#1-4 seem like reasonable issues, and I hope they get fixed. None are things that are a problem for me, but I can see how they would be for some.
#5 - I might be misunderstanding this, but it reads like: Apple-specific hardware does not work on Android, and this is the fault of Android. I would say the fault lies with Apple, who force proprietary interfaces and not open standards. Then again, for headphone interfaces (which I myself don't use - I have a decent pair of Sony headphones which just have a standard audio jack for audio only), I suspect that other manufacturers are dropping the ball too.
I'm unaware of a phone camera that doesn't have some kind of focus capability, and the tap-to-focus feature is part of the AOSP camera in, at least, anything north of 4.0, so...
TitaniumBackup with back up to a cloud service or your own server solves that problem. Alas, you do have to "root" your phone.
I agree such functionality should be included with any Smartphone at this point, but it appears that only a small percentage of Smartphone consumers seem to care.
These are not deal killers for me, so much as they are selling points for Apple.
Android has plenty of deal killers; slow scrolling response, too many crap apps in store, bloatware, cheap hardware designs, music players that lack complex playlist algorithms, lacking mac integration, limited upgradability, dumb OS features (samsung, ei: eye tracking?!), OS updates delayed up to one year after release, short battery life, etc.
Most of those complaints are device-specific. And that's the primary pitfall of Android: It's an ecosystem rather than a single, polished experience for everyone.
The best experience you can have of Android, IMO, is to get a Nexus device. Anything else is asking for disappointment.
Like maxk42 said, most of these are device specific. I will address some of these more specifically, though.
slow scrolling response
While Android as a whole may not be as smooth as iOS is (due to the Dalvik VM if I'm not mistaken), this is pretty much a non-issue on most newer phones from what I've seen. Also, the addition of the Android Runtime, I've noticed zero lag on my Nexus 5.
Too many crap apps in store
This is an issue on both platforms. Most of the most popular apps on the App Store are on the Play Store as well.
Cheap hardware designs
Not really an Android issue. Blame this on the OEMs. Though, there are some very well built, comfortable phones. HTC One, Moto X, both Nexus 4 and Nexus 5. This is more of a personal preference. I could say the same about iPhones as I personally don't like the design of the phone.
Music players that lack complex playlist algorithms
Perhaps not as complex as iTunes, Google Play Music is quite a service. Check it out if you haven't.
Lacking mac integration
Any specific examples here? I have used a Mac for the past year and have had no issues with integration.
Limited upgradability
Not sure what you mean if not OS upgradability (see below).
Dumb OS features
Again device specific. Also, something you might see as dumb may not be to someone else. Personally, I think the fingerprint scanner is dumb. Thought it was when Motorola did it years ago, think it still is today.
OS updates delayed
Again, device specific. Nexus phones do not have this problem. Moto X is another phone that is getting quick updates.
Short battery life
No response here. This is my biggest gripe with Android.
In other words : An Apple fanboy is being a total compainypants about Android because he doesn't want to accept that it's actually a pretty good phone.
I disagree. Any time someone switches platforms, they will undoubtedly be more prone to identify quirks and missing features in the new platform than everyday users.
If companies (be it Apple or Google) want users to switch to their platform from their competitors, it's critical for them to maintain feature-parity and push the boundaries on their strengths. Case in point: Apple adding notifications and copy&paste to the iPhone. Both were gripes from non-iPhone users. But at some point, Apple had to bite the bullet to follow suit. Whether their implementation was a success isn't the point, but rather keeping up with the competition in feature parity.
> I disagree. Any time someone switches platforms, they will undoubtedly be more prone to identify quirks and missing features in the new platform than everyday users.
Exactly, and this goes both ways. I switched to iPhone a little over a year ago (because apps) and the new car smell lasted about a day before I was annoyed by quirks like lack of a swipe-keyboard, inability to get a piece of information from one app into another app, and bad app switching. I returned it after about a week of frustration.
It isn't just him. I do miss undo still. I also still hate the soft buttons - I've hit "back" with my palm and lost what I was doing too many times. I like a lot of things about android, but small things really matter.
Hey, who doesn't? That's a very valid point. Too bad it's muddled in with other fan-boyish comments that greatly detract from the post's legitimacy. Is this a blog post about adding undo to Android, or nit-picking about things that aren't even issues?
And I quote from the article:
> Here's the thing: Typing a password to unlock your phone every time you want to use it is annoying. The root theme of this blogpost is smartphones ideally not wasting one's time, but by typing a password every single time you want to access your phone you're sure wasting a lot of it!
