d3Xt3r

Promising, but since there's no mention at all about TDP / power consumption, those Geekbench scores are kinda meaningless.

Examples of Samsung bloat: AR Emoji, AR Zone, Bixby, Bixby Vison, Samsung Global Goals, Galaxy Wearable, Samsung Kids etc.. there's a whole bunch of them. I've disabled/removed all of them though.

The only Samsung apps I use are the basic ones such as the phone dialer, browser, camera, clock etc, and the system customisation tools part of the Good Lock suite. There aren't any ads in any of these.

What is the C*****e company?

I'm talking about phones made by that country, such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Redmi etc. They usually tend to have ads, unwanted popups and third-party bloatware.

I'd say stick with the Pixels, especially since you're already invested in Google services. You wouldn't be gaining much from switching to Samsung, unless you want to use the S-Pen, or some of the advanced multi-tasking features or customisation options (Good Lock stuff).

But FWIW, I've had the Galaxy Fold 4 and now on a Fold 5, and I haven't seen any ads on my device, nor do I recall seeing any third-party bloatware (besides Samsung/Google bloat of course). But your experience might be different if you buy a phone from a carrier, since it's usually the carriers who load crap on your phone (with the exception being most C*****e phones, which come with thirdparty bloatware out of the box).

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What does surprise me is that people actually pay their own subscription for these platforms. Netflix had a win in profit/revenue. I’m surprised that these people did not go for the Piracy method even though, they complain about:

Most people don't like change. Maybe they have a habit of switching on Netflix daily during dinner or something. There's also a big "Netflix" button on their remotes and their TV's homescreen, which serves as a constant reminder. They probably even have the app on their phones. All of this leads to mental conditioning and addiction, it's now a part of their daily lives. Humans are a creature of habit, and it's hard to break out of a routine ingrained over several years.

Piracy could be a option for some people, but it's still either too technical, or not as convenient, for the average Joe. Sure, there are even websites you could simply go to without installing any app, but most people won't bother with that - they just want to hit a single button on their remote/TV and watch something, without needing to go to some website, a website which may eventually stop working.

You'll find that most people would prefer to take the path of least resistance, even if it means paying (more) money. Don't forget that even pirates may sometimes pay money to make things easier - eg usenet/seedbox/debrid users - and that's simply because they too would prefer to take the path of least resistance, even if it means being in the ironic situation of paying to watch pirated content. So it's not too hard to imagine why normal people would just prefer to cough up the extra cash for Netflix and continue with their lives, routines unchanged.

I mean, if it's a corporate device then it's really a policy IT should be setting - this can be easily be done via a GPO or Intune policy, where an elevated script can prompt the end-user for a password.

Yep, you'll need local admin of course.

FYI: You can set it to require a PIN + TPM, or even just a password eg using manage-bde -on c: -password.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/manage-bde-on

If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

I disagree, the best place for such answers used to be Reddit, and Stack Exchange for the techy stuff. Quora always felt like cancer for some reason and I never really used it.

I think they probably meant the AOSP Camera, or certain Snapdragon camera variants bundled with some LineageOS builds.

There are decent alternatives to anything and everything.

Not for most of the apps that my folks use. For instance, there's this local grocery shopping app they use for groceries - the service is actually so good that there's nothing really competitive in that space. Another one is an app for a TV channel which has the shows they watch, the app is needed for some interactive features. And so on. All of these apps spam notifications, with no option to filter them out without turning off the notifications completely.

No, that’s probably the opposite of what we need. You realize that is far too complicated for 99% of users, right?

Sure, but so are notification channels - how many normal users even know it's a thing?

Your text matched will constantly need to be updated and maintained. Sounds like a nightmare.

Not really. From what I've observed, lot of these notifications follow the same pattern eg "X% DISCOUNT" "Something something DEAL" etc. Should be fairly easy to use a simple text filter, regex for the advanced users.

In any case, I still think having at least a Bayesian-style spam filter, or even an AI-backed one, would be a good thing. And having Google penalize spammers somehow.

Notification channels are great when an app actually uses them (properly). Of late I've been seeing many apps sending spam thru the main channel, or not describing/using channels appropriately, all of which makes them kinda useless.

My folks live overseas and they often miss my chat messages because it gets lost in a sea of junk notifications. When I visited them last time, I tried to use notification channels to filter some of it out, but it was useless - there was basically no way to just filter out the junk notifications (without disabling notifications completely) for most of the apps they were using.

What we really need is a generic notification filter, where I can define my own text/regex filters, or maybe even employ some bayesian-style spam filter. Heck, I'd say Google should add a "mark as spam" option to one of the notification options, and if an app gets enough of these, the devs should get a warning or delisted from the Play Store.