Always fun to see Apple users step out of the RDF and gush over features that Android has had for years (not all of them, but a good chunk of them have been present in Android for a long time now).
Edit: And yes, the UI/UX has changed remarkably little between Lollipop and Nougat, despite the popular memes amongst non-Android users... like the ones already repeated here.
It's never been about the features. We have this conversation every single time.
Users care about the experience, and features are only a portion of the experience. That's what Apple really truly gets and other companies miss time and time again.
And the UI/UX is hardly at all different than what has been shipping for the last 3 major Android versions.
Again, none of this is new for people who are actually using a recent version of Android in the last 2-3 years, but go figure I get downvoted for pointing it out.
Just as your comment proves, it's a sad, tired and completely out-dated meme that Android doesn't have good UX. And then these blog posts come along and I roll my eyes because my old phone that is 2 major revs behind Nougat looks and behaves virtually identical to Nougat.
Ironically, there are good features in the last few major revs, but they're more about granular permissions and other functionality that isn't touched on by this article at all.
When I point out that something is out-dated and inaccurate and then someone repeats the exact same trope I'm criticizing along with a downvote... what reaction am I supposed to have?
How would it go over if I wrote a blog post about how amazing iOS is now that it doesn't look all Aqua-themed despite that change happening years ago?
Half the positives on this list I find to be kinda crazy to be positives. For example having Facebook Messenger handle your SMS messages. Really? You want to voluntarily give all that info to a company as user hostile as Facebook?
Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?
I'm glad he's happy and the Pixel seems like a great phone but this list just felt half crazy to me.
Are you absolutely sure about that? I'd like to believe you but I can't take it on faith. I completely expect Facebook is giving itself some level of info about your SMS messages unless there is some reason they can't.
Trust is the only reason. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are examining the traffic of Facebook apps and someone would make a sink about it if there was evidence they were lieing about their privacy policy. That seems like an adequate assurance for most people but certainly not all.
They don't get your texts in the message routing sense, but they absolutely have access to the content and could be shipping it to their servers every 5 seconds or whatever.
I don't think they are probably doing that, but there's not really any way to prevent them from doing that.
I think the messenger part was the ability to give an app of your choosing permissions to be your default SMS app, and in this case he chose Facebook's.
App drawer, it's personal preference but personally I like having a single home page and the rest of my apps in my drawer. But again that's just personal preference, I'm sure a lot of people would call it a negative because they have to manually move an app out of the app drawer every time they install one.
> For example having Facebook Messenger handle your SMS messages. Really? You want to voluntarily give all that info to a company as user hostile as Facebook?
The operating system shouldn't be paternalistically responsible for preventing this kind of preference. Some people do want to voluntarily give this information to FB in exchange for a simplified or more integrated messaging experience. I don't happen to be one of them (no FB account), but it's a meaningful positive that the OS allows this for a whole lot of people.
> Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?
Yes. I have an iPhone and a Pixel. The fact that I can't only keep 4, or 8, highly-used apps on my iPhone's primary home screen really does make it harder to use.
Imagine a Windows or a MacOS desktop that was literally covered in evenly-spaced icons. There's a reason most people don't do that.
You absolutely can only have 4-8 apps on your iPhones home screen. You can move them all off to another page. You could move them to the fourth or fifth or whatever page if you don't want them on the second page.
Good to know. I'm obviously a bit out of date on my iOS UI knowledge. Will experiment with this now.
After playing with the home screen on iOS for a minute I remember what was annoying. I can control how many apps appear on the home screen, but they always float up and to the left. If I want to use my phone one-handed most of the time, it's really critical that I be able to keep two rows of apps at the bottom of the screen. Currently impossible on iOS.
Recently I cleaned completely my home screen (iPhone). In the dock I keep Phone, a folder with Safari and Mail, a folder with what I used to have in my home screen (Calendar, todo, clock... 7-8 things) and the "social" apps folder (Facebook, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc). The rest, I have it in a secondary screen, neatly ordered by folder. And anyway, when I need to open almost anything that is not in the dock, I just search for it, just like I do on my computer. It's like having an uncluttered desktop so I can see the background.
I did that on Android too. I hate the iPhone's "YOU MUST LOOK AT ALL YOUR ICONS" mandate, because a quick swipe down brings up a search that's much more efficient than looking at things.
"3. Deep Google integration - This shouldn’t be surprising in any way, but having Google built into pretty much everything you do on the phone is seriously useful."
This is my main sticking point with Android lately. I would much rather have a stock Android OS + device from Google, and then add the few Google services I want. Instead Google is getting more and more baked into everything, and understanding how my data is being used is becoming more difficult - and this has me worried.
People have pushed this "You are paranoid, no one is out to get you" narrative since the 90s. Everyone has something to hide, even if its just their sex life or beliefs that aren't politically favored that might affect your employment.
And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists. All of the dumping on Google Services has, to the day I write this, proven to be absolute FUD without a single concrete thing to point at.
Well that system is partly to thank for the rich info they are forced to give up for secret court orders from the US government, so I'd say there are some.
“Past performance does not guarantee future results”
I don't have a single bad thing to say about Google, but that doesn't mean that I am not afraid of their power and I don't dread the day that the current management will not be there to keep them in check. And sooner or later that day will come.
You have no specific insight on the behavior of Google's future leadership team, so the assertion that Google will necessarily start abusing their users at some point in the future is unsupported.
(Apologies if this is coming off a bit blunt, there's just not much else to say)
The threat model isn't google. And I believe that google's engineers are more than up to the task of protecting their servers from everyday hackers.
The threat I'm worried about is the surveillance arm of the US government. The small glimpses we've seen are frightening - for example, they spliced a cable between two google data centers and recorded (some? all?) of the traffic travelling between them. This particular hole has since been plugged (google encrypts between-data-center traffic now), but we simply don't know what the US government's capabilities are. This isn't paranoia stuff - they really do this kind of thing.
