Close

What are you looking for?

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Who owns my phone? Do I own it, or does Samsung?

(Topic created on: 28-03-2019 07:44 PM)
1406 Views
RRS9user
First Poster
Options

Because if I own it, I want the Pie update removed, and I want a choice before a new one is installed. 

If I don't own it, I want my money back from Verizon, and you can take this phone back to update it as much as you want. 

 

Long post, but I'm not sure an update has impacted and irritated me so negatively. 
Imagine buying a new BMW with an awesome radio, cool features, and very easy ergonomic controls. First one you've ever had, and you're in love with it. Then in the middle of the night one day, BMW comes along and removes some features you loved, adds some that just get in the way, or changes how you turn on the radio and select an audio source. They they made the cluster display lighting bizarre and annoying colors. They moved the shifter to the column instead of the console. They replaced your automatic wipers that worked great with automatic-er wipers that sensed rain in the next county and started wiping. They changed the color from grey to neon pink, with stars along the side.
And...when you come out to the car, you find they took it all apart in the middle of the night, then stopped and waited because they needed your key to continue working. Then they spent the next 40 minutes installing the things you didn't want and didn't ask for (my S9 pie upgrade was 40-45 minutes).
You'd be at the dealer raising h***, right? You'd demand your money back or sue BMW, right?

So, why is Samsung able to do the same thing to my personal property, my phone, and people still buy their products? 


Issues since this Pie update:

- Action button/menu item locations. Don't see why these needed to change. I build muscle memory to work faster. Moving things around makes me work slower and have to relearn petty things, as well as make mistakes that add work. How does that make any sense?

- Touch sensitivity. It now takes multiple taps or swipes to get an action recognized. No screen protector. Never a problem before the update. Why did this need to change?

- Adaptive brightness. It doesn't work, and it didn't need to be changed. Can't use the phone in bed without manually lowering brightness, can't grab it quick to change songs while driving at night without it lighting up the entire interior of the car. Again, why break what was working great?  

- Text message app banner. Literally half the texct app display is grey, with the word "Messages." Why was this added? Why would you add ANYTHING that adds even a microeffort to your app's usability? I can't find a way to eliminate it. I open the app 300 times a day. I get it. I opened the messaging app. I don't need to see the word every time I want to grab a conversation quick.
Please don't replace my CONTENT with your excessive label. 

- Always-on Notification icons. Again, didn't need to change. The unobtrusive white or grey envelope is now blood red, full charge icon green.
Coupled with adaptive brightness, if I bump it in the night, its like I woke a demon that stares at me with 2 red eyes and a green ear. This was needed because...?   

- Contacts colors. There is nothing purposeful or aesthetic about this change. Not necessary and should be configurable. I'm an adult. I don't look at contacts to be entertained by colors, nor do I need a magical rainbow flowing by as I scroll. I ditched MS Outlook for Android because this was annoying and childish. Why force me to the same nonsensical junk?
Again, more content please, less arts and crafts. 

- Notification listing. The buttons are rearranged, at least for gmail. Delete and reply were swapped, so muscle memory, which still kicks in after over a week, has me hitting reply, which means I open the app, thus all that mailbox notifications are removed from the panel and I have to take a dozen extra steps to clean out messages.
This change was necessary to force upon me because...?

- Performance. It now has arbitrary hang ups. Like it's trying to call the mothership and can't, but everything else has to wait until it fails at that. As I write this post, I'm watching my S9 sitting on my desk s l o w l y attempt to open my gmail app. Just a white screen with a red banner as it tries to get it's stuff together and show me my mail list after tapping the new mail notification. Yesterday, standing in line at a store, I attempted to call my wife and make sure my list was right...but ended up not bothering because the phone took so incredibly long to respond when I hit the phone app icon. And nothing else worked while it contemplated my request...it was effectively a brick. Good thing I don't use the phone to pay, I'd have every customer behind me irate. But imagine if people depended on their phone to make phone calls? This phone is 4 months old, and it now performs worse than my 3 year old S7 did before I upgraded.
GMail app still hasn't opened. I gave up. I would reboot, but I'm afraid it will arbitrarily update again. 

- Display animations. I don't need a window shrinking up and down or across my screen. Ditch the cartoons. Open and close my apps faster. Or stop talking about cpu speed if you're going to waste it. Make it so fast I don't notice a delay from touch to open. Hit that goal, then you can give up some cpu cycles to make them look magical. I got rid of my iPhone because I am an adult and a professional that uses a tool, not a toy or life manager.  

- Recently used. Why. Why. Why. The tops of every recent app used to be identifiable in one single button press. Now I get a full shot of the app. Sometimes I don't want the last app so visible, like when sitting next to someone in a meeting and I have confidential messages or gallery pics in recently used, etc. This is a massive step backwards in efficiency and privacy.

- Notification panel. Can't get rid of "Accessibility: 2 functions..." no matter how many times I go in and confirm, yes, I want those features enabled. I do not want my notification panel full of useless clutter. This line will not clear, and touching it just changes it's detail. I'm not sure something could be intentionally engineered to be more pointless or useless.

- Settings pull down. I can deal with this, but don't like it. I'm impressed that this upgrade managed to make something seem more chaotic by making it all look the same. It's like there was once a drawer in my kitchen for every item, and I knew where every drawer was. Then Samsung or Google came along and smashed all my drawers, and dumped the contents of every drawer into a really ugly box. Now I have to hunt around the box whenever I need something. I almost wish that's really hat happened to I could have some recourse against it...

- Forced upgrade. I had delayed the install over an over, then had to reboot in the middle of the day while out of office because mail stopped flowing. This killed my productivity for a while because I didn't realize a simple phone reboot meant it would be a brick for a 45 minute upgrade.

 

Look, I've gone through interface updates that scramble things up and I have to learn to live with it, but enough is enough. These companies are getting away with extreme consumer abuse by removing an opt-out. There are so many changes here that are utterly useless; they don't even IMPROVE the interface appearance, they just clutter and disorganize it. I'm not even bothering to list the icon changes that seem to look less and less intelligent with every iteration; that's just more developer arts and crafts I have to live with being graffiti'd on my stuff.

It severely interferes with my functionality when I have to retrain my unthinking muscle-memory actions every few months, and for no decent reason. It's not like I bought a new phone; I just woke up one morning and everything was different. For no reason. And you're telling me I can't undo it. 

Who's phone is it, then?

 

 

Someone please explain to me why I am required to take updates that change operations and features that I don't want changed, on a device I purchased and was under the impression I own and control. 

0 REPLIES 0