HTC claims the UI in the HTC 10 is “slimmed down”. Let's compare it to the competition!

The worst offender

It didn't take us long to notice that Sony's Xperia Z5 is the worst offender in terms of having a bit too many apps in its utility belt. For example, we have Google's Photos app, which serves as a gallery browser and video player. However, Sony also has the separate apps Album – for photo viewing – and Video, for clip playback. Additionally, the Xperia has its own Music app, then the obligatory Google Play Music, and Spotify to top it off. We've got File Commander for our file exploring needs, but then have a separate Downloads app, which lets us view our recently downloaded files, despite the fact that File Commander already has such a tab. You can check out all our notes in the table below.

LG and Samsung are not as bad as believed

Samsung's TouchWiz UI has garnered the reputation of being heavy and bloated, and sure – it has had a fairly long period when it deserved these adjectives. However, for the past year or so, Samsung has been working on streamlining the experience and cutting off the excess bloat. Checking for duplicates, we didn't find many offenders.

Samsung does have its own Email app, next to Google's Gmail, which serves the same purposes; there's a proprietary Internet browser, doubling Google's Chrome. Sammy also continues to install S Voice on its smartphones, effectively doubling the Google Now voice-activated assistant. Finally, there's Samsung's proprietary Gallery app, co-existing right along Google's Photos. Arguably, Sammy's Gallery is a pretty useful tool, so it may have won its right to be a duplicate app.

To top it off, we also have some extra Microsoft productivity apps pre-installed, such as Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive. Not necesarrily bad, as many users may actually be using these apps, and Sammy does make up for this sin by offering users 100 GB of free OneDrive storage bundled with every Galaxy S7, so it's kinda hard to be too mad about these.

LG's G5 goes even lighter on the bloat – we've got the duplicate Email app, a Music app, Gallery, and the ever-confusing combo between separate Downloads and File Manager icons. We don't understand why – when you open the File Manager, you have access to your recently downloaded files right at the top of the app.

So, those duplicates aside, LG's only sin is the fact that it offers 4 icons, which open specific menus that can otherwise be found in Settings. We are talking about “Battery saver”, “Memory”, “Battery usage”, “Storage & USB”. All that these icons do is open Settings and navigate us straight to the respective tab. We would've preferred an easier-to-navigate Settings menu than a bunch of shortcuts on our homescreen, really.

Truly the slimmest of them all

(except for Nexus devices)

The HTC 10 proved itself to be the slimmest in this competition. Of course, Google's Nexus devices will have an even slimmer interface, due to the fact that there is no 3rd party input in them. On the HTC 10, we only have 1 duplicate – HTC's Email app, next to Google's Gmail. Interestingly, there is a Downloads browser, but absolutely no file manager out of the box. We have a feeling that HTC should've went the other way around with this decision, but oh well.



Here's the full table of doubles we discovered!