Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It’s a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services. Joel Chrono (he took his username from the best game ever made) just went through this experience, with new Samsung phones for his parents, and it wasn’t great.
Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line.
Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don’t work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree.
And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it’s not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It’s a mess all around.
↫ Joel Chrono
In this particular case it involves Samsung phones, but the same applies to phones from other brands and even with other operating systems. Do you want to login with these accounts? Please add your credit card and all your personal information! Set up tap-to-pay so we can see where you buy what! Do you want to subscribe to our music service? Do you want access to our streaming service? What about the premium versions? Need more online storage? You’re only getting 5GB for free, so if you don’t want to lose those priceless pictures of your grand kids you should really upgrade to 1TB! Have you checked out our application store yet? And don’t worry, if you say no to any of these questions we’ll keep pestering you about them with notifications, fullscreen interstitials and banners in the settings application until your brain dissolves to mush!
I have a collection of about a million PDAs, from the early days up until the very fanciest models from right around when the iPhone and Android started taking off. Of course, they’re in storage so virtually always out of battery, but when I do turn any of them on, their onboarding process couldn’t be simpler. Tap a few locations on the screen to calibrate the touch layer, set the date and time, and that’s it – you’re at the home screen ready to go. I wish modern smartphones were similar. I wish the greedy bean counters were told to pound sand and the user interface specialists took over again.
My wife and I have two young boys, 3 and almost 5. One day, I’ll be the out-of-touch dad or grandpa and I’ll need their help to set up my brain implant chip or whatever. I hope it won’t involve upsells for streaming services.
When i upgraded from my old iPhone (12 to 16), I just plugged in both phones together and hit transfer in the new phone OOBE. Done.
When you are used to iPhones, setting up an Android phone is quite a shocking experience. It’s like if the iPhone were a newspaper, the Android phone would be the advertising insert.
When I upgraded my iPhone it seems like I just had to sit them near each other and enter my password once or twice.
Yes, and it wasn’t so bad (Just vanilla with only a couple of extra apps), However it also wasn’t a Samsung, There is a very good reason I don’t buy their crap anymore.
There are a lot of reasons, actually. My current phone is and will remain the only Samsung I ever bought. Washing machines? Nope. TVs? Nope^2. Excavators? I don’t know much about those things, but I’m not inclined to.
I use https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation when setting up things for my family and friends. It’s not as extreme as installing Graphene, Calyx, etc.
Moving from an older Pixel 6 to the new Pixel 10 pro was pretty easy. They just connected to each other over wifi and copied over all settings/apps/data.
It was still a bit annoying having to answer questions on all the different AI crap that they wanted to ask me about individually, and I spent a day dismissing notifications about new features (And some old features, since it didn’t bring over a memory of features the previous model had shown me)
All in all the experience wasn’t too terrible. It’s been worse in the past.
It also wasn’t much different from setting up an iPad for the first time. But then, I do that multiple times per week, and if I end up having to answer all the iPad setup questions it means something went wrong and the iPad randomly decided it didn’t want to pull down my org’s configuration profiles for our MDM, so the process has to be attempted again, because Apple devices just loooooove to randomly not pull the MDM profiles for no apparent reason.
Chrono Trigger is a game that I see people clamoring for a remake of, but I’m of the mind that the game is already nearly perfect and that it should not be remade. I really don’t like the FF7 remakes, since they don’t add anything to the game that makes it better, just longer. It really does feel like a slog to get through, so much so that I just quit playing during my before the second bombing mission.
Chrono Trigger gets everything right – the pacing, the art, the music. I guess it could stand to be a little more difficult (But then, I’m still playing on the same cartridge I got more than 30 years ago, so I’m a bit of an expert), and maybe Marle should have an upgraded Heal spell for group heal, but there are so many things that CT does right that would be very easy to screw up.
“Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line.”
sounds like it works as intended
If this helps, this is my procedure for setting up a new Android phone:
– ignore everything about creating accounts – look for “skip this” on each screen.
( do I have to sign on to an account to use my land line phone? or my old flip phone? no, I do not. )
– side-load F-Droid’s apk. install all the useful apps that I need from F-Droid … including the AuroraStore app.
– use AuroraStore to anonymously install any useful free apps from GooglePlayStore.
– (optional) for good measure, disable any Google/vendor apps that I don’t use. About the only app that seems absolutely necessary is GooglePlayServices.