And even if google manages to 'go dark' to the NSA, the US government can just legally demand access to all of our data. And block google from telling us that the data intrusion happened.
Its funny you mention FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is exactly how I feel about trusting google (and by extension the US government) with every email, search, voice, in-app text in android, phone call and so on that I've ever made.
As a non-US citizen, I have even fewer protections and I can't fight this politically. But I can give my money to Apple instead. So thats what I do.
> And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists. All of the dumping on Google Services has, to the day I write this, proven to be absolute FUD without a single concrete thing to point at.
> But further examples of Barksdale's abuse of his privileges were more serious. Earlier this spring, he viewed call logs from Google Voice in order to identify the girlfriend of a 15-year-old boy, who had refused to name her. Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call his girlfriend.
---
Not a single instance of a Google employee misusing info? Not one you say?
A failure of internal controls qualifies as a problem just as serious as intentional abuse of it.
> You conveniently left out the word "advertising". Employees misusing admin access is a threat with any company you may do business with.
Then you shouldn't have replied to me and changed the context?
The context was information in Google's possession.
You tried to narrow it to advertising after I replied which is, at best, silly.
EDIT:
> ..did you read the original post?
You replied to me and tried to plays devil advocate. The context of my words is the one that is relevant, not your attempt to shift the goal posts into some narrow land of the absurd where you get to pretend the fact information Google collects ultimately gets abused isn't a privacy problem.
So just stop, honestly. Your position as absurd as storing plain text passwords because "Well, there has never been an official policy of abusing that information."
Rogue admins, hackers, etc. are all valid threats to privacy when the information is stored in an easily transportable form and the fact that isn't obvious to you terrifies me that you are somehow a professional sysadmin.
With google stepping away from masking your ad profile it is even more troubling... Apple doesn't get enough praise for protecting user's privacy IMO, or perhaps it's just really something most people don't care about...
Beyond their occasional public stands such as the San Bernardino case, I don't think Apple does enough to market how this is useful to the average end user. In fact, as a free software enthusiast who has never even considered getting an iPhone, the privacy issue has me seriously considering getting one (though not the 7!) when my Nexus 5x succumbs to entropy.
There are a few technical issues I need to work out before I make the change though. First, I need to get macOS running natively on my workstation so I can install my own software on the phone, as I'm not running out to get a MacBook for this single need. Second, I need a root shell.
I'm in a similar position, I considered changing to an iPhone but in the end it's just half-measure.
There's Ubuntu Phone, KDE Plasma, Copperhead and others but they don't feel like a good solution. The problem is always the same: no apps. It doesn't matter if I can install 99/100 apps I need but the one I can't is a messenger one of my clients requires me to use. Or if I can't really rely on a compatibility layer like MicroG, since Android is not that open anymore.
Hell, I'd take a solid foundation with no apps (aside from a media player, browser, SMS, and dialer) in a heartbeat. What makes the alternatives so problematic is the complete lack of support from OEMs.
These OSes exist today, and I'd like to use them, but they're typically limited to a very small handful of (typically obsolete) devices. As long as this is the case, they'll have a lot of trouble finding enough developers and users.
If we could simply link our own kernels against these drivers the way we do with the nvidia driver and DKMS on desktops, it would be a revolutionary step forward for alt smartphone OSes. We could start working on userland instead of spending so much time devising hacks to simply get graphics and radio working one handset at a time. Unfortunately, the OEMs couldn't care less and would much rather our phones become e-waste than eat into next year's sales figures. Until then, we're pretty much at the mercy of Apple and Google :(
Secure enclave. App sandboxing. Fine-grained revocable permissions. TouchID. Differential privacy. iMessage encryption. Find My iPhone. On-device models for photo recognition.
The question is how to spin it in a positive way.
The developer looks at the app sandbox and fine-grained permissions and thinks "I can't run my code on my own device," and walks away.
The police officer looks at TouchID and the secure enclave and thinks "I can't gather evidence," and walks away.
The marketeer looks at on-device models and differential privacy and thinks "I can't understand what my users want if the device doesn't report it," and walks away.
But the user (arguably) benefits from each of these things. App sandboxing, permissions, and a lack of background tasks remove the ability to run malicious code without my consent, in theory. Secure enclave and encryption remove a malicious third party's ability to intercept my communication, in theory. On-device recognition models allow me to benefit from better organization without sending my photos to some cloud vision service, in theory.
Perhaps I've been ignoring much of it because I've always ruled out iOS due to the walled garden. On the other hand, most of these features are available on the Nexus (and other Android phones) as well. The only catch is it conveniently doesn't do anything to isolate your private info from Google (or your OEM if you screwed up and didn't get a Nexus/OnePlus). I think it would be extremely powerful marketing if Apple did a case study of the kinds and amounts of data being betrayed by competitor's phones compared to iPhones. A nice bar graph illustrating the data minded from each phone, next to a much shorter bar for the iPhone would create many converts. Demonstrating what kinds of creepy things can be extrapolated from each data set would drive the nail home even harder.
I agree that this would piss off developers who value this kind of data robbery - but Apple is in a much better position to double down on selling quality apps that treat their users as customers instead of products than Google (based on the statistic that iPhone users purchase more apps).
To protect mobile search revenue. I get what you meant, I'm just saying Google doesn't need your location history and your assorted other meta data to profit off you. They just need to ensure Apple can never close the door on search to them.
I moved from Android to iOS last year for this exact reason. Using android over a few versions felt like a slow slippery slope of access prompts giving permission for google to use ever more personal data about me and my phone. The final straw for me was learning that google uploads and stores audio recordings of everything I've ever said into google now[1].
