Very few reasons to stick with Android. Apple has the Apple Stores to fix your device, iMessage, and guaranteed OS upgrades for years. Not having iMessage is a social death sentence for many teenagers too.
Not only that, but I find Android to just be a miserable UI/UX nightmare, and the Play Store to be filled with somehow 9/10 apps being shit instead of the App Store's even 6/10 being shit.
I recently purchased an Android (Galaxy S20) for testing a cross platform app I've been working on and was shocked at how much worse it's gotten over the years.
If you have a choice, and you do - (just buy a used iPhone a couple generations back, I got an iPhone 8 recently for $100 CDN) - I can't fathom why you'd choose Android, especially with Google's telemetry.
The iOS OS itself is incomparably easier and more pleasant to use (even my 120hz Galaxy S20 device has animations that are choppy as all hell) - and that's not even getting to the borderline unbelievable difference in hardware quality.
I paid $250 CDN used for this S20, and $100 for the iPhone 8 I recently snagged. The 6-year-old iPhone 8 runs incomparably better than the 3-year-old S20.
Yeah, I think buying an used iPhone is the best value for money at this point. Depending on the model you get the same or more years of support than from new Android for similar price. The iOS UX is so smooth I had zero trouble switching from Android to iOS, even though I had never touched an iPhone before.
I'll reconsider Android phone only when manufacturers start providing as many years of software support as Apple does. Planned, premature obscolence is unethical and sucks.
My Pixel (and I wouldn't buy anything other than Google hardware for Android because the integration and UX is top in the industry IMO) syncs up to my Google account, all my photos are freely stored, my phone backup is free, and any other backup data counts toward my Google One account.
If I bought an iPhone I'd have to buy Apple storage to do all of that, and I don't want to. My Google One account has Youtube Music and Youtube premium along with the storage. I never see Youtube ads which alone is worth every penny.
Other than that I really don't miss one thing from my old iPhone. Smartphones are so good these days all iOS competes on is sugar on top.
Apple offers full photo encryption as if this year, whereas Google can - and will - give your local gestapo your photo roll, mysteriously delete your account for taking pictures of your kids, and do god knows what with them for data mining.
There are very steep legal penalties for lying about it, and it’s not available in China, so on balance I think it’s a reasonable risk, especially since Android makes no such promises.
Android is not a cloud service like iCloud. Fundamentally it will not make any promises about the encryption of it's services.
That being said, I can use open-source projects like Syncthing or Owncloud to handle my syncing, and skip the whole mutual trust part. Though I'm sure the NSA does a wonderful job auditing Apple's private codebase, for whatever sense of security that offers.
That’s the entire point of ADP, you don’t need Apple to side sorb or against you, they don’t have the keys. Google doesn’t offer that and Graphene isn’t a photo hosting service.
Part of it comes down to whether you truest Google. I personally would rather Apple have my personal information than Google, who is actively trying to monetize it through advertising sales. I don't even use them for search.
(I know Apple is inching down that path too, but so far they have simultaneously maintained their privacy focus.)
It's hard to imagine reading this comment anywhere but the US. There are dozens of reasons to stick with Android, even practical ones that people use on a regular basis.
- Android is just cheaper and runs on more hardware
- Android is freely licensed and offers secure transparency that iOS does not
- Android doesn't claim authority over being able to install apps
- It has actual desktop-grade APIs like Vulkan and Linux syscalls
I initially swapped to iOS to save money, and it’s actually worked out quite well.
Apple is expensive if you’re constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest, but at the mid range longevity is more important than initial price alone. People replace their phone enough the important bit is how much your paying per month not the actual device cost.
The iPhone SE is highly cost competitive with Android and has double or more support timeline, higher resale value (even for a trade in from Google store!), and better build quality and processor.
So you bought an iPhone SE? Personally I think the Pixel 6a would be a better option, more battery, better camera, screen, worse processor though. I honestly think processor is much less of a concern than the screen and camera on a budget smartphone.
I think the 6a really illiterates the problem. Spec wise it’s fine, but as a phone you run into issues where for example battery size isn’t as important as battery life. Initially it came out at near parity with iPhone SE prices where today it’s at a significant discount. Unfortunately, it’s also much closer to end of life, and that’s the basic problem with mid range Android last years phone is already long in the tooth.
“Whether it's the smaller battery, the demands of the Tensor chip or some other factor, the Pixel 6a fell flat on our battery test, in which phones surf the web continuously until they run of power. The Pixel 6a lasted an average of 6 hours and 29 minutes, which is more than 3 hours behind the Pixel 5a's result on that same test. Even worse, the Pixel 6a trailed the iPhone SE (2022), and we consider the 9 hour, 5 minute time that Apple's phone produced to be below average for a smartphone.” https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/google-pixel-6a
That’s the trend, a new model Android phone has near iPhone prices for a device that’s comparable but will have a shorter lifespan/ worse resale price. Buy an older model and you save money today, but need to replace the phone even more frequently.
I am on my fifth iPhone. I easily sold/traded in the previous four after replacement. In two of the cases, I ended up making a profit!
Further, in each case I did so after three to four years of use. The one exception is an iPhone 8 I a) bought used from Sprint/T-Mobile, and b) traded in after 18 months to the same carrier for an incredible deal toward a new iPhone 13; otherwise I would still be happily using it.[1]
There is no way that any used Android phone, even the most expensive flagship model, would ever be worth anywhere as much. And that's not including their lack of software updates. Meanwhile, the iPhone 5S I sold in 2017 after four years of use believing that it would soon lose software updates a) did not lose active support until 2019, and b) still is getting security fixes (the most recent four months ago)!
[1] More happily than the iPhone 13, really. I hate Hate HATE Face ID.
