After giving up on Nokia and friends complaining about Moto and Pixel, its brothers in stock Android, I switched to Samsung and felt it was a massive improvement. If I'm refusing to buy Chinese brands and iPhone and stuck to models available in India, what are my choices?
If any apps work on the Samsung phone, it's because of the app developers' sweat, tears and cursing when they work around the phone-specific bugs that seem to be different for each model. Even Huawei and Xiaomi are better than that.
Source: I work an audio-related mobile app. The audio engine code is littered with comments that read like "On phone X, Y happens and we do Z to work around it". In about 75% of the cases X is some Samsung model. And before you ask, X is the phone it was discovered on so there's no guarantee that the same issues don't occur on other phones but somehow Samsung is the name that always pops up.
I've not really had issues with the Pixel. This is anecdata, but I've had the 2 and currently have the 4a. My wife has the 5. We've had zero issues with them (except for stuff we did ourselves, like cracking the screens) over the past 4-ish years.
I had the 1. The battery died after 2 years but it had already stopped receiving Android updates at that point. The 4a has been good so far but around here the 4a and 5a had really poor availability.
Yeah I guess I should have added in the caveat that I've never owned a phone in 15 years that has lasted more than 2 years due to some kind of mishap. Usually a broken screen or water damage.
On a side note, My favorite phone I've ever had was an LG Envy 3. It was about the size of the palm of my hand and, closed, had a 1.25" screen and a standard 9-key keypad. It could also flip open to reveal a full qwerty keyboard and a 3" screen with some respectable stereo speakers.