A year ago when I got my iphone I deleted all of the historical voice data that google stored. Just now, In the process of finding the google activity link below, I've learned that all my deleted voice clips have magically undeleted themselves.
I've been very happy with iOS - there's some little UI gripes, but for me the biggest feature is Tim Cook standing up to the US government on behalf of privacy. I'm convinced that as an organisation Google just doesn't understand what privacy is or why its important to people. With all the new deep app intelligence features in android, I shudder to think about simply how much data google might be storing about its users. I'm very happy to be out.
Apple keeps the data for up to two years, but from 6 months its associated with a random ID code so it's not personally identifiable. At least that's how it used to be done. They have been talking about using more advanced statistical anonymization techniques recently but I don't know if they are used for Siri.
Apple did not stand up for user privacy, they stood up against inserting a backdoor into their crypto and played it off in the media as a stand for privacy.
Apple have gladly handed over user info on dozens of occasions (in accordance with the law).
As far as I know, these are all "stock" and only come with the smattering of Google apps, and absolutely none of the carrier bloatware you usually get. When I got my OnePlus Two, all it had on it were maybe 6 Google apps and that's it, nothing more, nothing less.
I've been ecstatic with the performance of the phone and only having the apps you really want on the phone makes it much easier to use. Plus, you can completely customize it, put a custom ROM on it and turn off all the Google tracking stuff. I have way more piece of mind since I got it.
The smatttering of any of the google apps is all you need. One you contaminate the device with google and google play services, then all bets are off. Your opportunities to turn off google tracking are the same for these as the pixel or other nexus phones.
Like don't use the google "now" or "pixel" launchers. Turn off google on tap. Etc..
After trying pixel phone the most annoying thing for me is a fingerprint censor location, its so annoying to pick it up or use two hands to unlock it even when using the power on button which is on a side
I had the chance to play around with the Pixel and it is really cool.
Honestly I'd probably pick one up if not for the poor, IMO, speaker quality. If you like to talk to your phone Google definitely has the best voice assistant
I've been wondering if I was missing out on the iPhone's 3D touch feature, for interacting with photos, messages, etc. The author didn't mention missing it, so I guess I'm not.
I haven't found it very useful. Certainly not a reason to choose iPhone over Android. I have other reasons (like privacy concerns and ecosystem lock in).
Not the parent, but Android allows easy installation of arbitrary APKs downloaded from anywhere. Also, there are multiple app stores on Android, like Amazon.
voluntary Ecosystem lock-in is actually the reason I moved back to iOS. I use an iPad pro, and I don't believe there's a better tablet out there. I use Macbook Pros both at work and at home. Having all of those devices perfectly in sync is amazing for my productivity.
I use Force Touch every time I pick up my phone and especially on list views it allows for far more functionality. Touch Bar is nothing more than a nice looking contextual menu. I assume toolbars are a gimmick too ?
When it was first introduced, I used it very rarely.
With iOS 10, I've started using it frequently, many times per day.
So the answer, at least for me, has changed dramatically very recently. If I were already considering a move away from iOS, I would never have started using the new iOS 10 3D touch stuff to begin with, and therefore wouldn't know what I was missing.
I'm in the same boat. I switched from the 6 to 7, so this has been my first real usage of 3d touch and it's actually very useful. I even discovered recently that the flashlight has 3 brightness settings exposed via 3d touch.
I switched from an iPhone 6+ to the Google Pixel. I've had two problems, but overall love the phone.
1.) The phone is extremely slippery. I don't agree with the author on this one. My old iPhone was way easier to grip, and the iPhone 7 is even better. I bought a case which fixed this issue.
2.) I think this is pretty important. Android apps are second class citizens. A lot of applications don't work properly with Android and you can tell that there just isn't much developer time spent on it. I hope as the Pixel and Google phones become more popular at the high end, more developer time is focused on these applications. Most applications work fine, but sometimes it can be frustrating when an application you expect to work has major bugs.
I think your second point may have more to to do with the diversity of hardware that Android runs on than the developers simply putting less effort into it. Android runs on so many different devices. It is more difficult to develop and Android app that feels totally polished on every device
I doubt that would help. Some developers do the tests but aren't very good at testing. Others wouldn't do the tests but would copy and paste a long list of "tested devices", and with two million apps, you would never be able to tell the former cases from the latter.
Google could probably address this more effectively with some variant of: dev technologies making it easier to design for varied hardware profiles, test suites in the simulator that automate many types of testing across a set of standard profiles, specs for hardware makers showing them what the requirements of each standardized profile were, extensive test suites for hardware makers to make sure they conform to a standard profile, and a Google certification that a given device matches the such-and-such profile in all respects, so that if you test your code against the such-and-such profile in the simulator, and it works, it will work on the certified device.
There is less incentive to polish on even one device when you know it's <1% of the market. Seems better to put more effort to get it running reasonably well on more devices.
You would think they would at least polish it on their primary device.
I think there's a cultural difference between the two platforms as well. The developers that are inclined to want to make their application perfect and beautiful seem to be attracted to iOS.
Are there specific devices or manufacturers that seem to fair better here? I'm on the fence on switching to Android (probably the Pixel phone), too, and I can't imagine testing for all the different phones and android releases.
I had an issue with the Chariot App. I signed up as a user using facebook connect and the Android app doesn't allow you to login with Facebook...which led to some problems.
The Tesla app for Android has numerous bugs that wouldn't have shipped if Tesla leadership carried Android devices.
* The app must be closed in a certain way (back button or swiping away, rather than home button or switching to another app) or else it'll permanently lose network connectivity after a few minutes. I think this is because they keep the socket object in their main activity, and they don't deal with cases where an idle connection gets evicted from a NAT table or similar. But that's just speculation.
