I currently have two phones, an iPhone X and a Samsung Galaxy S8. The iPhone X is of course great and works beautifully. There are some flaws, but they do not affect the overall experience.
The Samsung S8 is a dog. The S8 was supposed to be fast, but it is really sluggish and laggy and crashes a lot. It is so slow that sometimes I cannot even use WhatsApp on it.
The user interface is also terrible. The auto-hide navigation bar requires an additional touch to navigate, and sometimes does not even work. The annoying Bixby keeps appearing when I inadvertedly hit somewhere in the screen. And the battery life is not good at all.
Of course, the S8 has a great screen, and a great camera, is slim, light and beautiful. But that does not change the fact that the experience using it is just terrible, mainly because of the crappy Touch Wiz, which seems to ruin everything.
This is not my first Samsung device. I had a Samsung Galaxy S4 a few years back. In the first week, it felt great, as it was a powerful phone with a big screen. But then I realized that the user experience was far from good, really crappy indeed. I then bought an iPhone and never looked back. People kept saying (and I kept reading) that Touch Wiz got much better over the years, which led me to buy the S8. Terrible phone.
Not all my experiences with Android phones are bad. Last year I had a Moto Z Play, as my secondary device (together with an iPhone). The Moto Z Play was a very good phone. It was not a delight to use as the iPhone, but it was reasonably fast, had a great user interface, and was not sluggish or laggy as the S8 (which is way more powerful). The near stock Android provided a much better experience than Touch Wiz. And the battery life was just great. It was much cheaper and in an inferior category than the S8, but it is definitely a superior device.
I just cannot understand why people keep praising Samsung as the best Android phone maker. The Galaxy S8 was considered by many as last year’s best Android phone, and some reputed it as being better than the iPhone. And nobody seems to point out how bad this phone is. All I see is praise. I just cannot understand it. Is it just me?