A more interesting thing I see on those stats is Android looks likely to beat iOS in tablets in the next couple of years. I don't know anyone at all with an Android tablet. I thought Apple had the tablet market pretty much conquered.
Monopoly as a word isn’t meant to describe any successful company that achieves decent market share. I’m really tired of people throwing that phrase around, iOS and Android are fiercely competing with each other for market share every year so yes there is fierce competition.
Android itself doesn't do anything. Samsung Xiaomi Google and others compete seperately and just so happen to use Android. Though this is becoming less and less true
The initial comment was quite snarky too, implying that there cannot be any competition in a duopoly. If anything, duopolies have some of the strongest competition compared to a situation where there's only one winner or one where all the 5-10 companies just stop competing because there's no way to win.
This is a pretty good point I don't think is seen very often: a lot of first-time iPhone users must be completely blown away by upgrading from the crappiest Android devices to something akin to a flagship on Android -- that they would never have considered upgrading to any other way other than switching.
The Android vs iOS graphs don't tell us a lot since Android is the accumulation of many devices across various brands, while iOS is just Apple's iPhone.
Dividing the share by brand or even by price point reveals the true competition in the market, Apple performs well in their category and regularly achieves the most sold smartphone. When figures were available these also revealed that Apple took home the majority of smartphone profits (90%+), that is unlikely to have changed significantly (Not because iPhone margins were particularly special, but because the market is saturated by competitors with razor thin margins.)
The Android v iOS graph is heavily skewed by low-cost devices. Apple's focus on a meaningful midrange product, long OS support and a build quality that is well above the low-cost alternatives are likely the reason why Android's share has declined by this small amount.
That said Apple won't achieve dominance in the bulk figures because these are buttressed by low cost devices, such as those used in less wealthy and developing countries. Can a large share of Android users even afford an iPhone?
This is all good for google, as users = profit, but it's not particularly inviting for smart phone manufacturers who don't have enough margin to develop a meaningfully differentiated product.
I don’t know how to find this but I would be interested to see a graph of iOS versus Android for high-end phones only. Say $429+ since that’s what a new SE starts at.
Samsung obviously sells a lot of high-end phones, but so many Android makers have trouble competing in the high end I wonder if there’s much left to go around after Apple.
Or maybe I’m just totally wrong.
But the numbers we see are usually overall, including whether you paid $100 or $1500.
I’m not surprised. I used Android devoutly, had a Galaxy S4, then an S8 when that started showing its age. I upgraded to an iPhone 12 when AT&T ran the promotion to get a free one.
I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me:
- Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in substantially older features and security patches.
- Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc.
- Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.
The big downside is slower upgrades to the latest hardware features. Specifically, I am envious of the people who have 120 FPS phones, they’re beautiful. There is also a loss of customization, but truthfully I thought I’d miss it much more than I did. The fact that the iPhone “just works” is worth it to me.
It's pick your poison. The only reason I'm still on android is because at least I can (still) have root there. I'm saying still because of safety net. But if apple let me have root, i'd probably prefer an Apple over Google.
Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage that I only turn on if I need to use a banking app or something.
> Is it seriously worth it for people to do stuff like this?
For the vast majority, it probably isn't. Also, I'm not full RMS since I would consider using an iPhone which definitely has closed-source components :)
I don't think it would be that much of a hassle to me, since I already don't use a lot of the "nice" apps etc. The way most people use their phone is quite alien to me. E.g. I much prefer old.reddit.com over a reddit app and/or constantly getting harassed with banners to use the app.
I'm pretty sure it would remove extra steps for me, instead of add them, by letting me compute how I like to (GNU/Linux) instead of trying to compute like GNU/Linux on Android.
I think you're genuinely asking, but just FYI it might seem to some people like you're perpetuating the common trope of "Stallman radicalism" or nothing. By far more people on Linux are willing to run some amount of "non-free" software depending on the situation. For example the Nvidia proprietary drivers are one of the most popular packages for many distros.
The only real problem right now is just lack of apps. Devs build against Android/iOS-only SDKs and use native features that aren't cross platform, so running those apps is mostly out of the question (although I have seen some people running Android apps on their Pinephones!! Need to look into that more).
So GP is saying for apps like that they'd keep an android around but do everything else in a browser.
Branding others as being part of a radical out-group helps you feel secure in your decisions.
I had a conversation with two people recently who got defensive at the idea that controlling the software in your phone should be the norm. As if criticizing Apple's approach to free/libre software is an attack on them as an identity.
I didn't say that. And I don't' think people think that when questions like that are asked.
People don't care about this stuff if it's going to waste a ton of their time.
Theres a reason people buy closed source oems and don't care. It's because it works and doesn't waste their time.
Imagine buying an open source car where you can to periodically rebuilt parts of the engine because it was "free". That's absurd, people aren't buying a philosophical journey. they're buying a car.
I'm sure if pinephone or OLPC used entirely free drivers and didn't waste your time to do the same asks people would find it much more agreeable.
If you want to have control over the UI and functional aspects of your phone, it can be - the thing is, there are enough leeways currently - Rootless XPosed, Samsung NiceLock, custom DNS for system-wide adblock, etc - that it's often not needed. Custom ROM scene pretty much dried up because of this. But with vendors more than ever locking up, and Google cutting back features and API access agressively, this could change.
There doesn't seem to be. Hell BB10 was basically what you describe and IIRC had a layer to let let devs submit Android apps into the Blackberry World from day one. It wasn't enough and devs couldn't even be bothered to do that. Later they partnered with Amazon and added the Amazon App Store and let users add their own Android apps. Still wasn't enough. It was a great phone OS and hands down was the best at email/messaging. Maybe a true FOSS community effort could carve out more of niche with this though.
Even Microsoft couldn't make it work with barrels of cash. Granted they did make some huge mis-steps.
You can probably make the case for it being a triopoly today had Microsoft done some things differently. But that's different from saying that Microsoft could realistically start down the mobile phone path again today. You can be sure if they thought they had any realistic hope of making it, they would try.
Blackberry's android application sideloading made it one hell of a killer smartphone. I had a Q5 as a work phone for a while and it was great to still have so many apps I was used to from android. The killing blow was everything moving to needing play services just to function.
Windows Phone was a shame, but completely Microsoft's fault. I liked the Windows Phone UI/UX, and the irony is that if they had've invested more into something like Xamarin, they could've likely had extremely compelling tooling for big enterprises (like banks) to support Apps on different platforms. But even Skype for Windows Phone took ages to actually land.
Or emulate Android apps, like you said. That solves the initial issue of having no apps. It seems like Google Fuchsia will likely take this approach. Although it isn't clear if another platform could do this, without a lot of goodwill from Google - and good luck with that.
I loved my lumia 520. It was cheap as chips, fast as hell and at the time more user friendly than whatever overheating droid alternatives were available. I think it was one of the fastest selling phones at the time.
I distinctly remember Google making it a right pain to use Google's products on the phone, namely Youtube and Google Maps. In addition I remember a bunch of articles talking about how Google prevented Microsoft from developing a native youtube app and doing shady nonsense regarding User Agent filtering.
Certainly makes me somewhat glad that Microsoft just chose to yoink chromium for edge. At least now Google can't do any more shady nonsense with the browser to filter them out.
Microsoft is a trillion dollar company with experience working on Chromium and browsers. They have the talent and resources to run/take over chrome.
If Google makes a misstep, it wouldn't take too much effort for Microsoft to run a hostile fork and capture a massive user base. They already are the 2nd most popular browser.
As it is, they have nullified Google's anti-competitive nonsense of using the browser as a way to manipulate markets.
Granted as a Firefox user, I conceded your point to how to affects open standards. Frankly though, that has already been long tarnished by Google anyway.
I have no idea if they will try it again someday, but I would love to see Microsoft give this another go. I think strong messaging about "quality over quantity" of apps would actually be a boon to them. I never go looking in the App Store for new apps anymore - just give me my video streamers, a Reddit client, Spotify, Slack, Discord, and Signal and I'm good to go.
Exactly. Years ago the number of apps in each app store was portrayed as "more is better" and a moat against new platforms. But realistically, how many apps does the average mobile user actually use, now that the novelty has worn off? I would guess that 75% of all users actually care about maybe 50 different apps combined, like Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp, Spotify, etc.
It's been said many times that Microsoft could've won the mobile wars by simply taking a billion dollars, and paying the companies with the top 100 apps in the Apple app store to port their apps to Windows Mobile. That's $10 million each.
Instead, they spent billions and billions of dollars trying to attract developers to their platform before eventually shuttering it.
There was a phone with awesome hardware, an awesome mobile-first operating system, and practically no apps. Bill admitted his biggest mistake was being too preoccupied with the antitrust activity in Europe, and missing the shift to mobile computing cost him ~400 billion.
I agree with this so strongly I was about to write the same and have held the theory a long time. I wonder if there is a data set out there to show 95% of the world population has substantially similar apps installed and the ones they care about enough to consider a deal breaker are even fewer and less diverse. I don't think MS would even have had to spend that much.
I'm sure many would be reluctant to trust m$ as a 3rd party in the mobile phone stakes, particularly with their telemetry, which is the root of the cancer plaguing the existing platforms (including desktop) already.
Most people aren’t using $ in words like Msft. Most likely find that weird. Same with caring about telemetry if they even know its definition. This is not even getting into not caring about all of this enough to call stuff “cancer”
Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads and search? Maybe cloud services? I would be afraid to use anything but open source tools on their cloud service given the kill rate they have for products...
One problem with relying on emulation is that Google has moved a lot of functionality from the open source Android layer to Google Play Services, and they obviously wont publish that on someone else's platform.
You can install those from the Play Store, can't you? If you are going yo emulate Android, it's best to go all in and install the Google services into the emulator too. (Of course, the distributor can't just install it, but he can make the device ready for installing it, requiring only some confirmation.)
I think there is absolutely no way we should consider it a third platform next to the other two giants. It is way too early to call it that when they struggle with even just being daily drivers for the most enthusiastic.
You should take a look at SailfishOS. I switched from Android to Sailfish OS 8 years or so ago. The original Jolla Phone was really nice and the OS too. Later I switched to an Sony Xperia X with Sailfish OS, but it goes only downhill from there. I think the problem are the devices, the software might be okay. Now I'm with an IPhone and I'm still not happy, it's just something that is not horrible.
AFAIK KaiOS (the operating system for some T9-keyboard-only phones like the rebooted Nokia 8110) is Firefox OS with a new coat of paint, but it also seems kinda dead. And no touchscreen in those devices, so not really comparable to "normal" smartphones anymore... :/
I don’t think you’re crazy. I think WebOS really could’ve done it if they’d had a better launch partner than Sprint, and had done better marketing.
Their application Model was web technologies based, which is quite popular now, between React-Native and PWAs.
I’m doubtful though that someone could pull out off now. Mostly because you need access to the services that people already use and Google/Amazon/Apple already wall their gardens to their own liking.
- DriveDroid to boot a PC, I haven't used a USB stick to boot off in... years?
- /etc/hosts
- Viper4Android for system wide EQ
- Messing with user hostile apps such a firefox when they disable your addons although they still work, proven by the fact that I was able to make them work again as root
Edit: more things
- Wireguard kernel module
- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself
you can add as many of these as you want, i'm not giving up root. The crippled API model that's in fashion these days kills innovation.
Ha, havent heard from that app in years!
DriveDroid's file-backed USB-thumbdrive emulation is marvellous.
Pick your .iso or whatever image, insert & boot your machines from it. No more searching for and fiddling with usb drives needed. It needs usb-gadget+mass storage module support in the Android kernel though. Miss it.
If you don't want to be leaving your phone plugged into PCs that you've booted, you might look into the "iodd" brand devices - either enclosures that you can put your own SSD into or the Mini series that comes with (I think) an mSATA drive already installed.
The Mini has a better screen for switching between ISOs and virtual disks.
- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself <-- or to work around Let's Encrypt's old certificate root expiring by manually adding the new one
- GravityBox for various UI tweaks and making volume control a little more fine-grained
- UMS Enabler to expose your external SD card as an USB drive (accessing it via MTP isn't really fun and doesn't work everywhere [1])
- proper local backups and therefore the ability to e.g. relatively painlessly revert borked app updates
- sometimes due to bugs cruft accumulates in data directories that as a regular user can only be cleaned by – depending on the nature of the bug – clearing the whole application data [2] (which is already annoying enough as it of course also means wiping all your settings and other stuff you might actually want to keep), completely uninstalling and reinstalling the app [3], or even wiping the whole phone [4].
[1] E.g. the local state library has a nice book scanner available for public use. You can either e-mail yourself the results (but that only works reliably up to a certain file size), or else save them on an USB drive. I didn't have an USB drive with me, but thanks to UMS Enable I could just plug in my phone, switch my external SD card to USB mode and voila.
[2] It seems that e.g. possibly as a result of /etc/hosts blocking via AdAway some apps accumulate telemetry data that they cannot send (Fabric / Crashlytics seems to be the particular culprit here) and after a few weeks that amount of data can reach a notable size.
Another example was that due to some sort of bug Google's TTS app (Speech Services) kept accumulating TTS voice packs after updates and wouldn't delete the old versions, and by the time I noticed they were occupying a few hundred MB.
[3] Don't know of a current example, but during the days of Android 4.1.2, Android had a bug whereby if a native library was removed from a future APK version (respectively renamed), then Android wouldn't remove the old copy of the library when installing an update. Skype was a particular culprit there, because their native library was around 25 MB and included a version number in its filename, so each time that library was upgraded an additional 25 MB file was plonked onto the file system, with the old file remaining behind. Without root, the only way to remove those superfluous files was by completely uninstalling the app.
[4] I occasionally find system RAM dumps appearing under /data/ss-ram-dumps. I've got no idea whether they eventually get cleaned up automatically, or if they would just accumulate and take up more and more space until you're forced to wipe the whole phone.
I tried looking for a replacement app for that last year or so, but didn't find anything really satisfactory, either. Didn't try OAndBackupX, though, because my phone's currently too old, but "the results are not great" doesn't sound very encouraging, I guess :-)
So while it's a bit clunky, for now I'm relying on a combination of Titanium Backup (at least on my phone it's still working fine except for split APKs) + SAI to do an extra backup of split APKs.
So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic (though I do agree that since then they should have improved the status quo)
> So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic
I don't care anymore though. I've switched browsers since, Mozilla is beyond help. Still, in that moment i was very glad to have root to override their bullshit.
Not the person you asked, but no. Because that would mean you have to trust iOS to not track you. I can be convinced that Apple is less bad than Google in that regard, but if Apple has nothing to hide, then they can let me have root, so I can verify, right :) ?
Essentially but not exactly. Their website is unusable on a phone. Just switching from mobile mode to desktop mode after login will expire your session.
I use an app called X-Privacy which can block specific permissions in other apps.
For example, I see no reason why a calculator app needs access to my contacts, phone, or microphone, and X-Privacy will let me disable permissions to those specific resources for the calculator app while still letting me use it. As a bonus, it'll also put in fake data in to these apps when needed, so the apps continue working, thinking they have access to my data but they don't.
Something like this should be standard in every smartphone, but obviously phone OS makers don't value privacy enough, and even require root in order to allow you to do this.
The principle of not letting a company or government have more power over a device you own that holds your private actions, whereabouts and even inner thoughts you communicate with those closest to you.
I'm not paranoid, but it's not the direction I want to see computing evolve in.
Not the OP, but for me this is a matter of principle. If you don't have root on your device, it isn't yours, its the manufacturer's, and you're simply renting it. I rarely if ever actually use my root access for anything, but I guess I'm just philosophically opposed to buying a device designed to ensure I don't control it. Doubly so for a device that's so critical and enmeshed in my private life.
- macros and scripts- it's nice not having to enable, disable etc stuff and just scan qr codes, nfc tags or use ble tags as markers to enable something
- chroot
- faking permisions and data for apps is a must
- sim links to app data folders for easy backup/restore
I switched from rooted Android to an iPhone that has the checkm8 bootrom exploit and use a tool called checkra1n[0] to 'jailbreak' it. It's been really nice, super stable (i.e. months between restarts) and unlocks so many little comforts for me coming from custom Android. To an android user, it's similar to Xposed, but with almost every change to the system going through Xposed instead of modules, random scripts, etc.
I had Xposed with a Note 3 or 4. It didn’t seem like the amount of customizing and tweaks were close to what iOS jailbreaking had. Maybe I never found the right place to figure stuff out. For iOS jailbreaking I just go to the subreddit once in a while for a bit.
Consider the Android distros that are free from Google services. I am on /e/OS which has an android base. Between its app store and F-Droid, you get almost everything you'd want from a mobile OS (minus games) without all the Google/Apple/Samsung crap.
> you get almost everything you'd want from a mobile OS (minus games)
You forgot reasonable support time: Proprietary drivers prevent you from upgrading the Linux kernel, and the device becomes very insecure and outdated within few years.