* If you launch the app in certain connectivity states, it will not just put up a no-connection alert, but it will flush your stored password. This could leave you in a pickle if you use a strong passphrase that you keep in a password manager, and you were relying on the app to unlock your car.
* The app doesn't support fingerprints. This isn't a bug, but it's something that enough apps support nowadays that it feels strange they're so far behind.
In addition, I'm told the iOS app has more features than the Android version, but I've never seen it myself.
I agree it's slippery. I never dropped my Nexus 5 over the last 3 years. Pixel's been on the floor at least 3 times and once it just slid out of my pocket on a reclining cinema seat. It looks like I'll be getting a rubbery cover soon.
On number 2 I think that's just your lack of experience with Android apps. Me I've made the switch from Android to an iPhone 6s which I've had for a year already and now I also have an iPad Pro, both received as gifts, as I'm an Android guy :-) And let me tell you, I like Android more because of the apps.
Now granted, there are a couple of nice, polished apps on iOS. But there are also entire app categories on iOS that simply suck. Some random examples:
1) For my big ass iPad Pro, I can't find a Torrent application and given how common torrent apps are, I have a feeling they are banned by Apple. On Android I have uTorrent, Bittorrent, BitTorrent Remote, you know the real deal.
2) For iOS the one KeePass port that's available and usable sucks compared with Keepass2Android.
3) For Android you've got a really awesome XMPP client, see https://conversations.im/ - for iOS the XMPP clients I tried sucked.
4) Firefox on iOS is just a shell around a Safari webview and cannot do plugins, being handicapped by Apple's restrictions - it can't even do ad-blockers like official Safari. On Android on the other hand Firefox is the real deal, as it comes with its own engine and can do plugins.
5) On Android I could find a good and usable app for Pinboard.in (PinDroid). No such luck on iOS, so I use it from the browser.
6) Speaking of Firefox, on Android you have the "official" Tor browser and Orbot, the proxy. On iOS you have the "Onion browser" - better than nothing, but still, it's not even a comparison.
7) We have Signal from Open Whispers Systems on both platforms, but can you encrypt plain SMS on iOS? No you can't. But on Android you can, see: https://silence.im
8) On Android I also have apps that monitors my battery usage and gives me detailed reports about what is consuming my battery (currently GSam Battery Monitor Pro). On iOS you only get the stuff in its settings and that's not enough.
9) On Android you can manage your files with file managers. So for example I use Amaze File Manager and you can organize files, copy or share them. And given that you can copy files to/from an Android phone directly, without that iTunes monster, that can be pretty handy. On iOS people use freaking Dropbox for file copying, which is pretty dumb.
10) Once upon a time VLC wasn't available for iOS, then it happened, then it got banned by Apple, being replaced by copy-cats trying to fool people, without Apple lifting a finger, then it got approved again. Either way, VLC is a second class citizen on iOS.
I'm a heavy app user and imho that's a myth, because people end up being naturally biased towards the platform they've been using, once they learn about what's good or not.
And even if I can feel my own bias, I really think Android is the more polished one, OS & apps. I could enumerate all sorts of reasons for why, but then you'd hand-wave it as not being relevant for moms using apps that could have been web pages :-)
I spent years as a mobile developer and have commercially worked on top tier apps for Android and iOS.
It's not a myth. Product Managers do look at the demographic split and invest more into iOS development. Also the fact that iOS is a more coherent platform i.e. Almost all users are on latest version means more resources on polish.
Design decisions have led to the requirement that apps can only access files inside their app container sandbox.
This means if you want a "file manager" for iOS, it can only manage the files that you send into that app.
Documents by Readdle is a bit of a hack: a file manager that also includes PDF reading bits and media decoding bits and picture viewing bits, with plugins to copy to/from cloud services. Either way, the only files you get to manage are livinng inside of Documents' file system. It's not very UNIX-y, granted.
But the inability to create a "file manager" is a legitimate design decision with legitimate upsides.
I use both Android and iOS and conversely, I think some apps are a lot better on Android due to the UI conventions (esp the "back" mechanism). For example, I find the official Facebook and Twitter clients to be better on Android.
The biggest issue I run into is Android apps are often more resource heavy. Amongst Android users I know, Snapchat is an app you really want to be quitting in between uses to prevent background CPU use.. which gets annoying fast.
> For instance, ask it to search for an actor and then ask, “what films has he starred in?” It knows you’re still talking about the same person. Impressive.
Yeah, but then you ask it: "What is heavier, a cat or an elephant?" and it fails, because it is lacking in common sense. It only has a small-ish factoid knowledge base and lacks all the general common sense things we take for granted.
Don't take it so hard. I am the greatest fan of conversational AI chatbots. I am just a little too impatient, especially that I have seen a chatbot that can do those types of common sense challenges.
True it can't answer logic questions yet. It's never going to pass the Turing test, but it's knowledge-base is actually pretty huge in my experience. Especially because it can more-or-less get facts from web sites. For example "are you more contagious at the start or end of a cold?" gives a useful answer. That's pretty damn impressive.
"The Pixel needs charging once a day, which is a little bit of a disappointment, but it charges really quickly."
I'm not sure I understand this negative. I'd think any problems caused by this would be easily remedied by just charging your phone while you're sleeping, when you can't use it anyway.
Or is he saying that it needs to be charged once a day, even if you charge it overnight?
Fair enough. In regards to the first point, though, you'd already have to carry the cable which I find to be more cumbersome than the plug itself.
I wish he would've elaborated a little more on battery life, as there's a big difference between a phone that barely makes it from morning to night and one that can't quite survive until the night of the second day since charge, both of which would need a daily charging.
