Companies exiting a market and leaving clients/customers without their service isn’t a new thing. Was happening well before DRM was even thought of, let alone implemented. And still happens now. Polaroid leaving the instant photo market comes to mind.

Yeah, that wasn’t my experience in Australia. Every Samsung I ever had had google apps and Samsung apps preinstalled. None of the rest. And all those baked in apps were easily disabled if they couldn’t be deleted (I couldn’t delete YouTube, but I could disable it so I could run Vanced and not have the normal YouTube app be the default). I suspect that even though you bought a unlocked phone, it came with a bunch of shit baked in cos you are in the US. There’s a lot of shit that is copacetic there (more generally speaking than just phone related) that doesn’t fly in the rest of the world.

As I said, there are other reasons not to use Samsung devices, but all these stories I’ve gotten in this thread have not matched up with the experience I had in over 7yrs.

I literally said there were other reasons not to choose Samsung, I’m not making them out to be a saint. And I have literally had none of the issues you’ve described with the Samsung’s I’ve had in Australia.

Nah, Samsung didn’t ruin their phones, carriers in the US did. Don’t have any of that bloatware or ads on em down here in Australia. That being said, there are other reasons to avoid Samsung…

I torrent so much I had to switch to 720p to save space and still have a backlog of 3tb. I blame my ADHD, I have to hoard everyyyyyyyyything.

Nope. Only on the grey market. To be fair, most grey market sellers if it do have a fairly robust refund set up cos Australian law dictates they must. But some of them will make you feel like you’re trying to get blood from a stone if something goes wrong…