My first smartphone. I started working at Tmobile in college as a sales rep when the G1 came out and I immediately was smitten with it. The functionality and experience was so much better than anything that BlackBerry had to offer, yet all of the seasoned reps scoffed at the G1 and continued to push and sell Blackberries. They thought I was crazy to carry and sell the G1. I think I got the last laugh.
Not OP and I also never used a Blackberry but, man, the G1's keyboard was so so good! I could (and did) type for hours and could even type blindly (without even looking at the screen).
One of the understated innovations of the iPhone was bringing awareness of the phone manufacturer to the masses, disrupting the relationship between customer and carrier. Android provided (and still does) a way for carriers to regain some control in that relationship.
One example is Verizon's Droid campaign, which was so successful that "Droid" became a genericized trademark for any Android phone for a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Droid
Manufacturer and career relationship was very strong in Japan ,because career was a new service developer and order what to make. iPhone did great here too.
Still is. iPhone never allowing carrier-customized ROM changed everything. At least now we can disable ~stupid~ sheep wandering homescreen on localized Android phones.
Missing from 2014: pushed out Lollipop release to OG Nexus tablets, destroying performance, leaving only those technical enough to downgrade with any way to keep using the devices.
2023: pushed out Android 14 update, removing access to any additional profiles used on the devices. TBF they still have time to deal with this one, but their response so far has been terrible.
And yet I still buy the damn things because there's no suitable alternative for me (ios doesn't have fdroid, netguard, non safari browsers etc.).
Oh fuck me. Given that I'm on automatic updates and the update has already been downloaded, next time I reboot my phone it will switch to Android 14 automatically. :(
The lock screen won't show anything sometimes, and you can't unlock it. It's just a wallpaper. I had to enable face unlock and auto unlock in order to use the phone. It start the camera app with the power button, try to access photos frying there, and that gets the fingerprint to work and unlock it.
If you use multiple profiles, you could potentially end up somewhere between locked out of your main account, to even soft- and hard-bricked. See siblings link from Ars.
I really liked Android, but at a certain point I just couldn't deal with the constant buggy releases, security flaws, and short update cycle anymore. Especially things like the Pixel phones crashing when calling 911 seems ridiculous in 2023. Maybe 10 years ago when I had time to play around with ROMs and nobody really needed to reach me 24/7 that would be fine, but now I need a device that "just works" and that's iPhone.
It is great that we have choice, but "just works" is not really the whole truth. It just works as long as you do exactly as Apple wants you to do. Any misstep or need for choice outside what they deem correct usage and Android "just works" much, much better. For you this might be perfect, but to me having zero choice is perfectly bad. A phone without F-droid is to me a brick.
That’s why I simply rock two old smartphones (an Android, Nexus 6P, and an iPhone SE, 1st Gen.). And as I look around, I use them much effectively than everyone I know with much more modern phones, when they have just one device. My iPhone just works (and it does it very well), while my Nexus can do whatever it wants in terms of instability, I don’t care. I use it as a pocket computer, with F-droid and its wonderful apps. On top of that I have an old low-end Samsung smartphone (someone just gave it to me), I re-flashed it with Lineage OS and it has its use-case, slightly different from Nexus. I really cannot see any need in one extra phone, as those 3 cover all my use-cases at the moment.
It would be nice if that's what they were advertised as, not as top end premium Android devices with polished experience as a major selling point.
But I agree, I had a Pixel 6 briefly when my S23 was in repair for a week and it was an incredibly buggy experience in comparison, although it was quite pretty.
Oh there's a ton more missing than that if we're talking the gritty take on 15 years.
There's Android 4.4's FUSE migration which setup a generation of Android devices to just randomly turn to crap over time, the iOS-ification of the OS by blocking things like log access behind non-standard permissions, there was Doze marking the official start to "important things can live in closed source Google Play Services", there's the death of the AOSP apps so now there's not even a maintained calculator app for Android proper, there's SAF bungled launch with 11 that made I/O for apps 10x slower (not sure they ever even fixed that)
I owe a lot to Android in some ways, my early career was putting together embedded Android deployments, and eventually I even lead a team that launched an Android based consumer product, but my phone is an iPhone, and that's not changing any time soon for a reason.
Also Google Pay stops working half way through a journey across London meaning you end up in a massive human pile up.