Let me put this in another way: you already purchased a pinephone and a librem in the span of a few years. You already blew up your e-waste quota for the next 10-15 years, and you don't even have a device that could be considered a daily driver.
Meanwhile I have a phone that is based on free software (for all the aspects where it matters) and that works. Today. And which has future potential to be just as free as the librem/pinephone - after all, if the code being developed by Purism is free, it can be adopted by other vendors.
A laptop from 12 years ago more likely than not has less memory than a mid-range phone from today, and unless such laptop is your only device for all this time, it has no point in this conversation.
> and you don't even have a device that could be considered a daily driver
I do use it as a daily driver.
> unless such laptop is your only device for all this time, it has no point in this conversation
It's the only device used by my non-technical relative. But even if it wasn't, the device would serve a purpose and not be another piece of e-waste.
> And which has future potential to be just as free
You can't upgrade Linux on your phone due to the proprietary drivers. You're stuck with the ancient version. When it's not supported, your device effectively becomes a brick, unless you are going to recompile everything yourself or fine with being hacked.
Even the most hardcore linux enthusiasts that tried the pinephone claim that they can not reliably make calls, have constant crashes and the app ecosystem is limited. If you are okay with not being able to reliably make calls, fine, but don't oversell on the definition of "daily driver".
> You can't upgrade Linux on your phone due to the proprietary drivers.
Hardware-specific binary blobs don't stop the UBPorts devs to make constant updates to my old BenQ phone. The software part is still up-to-date, but the application catalog is almost non-existent, the hardware is limited (1GB RAM) and the camera is shit. Eventually I want to turn that device into a networked music player, but as a smartphone it didn't last two years.
If I manage to get 7 years out of this Fairphone, its ROI will have been unbelievably great, I will gladly buy whatever comes from Fairphone in 2027, and I will try to find another use for this device.
Hopefully by then Linux on mobile will have matured, but I don't need to compromise on my actual needs just to please the FOSS-purists.
> If you are okay with not being able to reliably make calls, fine, but don't oversell on the definition of "daily driver"
This is an outdated information. The development pace of Pinephone is unprecedented. Even here on HN I saw many recent posts saying that calls and MMS work fine already.
Ok, good to know. Too bad that I needed a phone 10 months ago.
Update: reading through https://www.reddit.com/r/pinephone/comments/u6zzyc/how_pinep... (from 6 days ago) it seems like you are not just overselling hard, you are trying to convince people to switch to something that is absolutely not ready for general consumption.
You do realize that if your goal is to get more people to adopt FOSS, your approach is more harmful than beneficial? Don't make promises that you can not keep, it will burn whatever goodwill people might have and it ends up convincing them Linux is never going to be for them.
Yes, it's not ready for general consumption. Mainly due to the battery life (I use two batteries) and sluggishness (it's fast if you use non-mainstream Sxmo). For Librem 5 (which I also preordered) both these points are fine (well, the battery is still worse than for Android).
Note that we are not on Reddit but on HN. Is its audience ordinary people? My goal is to bring more technical people to GNU/Linux phones.
HN audience is large and diverse enough to the point that it makes no sense to think as some homogeneous group of people who are interested in tinkering with their phones. By making absurd claims about the feasibility of the Pinephone as a daily driver, you are doing a disservice to your own community.
Also, is your goal to get people to use GNU/Linux phones or is it to maximize the overall adoption of Free Software? The former requires a radical shift in consumer behavior and will be unlikely to happen, the latter can be done in gradual steps with a much higher chance of success.
Think of it this way: if you manage to upset me, who is pretty much in favor of F/LOSS, imagine how many bridges you burned with those "on the other side"?
> By making absurd claims about the feasibility of the Pinephone as a daily driver
Where did I make this claim? I said that I use it as a daily driver. It's possible, though not for everyone yet.
> Also, is your goal to get people to use GNU/Linux phones or is it to maximize the overall adoption of Free Software?
It's the same goal. Adoption of Free Software without using it on the phones will not help much. There are more people using smartphones than computers. I also don't see how one is a "radical shift" while the other is "gradual steps". It's the same to me. People are going to switch to new type of smartphones slowly: first developers, then early adopters, then theirs friends and then the rest. Same for Free Software.
> HN audience is large and diverse enough to the point that it makes no sense to think as some homogeneous group of people who are interested in tinkering with their phones.
This is true, but these people are "hackers", i.e. interested in though-provoking things and intellectually curious. I don't expect that they would just buy a new phone with a new OS without doing any research and believing a random comment on HN.
The original comment I responded to was complaining about how the Google/Apple duopoly leads to a "pick your poison" situation and the user hostility. My recommendation was to into Google-free Android distros that can be used and do not require big compromises in terms of usability.
Your interjection came off as one that could provide the same level of usability and no compromises on the freedom aspect. It's only now that you are backing off on the claim by adding the caveat that you can use it as a daily driver.
> Adoption of Free Software without using it on the phones will not help anyone.
AOSP is free-software. F-Droid only distributes free-software. So why did you feel the need to interject about
> I also don't see how one is a "radical shift" while the other is "gradual steps".
The amount of people that could be interested in using /e/OS with F-Droid is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of people interested in tinkering with "Pure FOSS, GNU/Linux".
"Google Android -> AOSP + closed apps + f-droid" is a much easier adoption curve than "Google Android -> GNU/Linux"
There is no phone in the world which can run AOSP without proprietary software, at least drivers. (Well, technically, Pinehone and Librem 5 could do it, but it's not ported yet.) F-Droid is great, but it's running on top of a proprietary OS. It's probably a step in the right direction, but you can't just say "AOSP is FLOSS".
> The amount of people that could be interested in using /e/OS with F-Droid is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of people interested in tinkering with "Pure FOSS, GNU/Linux".
Every single change in the society starts like this. I don't see anything wrong or unexpected here. It doesn't mean that one should not promote the change. To me it even proves my point, because more technical people will get interested first anyway.
> The original comment I responded to was complaining about how the Google/Apple duopoly leads to a "pick your poison" situation and the user hostility. My recommendation was to into Google-free Android distros that can be used and do not require big compromises in terms of usability.
In this way you are still supporting Google with your money, it's not the best solution to the problem. Yes, the compromises are smaller and I did not disagree with it. I just noted in my original comment that anything Google-related will inevitably become e-waste, even if you use "AOSP" on it.
> Your interjection came off as one that could provide the same level of usability
You are probably right, and I could add a disclaimer that GNU/Linux phones can't do everything yet and are less reliable. But I don't see how those things were implied.
That's why I had my quip about "FOSS purists". In practical terms, people using AOSP (and boo-hoo closed drivers) have a lot more options of free software in applications and all other aspects that matters to them.
> It doesn't mean that one should not promote the change.
We have a quarter of a century of "This is the year of Linux on the desktop", and any adoption that Linux ever got could never be attributed to an increase "technical people" interested in a "pure" alternative. Valve's working on Proton and making gaming on Linux a reality is doing more for FOSS than any "activist" ever will.
The problem of FOSS is not a lack of education or promotion. The problem is that its activists miss the forest for the trees. To illustrate, instead of taking my comment about an alternative that would be miles better than iOS/Google Android and adding to it, to make the message stronger, you decided to "educate" them, and now all it's left is the two of us on a debate that does not help the others in any way.
> In this way you are still supporting Google with your money.
No, I am not. A Google-free Android, is as useful to Google as a GNU/Linux system. Google will only make money if people continue to use its search and see their ads.
Notify me when their lifetime actually start. Because other than playing with them, they are currently not up to the definition of a daily driver-ready mobile device.
From my experience if you stay on the Google flagship/Pixel line then everything is great. Pretty much every other vender is garbage and will screw you and you'll have the experience you're talking about.
I typically tell people if you want an apples-to-apples (no pun intended) comparison, you can't compare iOS to Android. You need to compare iPhone to Google Pixel. If iOS was open source and available for 3rd parties to roll-their-own, you wouldn't take a cheap "iPhone" maker and compare that against the latest Pixel Pro, so the reverse shouldn't be done either.
It seems though in the latest iteration at least, the Pixel 6 is actually worse than the Samsung S22. And frankly I've often felt like Samsungs were the flagship Android phones, not Google's phones.
Kind of a late comment but I really do wish Samsung would make a serious attempt at a "stock android" type of device that was affordable, because I think they would kill it. Their phones have always seemed really high quality to me, but so expensive, and the S2 that I had back in the day was riddled with Samsung versions of apps that I didn't want.
Last time I had a Sony phone (Xperia Z5), the hardware was quite nice and the software was nearby stock Android, except for some apps like launcher, camera or gallery, which were a slightly nicer than the stock ones.
But they were on a strange schedule, they released a new flagship every 6 months instead of every year. They of course could not support all the models at the same time, so the support was shorter that competition.
I owned a Pixel 1 and a Pixel 3 and they were two of the worst phones I have ever owned. You couldn't pay me to take another Pixel phone. I now rock a much cheaper Motorola which is fantastic.
What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode
AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins.
To me browsing the web is unusable without those plugins in Firefox. How is browsing the web on an iPhone? Do you get overlays, autoplaying videos and ads on websites or can you block them? Do you get a reader mode?
Typically I use my phone when not at home since at home I have a computer to browse the web of course. Is pihole installed on your iphone? Does it work when in a train, in a restaurant somewhere, etc...?
Yes there's a reader mode built in to the browser. Ad blockers are available since 2015, although these are declarative ad blockers. Custom web extensions are also available more recently; these can actually run custom JS.
It means all ad blocking rules must be compiled and then sent to Safari. You can't, for example, execute some JavaScript to find out what elements to block. The format of these precompiled rules isn't as flexible as, say, uBlock Origin, but works well enough in practice.
Does it also have extensions like redirect to old.reddit and such? If so, then it sounds like it would allow more user control than the latest versions of firefox of android, is this really true?
Yes, but I don’t know what’s like without a developer account.
All extensions are distributed as native apps, usually bundled into the primary app and are (when applicable) installed into Safari when they’re installed onto the device.
There are Content Blockers, App Extensions (into/out of Safari), Web Extensions (“of” Safari), share extensions etc with different limitations and abilities that run individually within their apps and message Safari and other apps, or have rules read ahead of time by Safari with no runtime access, or run within Safari using the WebExtension API etc etc
The archetypal web browser plug-in via the WebExtension API totally exists and are convertible for the most part to Safari’s very proprietary but very user conscious ecosystem.
I run ad/content blockers on iOS, I watched my wife use safari the other day and was shocked at how much irritating content/ads she deals with so I installed the same one for her, works a treat.
I do desperately miss this. I’ve tried hard to get as good an experience as possible, but there’s no denying that Android wins on this one. The total closed garden approach of Apple is way overkill and I dislike it.
There is a systemwide ad-blocker available called MYbloXX[0] that I've been using on a jb iPhone, but you can also use it on a stock iOS device with the caveat that you have to do a device restore to be able to apply the configuration. The web site is a bit cheese but the developer has been doing this for years and it works really well, across all apps. You can see the PAC file it uses here[1]
Alternatively, I've just signed up for the Orion browser beta[2] for Mac and there is a testflight available for iOS. This can apparently use (some) WebExtensions, notably uBlock origin. I cannot run testflight apps on my old jb iPhone so I can't speak to how well it works
But the iPhone only "just works" if you completely buy in to Apple's ecosystem. E.g. if you want to buy some FLAC music files from somewhere else, it won't "just work" anymore. Android is still the lesser of two evils in terms of allowing more choice on its platform.
You must have installed some niche piece of software that the vast majority of iPhone users will never use or hear about. Hopefully the indie dev keeps updating it and Apple never pulls it from the store!
In what world VLC is “some niche piece of software that the vast majority of iPhone users will never use or hear about”?
You REALLY never heard of VLC?
VLC and free open source software certainly won't offer "just works". If you are happy to go down this path, then Android will offer more free open source apps for you.
It seems more likely that the majority of iOS users (and likely Android users too) just don't care.
I would be shocked if > 20% of Android users manage their own music library rather than using one of the standard music streaming services.
You've picked on iOS (incorrectly) for not being able to playback FLAC, then shifted argument. The point was proven that you don't need to buy into Apples ecosystem for this.
How do you play it? How do you import them into your library? If it's not mp3, aac, or m4a, iTunes won't index it, it won't end up in your library, and any of the standard music apps will not play it.
Speaking from experience because this is a continuing pain point for my music collection that includes oddball formats like flac, ogg, and others--none of which I can even get on my phone without using a cloud service.
Nevermind, looks like I had some conversion going on to get those files on my iPhone. It's irrelevant anyways, since AAC is audibly transparent to the human ear.
AAC may not be audibly transparent after its transcoded for Bluetooth. If you are using Apple headphones then this of course shouldn't happen, but for Sony's LDAC, better to start with FLAC.
I use Foobar2000 on iOS where you can toggle its embedded FTP server to transfer files, either to its own music library or one shared with iTunes. It's very easy.
VLC is currently #18 in the app store in the media player category. It's not just some linux app. As to how to get flac files on the iPhone,
1) you can connect it a computer open Finder go to apps section drag the file there
2) put the file in the iCloud and access it from any device with the files app on
3) in Safari if a link is a media file you can share it with VLC
and that's just 3 off the top of my head, I think there's a couple more. It's really not that hard, gone are the days where apps needed to run local webservers to slurp content. But actually VLC can actually probably get media that way too.
Isn’t the poster replying on the options for downloading FLAC to a DAP on IOS?
What is the options for Android?
I don’t know of any native android solution that allows for sync to sync desktop or online platform for specifically FLAC files without a backend user/server/client service that is native.
You can download them from Safari and select 'VLC', for one...otherwise you can easily use Finder on Mac to just drag it over to the VLC documents folder on your iPhone - not sure about Windows.
I have never been able to make an Apple laptop recognize my phone as a USB storage device to copy photos from it.
GOOG phones used to cost less than half of APPL ones. And for a while to have physically wider screens which made them better book readers. Unfortunately the price difference seems to be nearly negligible now.
There are third-party apps available that handle FLAC just fine. I use a paid app called Neutron Music Player mainly because it has an SMB client to connect to a NAS with my FLAC collection, but you can also use its built-in server to transfer FLAC to internal storage. I think you can even sync the SMB source to local storage as well but I haven't explored that, since I play them over the network just fine.
Yep Foobar 2000 for iOS is free and plays Flac (and many others), and has a convenient built in FTP server that you can temporarily enable to tranfer them over the network into its music library.
> E.g. if you want to buy some FLAC music files from somewhere else, it won't "just work" anymore.
The thing is nobody* does that.
There are a few. That’s why I added the asterisk. But realistically very few people actually do it. Especially compared to the number of iPhones they sell every year.
If you were using MP3 files, you wouldn’t have an issue. Or AAC. There might even be others. Apple really likes to make things easy, but they tend to only do it for the common case. That’s what gets the most use, that’s what makes the most people happy, that’s what they focus on.
If you’re the kind of person who wants to do things that are far out of the mainstream you’re never going to be happy with an iPhone. You can use other apps as other people pointed out. But I wouldn’t expect this to ever work in Apple’s music player. It’s the same reason you can’t have root, re-theme your phone heavily, replace the dialer, or a lot of other heavy customizations. That’s not what they focus on.
No, at this point I think the vast majority of people just use streaming services.
The second biggest group, but probably much smaller, it’s people like me who both have a library and a streaming service.
After that, smaller again, I would assume it’s people who have just a library. The majority of these are probably files bought from Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. Those are all formats that the iPhone can play.
In last place is people who use more unique formats like FLAC. I understand why you would want it over the other formats. But I think it’s by far the least common case.
I find that hard to believe when so many music stores and labels (especially classical music and jazz) are selling FLAC downloads. It all works fine on Android with great polished and featureful apps like "USB Audio Player Pro".
Perhaps not the best example because my brand new pixel 6 has a horrible DAC and can't pass through properly to a USB DAC which iPhones have no issue with. (I'll believe a fix is coming then I see it.)
I did the same, roughly two years ago. I'd been Android since the Nexus One. The lack of commitment to long-term support is what did it for me. Between Apple's support for OS updates for much older hardware than Google, and the fact that we can get a phone battery replaced at an Apple store rather than a sketchy phone repair place is what did it for me.
For me, the downsides are:
- Notifications really suck. Everything has the same sound, unless the developer really cares. Its far harder to have custom alert sounds vs Android.
- Garmin watch notifications can't be filtered. I realize this is partly Garmin's fault, since apparently competitors have worked their way around it.
- I hate that "firefox" on iOS is a wrapper for Safari, and I can't use add-ons like uBlock
A minor note on your last point: since the last major iOS release, Safari now supports extensions. I use one for adblocking, for redirecting every AMP link to a non-AMP version of the page, as well as the one that automatically redirects every reddit link from a webpage to Apollo (a third party reddit app).
