Yeah, that wasn’t my experience in Australia. Every Samsung I ever had had google apps and Samsung apps preinstalled. None of the rest. And all those baked in apps were easily disabled if they couldn’t be deleted (I couldn’t delete YouTube, but I could disable it so I could run Vanced and not have the normal YouTube app be the default). I suspect that even though you bought a unlocked phone, it came with a bunch of shit baked in cos you are in the US. There’s a lot of shit that is copacetic there (more generally speaking than just phone related) that doesn’t fly in the rest of the world.

As I said, there are other reasons not to use Samsung devices, but all these stories I’ve gotten in this thread have not matched up with the experience I had in over 7yrs.

I literally said there were other reasons not to choose Samsung, I’m not making them out to be a saint. And I have literally had none of the issues you’ve described with the Samsung’s I’ve had in Australia.

Nah, Samsung didn’t ruin their phones, carriers in the US did. Don’t have any of that bloatware or ads on em down here in Australia. That being said, there are other reasons to avoid Samsung…

I love this app so much. Ran into issues with Poweramp draining my battery and overheating the device. Went back and forth with the dev, we couldn’t figure it out so I moved on. And my god, there is a lot of shite out there. But this app is magic. I use it every day and have never had an issue with it. Everything just makes sense and it is a joy to use.