SMS messages stop getting received suddenly at least once a quarter usually when I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere and need to so a 2FA bounce requiring a reboot.
And that time it destroyed the filesystem on an SD card resulting in the loss of two weeks of irreplaceable holiday photos in Australia.
Travel advice for Android users:
1. Take a DSLR/mirrorless and use that. Or upload all your shit to OneDrive or something at every available WiFi hotspot.
2. Use actual debit/credit cards rather than rely on Google Pay.
3. Write down all your bank details and credentials on paper using a simple cipher (shift left/right a few digits / alternate).
Still I'd rather travel with an Android device because I'm less likely to get beaten over the head and getting it stolen because it's 3 months' salary where I am travelling.
SE series is great. I’m still rocking the very first SE, and apart from OS software updates (I still have security updates sometimes) it’s fine. Given the broken protective glass screen, it doesn’t look very attractive. The same could be said about modern SEs with the looks of iPhone 6.
I bet something that looks like iPhone 5/5S/6 in 2023 isn’t that attractive to steal, even compared to modern Android phones.
But if we stay on the subject of travelling, I would definitely took _at least_ two phones, an iPhone for stability and an Android for functionality.
>Don’t forget you can’t call emergency services if you had Microsoft Teams installed.
That was on Microsoft – not Google, though.
>Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?
FUD.
>Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?
If you want someone to tell you (read: decide for you and leave zero room for choice) what permissions are Good and which are Bad, then yes, iOS is much better. If you want to decide which permissions are Good and Bad, then no, Androids are much better.
What’s so special about Android 14, compared to other versions?
I’m still on Android 8, with my Nexus 6P that happened to be lucky and have no bootloops. Curiously, it still covers everything I need, has a quick charge, nice stereo speakers, and is updated with everything (all the apps, including built-ins), but the OS. Even the camera is great for my use case. A have an old Pixel camera mod, back from those early days.
I want to upgrade to a Pixel, but I have nothing else to do with my Nexus, so I try to keep it as much as I can.
> our mission has always been to bring computing to everyone
Yet if you try to do computing on Android, you hit a wall: file access is absymal from a user point of view (virtual folders ?). Text editors are terrible. The only thing existing are some BASIC interpreters, terrible to use.
Combine this with the unaccessible GUI (small scroll bars, widgets too big or too small) and everything tells you to go away and never look back.
Android is a computing device, in the same way your microwave is a computing device.
As opposed to what? Your Linux desktop that will readily allow sending your browser cache, ssh keys, family photos to anyone with a simple ‘npm install’, nothing at all preventing it?
Also, if you call that GUI inaccessible, you write from a place of privilege: mobile platforms absolutely beat the shit out of any desktop computer on accessibility count, hands down, any people with some kind of disability will tell you as much.
There are negatives, but also, all around mobile OSs are a newer generation of OSs, that fixes many problems of their forefathers. To not call them computing devices is just unreasonable.
> Your Linux desktop that will readily allow sending your browser cache, ssh keys, family photos to anyone with a simple ‘npm install’, nothing at all preventing it?
That's why everyone is pushing for development in containers..
Why not? If I run Firefox in a container, I would have to explicitly map in my entire real home directory for it to be able to read SSH keys (for instance).
>Your Linux desktop that will readily allow sending your browser cache, ssh keys, family photos to anyone with a simple ‘npm install’, nothing at all preventing it?
Either you are using it wrong (su) or you are describing the exact same behaviour as Windows and MAC. Is it perfect? No. Is it worse than any other mainstream product? No.
>Also, if you call that GUI inaccessible, you write from a place of privilege: mobile platforms absolutely beat the shit out of any desktop computer on accessibility count, hands down, any people with some kind of disability will tell you as much.
Really? A thread on HN a few weeks (months?) back about this did absolutely not show any such consensus. Many loved Apple products for accessibility, but even more commented that Windows was by far the best product available, far ahead of Mac and iPhones.
I used to SSH from my moto droid to my university lab and work on my bus commute.
Back when I cared, I would root my phone and install custom roms and had basically a fully functioning Linux environment. iptables worked and I would block network access to certain apps.
It's been a long time since I used to mess around with this stuff, but file access was fine. I'm not sure what the case is now, but it was possible to access pretty much all the files on the phone. Apps had their own folders mounted in /data/ and you could mess around with their files easily.