> That's big of you to mention.
Agreed, we need a lot more people normalizing prosocial behavior.
I was guilty of being on the Team Linux vs. Team Windows war back in the day and then I had an epiphany! You could like both. You could actually use what suits you when it suits you. Cheers.
iOS messaging has end to end encryption by default, when that is enabled the messages are shown within a "blue bubble".
When this is not possible, it falls back to sending normal SMS, which can be read in plain text by third parties in the middle and has no encryption, when that occurs messages are shown within a "green bubble".
Therefore, messaging android users shows a "green bubble". People know its both an android user and unencrypted.
This also results in a worse messaging experience for the iOS users, as all of their other rich media is disabled and handicapped as long as that conversation involves an android user.
The thing is, zero people I regularly chat with (SF bay area) use iMessage. Most people in my US friend group use Signal, the rest use Facebook, and many of my international contacts use Whatsapp.
Hmm, I have never heard anyone mention "knowing its... unencrypted" I doubt most iOS users would care about that, realistically. Note that the experience is bad in both directions (at least for me in Signal on Android I get to endure a lot of 'so and so loved whole-text-of-previous-message' instead of just a heart emoji - I see that GOOG has improved things Messages recently to parse those, at least)
> The impression I get is that every iPhone user has heard all the arguments before and understand the accuracy of those arguments and its the android users that lack the self awareness in that area and other areas of their life,
This might be the most ironic comment I've read in a long time. 90%+ of users on both platforms are purely religious about their choice, and if there's one thing I can say that most of them have in common, it's (over)confidence that they understand "the other side" while utterly failing to. There are 3 topics that I used to discuss regularly but now avoid with most people because too much processing happens in the Amygdala: religion, politics, and phone religion (aka iphone v. android).
I think it's also worth adding that a lot of "preference" just comes down to choice based on values. If you highly value cohesive user experience, security (especially from own mistakes), and brand recognition/status, more curated app store, then iPhone is a good choice. If you highly value device ownership (for example my device, my choice to sideload or root, ability to run apps that can reach deeper into the device, unlock bootloader and install custom ROMs), price (not really true anymore though), etc then android is for you.
In this case its just tech enthusiasts that fall for evangelizing the technical prowess while ignoring that the social aspect of a technically good-enough system is more important to people. tech enthusiasts do this in other areas of their life too. just a heavy correlation, which people experience nationwide.
I still think the ultimate platform is yet to be out there. It’s foolish in hindsight to religiously fanboy either iOS or Android. There is still no platform that is fully featured, with strong network effect (where needed - which should be less than it is), privacy, security, open source, control in the hands of the user, customization…etc. The idea that users should have to choose one or the other and cannot like all the features is perhaps holding us back.
Most people just buy whatever they had last, whatever most of their friends and family have, or whatever is cheap. I doubt more than 10% of people think about it very hard.
FWIW that underhanded description of Apple users as idiots who value looks and brand names and can't be trusted with a real computer is... annoyingly old.
Android devices have "Nearby Share" now. Works basically the same as Airdrop. I use it to beam documents to my eReader all the time.
If you need to copy a file to a computer all you need is a cable and a decent OS that supports MTP and you can then just drag the file off like a USB drive. It's great and requires no special software unless you like fruit flavored computers.
One of the things I really like about my Samsung phone is I can have an alphabetical ordering of my apps in the drawer. With iOS you have to painstakingly rearrange every app to get that or use the shitty hidden alphabetical scrolling list they finally graced everyone with after 14 years.
I switched from an iPhone XS to Android. XS still works, had a choice, just got tired of Apples shit.
- Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in substantially older features and security patches.
Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.
- Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc.
iMessage? Everyone here (Scandinavia) uses FB Mewssenger, Whatsapp, Telegram or Discord anyway.
The data thing, sure
- Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.
Thats fair.
The big thing for me with Android is price (my Asus 5z from 208 still going strong)
Customization, and I don't mean homescreen
I mean that webbrowsers are not just Safari re-skins, Firefox has actual addons for excample, there is the Google playstore but I can also use F-Droid
Yep. There is one reason and one reason only I am on Android: price. A mobile phone does not have enough value to me to pay for Apple's least expensive phone.
Exactly. I was recently talking to a guy who had had his iPhone stolen. But it was no big deal - he had replacement insurance and the deductible was only $200. Which is more than I have ever paid for a phone in my life.
I wasn’t critiquing you. Just pointing out what makes sense. I’m positive you come out with less paid in every metric than most. Since I live in the US and my cousin and brother want to be on Verizon. The price of Verizon with 4-5/lines and carriers that piggyback off the big three are not too different, for me, I do end up getting a $1K phone every 3 or so years without paying anything directly. I’m locked to the big 3 carriers at that point for 2 years.
It’s not as flexible but my end cost for the phones is usually $5 more a month in plan cost and being stuck to a big 3 carrier, I haven’t paid much for a phone since I started doing this after Att paid T-Mobile equivalent of $4B in break up fees a decade ago and that pushed for more competition. Though back then I was rocking webOS then Windows Phone before sadly going from iPhone to iPhone. I believe it was iPhone 6 to 8 to 13 Pro. So 3 year and 4 year gaps waiting for deals where I wouldn’t pay anything except a trade in and being tied to the carrier.
I also use a ton of data. Except during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. During that time period I for sure was wasting money.
Android phones don't break even if they stop getting updates. Big popular apps like Firefox, Kindle, etc. work on old versions of Android like 6.0. $400+ is still a steep upfront cost to a lot of people.
I consider phones that don't have constant security updates as broken as I do a lot of banking and personal communication on my phone. Iphone updates IOS for years and years and I kept my last iphone for 5 years,probably will keep my iphone12 for a similar amount of time barring something catastrophic; it won't be from "desire to get the latest and greatest"
It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone. That it is not really surprising at all is a sad reflection on how normalised shipping insecure connected devices with inadequate support has become.
Obviously we don't yet know how to build 100% secure devices of this complexity but we are talking about some of the biggest businesses in the world here. There is little excuse not to require (by law if necessary) essential security updates for a much longer period given the reasonable useful life of the hardware and the rest of the software on it.
> Four whole years?
It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone.
I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months. And the market would correct for that, but everyone was doing the same thing - abandoning a device mere months after its release.
And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.
But we are very very heavily in the diminishing returns area now. 5-7 years ago, next-year’s device might easily have doubled its performance, camera performance, etc, but nowadays a 3 years old high-end phone is perfectly adequate if it’s not deliberately crippled by software
I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months.
Given that many new phones were bundled with two-year contracts it seems likely that consumer protection laws in many places would have meant a phone that was not properly supported for at least that long after the time of purchase would have fallen foul of fitness-for-purpose rules and potentially entitled customers to partial refunds or updated replacements.
And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.
Sure but again that's why we need consumer protection rules. Any security patch implies that the original product was defective. Buyers are entitled to reasonable corrective action if a defective product was sold to them. It may be unrealistic to release a product with no defects, and the corrective actions are typically intended to compensate for actual loss of value rather than being punitive, but the basic rules still apply.
Hmm, seeing as even most desktop OSes out there aren't supported for much longer, i'm not sure whether things are terrible in that regard.
Debian's EOL comes to mind, even Ubuntu LTS isn't supported for much longer, CentOS was supposed to be the more stable option but that didn't work out either.
Though for some reason mobile devices are somewhat crippled in regards to upgrading to new OS releases versus their desktop counterparts: not being update from Android X to Android Y is the real terrible bit here.
Not sure why on earth that should be acceptable or why the drivers should be such an insurmountable problem, wherein using anything but flagship phones with third party ROMs is a total mess (i've personally had everything from the touch screen to radio, to even Wi-Fi stop working).
We are talking about the very crippling of devices. So having n years of updates means that the device will effectively die after that, which is a shame and frankly ridiculous at only 4 years.
I've had pixels and motos for years and never really had any issue with being slow to receive updates. The real issue is the short lifespan of software support. It doesn't affect me personally because I lose / break phones often enough that I don't run into it. I just find deals on mid range phones that make them cheap to replace.
I keep an eye on the libre phone space, so when I hopefully finally ditch android, it will be in that direction (unless perhaps regulations force Apple to open their walled garden, then we'll see.)
Long time Google fanboy here, and I'm honestly a hair's breadth away from buying an iphone 13.
I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelized android to for almost as long. I did ground work for google by pushing people into google's services. I have a day 1 pixel 6 pro. I pay for cloud storage and yt premium.
But to me google is just falling apart. I feel like they have lost their technology drive in order to pursue ideological ones. Their tech has become all half-assed with poor/no support. I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. RCS is still a disaster, my one friend on Fi with a pixel 5a still cannot get it working and Google/Fi has pretty said "We don't know".
I do not like Apple, but after almost 20 years a Google fanboy, I'm starting to like Google even less. So much so that I'll have to eat lots of shame from the many iphone people who questioned my android love for years.
*If anyone can convince me otherwise, please do*. I feel like the best thing that could happen is disposing of Sundar and getting someone who can refocus google on being a tech company devoted to making the best tech products.
I switched recently, and honestly have found the experience on iPhone to broadly be worse. There are a few things that are a bit nicer, but the downgrade in the notifications system alone just tanks the experience.
That said I switched for mostly privacy reasons, so won't be going back.
I don’t think I’ve ever used android for more than about 30 seconds on someone else’s phone. I wasn’t aware there was a difference in the notification system. What makes android better?
Android notifications can be more interactive. They're you perform quick actions like reactions to slack messages or archiving emails. Basically the things you can do on an Apple Watch but not the iPhone.
I'm not really sure how the ownership model of the OS is relevant. That said, I agree that Lineage would be the choice where I have the most control, but it simply isn't practical for my personal needs.
Probably from the sense of sharing of location/identifying information/etc that Apple makes much easier to set and less likely to be circumvented by apps. Apple also does not sell your information, buying habits, etc to 3rd parties like google does. Apple makes money on the hardware and software they sell you. Google makes money on ads and selling your information to 3rd parties.
Apple has a huge vested interest in privacy. The second they stop supporting it, the clock on people switching away and the their stock price plummeting starts. They just have enough money to pay smart people to worry it.
I have a company issued iPhone, and the atrocious notification system is enough to assure I will not buy an iPhone personally. If notifications in iOS were ever completely overhauled to the Android model, I would probably jump ship.
Well, I don't really know the iOS system, but Android lets you authorize (or block) each different interface of notifications (like text, sounds, or appearing at the top) for each different application, and you can do that right from the notification itself.
Not sure what I’m missing here. I make Android and iOS apps and so I have access to both operating systems and various devices on a daily basis. What is iOS missing that Android has (when it comes to notification settings)?
That makes sense, but I’m not sure that’s what the GP comment was talking about. For instance, both Samsung and non-Samsung Android devices have threaded/serial message notifications (?) which are very helpful for conversations, whereas iOS still has the primitive notification-per-message system. I’ve learned to live without it now as I prefer iOS for its advantages, but I’m frequently expected to make sense of several notifications out of order for each conversation when one would suffice.
I use a Samsung and my SO an iPhone which I'm the one "administering" and I can tell that both notifications can be customized at (our) will. I have no idea what you mean there.
I switched recently from years of Android usage simply because the car I wanted to buy only supported CarPlay. I could either give up Android or give up the car. I chose to keep the car. Now that I’ve had the iPhone a while, there seem to be about the same number of annoyances in iOS as there were with Android, they’re just different. I think I’d give the edge to Android, iOS is slightly more annoying, but not enough to worry about switching back.
Do I understand correctly that your car determined your smartphone choice? Furthermore you considered changing your vehicle selection based on your current smartphone?
I find the concept of a smartphone affecting a transportation decision or the reverse to be highly unusual.
Can you please explain your rational? For example, do you spend excessive amount of time in your car? Do you do specific tasks from your car that require a specific connection between car and smartphone?
Not parent, but nowadays the smartphone is the way to get decent information on the screen of your car. The built-in car infotainment/nav systems are all horrible. Voice recognition is terrible. Plug the phone in, and to a first approximation everything works. With wireless Car Play, you don't even need to plug in.
A car is both longer-lived and more expensive than a phone. It’s definitely not unthinkable to have that influence your choice of smartphone, especially since there might be many other more important factors that affect your choice of car.
Yes, my choice of car determined my smartphone choice. I decided I was more interested in the particular vehicle (Porsche Macan) than the particular smartphone (Pixel 5a vs iPhone 13). Both CarPlay and Android Auto are worlds better than the OEM head unit software crap I've found in any of the cars I've owned (Audi, Porsche, VW, Ford, Chevy, Kia) for both navigation and music/podcast listening. I was hesitant to switch, but I figured it was an easier choice to back out of than a car purchase. And six months later, I think I made the right choice. While I still would prefer Android, I'm ok enough with the iPhone that I'm not bothered day to day with it.
Apparently next year the Macan is getting Android Auto support, so people in the future won't need to make the choice. But I was in need of a car this year, so I had to make the choice.
Luxury automakers have often been more restrictive and exclusive about features, mostly because they can be. BMW was known for their annual subscription CarPlay option which required ongoing payments for what was clearly a one-time software update. Porsche likely has even more brand loyalty driven by other elements of their cars, so I’m not surprised that they’d choose to negotiate some exclusivity with Apple CarPlay or otherwise just not bother adding Android Auto until 2022.
I switched as well and it's actually such a "pick the lesser evil" situation and I hate that.
I'm gonna write a quick comparison as I've switched between platforms several times (still miss my Windows Phone tbh though):
I've found that no matter which Android "iphone camera killer" phone I got, the camera was unreliable and always ended up having crappy results. Meanwhile, my iPhone pics are constantly a decent quality.
Somehow, iPhone screens _consistently_ shatter for me. Even when I'm careful. I've yet to break the screen on an Android phone -- even if I've used it significantly longer or it was significantly cheaper. Something about iPhone's design or manufacturing lends it to shattering. My current iPhone has a shattered back from when I dropped it on my soft carpet from a foot up-high about a year in...
iPhone and Android software both sucks but Android's app experience is _significantly_ better. Why? BACK BUTTON. Every iPhone app has different expectations around going "back" from swiping up, left, right, or just having no way to go "back" at all. Which is common. Good Android apps are _great_; however, most iPhone apps are ok and most Android apps are not even ok.
iMessage isn't great but it's hard to give up on it. SMS/MMS experience _sucks_ -- so knowing when someone will get your 5 minute audio message in good quality is actually really nice. Sending pictures between platforms _sucks_. With that said, Android's web interface for messages is a million times better than the iMessage app and obv cross-platform.
I also absolutely hate getting data off an iPhone. it's unreliable especially if you don't have a mac. The Android experience is so much nicer.
So it's kind of a give and take. :/
Also -- less notification/customization options on the iPhone but having a hardware "silent" button is rad.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm considering this too as many others in thread.
The camera thing drives me nuts. My pixel 6 can't take a reasonable photo of a flat piece of paper due to spherical distortion causing blurring of text. Sure you can go 2x and hold the phone further as suggested in online discussions but it's nuts that this made it past any attempt at QA and testing.
Similar. I miss Android for its technical features, but Google has turned the typical experience adversarial, like it’s all just an elaborate marketing vector. Apple’s ecosystem remains a proprietary dystopia, and its software is bafflingly inadequate for all the hype, but at least the business model is transparent.
The security upgrades situation on Google is intolerable.
I finally have a phone (3axl) that didn't die in a couple years from accidents / abuse / going to the gym in my pocket, and Google is eol-ing it because they've cut off security upgrades.
Google is not operating system vendor for all Android phones.
They release a generic template, other vendors then apply platform kits for the SoCs they use and they release the operating system for their devices. Google has no idea what it runs on, or what is needed to make it run on specific devices. It is the vendor's task.
Mobile devices have no UEFI, no bus enumeration, so the OS image has to be taylored for each device. It is similar to Raspberry or Odroid or similar SBCs: althrough both are arm, you cannot use Ubuntu (or other disto) image intended for one on another.
Since the Snapdragon 835, Android devices with Qualcomm processors use UEFI all the way to the kernel.
However, custom UEFI binaries aren't part of the boot flow, with an Android UEFI boot application running instead.
> no bus enumeration
It's device tree instead of ACPI, but apart from that the situation isn't _that_ different from PCs today. We aren't in the ATAGS era anymore. The reflashing interface nowadays is standardised through fastboot too.
> so the OS image has to be taylored for each device
Thankfully a lot of progress has been done on that.
Since Treble, the BSP proper has been untied from Android releases.
Since devices shipping with Android 12, a Google-built kernel with a stable kernel module ABI has been shipping (for a given major kernel + Android version release combo). This allows kernel security updates to be identical across the whole ecosystem.
> althrough both are arm, you cannot use Ubuntu (or other disto) image intended for one on another
That used to be true, but across the whole Android device fleet (even between SoC vendors) it's not true anymore.