I'd never buy an iPhone because of Apple's practices, but it does make sense. Spending $500 on a phone that gets updates for five years is almost impossible to do in many Android ecosystems. Samsung has been getting a lot better the past two years, but even two or three years ago you had to buy Apple if you wanted an update guarantee of more than "two major upgrades, eventually, and security updates, sometimes". If you care about security updates, you would've had to buy a new phone right in the middle of the support period of iPhones that will soon be abandoned.
On the other hand, almost nobody I know outside the tech sphere gives a crap about security updates. OnePlus is a very popular brand with an atrocious update policy, but it delivers much better value than something like an iPhone. Xiaomi is also getting very competitive in this market, often ignoring or rescinding their software update promises but handing you an excellent phone for super cheap. The cheaper iPhone models also offer this, but often with weirdly outdated designs and comparatively inferior screens.
Buy last years model second hand for half the price. Keep it for 3 years. Sell it for a reasonably high value since it’s still getting updates and repeat. I have done this twice now.
Very low end Android devices have issues, and the midrange need to be replaced significantly more which more than offsets the price difference.
Basically, a device that’s got a 30% price premium for equal hardware, but lasts 50% longer saves me money.
PS: I would suggest a battery replacement at year 3 or 4, that dramatically reduces the issues with older phones and can push you well past that 50% mark.
- Browsers with add-on support, to make browsing the internet bearable
- DNS-level adblocking, to make app usage bearable
- Sideloading apps, to access software which Apple nor Google would condone
All of these are dealbreakers for me.
OS upgrades are less of a concern on Android, where apps tend to support very old versions of the OS (5.0 is not at all uncommon to be supported, which was released 9 years ago), as opposed to iOS, where it's common that only the latest two OS versions are supported. This fact alone makes it so that an Android device might even be useful for longer than an iOS-device, which is entirely locked out of basically all of the app store after 6-7 years, with no way to salvage the device any more.
Safari does have content blocking integration in addition to ITP whereas chrome on android has no means to disable ads and provided a virtually unlimited tracking surface.
I use both platforms, and they have strengths and weaknesses, but for the average user Android is going to provide a massively worse web privacy experience.
>- DNS-level adblocking, to make app usage bearable
it's possible with AdGuard Pro and similar apps on iOS, although it's obviously not possible to run these apps with root privileges, like AfWall and others.
Is there really a browser on Android that has better addon support than Safari on iOS?
On iOS content blocking can be done on a very low level by ad blockers posing as local on-device vpns. This doesn’t require root and is super easy to set up. (e.g. https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS)
That's also my experience, part of the issue with iMessage is it's lack of Android client and the other half is that It's branded as an SMS app and SMS being dead for more than a decade in Europe doesn't help its case...
Sideloading, customizable home screen, better notifications (Samsung specifically), much cheaper bottom end for devices, USB-C port, ability to access the filesystem.
Very few reasons to stick with Android *for someone who isn't technical or succumbs to pubescent peer pressure
+background/foreground services. Our product does tonnes of photo/video uploads and iOS is a user nightmare by comparison. Android - kick off a service and happy user!
But that said the Android constantly-changing API's, device compatibility/fragmentation is a bit of a nightmare.
I get it! I too want a phone to just let me do my work, which is why I have Android so I can get pictures off my phone without special software!
Snark aside, Apple is really nice and if you're used to it, great, I don't have a strong opinion anymore. But I bought the 14 Pro then went back to my S21 despite the apple being much better hardware. The gesture nav and experience was just annoying to me.
On my case it's the translate bubble which I would miss the most, it's a simple widget but on iOS it's not a thing yet, if your hobby involves language learning, it's must have.
There are many reasons to choose android over ios. Unfortunately Google seems bound and determined to destroy them. Half of them now require you to get a device with an unlocked bootloader and use root.
It depends on your use case. If the most important thing to you is the color of your chat bubble, sure go Apple.
My wife and I don't give two sticks about that. Most her friends use FB Messenger, mine Whatsapp or plain ol SMS.
Once that's out of the way, the 'which is better' becomes less clear. I don't like how locked down IPhones are, and feel Samsung has better cameras. What would an IPhone buy me, at that point?
Clearly what the iPhone needs is a real competitor. Google's got a lot of great stuff going on, maybe they should pass the phone baton to another company.
"Clearly what the Android phone needs is a real competitor. Apple's got a lot of great stuff going on, maybe they should pass the phone baton to another company."
I agree, and that's really my point. Let's not pretend first means anything here. Apple let notifications be a disaster for way too long (and it's still bad) and Google can't make a bluetooth stack to save their lives.
These features aren't even all that new. The "find my device" name has been used since at least 2017, for one. Live wallpapers have been a feature in Android since at least Android 2 and I distinctly remember apps for setting videos as wallpapers popping up almost immediately (with the corresponding impact on battery life, especially back in the day).
I can't say I know what an emoji wallpaper is. From what I can find, it's just another type of live wallpaper? I guess the new Android version may integrate better with the system UI colour theming?
RCS is an absolute failure. It's better than SMS but so is Signal, and with Signal your ISP can't read your messages. With the EU forcing companies like Apple to interoperate, Google should really be looking towards initiatives such as MIMI rather than try to force this stupid phone carrier-based protocol down everyone's throats.
The new Pixel phone seems to be doing things well. It's well-reviewed, despite its comparatively mid-range processor, and the new Android theme seems to fit the device well. These new Pixel devices all seem pretty good, to be honest. If Google can manage to keep supporting these devices (sounds impossible, I know!) I think they have a find product range on their hands.
I don't know what the Whatsapp bug has to do with Google, though? I suspect that's just WhatsApp's calling functionality not giving up a microphone lock after the app is dismissed into the background.