"Out of routine" is routine for frequent flyers. You never know when you'll end up spending the night in an airport transit lounge or you can't get into your hotel at the end of a flight around the world, or whatever. Or when driving or hiking through a somewhat remote area and something goes wrong....
When things go wrong, you need to make calls, put out fires, keep trying to reach remote towers using full radio power for extended periods.
When things go wrong is when you MOST need your phone, so you need a battery that can continue to serve you a lot longer than it normally needs to on an ordinary day unless you can somehow be certain that for you every day will be an ordinary day.
Tell me. Where in LAX or SFO or LGA can I find an electric outlet?
Some airports make them impossible to find, highly coveted, surrounded by the territorial and ferroucious Horde, oodles of macbook MagSafe and ipad Lightning cables eminating from the wall like thin withering tentacles of some white goop monster emanating from the power grid.
Other airports lock the power sockets away behind "Employee Only" signs and caution tape, with menacing security guards patrolling the area should you even think about stealing those precious MWh from the institution.
Still other airports have rows upon rows of power outlets in plain sight, but every single one of them is dead, disconnected, dying like your phone battery.
> this would be easily remedied by just charging your phone while you're sleeping
This goes well and according to plan until you go to bed really tired one day and forget to put your phone to charge. And then it happens again a week later, and then again...
(This might be related to using your phone in bed)
It would be nice to have a phone that could survive a few days without charging. For example if you go camping for the weekend you can use your phone to take photos without worrying about battery.
I just got back from a three day hike through the Grand Canyon, and I took an external battery charger with me to recharge the phone. I took over 1,300 photos, and definitely needed the juice.
95% of the time, though, I don't need that much charge, and would rather have the option of carrying an extra battery charger with me only when I need it, rather than having a much larger, bulkier phone 100% of the time.
With wifi, bt, and mobile data on, I easily get 24h out of my pixel. (not xl) And it does doze state pretty well: ~8% charge drop overnight (that's around 1% per hour of complete inactivity)
If you pay 3d games or use it constantly, of course you'll need to charge it sometimes. But for casual usage with standard basic apps, I sometimes forget to plug it in at night and it's not problem.
I am giddy about my Pixel XL. I've sold a few of my friends on getting one. I was in the Sprint store cancelling my service as I moved over to Fi and once the guys saw it they all had to play with it.
Only problem that I've had was getting the fingerprint sensor working. You're finger down for around 45 seconds and it vibrates to tell you that its got it. That wasn't working for me and the Google engineers blamed it on software that I'd installed. But it failed before I'd installed any software.
I found an alternative way to do it ironically while waiting for a callback from the engineer. Hold your finger down for 15 seconds, lift it up but keep it hovering over the sensor. Then it will show you it's 20% done and prompt you to put your finger down again. It takes five iterations to get a finger done. You can do more than one finger and I've added four.
The one thing that I don't like is the dialing directory. You can't get it to be alphabetical and instead of a standard list you end up with these big boxes on the screen. Looks great in the photos with a half dozen contacts but fails with hundreds. The UI is extremely awkward and I don't know how it passed user testing. Does anyone have a favorite alternative for me to try?
Two pluses - battery life is fantastic and I've actually gotten almost two days from one charge. I am usually negative on all assistants but Google's is fantastic and I actually find myself using it for all sorts of things. I let my 100 year old dad try it. He smirked and said Google what is the weather in Paris, France tomorrow. It gave him the weather report and there was this gorgeous look of complete shock on his face:<).
I've been using Samsung phones for several years (currently still using a Galaxy S6), and my Pixel is supposed to come around the end of the month. Did they really get rid of app badges? That has been a thing for a while, unless I'm not understanding what "badges" are. Also, is the battery life on an iPhone good enough that you don't have to charge it every day. I can't remember owning a smartphone that could go longer than 24+ hours on one charge.
> is the battery life on an iPhone good enough that you don't have to charge it every day
Yup. I have an iPhone 6, and routinely go two days between charges. I can charge it overnight, use it all day, skip a night, all day again, and still have about ~20% charge still left by the time I plug it in the next night before bed.
Pixel. iPhone. Two sides of the same lousy coin. They both do the same thing. And they are doing it increasingly poorly. But consumers keep lapping it up blindly. Do we really need hardware and software updates every year? They just about get the bugs out of iOS 9 and lollipop, and hey, it's been a year. Let's start all over again with new bugs.
The saturated colors gave me a headache in the first hour of using the phone. Luckily, there is an option to turn on sRGB color profile buried in the developer tools menu (activated by tapping the build version in about phone menu multiple times). After turning the option on, I don't want to look at any other screen.
I'm not sure why this isn't on by default given that the sRGB option on pixel apparently has the most accurate color representation of any phone (can't remember where I read it) today.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadHowever, the invasiveness of the Pixel changes for "Deep Google Integration" in #3 is likely as much a pro as a con.
Edit: And yes, the UI/UX has changed remarkably little between Lollipop and Nougat, despite the popular memes amongst non-Android users... like the ones already repeated here.
Users care about the experience, and features are only a portion of the experience. That's what Apple really truly gets and other companies miss time and time again.
Again, none of this is new for people who are actually using a recent version of Android in the last 2-3 years, but go figure I get downvoted for pointing it out.
Just as your comment proves, it's a sad, tired and completely out-dated meme that Android doesn't have good UX. And then these blog posts come along and I roll my eyes because my old phone that is 2 major revs behind Nougat looks and behaves virtually identical to Nougat.
Ironically, there are good features in the last few major revs, but they're more about granular permissions and other functionality that isn't touched on by this article at all.
I really hate this "I'm only stating the truth that people don't want to see! Wake up sheeple!" attitude that some people seem to cop.
How would it go over if I wrote a blog post about how amazing iOS is now that it doesn't look all Aqua-themed despite that change happening years ago?
Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?