However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those.
This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributions on phones too if there's motivation to do so.
> However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those.
> This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributions on phones too if there's motivation to do so.
So assuming my bootloader is unlocked, have a GSI compliant phone, what is the remaining work I would need to have done in order to get it working under linux (and by working I mean all devices - including cameras and etc)?
> what is the remaining work I would need to have done in order to get it working under
A good chunk of the Linux community on phones didn't want to have to rely on binary drivers for non-technical reasons, and that's one of the reasons why it isn't exactly well taken care of today.
An upgraded Halium (https://github.com/Halium) image on a can work unmodified across the whole ecosystem of Android devices.
However, the latest currently developed experimental Halium works on an Android 11 base at most, so that devices launched with Android 12 might be using drivers too new for it at this point in time.
This can be fixed with an engineering effort to do so to make it work on devices launched with Android 12. The Linux on phones community is very small and that causes problems in this case.
Together with the unified kernel image (GKIs) on Android 12 which allows to have kernel image binaries built with GNU/Linux-specific features that work across the whole fleet, a full straightforward experience can be made possible. This would fill the last chunk of custom per-device bits.
I wonder how big the audience would be for such a project though. :)
I gave my 6-year old iPhone to elderly relatives and it still gets security upgrades.
Google “upgraded” to less than any other mainstream computing platform. Windows gets about 10 years of security updates for each major version, up to 15 if you pay extra.
I thought they had moved security updates to be delivered via Google Play so that users could keep receiving them even when the OEM doesn’t deliver OS updates anymore? Or are those separate security updates from the "normal" firmware security patches?
Almost all attack services are now updated remotely by Google for security issues. In the kernel only video drivers can be updated remotely (and support for this depends on the vendor).
I think it is a much better way to do security updates than the Apple model - security issues shouldn't have to wait for the next firmware update and for the user to apply them.
How do you know you didn't get them? They are silent. Also, I don't think that 'not getting them' is an option other then with video drivers. The whole idea is that security updates should be pushed immediately to all devices and not require user action. You get them even if you don't want them.
No, that's just for the security updates that must be applied as full firmware updates, usually because they are in the kernel. Google has been progressively redesigning Android over the past decade to the point where they can do all non-kernel security updates immediately and silently via the play store. It's a much better way to do it IMO.
So to be clear: I have no clue about any of this. I like not having to think about what's going on under the hood. I've never had to since getting an iPhone.
It sounds like what you're saying is Google has only continued to shuffle ever more vital functionality into the Play store since I left Android, which negates the often claimed benefits of an "open source" operating system. If all the important stuff is in a proprietary blob attached to a proprietary platform, I might as well stick with the one I already know that's never given me any trouble. I'm not going to root my iPhone or install a custom OS, so that's irrelevant to me.
But you don't have to worry about or understand the Android security updates - they are applied without you even having to do a firmware update. As you indicate, security updates are not something you should have to worry about.
And just because they are applied by the play store doesn't mean they are closed source. The play store itself is closed source, but the security updates to the OS get published via the normal processes.
Android is open enough to allow competition, eg. Amazon's Android, Microsoft's Android runtime, etc. are all done without Google's permission.
To me, that's key, but I'm not trying to tell you whether open source should matter to you. I just wanted to clear up the stuff about the security updates because I think the Android way of doing it is now better than Apple's method.
I have to manually search for the Google Play System updates on my Galaxy S21 and Z Flip 3 (both quite new phones) because they are not being installed automatically. My brother has the same problem with his Galaxy S21.
Some things moved into Google Play, which is a mixed blessing. On the upside, they may get updates longer. On the downside, there's an argument that moving things from AOSP into Google's proprietary blobs is not so great.
Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work anywhere near phone stuff.
I assume your friend has tried all the debugging on this page? https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en My wife's phone keeps failing to connect and we have to do the carrier services reset to make it work. A terrible solution to me requiring factory resetting your phone.
But even then, I have a friend that was never able to get RCS to work on his phone, and he spent multiple hours with Google support trying to figure it out. There is something wrong with his account on Google and the carriers side (he tried multiple phones, and it never worked). The RCS team definitely has some corner cases to work out getting everyone activated, because it leads to really bad stories like this.
Thanks, but I feel I am reaching a point where I need my friend to be able to go to a physical location where they either fix it or clone his phone onto a new one that does work. I can't be google's advocate twisting my friend's arm to troubleshoot their phone anymore.
This is just a tiny sliver of my dissatisfaction too. I feel like the long time lover that sits down one night and after a lot of thinking gives pause with "Wait, why am I still in this relationship?"
I think Google was in a different position than Apple in the case of messaging client. Apple has total control of the text message app on the iPhone, or Google does not. Google had to appease Samsung and likely some other cell phone makers to allow them to make their own RCS compatible app. Google took RCS and created universal profiles, and I think wants to get Apple on board with it so that there is a shared protocol between vendors.
Apple went to full proprietary stack that no one else can use, while Google went the more open protocol. Open protocols like this always tend to have a bit more headache, and we're seeing that with RCS. Especially when some of the players are cell service providers.
If the EU open protocol legislation ever pans out, I wonder how that would impact iMessage and RCS.
I switched from Google to Apple after being in the Google ecosystem since the early days of Android. I had pretty much every single Nexus, Pixel, and a variety of Samsung devices. But Google's lack of support, half-assed one-foot in one-foot out, and lack of support made me switch to Apple about 3 years ago and I've never been happier.
Apple's ecosystem, while it doesn't offer as much, is a much superior and polished experience. iMessage works great, integration with Apple Watch is top notch, and the whole ecosystem is very fine-tuned. There are still a bunch of things to complain about, for sure, but overall comparing the two is a night and day difference.
I've slowly started phasing out all my Google products.. and not by choice either. Had Google Nest and Nest Secure for over 3 years until Google decided to just cancel Nest Secure all-together. Google Home devices are increasingly being less and less effective. Google just can't seem to commit to anything longer than 2-3 years and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather deal with getting features much later but thoroughly thought out, then half-assed and cancelled in 2 years. I will say the one thing I do miss is native Google Assistant, Siri is complete ass in comparison.
Not really here to convince you of one os / ecosystem or the other, but wanted to say that you can get an iPhone, try it for two weeks and return it if you don’t like it.
I went round about a lot. Started with windows phone back when it had the honeycomb ui. Stuck with it until I moved to Singapore where Microsoft announced a new phone and didn’t release it anywhere except a few countries.
From there I went to iPhone 4 and had so many issues. So I went to the Note 4 and initially I loved it. But android got slower and slower so after 6 months I reset the phone and didn’t install anything. It got slower and slower and all I used was phone text and browser.
But I refused to go back to Apple.
I did a few hours of work for a friend fixing something and was complaining about my phone being slow so he bought me an iPhone 6 max as payment.
I was annoyed at first but it was so fast… and I’ve stuck with iPhone since and don’t regret it. Best thing ever moving over to iPhone.
I've had an Android device since the G1, then the G2... I'm currently on Project Fi with a Pixel 4a. When this phone no longer suits me, I'll also be moving to Apple hardware. At some point, and it's subjective / an individual choice but, enough is enough.
> The fact that the iPhone “just works” is worth it to me.
While I’m firmly entrenched in the iPhone/iPad ecosystem, nowadays there’s quite a lot of little things that don’t “just work”, but instead behave (or are designed) in quirky and inconsistent ways, or fail randomly. I’m not talking about third-party apps, but iOS functionality and essential built-in apps. I can only imagine it’s worse on Android.
My iPhone 13 Pro Max has 120 hz, so that feature is available. I don't mind that it was Android only for a bit, very little on that platform can actually render a non-static UI at that rate.
So... I'm curious, why were you spending a lot of time arguing vehemently that Android was superior, at the same time you weren't actually liking it yourself?
[I have an Android phone, and don't love it or hate it.]
I'd accidentally dropped my Mi Mix 2S in the bath and screwed the display, so while I waited a month for a new display & body to arrive from China I grabbed a refurbished Pixel 3a to hold me over.
After seeing the absolute state of the Android 12 UI, I'm bailing out to a Pinephone Pro as soon as its viable.
> iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that)
What security guarantees would iMessage have if it ran on arbitrary hardware instead of only iPhones and Macs? To some people, that's important, not a gimmick. Totally fine for you to have your own opinion about it, but it's probably a good idea to be able to think about why people might disagree.
Apple has fooled you. iMessage is not end-to-end encrypted as advertised. If you use iCloud backups then all your messages can be read by Apple and by extension law enforcement. If you decide not to use the only allowed cloud backup option for iPhones, then your messages can still be read by Apple on the other end when your friends have iCloud backups enabled. Apple has not end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups of iMessage at the explicit request of the FBI. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
Most of us on HN aren't stupid enough to put critical, life changing data through icloud server platform, but for day to day messagng imessage is fine. Most of my techie friend circle use signal anyway.
The iPhone 12 was released end 2020, right before we went into the pandemic. To me it would interesting to know if you made the switch before or after Covid hit full blown (as you mention rebate, I’d assume after)
I know a lot of people who revised their relation to phone during that time (me included), and going for simpler things seemed to be a overall theme. Including those who went the other way and gave up iOS for the Pixel 4a for instance, or even some much smaller “dumber” phone.
Security patches stopping after 3 years made me switch. The phone (Pixel 2 XL) was perfectly fine performance-wise and still competitive with camera and screen quality but it wasn't safe to use anymore. I could've flashed a different OS but getting security at work to accept that to enable email and calendar access is unlikely.
I switched recently, from an iPhone 7 to a Ulefone Power Amor 13, cost me $440 delivered from Hong Kong to Tasmania. Or $780 from an Aussie vendor, who must comply with our consumer protection laws, so warranty for replacement or refund, or parts to repair. But I figured at $440 if it breaks during the regular warranty period, I can just buy another, or similarly priced device.
I definitely miss frequent OS and security updates, but I wasn't prepared to spend a similar amount on a slightly newer secondhand iPhone, or three times the amount or more on a new iPhone, which still won't have as good a battery as the Ulefone Power Amor 13, the thing weighs in at a little over 1 pound, just under half a kilogram, and requires recharging so infrequently I forget to, versus having an iPhone charge cable every couple metres at home and work.
Another added benefit of having a phone that is mostly battery and weights over a pound it that I rarely drop it, because you certainly know you've got hold of it!
If Apple did an iPhone that had a huge battery, and was ruggedized for us in the trades, and others who work in dusty / greasy environments, I'd be straight on to it.
If my only choice was between a flagship Android from any manufacturer or an iPhone, it'd be the iPhone.
Fortunately they aren't the only two options, and Android doesn't feel disappointing below about the $500 mark.
2) I don't want control of my device taken from me.
On #1 - I buy a cellphone to be contactable, and to browse the web on the move with a reasonable modicum of speed. I rather dislike the whole "hey, our app is far better than our website" movement in the industry, because I know that "far better" means "far better for tracking and targeting you", based on my experience in adtech. And I don't need whatever bollocks tech (two cameras so your photos can do a little swoopy thing!) Apple is chucking in and charging big bucks for. I just need a smartphone that has enough CPU to run things okay.
But I get other people might want fancy camera stuff without forking out for a proper camera, all good.
And I find Android phones offer far more options at varying price points along the spectrum in this regard than Apple.
On #2 - I've never had to wait for someone to find a vulnerability in my phone before I can root it, and do whatever I like with it. I can easily install APKs from others or myself without going through an app store, or paying Apple for a developer licence to write code to run on my own frigging phone.
My non-technical wife can't grok Android, she's been on iOS since the earlier iPhones, so when her iPhone 5S' browser began to routinely crash when loading websites she read on the regular, I caved and got her an iPhone 13, at much expense, and she's generally unimpressed at the upgrade (she really misses that physical button). She doesn't care about any of the bollocks that they're advertising as a reason to upgrade - macro-photography, night photography, cinematic mode? She gives zero shits.
Having to Google how to restart her phone when an app wouldn't stop playing audio really pissed her off though, I will say.
The price of that thing was fucking ridiculous, but she can at least use it for the things that she always used her phone for, until something happened that caused the browser in her last iPhone to start shitting the bed - lack of browser upgrades? Bad browser upgrades? I'm unsure. I'm not a fan of Safari on any platform, so I'm just going to glare accusingly in that direction.
TL;DR - iPhones are pricey AF, glad you got the iPhone 12 for free, and I really dislike Apple's approach to letting me do stuff with the small computer I bought that can incidentally do phone calls.
Sounds like you might have picked the wrong product. The iPhone SE is significantly cheaper and has the button still. Probably a great purchase if she doesn't want the latest hardware widgets.
Regarding messaging, contrary to popular belief WhatsApp is great for privacy as well. It is now end-to-end encrypted since it recently adopted the Signal protocol [1]. It's cross-platform and more widely used on a global scale.
I've always used Android, thinking that it would improve with age. But eventually I had to face the fact that Android is always going to suck. On top of that every year it gets more and more locked down. Why not buy an iphone instead? At least it works well.
Performance, battery life, dependence on Google, inconsistent UIs from different manufacturers, bloatware from networks, networks control updates, most phones don't even get much in the way of updates.
I don't think that was his point. Companies take features from competitors all the time.
But even with that "feature sharing", Android's flagship phone still feels like more of a knockoff compared to any iPhone.
Having owned every Pixel and the Nexus predecessors, they have about a 3 year lifespan, software is slow and freezes start after a few updates, the battery isn't great to start but shits out after year 2, then oled burn-ins.
But I got $5 for my Nexus 6P bootloop class action settlement, so there's that I guess...
Browsing the web, using normal apps. Things are just snappier on iOS in my experience. It is not a big deal. But it is one area that android could be improved.
This is always interesting. I don't even buy phones anymore if they don't support Lineageos. It fixes all those issues. It still surprises me when I see stock Samsung devices and how utterly rubbish they are. And they are sold as premium flagship devices. The amount of bloat and garbage is incredible.
Oh sure. All that was typed by a lineageos user. But such a small minority is likely to use that in the grand scheme. Hence why I thought it relevant to evaluate the "stock firmware".
And? Does it really matter? Android is the #1 OS of all user devices worldwide. When you're at the top only one direction to go... iOS gained a bit in the developed world but Android enables tons of people all over the world to communicate and do things.
It's the truth. Go to Africa, go to South America, a bunch of places, people running businesses and whatnot off their phones. Hardly anyone uses iOS outside a few rich countries. Because most people use them to do stuff, so most open/ubiquitous (and yes cheap) wins.
People somehow worried about an OS given away for free that is still the #1 OS of all user devices including desktops...
I said the open, cheap and ubiquitous nature gets it into the hands of people who care about doing things. The implication is not that you can do more rather that you can do the same without spending as much on an iPhone (especially since in most of the world people buy devices outright).
And it's the truth. You can do the same with a $400 Android as a top of the line Samsung/Apple device save some games...
While it could maybe be phrased better I think this is the crux of the matter. I'm typing this on a US$200 (roughly) phone. I don't particularly care about, or have any affinity to, the OS. I don't even remember the manufacturer, Xiaomi maybe, but I use it because it cost slightly under 200 dollars.
The choice for a lot of people I imagine is more between no phone vs Android rather than iOS vs Android. On the island I'm living on currently the bottom tier but usable Motorola or Samsung phones are like local$600 and I think Apple devices start around local$4000+.
At least in the USA, you have mainly three choices for "$500+ phones": Pixel, Samsung, and iPhone. The iPhone has been priced very competitively in recent years to the point that they are better hardware at cheap price points than Samsung. That has taken a large chunk of Android sales as people upgrade to iPhones instead of paying more for Samsung.
A thought: It seems that as people get richer around the world they move away from $200 Androids to what is more perceived as luxury: iPhones.
> It seems that as people get richer around the world they move away from $200 Androids to what is more perceived as luxury: iPhones.
This but not only this. There’s also that phones have moved from being a simple voice communication device to the most essential item a person owns. It makes sense that a larger portion of income is spent on them when they get more important in peoples lives
Does "Samsung" mean Tizen or dumbphone (like Xcover 550)? Unknown/Other having the same color as Android? Also Windows Phone was discontinued 3 years ago. The interpretation of the data is rather reprehensible.
I can't stand Apple's required software like iTunes. Apple HW is great. Just hoping Asahi Linux is ready soon. Until then, Linux Chromebook is my dev machine
The sync functionality has been moved into the Finder app, so it’s part of macOS. I‘m not sure what’s the best way on Windows, but Microsoft‘s Phone Companion seems to take care of necessary software installation.
I don't have iTunes, use NextCloud to move pictures of the iPhone. But you're right, I really hate it that I can't just move pictures off with a cable. It worked for me on Ubuntu but has been nothing but pain on Arch, I tried a lot of different things. Really annoying. In fact, I'd say it's the one main annoying thing for me (that and the fact that the NextCloud docker image people refuse to add .heic support and I'm too noob to do it myself ;) )
I only ever connect my iPhone for debugging purposes (can be done wirelessly btw), and sometimes I hook it up to transfer files faster to VLC, but that will go away once I have Plex up and running.
