I am not talking about the obviously cheap Temu items that are made for 1 use before disposal or burial in a hoarder's house.
Instead it's about electronics which seems nicely made until "oh, what the fuck is this".
Some examples:
Other electronics
RFID scanner with permanently half-pressed button
If testing for "does it work" was all they did, then yeah, it passed. But the plastic housing was too narrow for the button, causing it to be mostly pressed. Even just touching the housing elsewhere would make that register as button press.
Speakers/earphones that scream "low battery" at full volume
Not much to comment here. I bought some earbuds, and got a nice midnight shock when they did that.
Screwing into plastic
I've got a 5.25" drive enclosure. Taking it apart, I was pleased. For the outer metal sheets they put metal inserts into the inner plastic for the screws.
And then the thing that actually holds some weight is tapered holes in brittle plastic for mounting the drive.
Lack of insulation
I've got an IDE to SATA adapter. Sounds like a piece of electronics that needs some thought to design.
And... what the fuck, the power connector leads are only separated from touching metal by a thin piece of foam tape they will puncture soon.
Badly designed phone cases
At this point I just expect to need a knife to fix them.
2 phones back I had to cut a lager hole for the headphone jack.
With previous phone I had to cut down some of the silicone (?) to reach side-mounted fingerprint scanner.
With current phone I had to cut off the entire camera lens protector part as it was conducting light from flash back to the lens.
Smartphones
And now the main part.
There are a few brands that manufacture unique phones such as Doogee, Unihertz, Ulefone, etc.
There's also many devices with pretty powerful hardware for a great price.
But the software...
Seems to frequently be a very buggy experience. Also, previously I had a Poco which had ads throughout the UI.
Oh, and there's a chance for pre-installed malware.
Anyway, for the bugs, it's things like random restarts, partial system crashes, and it seems even a chance of bricking on update.
If you check reviews from people online, you'll figure out one thing quickly: if the software currently works at a usable level, DO NOT UPDATE EVER AGAIN.
Oh, one of the more important bugs was reversed L/R channels for microphones on the Poco.
Speaking of audio, my Ulefone has really crappy audio post-processing, so the only way to get usable audio is to use "Unprocessed" audio source in Open Camera, and then edit the audio appropriately in Audacity.
Anyway, the list of bugs would be quite long.
What really sucks, is the lack of custom ROMs since these devices tend to be MediaTek-based.
And I really hate that as there's so much interesting hardware with crappy software.
If you haven't seen them, they have really tiny devices, devices with huge batteries (like 25,000mAh large) that look like bricks, phones with keyboards, massive speaker, extra strong lights, even built-on projectors, etc.