That's fair, although its also fair to remember that some of these are extensions of pretty old Android features. Live wallpapers aren't really a new thing in the Android world.
And RCS is something that would get copied by Apple, if Apple wasn't against it for business reasons.
...because they don't want to be excluded from their friends' and families' group chats. And once they join the blue-bubble club, they of course partake in the chanting: "Blue bubbles only, please!", "The green bubbles mess up group chats on my iPhone!", "Images in green bubbles never look right!", etc.
Well...they do mess up group chats, and images and other basic features usually don't work the best, so...what's wrong with this criticism?
I'm sure Google could figure out how to make it play along nicer (they already implemented reactions, so don’t give me bullshit telling me they can’t improve it more) or - better yet, create a more solid alternative.
That's not really Apple's job. They made a superior piece of software and reasonably want to use it to encourage people to their platform.
You might not like it - but it is allowed.
If you'd like the features Apple offers, you're welcome to move to their platform. :P
No different than if you'd legally like to watch Star Wars at home, you'll need Disney+.
Disney isn't somehow required to also offer it on Netflix. :P It's called a feature of the platform. If you'd like that feature, use that platform.
Your cousin doesn't have D+? Well, I guess y'all aren't chatting about the new episode of 'Andor' that dropped that week.
They don't have an iPhone? Guess y'all have to deal with green bubbles.
That's part of how platforms - necessarily - differentiate themselves from one another to encourage users to them, just like console exclusives.
When I was a kid, if you liked Sonic, you had a SEGA. If you liked Mario, you had a Nintendo.
Nobody in the world in the 90’s was expecting a Sonic game on a Nintendo console or vice versa.
I don’t know what changed that people are suddenly freaking out about this, lol.
It shouldn’t have to be explained in a group as highly intelligent as this one that this is simply basic anti-competitive practice.
If iMessage was everywhere it would be a monopoly and y’all would be clamouring for some alternative anyway. :P
There’s literally just no pleasing some of you, lol.
MMS supports video, just very poorly, so one makes that mistake once and then learns to send links to YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever. IMHO that's vastly preferable anyway.
Makes total and complete sense, and seems absolutely anti-ridiculous.
Group chats also work fine if we’re all using Messenger - group chats work just fine if we are all using Signal - it’s almost as if software works as expected if it’s being used as expected.
Mind blowing, I know.
There is no other major chat platform that offers interoperability with services the platform owner does not own.
(Messenger and Instagram just got some sort of interoperability, but since they are both Meta properties, it only helps prove my point.)
What’s beyond ridiculous is to expect a SEGA Genesis cartridge to just run, unmodified on an SNES, which is what you’re demanding, here.
Yeah, a group game of Super Mario Kart 64 works awesomely on an actual N64 with a real cartridge and four controllers - but hey, why doesn’t it work the same on my PS1?
Well, fuck Nintendo for not opening up their game to other platforms! They have awful business practices!
…
…now that’s ridiculous shit, and what you’re almost literally saying; word for word, just with different hardware and software.
(The PS1 doesn’t even have 4 controller ports out of the box, even if it could run N64 software unmodified. The PS1 also had its own exclusives and benefits, such as Final Fantasy 7. Both platforms had their advantages and disadvantages. The N64 was far more powerful, but was hampered by cartridges, whereas the PS1 used CD media and could store much more, but push far less polygons.)
Why on Earth would it be Nintendo’s responsibility to make sure Kart 64 plays great on a PS1?
Isn’t half the point of a first party software release (either Kart 64 or iMessage) to provide a reason for users/players to choose that platform instead of whichever alternative?
Should GarageBand/Logic or iMovie/Final Cut suddenly be ported to Windows or Linux as well?
At what point does the ridiculous demand for interoperability stop? What do you want, only one monopolistic set of hardware and software for everything?
Any messaging protocol that puts the mobile telecoms as the operator and man-in-the-middle, like RCS, is a terrible idea. It would be like putting Comcast in charge of the Internet. I can think of few companies I trust less with critical app infrastructure.
Erm, SMS has been solid for decades. RCS is end to end encrypted. It's not a "terrible" idea and it's nothing like putting Comcast in charge of the internet, that's just hyperbole.
It's still a protocol that was designed specifically to have the Telco take an active role in the message handling again, something that they lost with the decline of SMS.
Personally I'm very happy for my Telco to just be a dumb pipe that supplies internet bits. Especially because that means I can get at my bits anywhere, not just on blessed networks. They're not however, they want lucrative "value add" features. Features that will have all sorts of strings attached.
But anyway, luckily RCS is dead. I'm not sure how they thought marketing "RCS" against WhatsApp could possibly work. Sure SMS was also a complex acronym but it only took off because there was nothing else. Acronyms are eschewed now by the mainstream. And even as a tech person I'm really happy not having to say "double you double you double you" anymore.
Maybe I'm just narrow minded but I don't really see much way to improve upon existing chat software. The crux of the matter is iMessage is the default on iOS and the majority of users don't swap off for a multitude of reasons.
Unsure if you're being obtuse or sarcastic. However in case this is an actual reply, there are a lot of things wrong with it - they produce a closed ecosystem and deliberately hobble interoperability. These kinds of tactics are called platform abuse, but they have also conditioned a sizeable chunk of the population to consider it, and the ensuing behaviors, completely acceptable and moral. If anything, users should be asking for better interoperability, but the fact that I regularly see comments like yours makes me realize that their corporate brainwashing is successful, and secondly, glad that I do not live in that country.
What I think is missed in this conversation is that this behavior seems to be almost exclusive to America as the rest of the world has moved onto WhatsApp. The "blue bubble" rants, to me are like complaining that google's messenger doesn't work with WhatsApp. I'm not sympathetic to Google here. They shit the bed on messaging for years, and now Apple must open up.