Between streaming services, cloud backup, iCloud Drive (like Dropbox), and Airdrop (secure file sending via peer-to-peer WIFI) there‘s absolutely no need to own a Mac or PC to drive an iPhone.
I‘m also holding out for Asahi though, and hope they get things like Proton to run.
I've been heavily considering getting an iPhone because of how terrible the Android experience but my problem with Apple is that you are either fully in their ecosystem of you aren't a worthy enough customer in their mind. I have no desire to use iCloud or Apple mail or have an AppleID. I just want a small phone that gets updates, has maps, and has a decent music app.
Any of several alternative OSs have small-to-no ties to Google, though Google is a heavyweight in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
E.g. my phone runs GrapheneOS, and it is doing that while I am not logged in to a Google account, running any Google-branded software, or seeing any pings to the panoply of xxx.google.com sites.
Check out CalyxOS or DivestOS as well.
Okay, but did you buy it like that or did you put in work to de-Google your phone? You mention GrapheneOS. Is your phone manufacturer Google? Do you run Google Play Services?
Bought a stock p5a, stuck on Graphene through the web installer, added apps from F-droid and Aurora. No Google stuff. A hell of a lot of apps run without even installing the Google services framework, and Aurora sure helps: anything requiring GSF is noted in the app descriptions.
I've been using an iPhone without any apple services for the last year and a half and it's been a pretty pleasant experience. Gmail, Google Maps, Spotify all work fine and there's nothing prodding you to switch back to apple services. It's much improved compared to ~5 years ago when I last tried iOS.
You need an apple ID for the app store, but that seems pretty reasonable.
I’m a happy Apple hardware customer for all of my devices, and while you will want to have a (free) Apple ID/account for the App Store if nothing else, you don’t really need to use any of their real services. I have iCloud mostly turned off, I use Apple Pay and Apple Music because I like them, but that’s all. Most of their paid services are garbage and I use alternatives.
I have to say that my Android phones have gotten more buggy and less user friendly over the years.
One thing I do like about Android is that I can develop and publish apps for a reasonable fee. Apple wants $100 per year to be a developer. My apps are free so they don't make money. I would simply stop developing if I had to pay that.
It's been mentioned before in other articles, but I don't think it can be understated how much iMessage makes it difficult to be the "odd man out" if you're on an Android phone. And it's not just about teenagers, and it's not about "green bubbles".
I recently went on a vacation with friends, 4 other folks on iPhones and me on an Android. Our group chat experience almost made me consider getting an iPhone. The inability to do emoji responds, and the fact that shared videos always looked like shit on my phone were just 2 of the examples. And I'm well past middle age! I can imagine what it feels like to be a high schooler or young adult feeling like the reason the group chat experience is sucking is because "you're the one with the Android".
As much as I hate promoting Facebook products, "let's make a WhatsApp group" seems to be the socially-acceptable solution to this. Everybody has it installed and always seems to be happy to switch communication over to it if somebody in the group suggests it.
This is really where Facebook can excel against Apple. Although I do prefer my messages to be more like emails and texts - not platform-bound. Currently I have to have Whatsapp, Messenger, Viber, Telegram, Signal to talk to diff groups of people. Why isn't there a unified protocol and system?
No way I let Facebook get access to my phone contacts. I guess this is worth billions for them, because it’s a huge social graph they were missing. Interestingly the option to use the app without giving away all your contacts has been removed years ago. It tells a lot. Note that Signal still works without your contacts.
So, you would never give up your contact list to one mega corp, but readily give it away to another. How do you made that decision? Asking not rhetorically and without sarcasm.
Huh? I didn’t give away my contact list. Neither to Facebook nor to Signal. As I said you can use Signal without allowing access to contacts. You can enter telephone numbers directly. Was I being unclear?
I would expect Apple not to sell this data. They don’t need to, and the bad press if it gets exposed could loose them more money. Their business model doesn’t require it.
Facebook is not selling this data too, afaik. It's too valuable. They are using it to target paid ads. Apple's ads business is still in its infancy, but it will inevitably grow bigger to justify their share price. I beleive, however, that at least their music recommendation system is lavishly fed on their social graph data.
I think this is only really true outside of the US. I only have WhatsApp installed because I've spent time outside the US (Africa, specifically) and it's defacto standard there. I literally never use it to talk to people in the US, nor do I know anyone else here who uses it.
I'm well outside the US (Eastern Europe) and have never needed WhatsApp. I can talk with all the people I know over Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger. Perhaps it's also an age thing? I guess the youngsters use WhatsApp.
Oh I'm not very far East, actually I'm from Central Europe. The Brits kindly told me there was no such thing as Central Europe, just West/East, so I stick to saying that on the internet :)
I'm from the Czech Republic and often spend time Poland. No one I know forces me to use WA or Telegram, everyone's either on G Hangouts or FB messenger.
Whatsapp is the number one app in most EU countries. It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners).
It's really interesting reading these comments. I'm in Australia, more of my friends use iphone (but it's close), nobody I know uses iMessage though, everyone uses WhatsApp. I had to go read about iMessage to understand the context here. Not a fan of Google but this stuff is not endearing me to apple at all.
> It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners).
You couldn't be more wrong. I've lived in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the UK. I've played go competitively at a European level and have travelled a fair bit and socialized with nerds all over. Name a European country, chances are I know several people there.
Most people here have both FB messenger and WhatsApp (and likely Instagram), so if you have one of those you're fine. I've tried not to use /any/ facebook product for a while and that's when I ran into bubble color issues.
Indeed, I simply tell people I don't have WhatsApp and we usually end up with FB messenger. My claim was not that I don't know people who use WhatsApp (I do!) but rather that FB messenger + G Hangouts about covers everyone for me.
SMS/iMessage is always everybody's first choice for communication here, i wouldn't say whatsapp is the dominant communication platform or used for in-country communication on a regular basis, but everybody seems to always have it installed or if they don't have it installed they know about it and are willing to install it.
I talk to my friends on Discord almost exclusively, though one of the communities I'm in is also bridged to Matrix. I do not do crypto or gaming really.
We use Discord at a small startup. It's nice because we can easily get our external clients on and make rooms for giving them customer support without going through the janky slack process. We also have public channels so people can come by and report bugs or ask for help. Highly recommend Discord. It's a great product.
WhatsApp is a fantastic app. Kudos to people that work on it and hold themselves up to high quality. It is smooth and had zero issues for using it over a decade.
Agreed. This was a hard one for me to accept, because being in tech, I am fully aware that iMessage is a software gimmick to lock people into the ecosystem. There is no reason, technically, that things have to be like this, and I dislike Apple strongly for this. But it works, because here I am on my iPhone.
what's the alternative? of all the friend groups i've had only _one_ has ever been among a group that has all iphones. i'm having a hard time imagining that, in a world of 70% android share, finding yourself in a group that can actually make use of the iOS-only stuff could ever be the _norm_? like, the statistics of this just don't make sense to me unless the OS distribution is _extremely_ skewed along a handful of metrics and you find yourself at an extreme end of multiple of those.
This is totally US problem. Any other country - no one even consider using proprietary OS chat app. Everyone uses either WhatsApp (Europe) or Telegram (exUSSR, Middle East).
I am an Apple user. I migrated from Windows the the Mac in the late 90s, and the shift to OS X only cemented my relationship with the platform. Having a unixy (well, BSD-y) system with MS Office on it is a powerful combo for my line of work, and so I am still here.
I disdained the iPhone at first, but ended up getting won over pretty quickly. At introduction, it was just better than anything else, and the smooth connectivity between my Mac and my phone was really appealing. As the platform has grown, I've stayed with it; I've never really used Android for a long period of time except for a brief dalliance with a tablet a few years ago.
I'm not here to argue about which is better. I know which works better for ME, and is more appealing to ME. I say all this to establish my position. Silly people describe people like me as "fanboys," as though it's not possible to make a rational decision to use this ecosystem. Whatever.
HERE'S MY POINT:
I do not welcome news of Android market share loss. I do not want Apple to become the kind of dominant player in mobile that Microsoft was on the desktop 25 years ago. That kind of platform control inevitably becomes toxic, IMO. MSFT absolutely sought to exploit that position from the getgo; Apple doesn't seem to have the same kind of insane ALL PIE FOR ME motivation, but supermajority market share is a hell of a drug.
So while I have no interest in USING an Android phone or table, I very very much Android to right its ship and maintain their position as a peer or near-peer to iOS.
Credible competition is good for the market, and thus good for my preferred platform.
This seems a little bit like a good thing to me. I agree it’s important to have at least two good options. Whenever one company has too much market share things stagnate.
Android is now at 70%. The closer that gets to 50% the better. I don’t care if that’s because Apple gets closer to 50%, or if they stay near 25% and new competitors take up the rest.
The US has always skewed marketplace percentages. My understanding is in many countries Android had a massive majority. The less that’s the case, the better I think things will be for consumers.
Every two months my company disables work access on my android phone because it doesn't have the latest security updates. That's one reason why I'm considering an iPhone in the future.
Apple’s support cycles must play a part? You can get a 6S or SE from 2016 that will run mostly fine still at an okay price.
That’s without even mentioning the nightmare of trying to weigh up dozens of Android phones over multiple years, finding out which ones still work reliably several years down the line, etc.
In practice even though you don't get OS and then security updates anymore, the way Android works, relying on Play services and individual apps upgrades, means you can still use old Android phones for a very long time.
Well, at least they're using the correct term "market share" in that phrase, whereas in the graph they use "dominance in percentage", whatever that may be. All in all, it's not a very high quality article...
I don’t think Apple would actually want to grow their global market share beyond 30% or so. It would start eating into the brand’s premium image, and more importantly, would invite more uncomfortable antitrust attention.
They’re really at a sweet spot here IMO in the mobile market: not too big, not too small (like the Mac used to be in 1995-2005). It’s better for the company if revenue growth comes from services, high-margin computers (like the Mac Studio) and new devices rather than selling more phones.
I was so committed to android since my very first smartphone. I liked that it was a more open platform and that it was a bit more of a tinkerer's phone. I recently got an iPhone SE for just too good of a price and thought, "why not". The moment I started to really use the phone, I felt like a complete fool. Android was always a buggy, stuttery mess. Apple is miles ahead. The phone and OS is incredibly polished. everything fades into the background and it just works in a pleasant and perfect way. Android
Today we can buy a really good (and small) iPhone from $430 with the same powerful SoC than the bigger ones and more years of updates, so more future-proof than a similar price Android phone.
For markets outside the more expensive parts of the US, this is a big deal, because in a country where the monthly income excluding taxes is between $1500 and $2500 (like most of the UE countries), paying $1000 or more in a phone is a huge thing, and this inexpensive iPhone maybe have a reasonable price for those clients.
$430 is an insane amount to pay for a phone if you aren't in the global top 5% or so (which most people reading HN are, but it's not very representative).
I paid $190 for a refurbished 2020 SE with 100% health battery and no scratches. Still more expensive than cheapo androids but you can have affordable iPhones if you want to
After suffering through the Blackberry Storm and then a few Motorola Phones with the Motoblur, I tried a Nexus 4. I liked stock Android a lot better, but a bunch of my friends and family were using iPhones, and I wanted iMessage.
So I upgraded to a year-old iPhone 5, and have never looked back. It just worked better. Every app just worked, and the UI felt somehow smoother. I'm on an iPhone 11 right now.
I also was converted once Apple started to make the cheaper models. I was a android diehard from the original Galaxy until the iPhone 5c hit my price point. It just works and feels more cohesive and responsive.
What I find quite interesting amongst my colleagues is that they are deeply invested/locked into either the Google ecosystem or the Apple ecosystem. I know zero people who have recent experience of using both iOS and Android - they’re either in one camp or the other, and have only superficial knowledge of what it’s like to use the other. It feels like two parallel universes running side by side, just out of reach of each other.
It is like not knowing stuff about Windows 15 years ago. I find peculiar as yet alone the curiousity of a tech-savvy person (which I assume you are based on yout comments) should drive one at least to one of those modern OSes.
Some people do here, but perhaps I'm not brave enough
I'd be worried about mixing up business and personal chats and photo galleries. Like if I need to take a picture with my work phone it's usually of something work related.
Or forwarding the wrong meme on a business chat, or attaching the wrong file in a family/friend message could land me in trouble.
Our telco salespeople must be really happy for selling two phones to each of us here.
How does it work in NDA'd work environments? Like when company's information can't leave company's devices? Is BYOD accepted in those cases? Like with MDM managed phone or workspace separation?
Microsoft 365 (e.g. the Outlook and Teams apps) has a bunch of certifications which seem to mollify some CSOs. In high security environments I would imagine work-issued phones are no better.
I prefer my Samsung Android phone over an iPhone...but I have an iPad. I had an iPhone 2 generations ago.
My wife has an iPhone so I'm fairly in the loop on the pros/cons.
I also have some Android tablets laying around and know how poor they perform.
I wonder how much the pandemic has influenced these published numbers. I don't think they can differentiate someone download app from an iPhone vs iPad? All the remote learning has had students get tablets and I personally woulda have picked up an iPad...they do have the iPad pricing and features tailored with schools in mind.
I have a Pixel 3a and an iPhone SE both of which I use on the daily: the iPhone on my person and the Pixel installed in my car. I can confidently say that Android is written by a technologically inferior race of extraterrestrials who hate humans and want them to suffer. Sometimes it is so busy recompiling JAR files, or whatever the hell it is doing, that it fails to ring for incoming calls. It is 50/50 chance whether it will hook up to Android Auto by itself, or whether I'll have to unplug it and plug it back in. It gobbles so much power at idle that even if I switch it off the battery will be dead in a week. When I power cycle it, it's a solid 5 minutes before it is responsive.
I'm pretty sure what you say is true, but I think it only runs in one direction: Android users who are ignorant of iOS.
There seems to be a level that some users reach where they truly engage their respective ecosystem efficiently. Those which can engage technology this way usually leverage the platform's abilities in a lifestyle enhancing way and switching isn't really a consideration: what they have works well, if it aint broke, don't fix it etc.
However, as with computers (or really anything), there exists a sizeable group which don't use their devices well and instead have a superficial grasp of their platform, for these people switching is relatively straightforward since they rely very little on the interconnecting magic that makes the various apps and services work well together and instead mostly use the basic functionality of each app, which is relatively identical.
I'm very long time android user (since original galaxy s). Bought my first iPhone this year (13 pro max), and have 0 regrets. It just works. Great screen, great camera, I still use most of Google apps on it: maps, calendar, mail, assistant
I lost my drive to tinker with os/apps long time ago, so the fact that everything is quite friction less makes me happy.
On Android I constantly had issues with lastpass, dji asks you to download apk to fly drone etc.
I just bought the Pixel 6. That's the flagship device for Android. It doesn't really get any better. It's fine as a phone. It's got a nice screen. The camera isn't bad. Reasonably priced (I payed 555 Euro). And all the other specs people seem to obsess about. But other than that, I struggle to see how this thing is any better than the cheap, four year old Nokia 7 Plus it replaced. I feel slightly ripped off actually. The only thing wrong with that device: the usb c connector was getting flaky (could not charge unless I held the cable just right) and it was no longer getting any security & feature upgrades because Google are being idiots. Lets face it: there has been no meaningful progress for Android phones in the last half decade. It doesn't matter what you buy. You get the same apps & experience with slightly different screens, batteries, cameras, etc.
That's the challenge in this space. A four year old cheap smart phone actually doesn't look half bad compared to the latest and greatest Google has to offer. Whatever Google did since Android 9, I don't really care for any of it. It's not really any better in any way that matters to me. IMHO the gesture bullshit is gimmicky & annoying and the endless Android theme tweaking close to irrelevant at this point. It doesn't feel exclusive to me; just different in a way that doesn't matter to me at all.
The reason Apple has progressed in terms of market share is that they doubled down on what matters. People seem to like IOS as it is and they did not mess with that too much. Other than that, good hardware improvements, software updates for almost anything they sold in the last eight years, and improvements where it matters (screen, camera, speed, etc.). You pay a premium for it but you get what you expect. And then you use the device until it breaks down and you get another one. They offer stability and incremental progress for the life time of the device. There's nothing that Android offers that IOS needs. It has it all.
With Android you're haggling on a lot of different specs between different vendors. And somehow you get a worse deal no matter what you choose. You can go Samsung and deal with their proprietary crap-ware. You can go generic Chinese & out of favor brand and deal with the fact that they've been cut off from the Google Play services. Or you can buy a few me too products from generic Android OEMs and obsess about how many pixels the screen has; how many redundant camera lenses they have, how bad the battery is, etc.