I'm glad he's happy and the Pixel seems like a great phone but this list just felt half crazy to me.
I don't think they are probably doing that, but there's not really any way to prevent them from doing that.
That said, if you already use Messenger for talking to friends, adding SMS isn't going to make a huge difference.
He and 7 billion other people.
Edit: and which sites they visit and like.
App drawer, it's personal preference but personally I like having a single home page and the rest of my apps in my drawer. But again that's just personal preference, I'm sure a lot of people would call it a negative because they have to manually move an app out of the app drawer every time they install one.
The operating system shouldn't be paternalistically responsible for preventing this kind of preference. Some people do want to voluntarily give this information to FB in exchange for a simplified or more integrated messaging experience. I don't happen to be one of them (no FB account), but it's a meaningful positive that the OS allows this for a whole lot of people.
> Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?
Yes. I have an iPhone and a Pixel. The fact that I can't only keep 4, or 8, highly-used apps on my iPhone's primary home screen really does make it harder to use.
Imagine a Windows or a MacOS desktop that was literally covered in evenly-spaced icons. There's a reason most people don't do that.
After playing with the home screen on iOS for a minute I remember what was annoying. I can control how many apps appear on the home screen, but they always float up and to the left. If I want to use my phone one-handed most of the time, it's really critical that I be able to keep two rows of apps at the bottom of the screen. Currently impossible on iOS.
This is my main sticking point with Android lately. I would much rather have a stock Android OS + device from Google, and then add the few Google services I want. Instead Google is getting more and more baked into everything, and understanding how my data is being used is becoming more difficult - and this has me worried.
You are among the few (yes yes even here on HN). And google doesn't make money with you. So who cares?
People have pushed this "You are paranoid, no one is out to get you" narrative since the 90s. Everyone has something to hide, even if its just their sex life or beliefs that aren't politically favored that might affect your employment.
I don't have a single bad thing to say about Google, but that doesn't mean that I am not afraid of their power and I don't dread the day that the current management will not be there to keep them in check. And sooner or later that day will come.
Which one? In which way is it a fallacy?
You have no specific insight on the behavior of Google's future leadership team, so the assertion that Google will necessarily start abusing their users at some point in the future is unsupported.
(Apologies if this is coming off a bit blunt, there's just not much else to say)
:D
The threat I'm worried about is the surveillance arm of the US government. The small glimpses we've seen are frightening - for example, they spliced a cable between two google data centers and recorded (some? all?) of the traffic travelling between them. This particular hole has since been plugged (google encrypts between-data-center traffic now), but we simply don't know what the US government's capabilities are. This isn't paranoia stuff - they really do this kind of thing.
And even if google manages to 'go dark' to the NSA, the US government can just legally demand access to all of our data. And block google from telling us that the data intrusion happened.
Its funny you mention FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is exactly how I feel about trusting google (and by extension the US government) with every email, search, voice, in-app text in android, phone call and so on that I've ever made.
As a non-US citizen, I have even fewer protections and I can't fight this politically. But I can give my money to Apple instead. So thats what I do.
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http://www.theweek.co.uk/google/11581/google-worker-fired-fo...
> But further examples of Barksdale's abuse of his privileges were more serious. Earlier this spring, he viewed call logs from Google Voice in order to identify the girlfriend of a 15-year-old boy, who had refused to name her. Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call his girlfriend.
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Not a single instance of a Google employee misusing info? Not one you say?
A failure of internal controls qualifies as a problem just as serious as intentional abuse of it.
Then you shouldn't have replied to me and changed the context?
The context was information in Google's possession.
You tried to narrow it to advertising after I replied which is, at best, silly.
EDIT:
> ..did you read the original post?
You replied to me and tried to plays devil advocate. The context of my words is the one that is relevant, not your attempt to shift the goal posts into some narrow land of the absurd where you get to pretend the fact information Google collects ultimately gets abused isn't a privacy problem.
So just stop, honestly. Your position as absurd as storing plain text passwords because "Well, there has never been an official policy of abusing that information."
Rogue admins, hackers, etc. are all valid threats to privacy when the information is stored in an easily transportable form and the fact that isn't obvious to you terrifies me that you are somehow a professional sysadmin.
My original words are: "And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists."
And nobody has got you since the 90s. When will it happen? And when it does, what will 'it' be?
There are a few technical issues I need to work out before I make the change though. First, I need to get macOS running natively on my workstation so I can install my own software on the phone, as I'm not running out to get a MacBook for this single need. Second, I need a root shell.
There's Ubuntu Phone, KDE Plasma, Copperhead and others but they don't feel like a good solution. The problem is always the same: no apps. It doesn't matter if I can install 99/100 apps I need but the one I can't is a messenger one of my clients requires me to use. Or if I can't really rely on a compatibility layer like MicroG, since Android is not that open anymore.
These OSes exist today, and I'd like to use them, but they're typically limited to a very small handful of (typically obsolete) devices. As long as this is the case, they'll have a lot of trouble finding enough developers and users.
If we could simply link our own kernels against these drivers the way we do with the nvidia driver and DKMS on desktops, it would be a revolutionary step forward for alt smartphone OSes. We could start working on userland instead of spending so much time devising hacks to simply get graphics and radio working one handset at a time. Unfortunately, the OEMs couldn't care less and would much rather our phones become e-waste than eat into next year's sales figures. Until then, we're pretty much at the mercy of Apple and Google :(
Secure enclave. App sandboxing. Fine-grained revocable permissions. TouchID. Differential privacy. iMessage encryption. Find My iPhone. On-device models for photo recognition.
The question is how to spin it in a positive way.
The developer looks at the app sandbox and fine-grained permissions and thinks "I can't run my code on my own device," and walks away.
The police officer looks at TouchID and the secure enclave and thinks "I can't gather evidence," and walks away.