Why it would be it only Google's problem to solve?
There are several companies that already solved it, the world moved on, but only certain groups are harping on Apple and Google, nothing else. Why? Just use something else, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, they all work beautifully and are significantly popular.
This isn't a technical problem and you're more or less trying to say it is.
There is a duopoloy in phone offerings and people in the USA just do it this way. If Google wants their market share - and to push back against Apple's offerings and prized position socially marked via bubble color - then it's on them. No other app is going to overcome the social issue here.
I'm not saying that it is technical problem. I don't know, how you would arrive to such conclusion based on my comment.
I'm saying that there's no reason why messaging should be put into hand of platform owners. The world is bigger, and if a third party makes a good entry, why ignore it and insist, that only Google and Apple are allowed?
Cannot tell if this is satire. But if you're serious: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/8/23343336/apple-tim-cook-im... This issue only exists because Apple stubbornly refuses to join the standard because showcasing how bad Android functions in iPhone Group chats sells iPhones. If they joined, everyone would have the same functionality, but basing the decision purely on money means that'll never happen.
Google's messaging experience has been incoherent until the last couple of years. I switched long before that partially because of how awful the experience was, not because of blue bubbles.
Whenever I ask someone the point of using Android, I always get back an answer of "oh, it's because it prioritizes user choice, I can sideload APKs, it's cheap" or something along those lines. But I'm old, I just want a device that mostly works and nothing more than that, and Android (historically) hasn't been it. Worth noting that my iPhone 8 plus still receives updates, a support cycle that long is something unheard of in Android circles.
There's cross platform messengers like Signal. In EU most population uses WhatsApp as it's the most populat cross platform messenger here and if a first party experience for bot Android and iOS users without any bubble discrimination.
Why is Apple or Google the only messaging option for you? Those are not the only services on the market.
I feel like you're missing the forest from the trees here.
If they’re discussing the bubbles issue, then the existence of Signal/etc is somewhat irrelevant. It’s a social problem, not a technical one - and that friends group is on the blue bubble train.
Yes, the bubble issue does not exist if we use cross platform messaging apps. Nobody is forced to use iMessage. It' mostly an US issue.
Europeans, latin Americans and other large demographics, don't have the bubbles struggle because people don't default to iMessage but cross platform messaging platform to not discriminate anyone. Crazy, I know.
I know. I have lived outside the USA and this is not lost on me. You are missing the point though.
The social issue exists in the USA and that is what they're complaining about. It does not matter what the rest of the world does when this thread is based on that - in a thread about US iPhone market share, no less. Cross-platform-apps would've been the solution for this already if they had any shot of doing so.
In Argentina everyone is on WhatsApp… but it’s not “to not discriminate anyone”. It’s because when WhatsApp came about we were still paying through the nose for SMS… so it was seen as “free text messages”. Then voice messages became super popular because it’s faster for people on phones with no/bad dictation and subpar/broken touchscreens and/or predictive not adjusted for local language (Spanish varies wildly from country to country, specially colloquially).
Its because getting people to download and sign up for another app is friction. Everyone already SMS in america because its free, unlike other countries where you have to pay per message.
I have friends from Africa and India, and they use whats-app when communicating with people in their home country because it costs money to send regular SMS.
SMS is also free on most of Europe's plans. But apps are just much nicer. Encryption, photos (MMS really sucks). Easily having a group chat which is really a pain with SMS. Sending files... History on all my devices, full scroll back.
SMS is just so outdated.
The only problem with the apps is that people use different ones. But I use matrix with bridges to unifi them all into one. Very much like beeper.com .
I use Signal. It's ok. I don't use it amongst friends or family because in the US we usually stick to what's installed by default on phones, which historically has been SMS or iMessage. The only people in my life that use Signal are a couple of my clients. They are only on Signal because as they have confided in me, they are distrustful of the government.
I can't really start a campaign to get people to switch to Signal, I don't have that much social capital to burn with my friends/family. And I personally would never use WhatsApp, and while I understand the history of its ubiquity, I can't bring myself to pull myself back into Mark Zuckerberg's ecosystem.
I find it really funny that having friends and family use a different app is considered bothersome but it isn't when they push you to buy a $500+ phone.
That's around the time of the Pixel 2 XL, IIRC. They wouldn't get base OS upgrades, except in emergencies.
I bet they are still getting updates Chrome, Gmail, Maps, and all the other core functionality from Google, though. Notably, the most security sensitive element is the system web browser. This also gets updated even when the base OS does not.
Android and iOS are different worlds. For most users, the update lifecycle differences are not large.
>Also, most Googlers in the US use iPhone for personal and corp.
Is this why (as I understand it) Google has historically launched new apps/features on iOS first? I know firsthand that this is true for Google Voice (including before, during, and after the lengthy detour to Hangouts).
Ads get higher CPCs / CVVs on iPhone. Much higher compared to Android, when everything else is the same (country, gender, etc). If I were to pick one reason for iOS-first strategy, that would be it.
Maybe for teenagers. I have yet to meet anyone over the age of 16 who cares what color their "bubble" is. iMessage is good, but I would never pick my phone based on it.
My work issued phone is an iPhone 11, which was released in 2019. It is running the latest version of iOS and it is still buttery smooth and a joy to use. The equivalent Android phones released in 2019 would be a Samsung Galaxy S10 (last update was to Android 12) or a Pixel 4 (last update was Android 13).
I'm using Galaxy S10, and I'm not bothered that it runs Android 12 and not 13. It was updated over several releases, and I cannot tell the difference, except some cosmetic changes.
