I am one of the few lucky people who got his mitts on a Samsung Galaxy S22 before the February 25th release date, and I'll be putting the phone through its paces in time for a full review in the next week or two. But one thing that struck me — and it wasn't just me, as you'll see later on — is just how messy, incongruous, and old it feels to set up a brand new phone.

Whether you're starting from scratch or restoring from a backup, there are a few things that strike me as absurd default settings to ship on a new phone in the year of our lord 2022. I mean, it's so bad that we typically wrap up such grievances into a nicely-formatted list of the first things you should change on a new Samsung phone. While restoring your settings from an older Samsung device will address some of the issues mentioned below, every Samsung user, novice to expert, has to tackle at least a few of them.

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This is the home screen most Samsung users see out of the box.

First, let's start with the obvious: Samsung phones are the only Android phones that ship, by default, with navigation buttons, a vestige of 2010s mobile pedantry that Google has persuaded practically every other manufacturer to move away from. Gesture navigation has become the de facto navigation standard on Android since Google transitioned to it with Android 10 — and began forcing companies to include it alongside the traditional 3-button navigation option — but Samsung continues to tuck it away in a settings menu without giving people the option to experiment with it.

This wouldn't be as problematic if it were a smaller company, but how Samsung chooses to represent changes to Android has an outsized effect on the ecosystem at large, since the company comprises so much of the platform's market share as a whole. On-screen navigation buttons were a necessary transitional step between the capacitive buttons of Android's early days and the low-profile gestures of modern smartphones, and while I begrudge no one the choice to continue using them, Samsung's decision to onboard users without that autonomy is, in my opinion, a problem.

I'm not the only one who feels this way, too. This weekend, we polled over 10,000 people, and two-thirds of you use gestures over on-screen navigation buttons. Obviously the data from an enthusiast website does not necessarily correlate to the wider Android user base, but I believe that if Samsung led people down a different path during onboarding, that number would be considerably higher.

Friend of the site, Michael Fisher (aka MrMobile), posed the same thing on Twitter last week, and got a similarly diverse set of responses as our own poll.

The response to the above tweet is interesting: a lot of people indicate they continue using nav buttons due to inertia, or because they don't like change, or because they haven't given themselves the chance to get used to gesture navigation. Samsung could do what Motorola does, though, and offer a guided tour of the feature upon startup, ending the tutorial with a choice to stick with gestures or revert to on-screen buttons. People stick to the defaults they're used to, and in this case they don't see any other options.

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You have to set the app drawer to sort alphabetically... in 2022.

Then there's the still-perplexing decision to allow chaos to continue to reign in the One UI app drawer. I won't even start on the fact that Samsung's app drawer still scrolls horizontally like some UX jigsaw puzzle, but the standard behavior to fill in the app list by most recent install — which, on a newly-restored phone, means in no order at all — is mind-bending.

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Staying on the home screen for a moment, I'm also going to try to keep calm about the fact that, even after all these years, Samsung's basic home screen layout wastes more space than a bad Android tablet app. Two app stores, a Google-mandated folder full of Google apps, and (in most countries, at least) what amounts to a sponsored folder full of Microsoft services that duplicate Google's defaults (except for LinkedIn, which... yeah). A Google search bar and an oversized weather widget. I'm no designer, but if it was minimalism Samsung was after here, it's failed (see the aforementioned two folders worth of apps).

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Samsung's keyboard has no business being this bad.

My last gripe is indeed the least serious, but it speaks to the company's half-hearted desire to work with Google while keeping one foot in the software world. No, I'm not talking about how Bixby is still a thing, and enabled by default when you hold the home button, but the company's terrible keyboard, which continues to ship as some relic of the past when both Gboard and SwiftKey (owned by Google and Microsoft, respectively) exist and are worlds better. The inclusion of a Samsung-powered keyboard makes sense on the company's Galaxy Z Fold 3, which requires separate layouts for the internal and external displays (something Gboard desperately needs as Google preps its own foldable), but on the most popular Android phone on earth? Not so much. Just as Google has proven time and time again, its Android apps are usually better than Samsung's, and the on-screen keyboard is no exception.

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None of this is endemic to the experience of using a Samsung phone in general, though, and is relatively easy to change with a bit of know-how and some menu-diving. Indeed, the Galaxy S22 series appears to be among the best Android phones of 2022. But that's exactly my point: One UI has come so far, diverted so much from the brutal legacy of TouchWIZ, that these Windows XP-like remnants feel especially egregious upon first boot. It's like starting a game at 80% health.

As someone who's used basically every Samsung flagship, none of these problems are insurmountable, and it takes me just a few minutes of tweaking to get things where I want them. But my concern is for the average phone user, the one who just buys a Samsung phone because they've always bought Samsung phones, this messy onboarding experience puts them at an unnecessary deficit, one that, with a bit of guidance and some subtle UX tweaks, could be avoided.

Samsung is Android to a lot of people, and an ambassador for the brand. Google has pushed back at times against what it considers bad UX hygiene, and cajoled its biggest hardware partner at other times by convincing the Korean giant that Google's apps and services aren't worth competing with. Google could force navigation gestures on people, but it won't and shouldn't, because choice is vital to Android's culture.

But every little thing Samsung chooses to languish on — see the company's lone insistence on not supporting Android's seamless updates — or ignore in favor of sustaining so-called legacy experiences holds Android back in minor but meaningful ways.