The marketeer looks at on-device models and differential privacy and thinks "I can't understand what my users want if the device doesn't report it," and walks away.
But the user (arguably) benefits from each of these things. App sandboxing, permissions, and a lack of background tasks remove the ability to run malicious code without my consent, in theory. Secure enclave and encryption remove a malicious third party's ability to intercept my communication, in theory. On-device recognition models allow me to benefit from better organization without sending my photos to some cloud vision service, in theory.
I agree that this would piss off developers who value this kind of data robbery - but Apple is in a much better position to double down on selling quality apps that treat their users as customers instead of products than Google (based on the statistic that iPhone users purchase more apps).
So yes they do feel the need to collect as much data as possible.
A year ago when I got my iphone I deleted all of the historical voice data that google stored. Just now, In the process of finding the google activity link below, I've learned that all my deleted voice clips have magically undeleted themselves.
I've been very happy with iOS - there's some little UI gripes, but for me the biggest feature is Tim Cook standing up to the US government on behalf of privacy. I'm convinced that as an organisation Google just doesn't understand what privacy is or why its important to people. With all the new deep app intelligence features in android, I shudder to think about simply how much data google might be storing about its users. I'm very happy to be out.
[1] https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=29
Apple have gladly handed over user info on dozens of occasions (in accordance with the law).
There are tons of stock Android phones you can get from "off market" manufacturers
The Nexbit Robin: https://www.nextbit.com/
The OnePlus two or three: https://oneplus.net/2 , https://oneplus.net/3
Xiomi Mi Note: http://www.mi.com/en/minote/
ZTE Axon 7: https://www.zteusa.com/axon7/
Obi SJ1.5: http://www.obiworldphone.com/global/sj1.5
VeryKool (InfoSonic): https://www.verykool.net/Products/Smart_Phones/
As far as I know, these are all "stock" and only come with the smattering of Google apps, and absolutely none of the carrier bloatware you usually get. When I got my OnePlus Two, all it had on it were maybe 6 Google apps and that's it, nothing more, nothing less.
I've been ecstatic with the performance of the phone and only having the apps you really want on the phone makes it much easier to use. Plus, you can completely customize it, put a custom ROM on it and turn off all the Google tracking stuff. I have way more piece of mind since I got it.
Like don't use the google "now" or "pixel" launchers. Turn off google on tap. Etc..
Honestly I'd probably pick one up if not for the poor, IMO, speaker quality. If you like to talk to your phone Google definitely has the best voice assistant
I use Force Touch every time I pick up my phone and especially on list views it allows for far more functionality. Touch Bar is nothing more than a nice looking contextual menu. I assume toolbars are a gimmick too ?
With iOS 10, I've started using it frequently, many times per day.
So the answer, at least for me, has changed dramatically very recently. If I were already considering a move away from iOS, I would never have started using the new iOS 10 3D touch stuff to begin with, and therefore wouldn't know what I was missing.
1.) The phone is extremely slippery. I don't agree with the author on this one. My old iPhone was way easier to grip, and the iPhone 7 is even better. I bought a case which fixed this issue.
2.) I think this is pretty important. Android apps are second class citizens. A lot of applications don't work properly with Android and you can tell that there just isn't much developer time spent on it. I hope as the Pixel and Google phones become more popular at the high end, more developer time is focused on these applications. Most applications work fine, but sometimes it can be frustrating when an application you expect to work has major bugs.
Google could probably address this more effectively with some variant of: dev technologies making it easier to design for varied hardware profiles, test suites in the simulator that automate many types of testing across a set of standard profiles, specs for hardware makers showing them what the requirements of each standardized profile were, extensive test suites for hardware makers to make sure they conform to a standard profile, and a Google certification that a given device matches the such-and-such profile in all respects, so that if you test your code against the such-and-such profile in the simulator, and it works, it will work on the certified device.
I think there's a cultural difference between the two platforms as well. The developers that are inclined to want to make their application perfect and beautiful seem to be attracted to iOS.
* The app must be closed in a certain way (back button or swiping away, rather than home button or switching to another app) or else it'll permanently lose network connectivity after a few minutes. I think this is because they keep the socket object in their main activity, and they don't deal with cases where an idle connection gets evicted from a NAT table or similar. But that's just speculation.
* If you launch the app in certain connectivity states, it will not just put up a no-connection alert, but it will flush your stored password. This could leave you in a pickle if you use a strong passphrase that you keep in a password manager, and you were relying on the app to unlock your car.
* The app doesn't support fingerprints. This isn't a bug, but it's something that enough apps support nowadays that it feels strange they're so far behind.
In addition, I'm told the iOS app has more features than the Android version, but I've never seen it myself.
Now granted, there are a couple of nice, polished apps on iOS. But there are also entire app categories on iOS that simply suck. Some random examples:
1) For my big ass iPad Pro, I can't find a Torrent application and given how common torrent apps are, I have a feeling they are banned by Apple. On Android I have uTorrent, Bittorrent, BitTorrent Remote, you know the real deal.
2) For iOS the one KeePass port that's available and usable sucks compared with Keepass2Android.
3) For Android you've got a really awesome XMPP client, see https://conversations.im/ - for iOS the XMPP clients I tried sucked.
4) Firefox on iOS is just a shell around a Safari webview and cannot do plugins, being handicapped by Apple's restrictions - it can't even do ad-blockers like official Safari. On Android on the other hand Firefox is the real deal, as it comes with its own engine and can do plugins.
5) On Android I could find a good and usable app for Pinboard.in (PinDroid). No such luck on iOS, so I use it from the browser.
6) Speaking of Firefox, on Android you have the "official" Tor browser and Orbot, the proxy. On iOS you have the "Onion browser" - better than nothing, but still, it's not even a comparison.