What is a crucial difference between Android and iOS: older Android releases do have updates for all apps, including those, that in iOS are bound to the system release, like the browser. So even old Android are getting current Chrome (or Firefox, if that's your choice), mail client, calendar, etc. With Android, new system release for existing device is just a number, as none of the critical apps are bound to it.
The big difference is security updates. I get every security update that Apple releases, on day one. Android users get whatever security updates their vendor decides to back port and their phone carrier decides to allow if the phone is carrier locked. The modularity of Android helps a lot but there are still important security advisories for the core OS that go unpatched on users phones.
I haven't used a Pixel 4, but my daily is a Pixel 5 that isn't really much more advanced. Its still pretty quick and very usable, and the battery has held up really well.
Everyone tells me that there are these mysterious kernel bugs that are super dangerous, but, tbh, I have yet to see evidence of that. The more important app layer still sees many updates, including a lot of key system components.
I use many of the popular messaging apps regularly. In my experience, iMessage is unquestionably the highest quality and most reliable messaging app I use, everything else is a downgrade. Some people may care about blue bubbles, but most people just want messaging that doesn’t suck or randomly fail at its core purpose.
If people want to compete with Apple on iMessage, they need to offer a product that isn’t obviously inferior. The longer they wait, the harder it will be to displace iMessage in the iOS environment.
I have not met a teenager or below who wants an Android for phone. Every one of them want iPhone probably the iPad effect. So US is going to be the market for iPhone for long time.
Google’s biggest existential risk is Apple changes the default search engine. As long as Google Search and apps are deeply wired into iOS Google isn’t much worse off when people defect from Android.
But if Apple goes their own way with search (they’ve started taking baby steps), decides to take Microsoft’s money for default placement (more likely now that Bing isn’t dogshit), or is forbidden by the DOJ to take payouts (highly likely), Google is in a world of hurt.
I wonder how many of them are like me: I have an iPhone and a Mac Mini in the basement, so I can be in "blue bubble" conversations, but those messages are just flung via AirMessage to a couple different Android phones of varying and interesting shapes and sizes that I choose on a given day based on mood and planned activities...
30% of iOS users in the US also have an Apple Watch. This is a huge part of the deal, your phone syncs with your high quality watch, your high quality Mac, your high quality tv, etc. They cannot do much of anything with an android.
iPhones also last for several years making them ideal to pass down to teenagers and children, so it’s no surprise that 87% of teens in the US have an iPhone.
in Europe, but going the other way - will switch to Android, as iOS quality is in decline. Siri is a bad joke, and iCloud ridicilously priced for what it does.
While I don't agree that quality is in any way declining, I do understand the move is easier. Europeans are in love with Facebook, not Apple. Makes it easier to switch device platforms, for sure.
No, that's really not the case. Facebook's reputation is not good at all here (in Europe), whereas people are shilling for Apple all the time. It's just really nice to have a messenger that is not tied to a hardware platform, and WhatsApp became popular before it was bought by Facebook.
iMessage lockin is really just an America-centric problem. Rest of world uses Whatsapp, which I find actually works better than iMessage. This gives me hope that Americans will eventually switch over to Whatsapp too. For now, if you want a social life in America, you need iMessage, at least in my circles. I am part of exactly 0 group texts that have android users. Having a single android user just completely breaks group texts, so those users are harassed by their peers until they get an iPhone.
I find it fascinating that Europeans are so enamored with Facebook that they choose it over Apple. I don't expect this attitude to become normal in the US anytime soon, if ever. The FB brand is becoming toxic.
Meh, iMessage is good, but not a lock-in level feature for me. I don't think anyone over the age of 16 cares what color their "bubble" is. LOL. Now the integration across the entire Apple ecosystem is another story. I'm absolutely hooked on how all my Apple products work together almost perfectly.
From a development perspective: Apple has been very pleasant to develop for. I like swift a lot, I like the metal API, I like objective C, they have solid options for UI libraries and frameworks, lots of up to date documentation, Xcode doesn’t drive me too crazy, etc.
Android development, in my experience, has been a complete shitshow. I remember getting started by following tutorials on the official docs that would fail to build with cryptic gradle errors. Like, the very first intro project.
There are numerous languages and frameworks that are options to use, and it’s not clear which are the best or most future proofed. If you’re getting started, what are you supposed to use? The base sdk, which can’t even work properly on the happy path? Jetbrains compose? React Native? I personally opted for flutter, which at the time was positioned to be the flagship framework for developing UIs on their upcoming OS, Fuchsia. RIP.
And last but not least, I would like to extend a single digit to Google for the hoops they make you jump through to ship a mobile app. I had the pleasure of having one of my apps rejected with only a vague explanation that I couldn’t make sense of.
I politely asked them to explain more about the issue and how I could bring the app into compliance, and I just got the original vague response copied and pasted with a random meaningless sentence highlighted. I tried one more time, same deal, and I gave up.
I since gave up on android development and switched to iPhone for my personal device.
I beg to disagree, you can praise the apple products all you want from a user point of view but the tech side..
Xcode is the worst ide I've ever used, laggier than an electron app, weight 12gb and the appstore doesn't understand how to resume downloads when it fails, it has a terrible config file which plays badly with git. The iOS app upload itself is so broken in it that apple themselves released a thirdparty tool to bypass it.
And don't get me started on appstoreconnect (the web portal) which looks like it hasn't been updated since 2012, the funniest bug might be the race conditions when you reorder images.
That it is laggy for you is a valid complaint (isn’t for me) but the rest aren’t really complaints about Xcode…. To the OP’s point I’ve aided experienced Android devs write their first iOS app with little to no help on my part and complete ease for them. I’ve had the same developers help me write an Android app using Android Studio and there was so much “sorry, oh yea sorry about that too, yea you just gotta wait…”
I'd never want to be pinned under Apple's thumb. Equally, I wish Android focus more on being actually usable and less on being eye candy and bloatware.
