I have had Android phones for the last 10 years and have never had a problem with the new UI upgrades...until today. Today my S9 got upgraded to Pie and it is horrible! So far the things I hate:

The way you close windows is to swipe up now vs sideways before.
The camera button is now on the left vs the right and you have to manually select photo or video.
The stupid health counter that is on the top left of the screen.
The stupid home, back and close buttons on the screen(I loved not having buttons on it before.)
No way to close battery hogging apps.

I could probably go on some more but haven't had time to play with the phone much today but I know after 12 hours I freaking hate this upgrade!!!

Curious, how much of the upgrade reflects Samsung's fingerprints?

My phone (not Samsung) was bought with Nougat and then a few months later upgraded to Oreo OTA. It had a limited amount of mods from the phone's manufacturer for which I was thankful. Others I know bitched that their Android 8 upgrades (other brands) were loaded with crapware and restrictions which sounds like what you're dealing with.

I've got a pixel 1 that's been running Pie for several months. The home/back/switch buttons have always been there and the camera button has always been dead center-bottom of the screen. I have no idea what the “health counter” is. Quite frankly, when I take a picture I usually use the volume buttons. They'll act like a shutter button.

What annoyed me was that they moved the clock from the right side of the top row to the left (presumably to clear room for a “notch” in a phone design). Other than that, it's still better than Apple's “Imma redesign your entire UI and make you confused about how to unlock the phone again” update.

That's probably not Google's UI design, but Samsung's. See: One UI, Samsung’s new Android Pie software, improves One-Handed use and adds a system-wide Dark Theme

Very few Android phone manufacturers use the stock Android UI. (Of course Nexus and Google devices do. Dunno if they still do, but Motorola and OnePlus used to. Used to be a few others only "mildly" touched the default Android UI.) Samsung has always replaced the Android UI with their own--and always otherwise heavily-customized the Android OS. That is one reason Samsung has always been one of the slowest to propagate Android security fixes. Essentially all the fixes Android pushes out, Samsung developers have to back-port into their highly-modified Android releases. That's very labour-intensive.

When we were still using Android devices my wife and I had Motorolas. One of the nice things about them was the quick, clean, relatively un-buggy, stock Android UI.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
That's probably not Google's UI design, but Samsung's. See: One UI, Samsung’s new Android Pie software, improves One-Handed use and adds a system-wide Dark Theme

Ok, it sounds like most of the updates were Samsung's and not the Pie update. Either way, I hate it. From what I can tell Samsung is trying to make the phone similar to the iPhone. I use an iPhone 7 for work and hate it.

That's one of the things I love(d) about Samsung - that their phones were so different than iPhones.