I actually like the Pixel 6 as a phone. But excuse me for not getting too excited about it because it's not exceptional in any way and Google will abandon supporting it in hurry for whatever their next shiny new hot thing is in six months.
This is a war that Apple has already won even with their lower marketshare. I think the only interesting thing left in the mobile OS space is the idea of dumb smartphone OS's such as KaiOS for people who want to simplify their lives a bit.
KaiOS is a long way from perfectly usable just yet but you know that wonderfully relaxed feeling you get when you forget your phone and decide against driving back to get it? Perhaps that's the impetus for a new kind of challenger to iOS. A phone /OS who's best feature is that it actually does less.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadI suspect that’s gonna impact StatCounter’s data collection.
Yeah, that duopoly is a lot of competition
I’m not referring to the nicer phones like the pixel or some of the galaxy phones. But the cheaper phones that are often given away for free.
I’m not saying that’s everything, just a guess. I’m kind of surprised the difference is as big as 8%.
Dividing the share by brand or even by price point reveals the true competition in the market, Apple performs well in their category and regularly achieves the most sold smartphone. When figures were available these also revealed that Apple took home the majority of smartphone profits (90%+), that is unlikely to have changed significantly (Not because iPhone margins were particularly special, but because the market is saturated by competitors with razor thin margins.)
The Android v iOS graph is heavily skewed by low-cost devices. Apple's focus on a meaningful midrange product, long OS support and a build quality that is well above the low-cost alternatives are likely the reason why Android's share has declined by this small amount.
That said Apple won't achieve dominance in the bulk figures because these are buttressed by low cost devices, such as those used in less wealthy and developing countries. Can a large share of Android users even afford an iPhone?
This is all good for google, as users = profit, but it's not particularly inviting for smart phone manufacturers who don't have enough margin to develop a meaningfully differentiated product.
Samsung obviously sells a lot of high-end phones, but so many Android makers have trouble competing in the high end I wonder if there’s much left to go around after Apple.
Or maybe I’m just totally wrong.
But the numbers we see are usually overall, including whether you paid $100 or $1500.
In the time it took me to write this comment, they could have shipped anywhere from zero to one phones.
That's conceivably not nothing.
I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me: - Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in substantially older features and security patches. - Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc. - Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.
The big downside is slower upgrades to the latest hardware features. Specifically, I am envious of the people who have 120 FPS phones, they’re beautiful. There is also a loss of customization, but truthfully I thought I’d miss it much more than I did. The fact that the iPhone “just works” is worth it to me.
Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage that I only turn on if I need to use a banking app or something.
Since the drivers for the wifi were non free he used some USB device instead.
Last I read that lasted a few months because he got sick of it.
I can't imagine adding all those steps to use a smartphone is any less annoying.
For the vast majority, it probably isn't. Also, I'm not full RMS since I would consider using an iPhone which definitely has closed-source components :)
I don't think it would be that much of a hassle to me, since I already don't use a lot of the "nice" apps etc. The way most people use their phone is quite alien to me. E.g. I much prefer old.reddit.com over a reddit app and/or constantly getting harassed with banners to use the app.
I'm pretty sure it would remove extra steps for me, instead of add them, by letting me compute how I like to (GNU/Linux) instead of trying to compute like GNU/Linux on Android.
no. i don't want an app. thanks. i want your desktop website, yes on mobile with a touch screen. yes i'm weird, i know.
The only real problem right now is just lack of apps. Devs build against Android/iOS-only SDKs and use native features that aren't cross platform, so running those apps is mostly out of the question (although I have seen some people running Android apps on their Pinephones!! Need to look into that more).
So GP is saying for apps like that they'd keep an android around but do everything else in a browser.
I had a conversation with two people recently who got defensive at the idea that controlling the software in your phone should be the norm. As if criticizing Apple's approach to free/libre software is an attack on them as an identity.
People don't care about this stuff if it's going to waste a ton of their time.
Theres a reason people buy closed source oems and don't care. It's because it works and doesn't waste their time.
Imagine buying an open source car where you can to periodically rebuilt parts of the engine because it was "free". That's absurd, people aren't buying a philosophical journey. they're buying a car.
I'm sure if pinephone or OLPC used entirely free drivers and didn't waste your time to do the same asks people would find it much more agreeable.
Especially if this platform was bootstrapped in a smart way, for example with an emulation layer to be able to run applications from Android.
Or perhaps WebAssembly will make it viable to do more things from a (mobile) browser.
I really miss the N700-N9 series with Maemo and Meego. It was so elegant and simple.
Even Microsoft couldn't make it work with barrels of cash. Granted they did make some huge mis-steps.
Or emulate Android apps, like you said. That solves the initial issue of having no apps. It seems like Google Fuchsia will likely take this approach. Although it isn't clear if another platform could do this, without a lot of goodwill from Google - and good luck with that.
I distinctly remember Google making it a right pain to use Google's products on the phone, namely Youtube and Google Maps. In addition I remember a bunch of articles talking about how Google prevented Microsoft from developing a native youtube app and doing shady nonsense regarding User Agent filtering.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-windows-...
https://geekinsider.com/google-blocks-youtube-on-windows-pho...
How Google got away with that is beyond me.
Certainly makes me somewhat glad that Microsoft just chose to yoink chromium for edge. At least now Google can't do any more shady nonsense with the browser to filter them out.
If Google makes a misstep, it wouldn't take too much effort for Microsoft to run a hostile fork and capture a massive user base. They already are the 2nd most popular browser.
As it is, they have nullified Google's anti-competitive nonsense of using the browser as a way to manipulate markets.
Granted as a Firefox user, I conceded your point to how to affects open standards. Frankly though, that has already been long tarnished by Google anyway.
It was on my short list for my next phone at one point, but the platform imploded before that happened.
Instead, they spent billions and billions of dollars trying to attract developers to their platform before eventually shuttering it.
There was a phone with awesome hardware, an awesome mobile-first operating system, and practically no apps. Bill admitted his biggest mistake was being too preoccupied with the antitrust activity in Europe, and missing the shift to mobile computing cost him ~400 billion.
Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads?
Fixed that for you. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31094407.
https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview
But frankly, many users only want messaging, maps, banking and a few other things.
WebAssembly could solve that.
And it already exists: GNU/Linux phones running desktop OSes, Librem 5 [0] and Pinephone [1].
[0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5
[1] https://pine64.org/pinephone
AFAIK KaiOS (the operating system for some T9-keyboard-only phones like the rebooted Nokia 8110) is Firefox OS with a new coat of paint, but it also seems kinda dead. And no touchscreen in those devices, so not really comparable to "normal" smartphones anymore... :/
Their application Model was web technologies based, which is quite popular now, between React-Native and PWAs.
I’m doubtful though that someone could pull out off now. Mostly because you need access to the services that people already use and Google/Amazon/Apple already wall their gardens to their own liking.
- DriveDroid to boot a PC, I haven't used a USB stick to boot off in... years?
- /etc/hosts
- Viper4Android for system wide EQ
- Messing with user hostile apps such a firefox when they disable your addons although they still work, proven by the fact that I was able to make them work again as root
Edit: more things
- Wireguard kernel module
- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself
you can add as many of these as you want, i'm not giving up root. The crippled API model that's in fashion these days kills innovation.
The Mini has a better screen for switching between ISOs and virtual disks.
This is possible on iPhones isn't it? I definitely remember Fiddlering my self a few years back on my iPhone.
Root is an insurance (to a degree) against apple changing their mind, like google did.
- GravityBox for various UI tweaks and making volume control a little more fine-grained
- UMS Enabler to expose your external SD card as an USB drive (accessing it via MTP isn't really fun and doesn't work everywhere [1])
- proper local backups and therefore the ability to e.g. relatively painlessly revert borked app updates
- sometimes due to bugs cruft accumulates in data directories that as a regular user can only be cleaned by – depending on the nature of the bug – clearing the whole application data [2] (which is already annoying enough as it of course also means wiping all your settings and other stuff you might actually want to keep), completely uninstalling and reinstalling the app [3], or even wiping the whole phone [4].
[1] E.g. the local state library has a nice book scanner available for public use. You can either e-mail yourself the results (but that only works reliably up to a certain file size), or else save them on an USB drive. I didn't have an USB drive with me, but thanks to UMS Enable I could just plug in my phone, switch my external SD card to USB mode and voila.
[2] It seems that e.g. possibly as a result of /etc/hosts blocking via AdAway some apps accumulate telemetry data that they cannot send (Fabric / Crashlytics seems to be the particular culprit here) and after a few weeks that amount of data can reach a notable size.
Another example was that due to some sort of bug Google's TTS app (Speech Services) kept accumulating TTS voice packs after updates and wouldn't delete the old versions, and by the time I noticed they were occupying a few hundred MB.
[3] Don't know of a current example, but during the days of Android 4.1.2, Android had a bug whereby if a native library was removed from a future APK version (respectively renamed), then Android wouldn't remove the old copy of the library when installing an update. Skype was a particular culprit there, because their native library was around 25 MB and included a version number in its filename, so each time that library was upgraded an additional 25 MB file was plonked onto the file system, with the old file remaining behind. Without root, the only way to remove those superfluous files was by completely uninstalling the app.
[4] I occasionally find system RAM dumps appearing under /data/ss-ram-dumps. I've got no idea whether they eventually get cleaned up automatically, or if they would just accumulate and take up more and more space until you're forced to wipe the whole phone.
What do you use for your backups?
I've used Titanium Backup in the past, but it has some issues in Android 11 and seems to no longer be maintained.
Trying OAndBackupX (recently rebranded as NeoBackup) but the results are not great. Hoping the next major version cleans it up.
So while it's a bit clunky, for now I'm relying on a combination of Titanium Backup (at least on my phone it's still working fine except for split APKs) + SAI to do an extra backup of split APKs.
Here's how niche indie software handles this: https://i.imgur.com/6m809SB.png (excuse the sarcasm)
I don't care anymore though. I've switched browsers since, Mozilla is beyond help. Still, in that moment i was very glad to have root to override their bullshit.
For example, I see no reason why a calculator app needs access to my contacts, phone, or microphone, and X-Privacy will let me disable permissions to those specific resources for the calculator app while still letting me use it. As a bonus, it'll also put in fake data in to these apps when needed, so the apps continue working, thinking they have access to my data but they don't.
Something like this should be standard in every smartphone, but obviously phone OS makers don't value privacy enough, and even require root in order to allow you to do this.
I'm not paranoid, but it's not the direction I want to see computing evolve in.
- macros and scripts- it's nice not having to enable, disable etc stuff and just scan qr codes, nfc tags or use ble tags as markers to enable something
- chroot
- faking permisions and data for apps is a must
- sim links to app data folders for easy backup/restore
I tap an NFC tag to open/close my garage door (the tag is outside, next to the door)
The main point of it is that if you don't have the control over your computing, someone else has and they can use this power for their own advantage against you. Examples are numerous: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor....
Oh, and some scripts to fake input events so I can automate apps.
[0] https://checkra.in
You forgot reasonable support time: Proprietary drivers prevent you from upgrading the Linux kernel, and the device becomes very insecure and outdated within few years.
Meanwhile I have a phone that is based on free software (for all the aspects where it matters) and that works. Today. And which has future potential to be just as free as the librem/pinephone - after all, if the code being developed by Purism is free, it can be adopted by other vendors.
A laptop from 12 years ago more likely than not has less memory than a mid-range phone from today, and unless such laptop is your only device for all this time, it has no point in this conversation.
I do use it as a daily driver.
> unless such laptop is your only device for all this time, it has no point in this conversation
It's the only device used by my non-technical relative. But even if it wasn't, the device would serve a purpose and not be another piece of e-waste.
> And which has future potential to be just as free
You can't upgrade Linux on your phone due to the proprietary drivers. You're stuck with the ancient version. When it's not supported, your device effectively becomes a brick, unless you are going to recompile everything yourself or fine with being hacked.
> You can't upgrade Linux on your phone due to the proprietary drivers.
Hardware-specific binary blobs don't stop the UBPorts devs to make constant updates to my old BenQ phone. The software part is still up-to-date, but the application catalog is almost non-existent, the hardware is limited (1GB RAM) and the camera is shit. Eventually I want to turn that device into a networked music player, but as a smartphone it didn't last two years.
If I manage to get 7 years out of this Fairphone, its ROI will have been unbelievably great, I will gladly buy whatever comes from Fairphone in 2027, and I will try to find another use for this device.
Hopefully by then Linux on mobile will have matured, but I don't need to compromise on my actual needs just to please the FOSS-purists.
This is an outdated information. The development pace of Pinephone is unprecedented. Even here on HN I saw many recent posts saying that calls and MMS work fine already.
Update: reading through https://www.reddit.com/r/pinephone/comments/u6zzyc/how_pinep... (from 6 days ago) it seems like you are not just overselling hard, you are trying to convince people to switch to something that is absolutely not ready for general consumption.
You do realize that if your goal is to get more people to adopt FOSS, your approach is more harmful than beneficial? Don't make promises that you can not keep, it will burn whatever goodwill people might have and it ends up convincing them Linux is never going to be for them.
Note that we are not on Reddit but on HN. Is its audience ordinary people? My goal is to bring more technical people to GNU/Linux phones.
Also, is your goal to get people to use GNU/Linux phones or is it to maximize the overall adoption of Free Software? The former requires a radical shift in consumer behavior and will be unlikely to happen, the latter can be done in gradual steps with a much higher chance of success.
Think of it this way: if you manage to upset me, who is pretty much in favor of F/LOSS, imagine how many bridges you burned with those "on the other side"?
Where did I make this claim? I said that I use it as a daily driver. It's possible, though not for everyone yet.
> Also, is your goal to get people to use GNU/Linux phones or is it to maximize the overall adoption of Free Software?
It's the same goal. Adoption of Free Software without using it on the phones will not help much. There are more people using smartphones than computers. I also don't see how one is a "radical shift" while the other is "gradual steps". It's the same to me. People are going to switch to new type of smartphones slowly: first developers, then early adopters, then theirs friends and then the rest. Same for Free Software.
> HN audience is large and diverse enough to the point that it makes no sense to think as some homogeneous group of people who are interested in tinkering with their phones.
This is true, but these people are "hackers", i.e. interested in though-provoking things and intellectually curious. I don't expect that they would just buy a new phone with a new OS without doing any research and believing a random comment on HN.
Your interjection came off as one that could provide the same level of usability and no compromises on the freedom aspect. It's only now that you are backing off on the claim by adding the caveat that you can use it as a daily driver.
> Adoption of Free Software without using it on the phones will not help anyone.
AOSP is free-software. F-Droid only distributes free-software. So why did you feel the need to interject about
> I also don't see how one is a "radical shift" while the other is "gradual steps".
The amount of people that could be interested in using /e/OS with F-Droid is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of people interested in tinkering with "Pure FOSS, GNU/Linux".
"Google Android -> AOSP + closed apps + f-droid" is a much easier adoption curve than "Google Android -> GNU/Linux"
There is no phone in the world which can run AOSP without proprietary software, at least drivers. (Well, technically, Pinehone and Librem 5 could do it, but it's not ported yet.) F-Droid is great, but it's running on top of a proprietary OS. It's probably a step in the right direction, but you can't just say "AOSP is FLOSS".
> The amount of people that could be interested in using /e/OS with F-Droid is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of people interested in tinkering with "Pure FOSS, GNU/Linux".
Every single change in the society starts like this. I don't see anything wrong or unexpected here. It doesn't mean that one should not promote the change. To me it even proves my point, because more technical people will get interested first anyway.
> The original comment I responded to was complaining about how the Google/Apple duopoly leads to a "pick your poison" situation and the user hostility. My recommendation was to into Google-free Android distros that can be used and do not require big compromises in terms of usability.
In this way you are still supporting Google with your money, it's not the best solution to the problem. Yes, the compromises are smaller and I did not disagree with it. I just noted in my original comment that anything Google-related will inevitably become e-waste, even if you use "AOSP" on it.
> Your interjection came off as one that could provide the same level of usability
You are probably right, and I could add a disclaimer that GNU/Linux phones can't do everything yet and are less reliable. But I don't see how those things were implied.
That's why I had my quip about "FOSS purists". In practical terms, people using AOSP (and boo-hoo closed drivers) have a lot more options of free software in applications and all other aspects that matters to them.
> It doesn't mean that one should not promote the change.
We have a quarter of a century of "This is the year of Linux on the desktop", and any adoption that Linux ever got could never be attributed to an increase "technical people" interested in a "pure" alternative. Valve's working on Proton and making gaming on Linux a reality is doing more for FOSS than any "activist" ever will.
The problem of FOSS is not a lack of education or promotion. The problem is that its activists miss the forest for the trees. To illustrate, instead of taking my comment about an alternative that would be miles better than iOS/Google Android and adding to it, to make the message stronger, you decided to "educate" them, and now all it's left is the two of us on a debate that does not help the others in any way.