I'm holding my Android phone upgrade (5.5" screen - it's been 7 years), waiting for the market to offer me a reasonably-sized screen that I can hold in my palm (single palm, not both).
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[ 113 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadI recently purchased an Android (Galaxy S20) for testing a cross platform app I've been working on and was shocked at how much worse it's gotten over the years.
If you have a choice, and you do - (just buy a used iPhone a couple generations back, I got an iPhone 8 recently for $100 CDN) - I can't fathom why you'd choose Android, especially with Google's telemetry.
The iOS OS itself is incomparably easier and more pleasant to use (even my 120hz Galaxy S20 device has animations that are choppy as all hell) - and that's not even getting to the borderline unbelievable difference in hardware quality.
I paid $250 CDN used for this S20, and $100 for the iPhone 8 I recently snagged. The 6-year-old iPhone 8 runs incomparably better than the 3-year-old S20.
Because Google lets you remove their telemetry, and Apple doesn't?
I'll reconsider Android phone only when manufacturers start providing as many years of software support as Apple does. Planned, premature obscolence is unethical and sucks.
If I bought an iPhone I'd have to buy Apple storage to do all of that, and I don't want to. My Google One account has Youtube Music and Youtube premium along with the storage. I never see Youtube ads which alone is worth every penny.
Other than that I really don't miss one thing from my old iPhone. Smartphones are so good these days all iOS competes on is sugar on top.
Sounds[0] familiar[1]...
[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
That being said, I can use open-source projects like Syncthing or Owncloud to handle my syncing, and skip the whole mutual trust part. Though I'm sure the NSA does a wonderful job auditing Apple's private codebase, for whatever sense of security that offers.
(I know Apple is inching down that path too, but so far they have simultaneously maintained their privacy focus.)
- Android is just cheaper and runs on more hardware
- Android is freely licensed and offers secure transparency that iOS does not
- Android doesn't claim authority over being able to install apps
- It has actual desktop-grade APIs like Vulkan and Linux syscalls
Apple is expensive if you’re constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest, but at the mid range longevity is more important than initial price alone. People replace their phone enough the important bit is how much your paying per month not the actual device cost.
“Whether it's the smaller battery, the demands of the Tensor chip or some other factor, the Pixel 6a fell flat on our battery test, in which phones surf the web continuously until they run of power. The Pixel 6a lasted an average of 6 hours and 29 minutes, which is more than 3 hours behind the Pixel 5a's result on that same test. Even worse, the Pixel 6a trailed the iPhone SE (2022), and we consider the 9 hour, 5 minute time that Apple's phone produced to be below average for a smartphone.” https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/google-pixel-6a
That’s the trend, a new model Android phone has near iPhone prices for a device that’s comparable but will have a shorter lifespan/ worse resale price. Buy an older model and you save money today, but need to replace the phone even more frequently.
Further, in each case I did so after three to four years of use. The one exception is an iPhone 8 I a) bought used from Sprint/T-Mobile, and b) traded in after 18 months to the same carrier for an incredible deal toward a new iPhone 13; otherwise I would still be happily using it.[1]
There is no way that any used Android phone, even the most expensive flagship model, would ever be worth anywhere as much. And that's not including their lack of software updates. Meanwhile, the iPhone 5S I sold in 2017 after four years of use believing that it would soon lose software updates a) did not lose active support until 2019, and b) still is getting security fixes (the most recent four months ago)!
[1] More happily than the iPhone 13, really. I hate Hate HATE Face ID.
On the other hand, almost nobody I know outside the tech sphere gives a crap about security updates. OnePlus is a very popular brand with an atrocious update policy, but it delivers much better value than something like an iPhone. Xiaomi is also getting very competitive in this market, often ignoring or rescinding their software update promises but handing you an excellent phone for super cheap. The cheaper iPhone models also offer this, but often with weirdly outdated designs and comparatively inferior screens.
Basically, a device that’s got a 30% price premium for equal hardware, but lasts 50% longer saves me money.
PS: I would suggest a battery replacement at year 3 or 4, that dramatically reduces the issues with older phones and can push you well past that 50% mark.
- Browsers with add-on support, to make browsing the internet bearable
- DNS-level adblocking, to make app usage bearable
- Sideloading apps, to access software which Apple nor Google would condone
All of these are dealbreakers for me.
OS upgrades are less of a concern on Android, where apps tend to support very old versions of the OS (5.0 is not at all uncommon to be supported, which was released 9 years ago), as opposed to iOS, where it's common that only the latest two OS versions are supported. This fact alone makes it so that an Android device might even be useful for longer than an iOS-device, which is entirely locked out of basically all of the app store after 6-7 years, with no way to salvage the device any more.
I use both platforms, and they have strengths and weaknesses, but for the average user Android is going to provide a massively worse web privacy experience.
it's possible with AdGuard Pro and similar apps on iOS, although it's obviously not possible to run these apps with root privileges, like AfWall and others.
On iOS content blocking can be done on a very low level by ad blockers posing as local on-device vpns. This doesn’t require root and is super easy to set up. (e.g. https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS)
Very few reasons to stick with Android *for someone who isn't technical or succumbs to pubescent peer pressure
But that said the Android constantly-changing API's, device compatibility/fragmentation is a bit of a nightmare.
Snark aside, Apple is really nice and if you're used to it, great, I don't have a strong opinion anymore. But I bought the 14 Pro then went back to my S21 despite the apple being much better hardware. The gesture nav and experience was just annoying to me.
My wife and I don't give two sticks about that. Most her friends use FB Messenger, mine Whatsapp or plain ol SMS.