Android is much more of a computing device than a microwave or an iOS device.
Smartphones and tablets, no matter the OS, are mainly suited to consume contents, not to create them. Sure, if you had a traditional Linux distro on your device you would be much less constrained, but then you hit other limitations like the lack of a physical keyboard and a small screen size.
With all its flaws and lets say "quirks" because we are doing with Google here, I am happy to be an android developer and make good money with it (Germany).
I usually compare my situation with my iOS colleagues. When I find a bug or documentation issue in a Google library that is still maintained properly, after creating a bug on their issue tracker, you usually get a real person to properly analyze your issue within 1 month, maybe it's even fixed in that timeframe if you are lucky.
Sometimes you think a library is maintained and officially it is so, but they say development has stopped because of other priorities. Or "basic" features take years to be implemented.
If you know the right person on Twitter you might be able to get it moving internally.
My iOS colleagues can submit private bug reports but chances are super low someone is ever looking at it. There's no community around it, it seems.
What about the difference in pay checks and difficulty of the development? E.g. I know many iOS developers that are, how to say that, very far from being techy, geeky or whatever name we’d use for the community. Some of them aren’t even aware about what git is (yet they use it somehow), but their pay check way higher than the one Android developers have. Also (if they work for a company) they’re given all the needed devices (e.g. a MacBook Pro, iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad, if needed). I haven’t seen an Android developer that is treated like that. And for me it looks like Android developers need to know way more, yet they’re under appreciated.
> We always celebrate each Android release with a statue. I remember them arriving by truck to the Mountain View office, and Tracey Cole (Android’s first administrative assistant) would send a message to everyone in the building asking for help to unload it. Then the next year, we’d add another statue and continue to just find space on the lawn. Pretty quickly it got crowded and we didn't know what to do with all these statues! I'm happy to report we've now found a good home for them in Mountain View, and that we have continued our tradition of statue unveilings with each release.
It is quite unfortunate that they’re no longer publicly accessible :(
Android existing is obviously good but I still wonder about the original sin of it being Java based. Latency on so many things always gets me (I still remember how an iPhone SE would routinely outperform a top of the line Galaxy for Google Maps), and I know “Java slow” is more of a meme than anything but I can’t help but imagine that it must affect every project (especially vendor stuff which might be competently made but not made with performance in mind)
Lazy management searching for the most used language back then and not willing to invest in finding what would have been the best technical solution, no matter the performance drawbacks. As a result, security is still a myth and Android can only dream the low latency performance of other platforms for example when making music.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadOne example is Verizon's Droid campaign, which was so successful that "Droid" became a genericized trademark for any Android phone for a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Droid
2023: pushed out Android 14 update, removing access to any additional profiles used on the devices. TBF they still have time to deal with this one, but their response so far has been terrible.
And yet I still buy the damn things because there's no suitable alternative for me (ios doesn't have fdroid, netguard, non safari browsers etc.).
Complete loss of data. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/android-14s-ransomwa...
Back up your data while you can.
(And yup, I'm using work profiles and all that.)
Or avoid rebooting somehow (if it's not automatic) in the hope they somehow fix it...
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111309676504712576
But I agree, I had a Pixel 6 briefly when my S23 was in repair for a week and it was an incredibly buggy experience in comparison, although it was quite pretty.
There's Android 4.4's FUSE migration which setup a generation of Android devices to just randomly turn to crap over time, the iOS-ification of the OS by blocking things like log access behind non-standard permissions, there was Doze marking the official start to "important things can live in closed source Google Play Services", there's the death of the AOSP apps so now there's not even a maintained calculator app for Android proper, there's SAF bungled launch with 11 that made I/O for apps 10x slower (not sure they ever even fixed that)
I owe a lot to Android in some ways, my early career was putting together embedded Android deployments, and eventually I even lead a team that launched an Android based consumer product, but my phone is an iPhone, and that's not changing any time soon for a reason.
Tim Cook: No, we have non Safari browser at home.
[Non Safari browser at home: WebKit logo wearing a wig]
Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?
One year they forgot December existed in the Contacts app.
Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?
SMS messages stop getting received suddenly at least once a quarter usually when I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere and need to so a 2FA bounce requiring a reboot.
