[OnePlus 3 Questions & Answers] Will_nonya:
What about google makes you trust them? Their history of spotty product support? Their track record of promising support then not delivering it?

I stand by my assessment of VR. I’ve seen good VR and I’ve seen bad VR. Its biggest issue right now is that there are so many people involved doing so much mediocre work. Its second biggest issue is that it’s so limited in its potential applications. It’s an interesting tech with nowhere to go. Once they combine AR with AI in a practical way that will change. Until then its development is limited to games and porn.

It’s clear you and I have very different views of google photos 

In my experience it’s a clunky UI with a miserable search experience that combine to obfuscate rather than aide you in anyway. Most of the features you’ve listed are niche or neat tricks but I have trouble seeing how they are practical or helpful. When I edit photos I’m not doing anything more than a basic crop on a phone and I’m certainly not doing with google’s photo app.

But no, my NAS doesn’t do that. It does back them up seamlessly from multiple sources and make them available on my other devices. When it comes to displaying, editing and sharing photos I have apps that I prefer over googles take. Obviously this is just preference and a difference in our use cases but nothing about google photos is appealing or significantly useful. And let’s not forget that google doesn’t do this out of the kindness of their hearts. They don’t do it because they think you’ll like it. They do it because they can monetize it.

Unless you’re a lethargic teen it’s unusual for people to do more than dismiss a notification in the manner you describe. You may like using it that way but I fail to see how the camera bump is a problem.

I’ve had warranty claims with both, admittedly for my wife’s phones and neither was what I would call swift, easy or seamless. I don’t doubt OP has earned their support reputation but I’ve seen nothing to think google is any better or has as much to lose form failing to do it well.

You’re using your OTG as an intermediate device but for what gain? How is carrying an extra device to do something that you could do by plugging the phone in directly more convenient? How often did you remove SD cards from your phones and why? I use OTG for some things but it’s not easier than using storage that’s permanently on the phone.

The argument about losing a phone and the sd card is a tired one. You’re far more likely to lose a flash drive than a phone. Not to mention if it’s important data only storing it in one place is already a failure. Besides didn’t you back everything up online already?

Which companies are you talking about? The bestselling phones in the world aren’t from companies with great customer support records…and regardless none of them are Google.

We’ve gotten a bit off track but I think the only thing we agree on is that more storage is better and that we use our phones differently.

Suffice it to say that I’m not a fan of google and that I use Android mostly because despite how little it has changed over the years it currently annoys me less than other platforms. One of the upsides though is that we have so much hardware diversity on with this OS that we can have these types of discussion.