Once that's out of the way, the 'which is better' becomes less clear. I don't like how locked down IPhones are, and feel Samsung has better cameras. What would an IPhone buy me, at that point?
* AirTags, but for android. Even called "find my device". Not "locate my device" or even anything different!
* Live Photo wallpaper, but for android.
* Emoji wallpaper, but for android.
* RCS features to bring it closer to parity with iMessage, for android.
in other android news this week, WhatsApp turns the microphone on all night to listen to you snore or whatever: https://9to5google.com/2023/05/09/whatsapp-android-microphon...
Clearly what the iPhone needs is a real competitor. Google's got a lot of great stuff going on, maybe they should pass the phone baton to another company.
"Clearly what the Android phone needs is a real competitor. Apple's got a lot of great stuff going on, maybe they should pass the phone baton to another company."
I can't say I know what an emoji wallpaper is. From what I can find, it's just another type of live wallpaper? I guess the new Android version may integrate better with the system UI colour theming?
RCS is an absolute failure. It's better than SMS but so is Signal, and with Signal your ISP can't read your messages. With the EU forcing companies like Apple to interoperate, Google should really be looking towards initiatives such as MIMI rather than try to force this stupid phone carrier-based protocol down everyone's throats.
The new Pixel phone seems to be doing things well. It's well-reviewed, despite its comparatively mid-range processor, and the new Android theme seems to fit the device well. These new Pixel devices all seem pretty good, to be honest. If Google can manage to keep supporting these devices (sounds impossible, I know!) I think they have a find product range on their hands.
I don't know what the Whatsapp bug has to do with Google, though? I suspect that's just WhatsApp's calling functionality not giving up a microphone lock after the app is dismissed into the background.
RCS has end-to-end encryption.
I don't think E2EE is even part of the standard, I think it's just a hack Google built on top of RCS for their own app.
And RCS is something that would get copied by Apple, if Apple wasn't against it for business reasons.
I'm sure Google could figure out how to make it play along nicer (they already implemented reactions, so don’t give me bullshit telling me they can’t improve it more) or - better yet, create a more solid alternative.
That's not really Apple's job. They made a superior piece of software and reasonably want to use it to encourage people to their platform.
You might not like it - but it is allowed.
If you'd like the features Apple offers, you're welcome to move to their platform. :P
No different than if you'd legally like to watch Star Wars at home, you'll need Disney+.
Disney isn't somehow required to also offer it on Netflix. :P It's called a feature of the platform. If you'd like that feature, use that platform.
Your cousin doesn't have D+? Well, I guess y'all aren't chatting about the new episode of 'Andor' that dropped that week.
They don't have an iPhone? Guess y'all have to deal with green bubbles.
That's part of how platforms - necessarily - differentiate themselves from one another to encourage users to them, just like console exclusives.
When I was a kid, if you liked Sonic, you had a SEGA. If you liked Mario, you had a Nintendo.
Nobody in the world in the 90’s was expecting a Sonic game on a Nintendo console or vice versa.
I don’t know what changed that people are suddenly freaking out about this, lol.
It shouldn’t have to be explained in a group as highly intelligent as this one that this is simply basic anti-competitive practice.
If iMessage was everywhere it would be a monopoly and y’all would be clamouring for some alternative anyway. :P
There’s literally just no pleasing some of you, lol.
Yes, this is how ridiculous the Apple ecosystem sounds from the outside.
Group chats also work fine if we’re all using Messenger - group chats work just fine if we are all using Signal - it’s almost as if software works as expected if it’s being used as expected.
Mind blowing, I know.
There is no other major chat platform that offers interoperability with services the platform owner does not own.
(Messenger and Instagram just got some sort of interoperability, but since they are both Meta properties, it only helps prove my point.)
What’s beyond ridiculous is to expect a SEGA Genesis cartridge to just run, unmodified on an SNES, which is what you’re demanding, here.
Yeah, a group game of Super Mario Kart 64 works awesomely on an actual N64 with a real cartridge and four controllers - but hey, why doesn’t it work the same on my PS1?
Well, fuck Nintendo for not opening up their game to other platforms! They have awful business practices!
…
…now that’s ridiculous shit, and what you’re almost literally saying; word for word, just with different hardware and software.
(The PS1 doesn’t even have 4 controller ports out of the box, even if it could run N64 software unmodified. The PS1 also had its own exclusives and benefits, such as Final Fantasy 7. Both platforms had their advantages and disadvantages. The N64 was far more powerful, but was hampered by cartridges, whereas the PS1 used CD media and could store much more, but push far less polygons.)
Why on Earth would it be Nintendo’s responsibility to make sure Kart 64 plays great on a PS1?
Isn’t half the point of a first party software release (either Kart 64 or iMessage) to provide a reason for users/players to choose that platform instead of whichever alternative?
Should GarageBand/Logic or iMovie/Final Cut suddenly be ported to Windows or Linux as well?
At what point does the ridiculous demand for interoperability stop? What do you want, only one monopolistic set of hardware and software for everything?
Personally I'm very happy for my Telco to just be a dumb pipe that supplies internet bits. Especially because that means I can get at my bits anywhere, not just on blessed networks. They're not however, they want lucrative "value add" features. Features that will have all sorts of strings attached.
But anyway, luckily RCS is dead. I'm not sure how they thought marketing "RCS" against WhatsApp could possibly work. Sure SMS was also a complex acronym but it only took off because there was nothing else. Acronyms are eschewed now by the mainstream. And even as a tech person I'm really happy not having to say "double you double you double you" anymore.
iMessage is ok, but it’s hardly the pinnacle of messaging software.
1) Who is being abused? The platform? Can you elaborate?
2) Can you give an example of the corporate brainwashing you’re referring to?
3) What are you glad about specifically?
