Updated: April 26, 2024
It's been a couple of months since the big Android 14, One UI 6.0 upgrade on my Samsung A54 smartphone. As you probably know, I got this device as a replacement for a failing low-mid-range Nokia X10 that started losing its battery charge too rapidly. I selected this Samsung mostly because of its five-year patch policy and decent price for its hardware spec. Since, I've been using it quite some, with moderate degrees of satisfaction.
Those degrees are explained in more detail in my long-term reports for this phone. The last piece revolves around the big version bumped, linked above. The others cover various facets of everyday use, mostly my frustration with taming this device to my liking. I had spent too much time trying to sort out the privacy aspect, and yet, to this day, the phone keeps annoying me. All right, let's do the fourth review.
Good things first, Gallery unbroken
Let's share some good news. In my first report, I told you about the Gallery app being borked. After I tweaked the system privacy, Gallery stopped working correctly. Namely, it could no longer delete images, and would just display empty thumbnails instead. No such problem in Google Photos. I let this problem be, no matter how much it annoyed me, on a deep OCD level.
The Android 14 upgrade didn't resolve the bug - but a small patch that arrived about two weeks later did. I don't know how or why, whatever Samsung did, it fixed the internal woes that prevented Gallery from doing its job. The "ghost" thumbnails are gone, and Gallery can now correctly delete images, if needed. The camera app, which is locked into using Gallery, also displays the image thumbnails without any issues. Now, I have not changed my privacy stance one bit. The permissions stand as they are. Good.
Bad things, the phone still pesters me with nonsense
It's been five months, and I still, still occasionally discover new problems. I noticed my phone has something called Gaming Hub. It's supposedly a gaming platform, who cares. Now, you cannot delete it, so I simply put it to Deep Sleep. Fine. But then, I noticed its icon was "back" in the app grid. So I had to remove it again. Funnily, the system asked me if I wanted to disable the app, but this is not possible through Settings. Whatever the case, this is another example of pointless.
Nope, not interested, miss me with this nonsense. YES, Disable.
Next, I was fiddling with Accessibility settings, and I tried to open one of the links. The phone prompted me to choose the app with which to open the said link. Why would it prompt? Firefox is my default browser, so why ever ask if I wanted to use anything else?
Next, one day, out of the blue, I got a popup notification about "ad privacy". Since I've already configured this setting to No, as I've shown you in my new Android privacy & security guide, I simply dismissed it. But then, I thought, let me double check. And, yup, this pointless low-IQ phone had changed some of the settings from OFF to ON. Explicitly against my wishes and configuration.
My settings from about a month back, and then 5 min after that pointless popup.
Specifically, Ad topics remained off, but App-suggested ads and Ad measurement were "reset" to ON. First, this may be a violation of my privacy, so I might file a complaint. Second, miss me with your low-IQ crap. Take your neurotic obsession with ads and shove them. Don't care, not interested. Save your pointless consumerism tricks for one of the common idiots.
Now, my predicament is pretty solid here. I feel like blowtorching the phone. That would be very satisfying. But then, this whole "ad privacy" nonsense comes from Google, if I'm not mistaken. So, by using Android, I am complicit in the stupidity experiment, in a way. The alternative, the iPhone. Now that I've figured a neat way to copy local music onto it without iTunes, and I know how to block ads in the browser, then maybe I should ditch this platform.
But perhaps the more elegant way would be to try a different Android manufacturer as the first thing. After all, I've never had so many issues with privacy and such as with this particular device, so the sensible thing should be to proceed gradually. Try something else. Say Fairphone?
I looked at the other Android devices that I have, and none of them had given me any prompts about ads or similar. Maybe this is specific to the A54? Well, all I know is that the phone changed my Ad privacy settings without asking me, this is the least friendly Android I've owned, and so, before I can make further, concrete judgment, I will have to do another round of testing with a different (new) phone. Either way, this is another minus point for this particular brand and its devices. I've already decided not to buy Samsung ever again, the only question is, will this A54 survive its five years, or get binned much much earlier? The urge to demolish it with a sledgehammer is enormous.
Some more problems
I encountered issues with brightness. While using it outside, in blazing sunlight, the phone would suddenly dim, almost completely. I tried to disable auto-brightness, play with the slider, nothing. What helped was to activate the battery saver and then turn it off right away. Seems like a bug, where the phone suddenly thinks power saving is on, and overrides the brightness levels.
Since the upgrade, the battery page remains rather useless. It shows me how much battery I used, per day, and so if I want to figure out the actual battery drainage curve, I need to do math in my head like a peasant, albeit an intelligent one. What was wrong with a simple 100-0% graph? Oh, right, everyone imitates Apple, for better or worse, because the logic says: if you do like Apple, you'll be Apple. Eh, nope.
What am I supposed to do here? Look at the first graph, no Y axis. Fail. It shows "drainage", but since there's no actual boundary, the range is effectively infinite. What is the X axis supposed to be? Time? Percentage? Then, on the right side, more problems, more confusion. Power saving, charging, what? The graph looks almost the same as the "Today" graph shown on the left, and yet, it's ever so slightly different. To make it worse, farther below, we have a date-based graph - supposedly, because it has no axis titles - that shows how much battery was used any given day. Again, how does this help me? Am I supposed to "sum" these numbers? Do they add up to 100% or more? When was the last charge? Why are there no labels on the bars? Why is the Y axis labeling so poor? I could go on, but these graphs fail the basics of data visualization. Mega fail. FAAAIL.
Then, I opened an app, and got this "popup" telling me about Nearby Share becoming something else. What? Why do I care. I've disabled all and every nearby feature that I possibly could, why would I want to know about this thing? Why bother me? I also discovered that Smart Search was enabled. What? Why? I never gave you any permission to scan file content, on-device or otherwise.
The neverending tribulation, the neverending cycle of on/off and surprise options.
Performance, heating, battery life
The A54 has received two patches since its big One UI upgrade. After the second patch, my observation is that the phone battery drains more quickly, and that after more sustained use, it runs a bit hotter than before. I don't have concrete numbers just yet. However, over the many years of using various computing devices, my hunches were rarely if ever wrong. Seems like a regression of some kind, which affects the overall usage. But then, given the amount of nonsense this phone has assailed me with, it ain't surprising.
Conclusion
Day by day, the experience with this Samsung A54 is getting worse. It's not that it does not work, it's the nerve-wearing vigil that I must keep to make sure no low-IQ nonsense invades my personal space. I am well aware that true privacy and the use of smartphones is a paradox - after all, these touch devices are the ideal prison for idiots worldwide - but even so, across my entire Android usage spectrum, it's never been this annoying. Maybe it has to do with the vendor brand, respect for privacy laws and such. But deep down, honestly, I just don't care.
All I know is that this Samsung A54 brings me more grief than joy. The "good" things stand - it's fast, its camera can provide, it was cheapish to buy, very reasonably priced for its hardware spec, and the five years of patching are a solid plus. Fantastic. But then, the software is just stupid. Stupid and rude and in-yer-face pointless. It's ridiculous than I still have to tweak random crap months and months into the purchase. Now, I also don't want to throw my hard-earned money into the gutter. But I feel like I need to swallow the cost, and buy a fresh device. For now, I'm considering Fairphone 5 and maybe Pixel 8 - the latter is all Google, for better and worse when it comes to Android, and then, there was that Play Store update fubarism recently. If you have ideas or suggestions, please ping me. With that, we end the fourth long-term usage report of this phone. Peace and intelligence be with you.
Cheers.