7 “facts” about Android that are no longer true in 2025

The Android landscape has made major strides since the first Android phones over 15 years ago. The early versions of Android didn’t even have features like multi-touch input, copy-and-paste, or auto-rotate!

Many nuggets of Android wisdom have been passed down over the years. But things change, and it’s fair to say that some previous facts and assumptions about Android and Android devices are no longer true.

For years, it was a given that affordable Android phones were generally bad. Samsung’s budget models were often the face of bad and cheap phones in those earlier years. Devices like the Galaxy J series and Galaxy Pocket series quickly drew the ire of many owners. Even as recently as 2019, devices like the Galaxy A51 had poor performance and disappointing battery life.

I think it’s fair to say cheap Samsung phones are actually pretty good today. Or at the very least, they’re not bad. These phones might not always outdo rivals when it comes to specs and features, but they generally offer a reasonable spec list and often beat rivals when it comes to update policies.

That’s not to say cheap Samsung phones are perfect, though. Colleague Ryan Haines complained about bad shutter lag on the 2023-era Galaxy A54 5G, and it’s something I noticed on the Galaxy A34 5G. Thankfully, this wasn’t a problem on the Galaxy A55 5G, and it doesn’t look like Ryan experienced this on the Galaxy A35 5G. Samsung’s latest affordable models are pretty good.

Apple upped its camera game in the early 2010s, as iPhones keenly focused on improved picture quality. To this day, many people assume iPhones take the best photos. Google also focused on picture quality with its first Pixel phones back in 2016, and the results were fantastic. In fact, enthusiasts even sideloaded the Pixel Camera app on cheap Android phones to get better pictures. That’s an amazing testament to Google’s software prowess at the time.

Pixels and iPhones still take great photos in 2025, but I’d strongly argue that Chinese brands have matched or surpassed them. We found that devices like the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, OPPO Find X8 Ultra, vivo X200 Ultra, and OnePlus 13 all take top-notch pictures.

“Forget the Pixel and iPhone, this smartphone camera bests them comprehensively,” colleague Rob Triggs noted in his Xiaomi 15 Ultra review, adding that he’d rather have the Xiaomi handset in his pocket. He also compared the OnePlus 13 to the Pixel 9 Pro and Galaxy S25 Ultra, finding that Google consistently took great photos from its various lenses, but still said the OnePlus phone performed “astonishingly well” at long range and took “super” portraits.

In other words, iPhones and Pixels still take great photos, but they’re not necessarily the best anymore. That’s largely due to Chinese brands offering superior hardware, much-improved image processing, and a bevy of software features.

In Android’s formative years, it was accepted wisdom to kill your phone apps to improve battery life and reduce RAM usage. This meant closing apps from the multitasking menu instead of letting them sit in the background, or using a task killer app to make sure you’d killed them.

Was this practice actually warranted back then? Opinions were initially divided at the time, although Google noted back in 2010 that it didn’t want to require users to close apps when they were finished with them. If anything, you only really had to manually close an app or use a task killer for specific bad apples.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Android has made a number of optimizations for background apps and operations. This means you really don’t have to close that app after using it. In fact, some phone makers have also veered way too far in the other direction by aggressively killing background apps and processes. There’s even a website dedicated to tracking the worst brands for killing apps. Needless to say, you really don’t need to obsessively close apps or use a task killer today.

For years, I thought stock Android was overrated, and a big part of this was due to its meager list of features. Top Android skins from LG and Samsung frequently offered far more features. Yes, these additions came at the expense of performance and updates, but these were often genuinely useful features that stock Android wouldn’t get for a while. This included Quick Settings, support for fingerprint scanners, and clone apps functionality.

However, I realized in the last five or six years that stock Android is actually good now. It now supports long-requested features like screen recording, scrolling screenshots, and one-handed mode, in addition to innovative features like Live Caption and anti-theft protections.

Android skins like One UI, Hyper OS, and Oxygen OS still offer more features, but it’s fair to say that pure Android has a respectable list of options. So, buying a phone with a stock-like Android experience (if you can find them) no longer feels like a huge compromise.

Samsung’s Touch Wiz skin was a bloated, stuttering mess in the early 2010s. This was particularly problematic during the Galaxy S4 era when the company shoveled a ton of needless features into its phones. So you’d be forgiven for thinking today’s Samsung software is still a hefty resource hog.

The good news is that One UI is actually one of our favorite Android skins today. It still has some bloatware, especially some first-party and Microsoft apps, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was in 2013. Furthermore, Samsung has also leaned on its optional Good Lock apps to offer a ton of features without bogging down the platform.

Performance itself is pretty good in 2025. Phones like the Galaxy A16 and Galaxy A26 generally don’t have major speed issues with One UI. That’s a testament to advancements by Samsung, Android itself, and device hardware.

My biggest bugbear with Android phones in the late 2000s and early 2010s was that these phones would often slow down dramatically as the months and years went by. That Galaxy S2 may have been flying at launch, but it was usually a chugging, unresponsive mess a couple of years later. Perhaps the biggest reason for this issue was that Android devices lacked support for the TRIM storage management feature.

This issue was brought into the spotlight by the Nexus 7 tablets, as many users reported extremely slow devices over time. Google would introduce TRIM support in Android 4.3, and this went some way towards improving long-term performance on Android devices.

However, some brands explicitly promise smooth performance over time. OnePlus says Oxygen OS 14 brought a ROM Vitalization feature that ensures a smooth experience after 48 months (four years). It even says the mid-range OnePlus Nord CE 5 is certified to be smooth for six years. Xiaomi also claims that its Storage Refresh 2.0 tech on recent flagships enables up to 60 months of continuous storage usage without performance degradation. Toss in the switch to UFS storage from eMMC, and your modern phone should still deliver a responsive experience years down the line.

The first Android tablets weren’t great experiences, as early versions of Android lacked tablet support. Sure, Android could technically run on early products like the Dell Streak series and HTC Flyer, but you had to deal with an awkward, stretched-out UI. It felt like you were basically using a large phone.

Google went on to release Android Honeycomb as a tablet-specific Android flavor in 2011. It then released Android Ice Cream Sandwich later that year, which combined the phone and tablet versions. So users didn’t have to fret about a phone-specific version of Android on their tablets.

One issue that persisted for a while was that many Android app developers didn’t take tablet screens into account. This meant stretched-out interfaces or awkward windows for unoptimized apps. Fortunately, Google has made numerous strides over the years, such as the introduction of Android 12L and mandating adaptive layouts for apps. In fact, colleague Rita El-Khoury says she prefers Android on tablets to phones. Needless to say, Android is just fine on tablets.