Except Samsung sells orders of magnitude more phones than Google does.

I don’t like the Samsung inference either, but millions and millions of people don’t just like it, they prefer it. They buy the phones specifically because they know how to use it. They aren’t loyal to Android, they are loyal to the Galaxy line.

Can confirm, having used several android phones across the last decade I can tell the most consistent Android experience is delivered by Samsung

Try a Pixel. None of the Samsung bloat and most importantly, no Bixby constantly getting in the way of the vastly superior Google Assistant already baked into android.

Pixel is known for amount of bugs and issues after the release. Also they release them in a handful of countries. It's not realistically viable alternative to Samsung when most of the world can't get it officially...

I have a recent Samsung Galaxy and haven't once accidentally triggered Bixby. Long press on home button is google assistant. I'm sure I disabled some Bixby settings when I set up the phone but at this point I don't know how to open it even if I tried.

Must have changed in the years since I had one. They had a dedicated Bixby button that you couldn't assign to anything else and updates to Bixby would constantly mess with settings related to activating Google Assistant. Good to know things have gotten better.

Samsung is consistent but with bloats. Pixel is somewhat inconsistent with very few bloats.

That hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, they are more userfriendly than other phones I have used. One thing in particular that is very nice is that everything is accessible on the larger screen sizes, action centers, call logs, messages, everything is designed to be accessible when holding your phone with one hand without having to awkwardly reach the top.

That used to be the case almost a decade ago, but everything is the past 5 years has been good in terms of user experience and little bloat.

They can go ahead and put an extra gig of basic apps on there as long as they keep making models with microsd slots.

I moved to Samsung from Apple and that wasn't my experience at all.

There's a separate Samsung version of every core Google Android app, a separate Samsung account system to sync everything, and a Samsung launcher. Mind you, I personally use none of it (except launcher), but that's basically the definition of Android bloat.

I'd expect bloatware to be unnecessary software. To a user who is not familiar with google's offering, the bloat doesn't exist, they don't see two different softwares. Samsung phones don't have two messaging apps, gallery, or phone app

Not including google's version doesn't equate to bloat. In fact, the opposite is true.

If I have to resort to dev mode to remove things I don't need, then to me it's bloat. Those things aren't there in vanilla Android.

I'm still using Samsung hardware and I like it, but it's got a little bloat goin on

Samsung is known for adding a more user friendly version of everything that comes from stock Android.

(Personally, I disagree, but this seems to be almost unanimous. Even for people that don't buy their phones.)

I guess one man's trash is another man's treasure. I like Samsung Health application and use it daily. I even had purchased something called RunKepper but stopped using it in favour of Samsung app.