> In this way you are still supporting Google with your money.
No, I am not. A Google-free Android, is as useful to Google as a GNU/Linux system. Google will only make money if people continue to use its search and see their ads.
But even without root I can side load an app via APK on Android. This way my Telegram messenger almost always a version ahead Google Play.
What about getting rid of the preinstalled "system" bloatware that may be present and outside of your control to remove without root?
But they were on a strange schedule, they released a new flagship every 6 months instead of every year. They of course could not support all the models at the same time, so the support was shorter that competition.
What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode
AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins.
To me browsing the web is unusable without those plugins in Firefox. How is browsing the web on an iPhone? Do you get overlays, autoplaying videos and ads on websites or can you block them? Do you get a reader mode?
Yes, there’s a reader mode.
One common example is setting up Tailscale on Pihole and your phone and then you can set the dns on whatever Wifi you’re on to the Piholes private IP
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...
You can also have Reddit links opened automatically in eg Apollo.
Also I'm a bit confused that browser plugins are apps. Are they actually running as individual apps, or part of the browser?
Can they get taken down?
All extensions are distributed as native apps, usually bundled into the primary app and are (when applicable) installed into Safari when they’re installed onto the device.
There are Content Blockers, App Extensions (into/out of Safari), Web Extensions (“of” Safari), share extensions etc with different limitations and abilities that run individually within their apps and message Safari and other apps, or have rules read ahead of time by Safari with no runtime access, or run within Safari using the WebExtension API etc etc
The archetypal web browser plug-in via the WebExtension API totally exists and are convertible for the most part to Safari’s very proprietary but very user conscious ecosystem.
https://developer.apple.com/safari/extensions/
I use Brave Browser on an iPhone and don’t see any of this, including ads.
Alternatively, I've just signed up for the Orion browser beta[2] for Mac and there is a testflight available for iOS. This can apparently use (some) WebExtensions, notably uBlock origin. I cannot run testflight apps on my old jb iPhone so I can't speak to how well it works
[0] https://myxxdev.github.io/depictions/MYbloXXforiOS/MYbloXXfo...
[1] https://myxxfm.com/script
[2] https://browser.kagi.com/
Although before that, I made my own ringtone using GarageBand off a ripped mp3 and didn’t buy anything through the apple store.
I would be shocked if > 20% of Android users manage their own music library rather than using one of the standard music streaming services.
You've picked on iOS (incorrectly) for not being able to playback FLAC, then shifted argument. The point was proven that you don't need to buy into Apples ecosystem for this.
Speaking from experience because this is a continuing pain point for my music collection that includes oddball formats like flac, ogg, and others--none of which I can even get on my phone without using a cloud service.
I don't use iTunes, ever, anywhere; and I feel sorry for anyone who does.
It's not 2008 anymore.
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html
> A media library, with WiFi Uploads & Downloads, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, OneDrive & Box.com integration and optional passcode lock.
>Web Interface for easy uploads and downloads to/from device.
1) you can connect it a computer open Finder go to apps section drag the file there
2) put the file in the iCloud and access it from any device with the files app on
3) in Safari if a link is a media file you can share it with VLC
and that's just 3 off the top of my head, I think there's a couple more. It's really not that hard, gone are the days where apps needed to run local webservers to slurp content. But actually VLC can actually probably get media that way too.
2. Requires a proprietary apple service. I'm starting to notice a trend with your suggestions.
3. Are you really suggesting people manually download their files one by one? Rofl.
What is the options for Android?
I don’t know of any native android solution that allows for sync to sync desktop or online platform for specifically FLAC files without a backend user/server/client service that is native.
What’s your alternative?
GOOG phones used to cost less than half of APPL ones. And for a while to have physically wider screens which made them better book readers. Unfortunately the price difference seems to be nearly negligible now.
The thing is nobody* does that.
There are a few. That’s why I added the asterisk. But realistically very few people actually do it. Especially compared to the number of iPhones they sell every year.
If you were using MP3 files, you wouldn’t have an issue. Or AAC. There might even be others. Apple really likes to make things easy, but they tend to only do it for the common case. That’s what gets the most use, that’s what makes the most people happy, that’s what they focus on.
If you’re the kind of person who wants to do things that are far out of the mainstream you’re never going to be happy with an iPhone. You can use other apps as other people pointed out. But I wouldn’t expect this to ever work in Apple’s music player. It’s the same reason you can’t have root, re-theme your phone heavily, replace the dialer, or a lot of other heavy customizations. That’s not what they focus on.
It’s just their ethos.
Because it is difficult to do.
> If you’re the kind of person who wants to do things that are far out of the mainstream you’re never going to be happy with an iPhone.
FLACs are not the act of an extremist.
No, at this point I think the vast majority of people just use streaming services.
The second biggest group, but probably much smaller, it’s people like me who both have a library and a streaming service.
After that, smaller again, I would assume it’s people who have just a library. The majority of these are probably files bought from Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. Those are all formats that the iPhone can play.
In last place is people who use more unique formats like FLAC. I understand why you would want it over the other formats. But I think it’s by far the least common case.
I find that hard to believe when so many music stores and labels (especially classical music and jazz) are selling FLAC downloads. It all works fine on Android with great polished and featureful apps like "USB Audio Player Pro".
https://www.reviewgeek.com/105739/googles-pixel-6-is-disappo...
For me, the downsides are:
- Notifications really suck. Everything has the same sound, unless the developer really cares. Its far harder to have custom alert sounds vs Android.
- Garmin watch notifications can't be filtered. I realize this is partly Garmin's fault, since apparently competitors have worked their way around it.
- I hate that "firefox" on iOS is a wrapper for Safari, and I can't use add-ons like uBlock
I was guilty of being on the Team Linux vs. Team Windows war back in the day and then I had an epiphany! You could like both. You could actually use what suits you when it suits you. Cheers.
What does this mean?
When this is not possible, it falls back to sending normal SMS, which can be read in plain text by third parties in the middle and has no encryption, when that occurs messages are shown within a "green bubble".
Therefore, messaging android users shows a "green bubble". People know its both an android user and unencrypted.
This also results in a worse messaging experience for the iOS users, as all of their other rich media is disabled and handicapped as long as that conversation involves an android user.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuaKzm7Kq9Q
The comments cover other aspects like middle school teachers seeing it first hand amongst students
This might be the most ironic comment I've read in a long time. 90%+ of users on both platforms are purely religious about their choice, and if there's one thing I can say that most of them have in common, it's (over)confidence that they understand "the other side" while utterly failing to. There are 3 topics that I used to discuss regularly but now avoid with most people because too much processing happens in the Amygdala: religion, politics, and phone religion (aka iphone v. android).
I think it's also worth adding that a lot of "preference" just comes down to choice based on values. If you highly value cohesive user experience, security (especially from own mistakes), and brand recognition/status, more curated app store, then iPhone is a good choice. If you highly value device ownership (for example my device, my choice to sideload or root, ability to run apps that can reach deeper into the device, unlock bootloader and install custom ROMs), price (not really true anymore though), etc then android is for you.
In this case its just tech enthusiasts that fall for evangelizing the technical prowess while ignoring that the social aspect of a technically good-enough system is more important to people. tech enthusiasts do this in other areas of their life too. just a heavy correlation, which people experience nationwide.
its not the early 2000s anymore!
If you need to copy a file to a computer all you need is a cable and a decent OS that supports MTP and you can then just drag the file off like a USB drive. It's great and requires no special software unless you like fruit flavored computers.
One of the things I really like about my Samsung phone is I can have an alphabetical ordering of my apps in the drawer. With iOS you have to painstakingly rearrange every app to get that or use the shitty hidden alphabetical scrolling list they finally graced everyone with after 14 years.
I switched from an iPhone XS to Android. XS still works, had a choice, just got tired of Apples shit.
Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.
- Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc.
iMessage? Everyone here (Scandinavia) uses FB Mewssenger, Whatsapp, Telegram or Discord anyway. The data thing, sure
- Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.
Thats fair.
The big thing for me with Android is price (my Asus 5z from 208 still going strong)
Customization, and I don't mean homescreen I mean that webbrowsers are not just Safari re-skins, Firefox has actual addons for excample, there is the Google playstore but I can also use F-Droid
And there aren't really downsides to Android imo
I would rather have a 10/month phone bill than a 40-50 one.
It’s not as flexible but my end cost for the phones is usually $5 more a month in plan cost and being stuck to a big 3 carrier, I haven’t paid much for a phone since I started doing this after Att paid T-Mobile equivalent of $4B in break up fees a decade ago and that pushed for more competition. Though back then I was rocking webOS then Windows Phone before sadly going from iPhone to iPhone. I believe it was iPhone 6 to 8 to 13 Pro. So 3 year and 4 year gaps waiting for deals where I wouldn’t pay anything except a trade in and being tied to the carrier.
I also use a ton of data. Except during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. During that time period I for sure was wasting money.
So when Google issues a kernel patch for an actively exploited zero day you aren't vulnerable?
Don't be ridiculous.
Software zero days can be patched and on Android even the vendors with the best support policies only cover half as many years.
Cheap Android phones don't even get that.
The OG iPhone SE is on it's sixth year of OS updates.
The iPhone 5s just got it's eighth year of security updates.
Even if it's a software flaw that can easily be patched, but the vendor prefers to force you to buy another device and toss the first into a landfill.
$250 is about the max I would consider spending on a smartphone.
That's really, really poor. I mean it's good for the Android ecosystem but their biggest competitor is at six+.
edit: replaced "almost twice that number of years" with "six+".
Four whole years?
It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone. That it is not really surprising at all is a sad reflection on how normalised shipping insecure connected devices with inadequate support has become.
Obviously we don't yet know how to build 100% secure devices of this complexity but we are talking about some of the biggest businesses in the world here. There is little excuse not to require (by law if necessary) essential security updates for a much longer period given the reasonable useful life of the hardware and the rest of the software on it.
I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months. And the market would correct for that, but everyone was doing the same thing - abandoning a device mere months after its release.
And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.
Given that many new phones were bundled with two-year contracts it seems likely that consumer protection laws in many places would have meant a phone that was not properly supported for at least that long after the time of purchase would have fallen foul of fitness-for-purpose rules and potentially entitled customers to partial refunds or updated replacements.
And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.
Sure but again that's why we need consumer protection rules. Any security patch implies that the original product was defective. Buyers are entitled to reasonable corrective action if a defective product was sold to them. It may be unrealistic to release a product with no defects, and the corrective actions are typically intended to compensate for actual loss of value rather than being punitive, but the basic rules still apply.
That's terrible.
Debian's EOL comes to mind, even Ubuntu LTS isn't supported for much longer, CentOS was supposed to be the more stable option but that didn't work out either.
Though for some reason mobile devices are somewhat crippled in regards to upgrading to new OS releases versus their desktop counterparts: not being update from Android X to Android Y is the real terrible bit here.
Not sure why on earth that should be acceptable or why the drivers should be such an insurmountable problem, wherein using anything but flagship phones with third party ROMs is a total mess (i've personally had everything from the touch screen to radio, to even Wi-Fi stop working).
I keep an eye on the libre phone space, so when I hopefully finally ditch android, it will be in that direction (unless perhaps regulations force Apple to open their walled garden, then we'll see.)
The new iPhone has 120 FPS.
I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelized android to for almost as long. I did ground work for google by pushing people into google's services. I have a day 1 pixel 6 pro. I pay for cloud storage and yt premium.
But to me google is just falling apart. I feel like they have lost their technology drive in order to pursue ideological ones. Their tech has become all half-assed with poor/no support. I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. RCS is still a disaster, my one friend on Fi with a pixel 5a still cannot get it working and Google/Fi has pretty said "We don't know".
I do not like Apple, but after almost 20 years a Google fanboy, I'm starting to like Google even less. So much so that I'll have to eat lots of shame from the many iphone people who questioned my android love for years.
*If anyone can convince me otherwise, please do*. I feel like the best thing that could happen is disposing of Sundar and getting someone who can refocus google on being a tech company devoted to making the best tech products.
That said I switched for mostly privacy reasons, so won't be going back.
There are limits, but it’s not display only like it used to be.
It was up until they took away the ability to fake app permissions.
I imagine this is what the GP is talking about.
I find the concept of a smartphone affecting a transportation decision or the reverse to be highly unusual.
Can you please explain your rational? For example, do you spend excessive amount of time in your car? Do you do specific tasks from your car that require a specific connection between car and smartphone?
Apparently next year the Macan is getting Android Auto support, so people in the future won't need to make the choice. But I was in need of a car this year, so I had to make the choice.
I'm gonna write a quick comparison as I've switched between platforms several times (still miss my Windows Phone tbh though):
I've found that no matter which Android "iphone camera killer" phone I got, the camera was unreliable and always ended up having crappy results. Meanwhile, my iPhone pics are constantly a decent quality.
Somehow, iPhone screens _consistently_ shatter for me. Even when I'm careful. I've yet to break the screen on an Android phone -- even if I've used it significantly longer or it was significantly cheaper. Something about iPhone's design or manufacturing lends it to shattering. My current iPhone has a shattered back from when I dropped it on my soft carpet from a foot up-high about a year in...
iPhone and Android software both sucks but Android's app experience is _significantly_ better. Why? BACK BUTTON. Every iPhone app has different expectations around going "back" from swiping up, left, right, or just having no way to go "back" at all. Which is common. Good Android apps are _great_; however, most iPhone apps are ok and most Android apps are not even ok.
iMessage isn't great but it's hard to give up on it. SMS/MMS experience _sucks_ -- so knowing when someone will get your 5 minute audio message in good quality is actually really nice. Sending pictures between platforms _sucks_. With that said, Android's web interface for messages is a million times better than the iMessage app and obv cross-platform.
I also absolutely hate getting data off an iPhone. it's unreliable especially if you don't have a mac. The Android experience is so much nicer.
So it's kind of a give and take. :/
Also -- less notification/customization options on the iPhone but having a hardware "silent" button is rad.
The camera thing drives me nuts. My pixel 6 can't take a reasonable photo of a flat piece of paper due to spherical distortion causing blurring of text. Sure you can go 2x and hold the phone further as suggested in online discussions but it's nuts that this made it past any attempt at QA and testing.
i expected IOS to be this perfect experience, but in fact many of apple's own apps are buggy ,and some quality of life features dont exist
and then theres TrueCaller :(
I finally have a phone (3axl) that didn't die in a couple years from accidents / abuse / going to the gym in my pocket, and Google is eol-ing it because they've cut off security upgrades.
My next phone will be an iphone.
At least they fixed this with the pixel 6 with a 5 year upgrade plan.
They release a generic template, other vendors then apply platform kits for the SoCs they use and they release the operating system for their devices. Google has no idea what it runs on, or what is needed to make it run on specific devices. It is the vendor's task.
Mobile devices have no UEFI, no bus enumeration, so the OS image has to be taylored for each device. It is similar to Raspberry or Odroid or similar SBCs: althrough both are arm, you cannot use Ubuntu (or other disto) image intended for one on another.
> Mobile devices have no UEFI
Since the Snapdragon 835, Android devices with Qualcomm processors use UEFI all the way to the kernel.
However, custom UEFI binaries aren't part of the boot flow, with an Android UEFI boot application running instead.
> no bus enumeration
It's device tree instead of ACPI, but apart from that the situation isn't _that_ different from PCs today. We aren't in the ATAGS era anymore. The reflashing interface nowadays is standardised through fastboot too.
> so the OS image has to be taylored for each device
Thankfully a lot of progress has been done on that.
Since Treble, the BSP proper has been untied from Android releases.
Since devices shipping with Android 12, a Google-built kernel with a stable kernel module ABI has been shipping (for a given major kernel + Android version release combo). This allows kernel security updates to be identical across the whole ecosystem.
> althrough both are arm, you cannot use Ubuntu (or other disto) image intended for one on another
That used to be true, but across the whole Android device fleet (even between SoC vendors) it's not true anymore.
However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those.
More info on generic system images: https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image.
This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributions on phones too if there's motivation to do so.
> However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those.
> This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributions on phones too if there's motivation to do so.
So assuming my bootloader is unlocked, have a GSI compliant phone, what is the remaining work I would need to have done in order to get it working under linux (and by working I mean all devices - including cameras and etc)?
A good chunk of the Linux community on phones didn't want to have to rely on binary drivers for non-technical reasons, and that's one of the reasons why it isn't exactly well taken care of today.
For Ubuntu Touch specifically:
https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction/Intr... for Ubuntu Touch.
https://github.com/ubports/porting-notes/wiki/Generic-System...
An upgraded Halium (https://github.com/Halium) image on a can work unmodified across the whole ecosystem of Android devices.
However, the latest currently developed experimental Halium works on an Android 11 base at most, so that devices launched with Android 12 might be using drivers too new for it at this point in time.
