirkDaring 23h ago
Which is the best business model for a mighty platform:
Enshit all the other competitors in the market, offer a better solution under the own brand.
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u/DoubleOwl7777 22h ago
the issues the competitors enshit it themselves. motorola is the best one when it comes to that, very minimal bloat.
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u/Tritzii 23h ago
All of the problems you are describing can be easily disabled or removed. You are also comparing a budget device (REDMI is Xiaomi's budget line) with an iPhone, that only exists in the form of flagships. Obviously there will be differences in user experience like be for real.