There are several companies that already solved it, the world moved on, but only certain groups are harping on Apple and Google, nothing else. Why? Just use something else, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, they all work beautifully and are significantly popular.
There is a duopoloy in phone offerings and people in the USA just do it this way. If Google wants their market share - and to push back against Apple's offerings and prized position socially marked via bubble color - then it's on them. No other app is going to overcome the social issue here.
I'm saying that there's no reason why messaging should be put into hand of platform owners. The world is bigger, and if a third party makes a good entry, why ignore it and insist, that only Google and Apple are allowed?
Nope, Apple intentionally blocks anything like this to encourage people to buy iPhones. Basically what is happening is intentional.
Whenever I ask someone the point of using Android, I always get back an answer of "oh, it's because it prioritizes user choice, I can sideload APKs, it's cheap" or something along those lines. But I'm old, I just want a device that mostly works and nothing more than that, and Android (historically) hasn't been it. Worth noting that my iPhone 8 plus still receives updates, a support cycle that long is something unheard of in Android circles.
Why is Apple or Google the only messaging option for you? Those are not the only services on the market. I feel like you're missing the forest from the trees here.
Europeans, latin Americans and other large demographics, don't have the bubbles struggle because people don't default to iMessage but cross platform messaging platform to not discriminate anyone. Crazy, I know.
The social issue exists in the USA and that is what they're complaining about. It does not matter what the rest of the world does when this thread is based on that - in a thread about US iPhone market share, no less. Cross-platform-apps would've been the solution for this already if they had any shot of doing so.
I have friends from Africa and India, and they use whats-app when communicating with people in their home country because it costs money to send regular SMS.
SMS is just so outdated.
The only problem with the apps is that people use different ones. But I use matrix with bridges to unifi them all into one. Very much like beeper.com .
I can't really start a campaign to get people to switch to Signal, I don't have that much social capital to burn with my friends/family. And I personally would never use WhatsApp, and while I understand the history of its ubiquity, I can't bring myself to pull myself back into Mark Zuckerberg's ecosystem.
I bet they are still getting updates Chrome, Gmail, Maps, and all the other core functionality from Google, though. Notably, the most security sensitive element is the system web browser. This also gets updated even when the base OS does not.
Android and iOS are different worlds. For most users, the update lifecycle differences are not large.
This is 100% self inflected damage and they should have stuck with the original open/source based gchat. They went propriety and played themselves.
Also, most Googlers in the US use iPhone for personal and corp.
Is this why (as I understand it) Google has historically launched new apps/features on iOS first? I know firsthand that this is true for Google Voice (including before, during, and after the lengthy detour to Hangouts).
I don’t think it’s intentional, it’s just harder to provide a consistent bug-free experience on Android, even for Google’s own flagship device.
My work issued phone is an iPhone 11, which was released in 2019. It is running the latest version of iOS and it is still buttery smooth and a joy to use. The equivalent Android phones released in 2019 would be a Samsung Galaxy S10 (last update was to Android 12) or a Pixel 4 (last update was Android 13).
What is a crucial difference between Android and iOS: older Android releases do have updates for all apps, including those, that in iOS are bound to the system release, like the browser. So even old Android are getting current Chrome (or Firefox, if that's your choice), mail client, calendar, etc. With Android, new system release for existing device is just a number, as none of the critical apps are bound to it.
Everyone tells me that there are these mysterious kernel bugs that are super dangerous, but, tbh, I have yet to see evidence of that. The more important app layer still sees many updates, including a lot of key system components.
If people want to compete with Apple on iMessage, they need to offer a product that isn’t obviously inferior. The longer they wait, the harder it will be to displace iMessage in the iOS environment.
But if Apple goes their own way with search (they’ve started taking baby steps), decides to take Microsoft’s money for default placement (more likely now that Bing isn’t dogshit), or is forbidden by the DOJ to take payouts (highly likely), Google is in a world of hurt.
iPhones also last for several years making them ideal to pass down to teenagers and children, so it’s no surprise that 87% of teens in the US have an iPhone.
Apple has been playing the long game.
2. WhatsApp is intentionally kept as a separate brand. Half of its users wouldn't even know that it's owned by FB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140412064444/http://blog.whats...
Android development, in my experience, has been a complete shitshow. I remember getting started by following tutorials on the official docs that would fail to build with cryptic gradle errors. Like, the very first intro project.
There are numerous languages and frameworks that are options to use, and it’s not clear which are the best or most future proofed. If you’re getting started, what are you supposed to use? The base sdk, which can’t even work properly on the happy path? Jetbrains compose? React Native? I personally opted for flutter, which at the time was positioned to be the flagship framework for developing UIs on their upcoming OS, Fuchsia. RIP.
And last but not least, I would like to extend a single digit to Google for the hoops they make you jump through to ship a mobile app. I had the pleasure of having one of my apps rejected with only a vague explanation that I couldn’t make sense of.
I politely asked them to explain more about the issue and how I could bring the app into compliance, and I just got the original vague response copied and pasted with a random meaningless sentence highlighted. I tried one more time, same deal, and I gave up.
I since gave up on android development and switched to iPhone for my personal device.
Xcode is the worst ide I've ever used, laggier than an electron app, weight 12gb and the appstore doesn't understand how to resume downloads when it fails, it has a terrible config file which plays badly with git. The iOS app upload itself is so broken in it that apple themselves released a thirdparty tool to bypass it.
And don't get me started on appstoreconnect (the web portal) which looks like it hasn't been updated since 2012, the funniest bug might be the race conditions when you reorder images.
I'm holding my Android phone upgrade (5.5" screen - it's been 7 years), waiting for the market to offer me a reasonably-sized screen that I can hold in my palm (single palm, not both).