(https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/jenkins-ci/generi...)
This can be fixed with an engineering effort to do so to make it work on devices launched with Android 12. The Linux on phones community is very small and that causes problems in this case.
Together with the unified kernel image (GKIs) on Android 12 which allows to have kernel image binaries built with GNU/Linux-specific features that work across the whole fleet, a full straightforward experience can be made possible. This would fill the last chunk of custom per-device bits.
I wonder how big the audience would be for such a project though. :)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/talkin-treble-how-an...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomm-promises-th...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/android-10-has-the-f...
Google “upgraded” to less than any other mainstream computing platform. Windows gets about 10 years of security updates for each major version, up to 15 if you pay extra.
Hardware wise, you can easily pull out 20 years or longer simply by constantly bumping up the OS version.
I think it is a much better way to do security updates than the Apple model - security issues shouldn't have to wait for the next firmware update and for the user to apply them.
It sounds like what you're saying is Google has only continued to shuffle ever more vital functionality into the Play store since I left Android, which negates the often claimed benefits of an "open source" operating system. If all the important stuff is in a proprietary blob attached to a proprietary platform, I might as well stick with the one I already know that's never given me any trouble. I'm not going to root my iPhone or install a custom OS, so that's irrelevant to me.
And just because they are applied by the play store doesn't mean they are closed source. The play store itself is closed source, but the security updates to the OS get published via the normal processes.
Android is open enough to allow competition, eg. Amazon's Android, Microsoft's Android runtime, etc. are all done without Google's permission.
To me, that's key, but I'm not trying to tell you whether open source should matter to you. I just wanted to clear up the stuff about the security updates because I think the Android way of doing it is now better than Apple's method.
Same reason I switched to Apple last year -- after being android only since original Motorola Droid (2009).
I assume your friend has tried all the debugging on this page? https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en My wife's phone keeps failing to connect and we have to do the carrier services reset to make it work. A terrible solution to me requiring factory resetting your phone.
But even then, I have a friend that was never able to get RCS to work on his phone, and he spent multiple hours with Google support trying to figure it out. There is something wrong with his account on Google and the carriers side (he tried multiple phones, and it never worked). The RCS team definitely has some corner cases to work out getting everyone activated, because it leads to really bad stories like this.
This is just a tiny sliver of my dissatisfaction too. I feel like the long time lover that sits down one night and after a lot of thinking gives pause with "Wait, why am I still in this relationship?"
Apple went to full proprietary stack that no one else can use, while Google went the more open protocol. Open protocols like this always tend to have a bit more headache, and we're seeing that with RCS. Especially when some of the players are cell service providers.
If the EU open protocol legislation ever pans out, I wonder how that would impact iMessage and RCS.
PS: I was the same as you (used Android, despised Apple) but eventually made the switch and never intend to go back.
Apple's ecosystem, while it doesn't offer as much, is a much superior and polished experience. iMessage works great, integration with Apple Watch is top notch, and the whole ecosystem is very fine-tuned. There are still a bunch of things to complain about, for sure, but overall comparing the two is a night and day difference.
I've slowly started phasing out all my Google products.. and not by choice either. Had Google Nest and Nest Secure for over 3 years until Google decided to just cancel Nest Secure all-together. Google Home devices are increasingly being less and less effective. Google just can't seem to commit to anything longer than 2-3 years and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather deal with getting features much later but thoroughly thought out, then half-assed and cancelled in 2 years. I will say the one thing I do miss is native Google Assistant, Siri is complete ass in comparison.
From there I went to iPhone 4 and had so many issues. So I went to the Note 4 and initially I loved it. But android got slower and slower so after 6 months I reset the phone and didn’t install anything. It got slower and slower and all I used was phone text and browser.
But I refused to go back to Apple.
I did a few hours of work for a friend fixing something and was complaining about my phone being slow so he bought me an iPhone 6 max as payment.
I was annoyed at first but it was so fast… and I’ve stuck with iPhone since and don’t regret it. Best thing ever moving over to iPhone.
That's actually the largest reason I can't invest in Google's ecosystem, but that's mostly from a tech stack end.
While I’m firmly entrenched in the iPhone/iPad ecosystem, nowadays there’s quite a lot of little things that don’t “just work”, but instead behave (or are designed) in quirky and inconsistent ways, or fail randomly. I’m not talking about third-party apps, but iOS functionality and essential built-in apps. I can only imagine it’s worse on Android.
you would be surprised, try it sometime.
[I have an Android phone, and don't love it or hate it.]
What security guarantees would iMessage have if it ran on arbitrary hardware instead of only iPhones and Macs? To some people, that's important, not a gimmick. Totally fine for you to have your own opinion about it, but it's probably a good idea to be able to think about why people might disagree.
It sounds to me like it is E2EE, but people can opt in to back up the message after decryption. How is this different to any other E2EE program?
I know a lot of people who revised their relation to phone during that time (me included), and going for simpler things seemed to be a overall theme. Including those who went the other way and gave up iOS for the Pixel 4a for instance, or even some much smaller “dumber” phone.
That's super surprising. I bought 120fps Phone back in 2019 and it still works great and I can't imagine using anything below 120fps since then.
I definitely miss frequent OS and security updates, but I wasn't prepared to spend a similar amount on a slightly newer secondhand iPhone, or three times the amount or more on a new iPhone, which still won't have as good a battery as the Ulefone Power Amor 13, the thing weighs in at a little over 1 pound, just under half a kilogram, and requires recharging so infrequently I forget to, versus having an iPhone charge cable every couple metres at home and work.
Another added benefit of having a phone that is mostly battery and weights over a pound it that I rarely drop it, because you certainly know you've got hold of it!
If Apple did an iPhone that had a huge battery, and was ruggedized for us in the trades, and others who work in dusty / greasy environments, I'd be straight on to it.
If my only choice was between a flagship Android from any manufacturer or an iPhone, it'd be the iPhone.
Fortunately they aren't the only two options, and Android doesn't feel disappointing below about the $500 mark.
1) I can't afford that shite.
2) I don't want control of my device taken from me.
On #1 - I buy a cellphone to be contactable, and to browse the web on the move with a reasonable modicum of speed. I rather dislike the whole "hey, our app is far better than our website" movement in the industry, because I know that "far better" means "far better for tracking and targeting you", based on my experience in adtech. And I don't need whatever bollocks tech (two cameras so your photos can do a little swoopy thing!) Apple is chucking in and charging big bucks for. I just need a smartphone that has enough CPU to run things okay.
But I get other people might want fancy camera stuff without forking out for a proper camera, all good.
And I find Android phones offer far more options at varying price points along the spectrum in this regard than Apple.
On #2 - I've never had to wait for someone to find a vulnerability in my phone before I can root it, and do whatever I like with it. I can easily install APKs from others or myself without going through an app store, or paying Apple for a developer licence to write code to run on my own frigging phone.
My non-technical wife can't grok Android, she's been on iOS since the earlier iPhones, so when her iPhone 5S' browser began to routinely crash when loading websites she read on the regular, I caved and got her an iPhone 13, at much expense, and she's generally unimpressed at the upgrade (she really misses that physical button). She doesn't care about any of the bollocks that they're advertising as a reason to upgrade - macro-photography, night photography, cinematic mode? She gives zero shits.
Having to Google how to restart her phone when an app wouldn't stop playing audio really pissed her off though, I will say.
The price of that thing was fucking ridiculous, but she can at least use it for the things that she always used her phone for, until something happened that caused the browser in her last iPhone to start shitting the bed - lack of browser upgrades? Bad browser upgrades? I'm unsure. I'm not a fan of Safari on any platform, so I'm just going to glare accusingly in that direction.
TL;DR - iPhones are pricey AF, glad you got the iPhone 12 for free, and I really dislike Apple's approach to letting me do stuff with the small computer I bought that can incidentally do phone calls.
[1] https://scontent-ams4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.8562-6/271639644_...
I used to joke that when I’d loudly state “I support the actions of the Chinese government” I’d get an extra 5% battery life. Sigh.
But even with that "feature sharing", Android's flagship phone still feels like more of a knockoff compared to any iPhone.
Having owned every Pixel and the Nexus predecessors, they have about a 3 year lifespan, software is slow and freezes start after a few updates, the battery isn't great to start but shits out after year 2, then oled burn-ins.
But I got $5 for my Nexus 6P bootloop class action settlement, so there's that I guess...
I have a 2 year old mid-level Android and have had 0 performance issues or crashes (aside from Android Auto).
Need a quick photo? Is maps giving you a direction? Oh let me freeze up! Let me hide the soft keyboard until you restart! Let me get into a bootloop!
Or rather, stuttering was the bigger problem in those cases. I’m sure the geek scores were similiar in raw performance
waves fist at sky
This is silly considering you can de-Google an Android phone. You can't de-Apple an Apple phone.
This... sounds like an ad.
People somehow worried about an OS given away for free that is still the #1 OS of all user devices including desktops...
And it's the truth. You can do the same with a $400 Android as a top of the line Samsung/Apple device save some games...
The choice for a lot of people I imagine is more between no phone vs Android rather than iOS vs Android. On the island I'm living on currently the bottom tier but usable Motorola or Samsung phones are like local$600 and I think Apple devices start around local$4000+.
A thought: It seems that as people get richer around the world they move away from $200 Androids to what is more perceived as luxury: iPhones.
This but not only this. There’s also that phones have moved from being a simple voice communication device to the most essential item a person owns. It makes sense that a larger portion of income is spent on them when they get more important in peoples lives
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210611
Required for what? I haven't opened iTunes even once in many years.
You don't need it even if you want to do local backups on macOS, you can do it all from an easy menu in Finder aka file explorer.
Between streaming services, cloud backup, iCloud Drive (like Dropbox), and Airdrop (secure file sending via peer-to-peer WIFI) there‘s absolutely no need to own a Mac or PC to drive an iPhone.
I‘m also holding out for Asahi though, and hope they get things like Proton to run.
You need an apple ID for the app store, but that seems pretty reasonable.
Either you are Edward Snowden or Elliot, there is no written rule to use every single Apple services in order to use iPhone.
I've been using iPhone for almost a decade and the only feature I only ever use is Find My Iphone for obvious reason.
> I just want a small phone that gets updates, has maps, and has a decent music app.
And what stops you for doing that in iPhone?
One thing I do like about Android is that I can develop and publish apps for a reasonable fee. Apple wants $100 per year to be a developer. My apps are free so they don't make money. I would simply stop developing if I had to pay that.
I recently went on a vacation with friends, 4 other folks on iPhones and me on an Android. Our group chat experience almost made me consider getting an iPhone. The inability to do emoji responds, and the fact that shared videos always looked like shit on my phone were just 2 of the examples. And I'm well past middle age! I can imagine what it feels like to be a high schooler or young adult feeling like the reason the group chat experience is sucking is because "you're the one with the Android".
How far east are you?
I'm from the Czech Republic and often spend time Poland. No one I know forces me to use WA or Telegram, everyone's either on G Hangouts or FB messenger.
You couldn't be more wrong. I've lived in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the UK. I've played go competitively at a European level and have travelled a fair bit and socialized with nerds all over. Name a European country, chances are I know several people there.
SMS/iMessage is always everybody's first choice for communication here, i wouldn't say whatsapp is the dominant communication platform or used for in-country communication on a regular basis, but everybody seems to always have it installed or if they don't have it installed they know about it and are willing to install it.
What is this, 2010? It's all about Discord now bb (who refused to be bought by Microsoft BD)
I think that makes plenty of people on HN hesitant to adopt those
I disdained the iPhone at first, but ended up getting won over pretty quickly. At introduction, it was just better than anything else, and the smooth connectivity between my Mac and my phone was really appealing. As the platform has grown, I've stayed with it; I've never really used Android for a long period of time except for a brief dalliance with a tablet a few years ago.
I'm not here to argue about which is better. I know which works better for ME, and is more appealing to ME. I say all this to establish my position. Silly people describe people like me as "fanboys," as though it's not possible to make a rational decision to use this ecosystem. Whatever.
HERE'S MY POINT:
I do not welcome news of Android market share loss. I do not want Apple to become the kind of dominant player in mobile that Microsoft was on the desktop 25 years ago. That kind of platform control inevitably becomes toxic, IMO. MSFT absolutely sought to exploit that position from the getgo; Apple doesn't seem to have the same kind of insane ALL PIE FOR ME motivation, but supermajority market share is a hell of a drug.
So while I have no interest in USING an Android phone or table, I very very much Android to right its ship and maintain their position as a peer or near-peer to iOS.
Credible competition is good for the market, and thus good for my preferred platform.
Android is now at 70%. The closer that gets to 50% the better. I don’t care if that’s because Apple gets closer to 50%, or if they stay near 25% and new competitors take up the rest.
The US has always skewed marketplace percentages. My understanding is in many countries Android had a massive majority. The less that’s the case, the better I think things will be for consumers.
That’s without even mentioning the nightmare of trying to weigh up dozens of Android phones over multiple years, finding out which ones still work reliably several years down the line, etc.
I wonder why is it so hard for people to differentiate 6% from 6 percentage points
They’re really at a sweet spot here IMO in the mobile market: not too big, not too small (like the Mac used to be in 1995-2005). It’s better for the company if revenue growth comes from services, high-margin computers (like the Mac Studio) and new devices rather than selling more phones.
For markets outside the more expensive parts of the US, this is a big deal, because in a country where the monthly income excluding taxes is between $1500 and $2500 (like most of the UE countries), paying $1000 or more in a phone is a huge thing, and this inexpensive iPhone maybe have a reasonable price for those clients.
So I upgraded to a year-old iPhone 5, and have never looked back. It just worked better. Every app just worked, and the UI felt somehow smoother. I'm on an iPhone 11 right now.
I've had a work provided phone and a personal phone for a long time and so most of the people I know.
Sometimes I've had a work iPhone and a personal Android, and now a work Android and a personal older iPhone.
I'd be worried about mixing up business and personal chats and photo galleries. Like if I need to take a picture with my work phone it's usually of something work related.
Or forwarding the wrong meme on a business chat, or attaching the wrong file in a family/friend message could land me in trouble.
How does it work in NDA'd work environments? Like when company's information can't leave company's devices? Is BYOD accepted in those cases? Like with MDM managed phone or workspace separation?
My wife has an iPhone so I'm fairly in the loop on the pros/cons.
I also have some Android tablets laying around and know how poor they perform.
I wonder how much the pandemic has influenced these published numbers. I don't think they can differentiate someone download app from an iPhone vs iPad? All the remote learning has had students get tablets and I personally woulda have picked up an iPad...they do have the iPad pricing and features tailored with schools in mind.
I'm pretty sure what you say is true, but I think it only runs in one direction: Android users who are ignorant of iOS.
However, as with computers (or really anything), there exists a sizeable group which don't use their devices well and instead have a superficial grasp of their platform, for these people switching is relatively straightforward since they rely very little on the interconnecting magic that makes the various apps and services work well together and instead mostly use the basic functionality of each app, which is relatively identical.
I lost my drive to tinker with os/apps long time ago, so the fact that everything is quite friction less makes me happy.
On Android I constantly had issues with lastpass, dji asks you to download apk to fly drone etc.
That's the challenge in this space. A four year old cheap smart phone actually doesn't look half bad compared to the latest and greatest Google has to offer. Whatever Google did since Android 9, I don't really care for any of it. It's not really any better in any way that matters to me. IMHO the gesture bullshit is gimmicky & annoying and the endless Android theme tweaking close to irrelevant at this point. It doesn't feel exclusive to me; just different in a way that doesn't matter to me at all.
The reason Apple has progressed in terms of market share is that they doubled down on what matters. People seem to like IOS as it is and they did not mess with that too much. Other than that, good hardware improvements, software updates for almost anything they sold in the last eight years, and improvements where it matters (screen, camera, speed, etc.). You pay a premium for it but you get what you expect. And then you use the device until it breaks down and you get another one. They offer stability and incremental progress for the life time of the device. There's nothing that Android offers that IOS needs. It has it all.
With Android you're haggling on a lot of different specs between different vendors. And somehow you get a worse deal no matter what you choose. You can go Samsung and deal with their proprietary crap-ware. You can go generic Chinese & out of favor brand and deal with the fact that they've been cut off from the Google Play services. Or you can buy a few me too products from generic Android OEMs and obsess about how many pixels the screen has; how many redundant camera lenses they have, how bad the battery is, etc.
I actually like the Pixel 6 as a phone. But excuse me for not getting too excited about it because it's not exceptional in any way and Google will abandon supporting it in hurry for whatever their next shiny new hot thing is in six months.
KaiOS is a long way from perfectly usable just yet but you know that wonderfully relaxed feeling you get when you forget your phone and decide against driving back to get it? Perhaps that's the impetus for a new kind of challenger to iOS. A phone /OS who's best feature is that it actually does less.