That's why Android phones let you customize a time-out before you have to type the password in to unlock the phone (e.g. when you type your password in, you can set it so you don't have to enter it again for the next X minutes automatically)... So I'm going to agree with the original comment and conclude that this is another case of misrepresenting 'facts'.
Also, regarding point #5 and the inability for him to use his Apple earphones with his Android phone, he clearly hasn't heard of standard TRRS connectors. At minimum, I find the author's titling of this section "External Hardware Incompatibility" - in an article comparing Apple products to others, no less - to be quite humorous. Or maybe this was intended as satire...?
Yeah, that's a common feature. iPhone has it as well.
I'd like to point out that in my next to last paragraph, I state that I want to use Android. I'm not some Apple "fanboy". I believe that setting the disk encryption password separately from the device's is a valid request and the fact that an App has existed for it since Android v3.0 validates that.
If you want more of a reason to do so, read this: http://nelenkov.blogspot.com/2012/08/changing-androids-disk-...
Using words like 'fanboy' is playing the man, not the ball. There's plenty of things to pick apart in there (from someone who's a dedicated user of iOS), but just labelling it as fanboyism isn't an effective way to argue against it.
Which sports are you talking about? Because in most sports where you directly face your opponent (i.e. no lines or nets in between), it is completely legal to use minimal body contact (in football, shoulder bumping is okay, for example) to defend or obtain the ball.
"Fanboy" is merely a convenient and quick way to annotate someone who is really into a certain company/product and actively defending it. I don't see how he is playing the man. If he would have said "you lil Apple faggot wouldn't accept Android if it were given to you for free" it would indeed be overly verbal, but "fanboy" is completely acceptable.
That's the one, the metaphor fit a bit better so I took the ball and ran with it. Not sure it was all in all a slam dunk, but you need to have a punt every now and again.
Not sure you watch a lot of football. "Was he playing the ball" is the idiomatic method to use when trying to figure out if pass interference occurred. Defenders are allowed to make contact after 5 yards if they're going for the ball, but not otherwise. Besides, you're just being pedantic, you know what he meant.
Football (or if you're American 'soccer'), that's where the phrase actually stems from.
I disagree, I think relying on a rally call of 'fanboy' doesn't do anything to further discussion of the points, and it's now used on both sides to immediately dismiss the points of someone as they're a 'fanboy' and implies they're overly blinded.
The point about his headphones seems especially off-key. It works on his iPhone and even on a Mac (disregarding the fact that those are made by the same company)? Obviously it's Android that is missing the standard.
The point about the camera is true though. I moved to Android from a Lumia 920 veeeeery begrudgingly simply due to the camera. The camera on my Nexus 4 is about on par with the camera on my old Samsung Focus: junk when compared with the Lumia 920. Now I'm back to the old days where I'm carrying both a phone and a camera (Nexus 4 as a phone, Lumia 920 as a camera).
I would pay Nexus 5 money for a Nexus 4 with a Lumia 920 camera, and I know I'm not alone on that.
As an everyday carrier of both an iOS and Android device, it's rather refreshing when people point out flaws and points of improvements on both platforms. I certainly hope Google fixes these problems ASAP.
The competition between Android and iOS will probably go down as one of the great technical "great leaps forward" in history. While I often wish they could all just get along, the fact that two incredibly capable companies (and heck, Microsoft as well now) are fighting it out hammer and tongs in a pretty flat playing field is ridiculously awesome. Imagine if the same level of competition had existed between Apple and Microsoft between 1985 and 2000.
Consider that we're getting smaller, faster, lower powered, and often cheaper devices with more features every year. We got this level of progress in PC hardware for a while (1990-2003 or so) but software progressed far more slowly. Right now, literally everything is up for grabs, and everyone is benefiting.
Man... I swear you can undo in nearly any text box on Android (unless it's a custom class used by the third party dev)... You long press on the text box and click undo on the popup.
Am I remember wrong? It's been 12 months since I last used my Xperia, so I probably am.
I'll be honest. I love Android, but little annoyances added up. I now have an iPhone... And am running into little Annoyances all over again. Like how that "a" is capitalised by accident, but is a pain to replace. Or how "Undo" on Archive for email doesn't work properly.
I meant, they are happy with iOS because there's something important, but they easily forget because it's hard to be described in words. Not impossible, anyway a lot harder than simple numbers and graphs. Or it looks too natural to be lacked.
And people realize that other products are lacking that after they drop iOS.
Android and iOS are very different OSes. iOS I feel is more out of the box everything you need but you must use our stuff (itunes, imessage...etc). Stock Android is more here is a barebone kit and we got all these third party stuff. