I don't think you appreciate the stickiness of OEM apps. If Samsung just launched a photo sharing app on the Play Store, it would be ignored. By putting it on 10M desktops labelled as "Photos" they probably get themselves 1M users. Tie it in to their smart TVs and now you're as embedded in Samsung as you would be in Google. It's extremely effective. A stupefying number of mobile users are browsing the web with Samsung Internet.
To be fair, Samsung's internet browser is actually a pretty solid piece of software. I bought my S9+ well over a year ago and prefer their browser over most other mobile browsers. It does adblocking and Dark mode effortlessly, especially the latter, which is super critical when you have a great OLED screen and are browsing at night.
I'm a diehard FireFox user on desktops/laptops but I have had no complaints about Samsung's mobile browser. Some people just seem to like shitting on anything Samsung in the software space without realizing that they are more than capable of writing good software.
Suprised me too and I didn't give it a shot until I really dove into using DeX as my primary computer and found chrome's lack of extensions absurd. Samsung internet is just a few versions behind stable chrome and has all the creature comforts safari seems to have which makes for a pleasant experience.
Also people forget Samsung runs a huge ecosystem of products that work together. They have a VR partnership with oculus and maintain a VR branch of chrome for their own apps and stuff, and also support running arbitrary android apps in VR in multi window mode. They seem to really care about pushing how much you can do without downloading a single app outside of their software ecosystem.
> Some people just seem to like shitting on anything Samsung
I had an S5 once (awesome phone) that was basically unusable with the official rom. I believe they switched the back and menu buttons and they had a lot of crapware installed. Was awesome with unoffical distributions though. So did they improve in the last few years?
I actually like manufacturers like Nokia a lot more who basically just install vanilla android and are very quick to provide updates. This is day and night compared to most phones 5 years ago.
Eh, I really don't subscribe to this mentality that stock Android is somehow superior and that all manufacturers should just make hardware and ship with stock Android. I say this as someone who drank the stock Android kool-aid, rooted and ROM'd more phones and ROMs than I can remember and owned a couple of (disappointing) Nexus devices.
My favorite phones to date have been my older LG G3 and my current S9+. I absolutely enjoy custom tweaks in both manufacturers Android flavors. Knock codes on the G3 were fantastic in addition to tap to wake and the LG G3 window case.
I have peeps who visit my webserver often, and they cant get to it with samsung internet over mobile, but as soon as they get on a hotspot its not a problem. there seems to be some intervention when samsng apps are used, instead of FF on a hotspot. There is probably something about my page samsng finds offending but the solution is quick and easy. i can only imagine what bixby might do, as it never gone that far yet.
Which is great because they use something different than Chrome or Chrome mod. Same with Safari, they help slow advance of walled and closed Googlenet.