7) We have Signal from Open Whispers Systems on both platforms, but can you encrypt plain SMS on iOS? No you can't. But on Android you can, see: https://silence.im
8) On Android I also have apps that monitors my battery usage and gives me detailed reports about what is consuming my battery (currently GSam Battery Monitor Pro). On iOS you only get the stuff in its settings and that's not enough.
9) On Android you can manage your files with file managers. So for example I use Amaze File Manager and you can organize files, copy or share them. And given that you can copy files to/from an Android phone directly, without that iTunes monster, that can be pretty handy. On iOS people use freaking Dropbox for file copying, which is pretty dumb.
10) Once upon a time VLC wasn't available for iOS, then it happened, then it got banned by Apple, being replaced by copy-cats trying to fool people, without Apple lifting a finger, then it got approved again. Either way, VLC is a second class citizen on iOS.
But in the sort of everyday apps most people use there isn't really a contest. Android lags far behind in overall polish.
And even if I can feel my own bias, I really think Android is the more polished one, OS & apps. I could enumerate all sorts of reasons for why, but then you'd hand-wave it as not being relevant for moms using apps that could have been web pages :-)
It's not a myth. Product Managers do look at the demographic split and invest more into iOS development. Also the fact that iOS is a more coherent platform i.e. Almost all users are on latest version means more resources on polish.
Design decisions have led to the requirement that apps can only access files inside their app container sandbox.
This means if you want a "file manager" for iOS, it can only manage the files that you send into that app.
Documents by Readdle is a bit of a hack: a file manager that also includes PDF reading bits and media decoding bits and picture viewing bits, with plugins to copy to/from cloud services. Either way, the only files you get to manage are livinng inside of Documents' file system. It's not very UNIX-y, granted.
But the inability to create a "file manager" is a legitimate design decision with legitimate upsides.
The biggest issue I run into is Android apps are often more resource heavy. Amongst Android users I know, Snapchat is an app you really want to be quitting in between uses to prevent background CPU use.. which gets annoying fast.
I don't have any, but the side by side tests I've seen of real world pictures it is a complete wash between the two.
I find it silly to say that Apple didn't present a compelling enough camera, but Google did, when they are as similar as they are.
Yeah, but then you ask it: "What is heavier, a cat or an elephant?" and it fails, because it is lacking in common sense. It only has a small-ish factoid knowledge base and lacks all the general common sense things we take for granted.
I'm not sure I understand this negative. I'd think any problems caused by this would be easily remedied by just charging your phone while you're sleeping, when you can't use it anyway.
Or is he saying that it needs to be charged once a day, even if you charge it overnight?
It means you can't go to bed drunk and neccessarily expect your alarm to go off in the morning.
It really just means that any time your life gets out of routine, your phone is probably going to die.
I wish he would've elaborated a little more on battery life, as there's a big difference between a phone that barely makes it from morning to night and one that can't quite survive until the night of the second day since charge, both of which would need a daily charging.
When things go wrong, you need to make calls, put out fires, keep trying to reach remote towers using full radio power for extended periods.
When things go wrong is when you MOST need your phone, so you need a battery that can continue to serve you a lot longer than it normally needs to on an ordinary day unless you can somehow be certain that for you every day will be an ordinary day.
Some airports make them impossible to find, highly coveted, surrounded by the territorial and ferroucious Horde, oodles of macbook MagSafe and ipad Lightning cables eminating from the wall like thin withering tentacles of some white goop monster emanating from the power grid.
Other airports lock the power sockets away behind "Employee Only" signs and caution tape, with menacing security guards patrolling the area should you even think about stealing those precious MWh from the institution.
Still other airports have rows upon rows of power outlets in plain sight, but every single one of them is dead, disconnected, dying like your phone battery.
This goes well and according to plan until you go to bed really tired one day and forget to put your phone to charge. And then it happens again a week later, and then again...
(This might be related to using your phone in bed)
95% of the time, though, I don't need that much charge, and would rather have the option of carrying an extra battery charger with me only when I need it, rather than having a much larger, bulkier phone 100% of the time.
If you pay 3d games or use it constantly, of course you'll need to charge it sometimes. But for casual usage with standard basic apps, I sometimes forget to plug it in at night and it's not problem.
https://i.imgsafe.org/cfad953cec.png
Only problem that I've had was getting the fingerprint sensor working. You're finger down for around 45 seconds and it vibrates to tell you that its got it. That wasn't working for me and the Google engineers blamed it on software that I'd installed. But it failed before I'd installed any software.
I found an alternative way to do it ironically while waiting for a callback from the engineer. Hold your finger down for 15 seconds, lift it up but keep it hovering over the sensor. Then it will show you it's 20% done and prompt you to put your finger down again. It takes five iterations to get a finger done. You can do more than one finger and I've added four.
The one thing that I don't like is the dialing directory. You can't get it to be alphabetical and instead of a standard list you end up with these big boxes on the screen. Looks great in the photos with a half dozen contacts but fails with hundreds. The UI is extremely awkward and I don't know how it passed user testing. Does anyone have a favorite alternative for me to try?
Two pluses - battery life is fantastic and I've actually gotten almost two days from one charge. I am usually negative on all assistants but Google's is fantastic and I actually find myself using it for all sorts of things. I let my 100 year old dad try it. He smirked and said Google what is the weather in Paris, France tomorrow. It gave him the weather report and there was this gorgeous look of complete shock on his face:<).
Yup. I have an iPhone 6, and routinely go two days between charges. I can charge it overnight, use it all day, skip a night, all day again, and still have about ~20% charge still left by the time I plug it in the next night before bed.
I'm not sure why this isn't on by default given that the sRGB option on pixel apparently has the most accurate color representation of any phone (can't remember where I read it) today.