And that time it destroyed the filesystem on an SD card resulting in the loss of two weeks of irreplaceable holiday photos in Australia.
Travel advice for Android users:
1. Take a DSLR/mirrorless and use that. Or upload all your shit to OneDrive or something at every available WiFi hotspot.
2. Use actual debit/credit cards rather than rely on Google Pay.
3. Write down all your bank details and credentials on paper using a simple cipher (shift left/right a few digits / alternate).
Still I'd rather travel with an Android device because I'm less likely to get beaten over the head and getting it stolen because it's 3 months' salary where I am travelling.
0. This may be an unimaginably reckless contribution to techno-totalitarianism, but just get an old iPhone. They just work.
I bet something that looks like iPhone 5/5S/6 in 2023 isn’t that attractive to steal, even compared to modern Android phones.
But if we stay on the subject of travelling, I would definitely took _at least_ two phones, an iPhone for stability and an Android for functionality.
As for the iPhone, they mostly just work yes. For a price. Even the old ones are overpriced.
That was on Microsoft – not Google, though.
>Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?
FUD.
>Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?
If you want someone to tell you (read: decide for you and leave zero room for choice) what permissions are Good and which are Bad, then yes, iOS is much better. If you want to decide which permissions are Good and Bad, then no, Androids are much better.
Now as a MS customer it would not surprise me. But data makes arguments.
Okay, I've decided that arbitrary network access is bad; how do I remove it from most applications on my Android phone?
https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard
I’m still on Android 8, with my Nexus 6P that happened to be lucky and have no bootloops. Curiously, it still covers everything I need, has a quick charge, nice stereo speakers, and is updated with everything (all the apps, including built-ins), but the OS. Even the camera is great for my use case. A have an old Pixel camera mod, back from those early days.
I want to upgrade to a Pixel, but I have nothing else to do with my Nexus, so I try to keep it as much as I can.
Yet if you try to do computing on Android, you hit a wall: file access is absymal from a user point of view (virtual folders ?). Text editors are terrible. The only thing existing are some BASIC interpreters, terrible to use.
Combine this with the unaccessible GUI (small scroll bars, widgets too big or too small) and everything tells you to go away and never look back.
Android is a computing device, in the same way your microwave is a computing device.
Also, if you call that GUI inaccessible, you write from a place of privilege: mobile platforms absolutely beat the shit out of any desktop computer on accessibility count, hands down, any people with some kind of disability will tell you as much.
There are negatives, but also, all around mobile OSs are a newer generation of OSs, that fixes many problems of their forefathers. To not call them computing devices is just unreasonable.
That's why everyone is pushing for development in containers..
Either you are using it wrong (su) or you are describing the exact same behaviour as Windows and MAC. Is it perfect? No. Is it worse than any other mainstream product? No.
>Also, if you call that GUI inaccessible, you write from a place of privilege: mobile platforms absolutely beat the shit out of any desktop computer on accessibility count, hands down, any people with some kind of disability will tell you as much.
Really? A thread on HN a few weeks (months?) back about this did absolutely not show any such consensus. Many loved Apple products for accessibility, but even more commented that Windows was by far the best product available, far ahead of Mac and iPhones.
Back when I cared, I would root my phone and install custom roms and had basically a fully functioning Linux environment. iptables worked and I would block network access to certain apps.
It's been a long time since I used to mess around with this stuff, but file access was fine. I'm not sure what the case is now, but it was possible to access pretty much all the files on the phone. Apps had their own folders mounted in /data/ and you could mess around with their files easily.
Android is much more of a computing device than a microwave or an iOS device.
I usually compare my situation with my iOS colleagues. When I find a bug or documentation issue in a Google library that is still maintained properly, after creating a bug on their issue tracker, you usually get a real person to properly analyze your issue within 1 month, maybe it's even fixed in that timeframe if you are lucky.
Sometimes you think a library is maintained and officially it is so, but they say development has stopped because of other priorities. Or "basic" features take years to be implemented. If you know the right person on Twitter you might be able to get it moving internally.
My iOS colleagues can submit private bug reports but chances are super low someone is ever looking at it. There's no community around it, it seems.
I don’t understand why Apple has chronically been so terrible towards developers. They need them!
It is quite unfortunate that they’re no longer publicly accessible :(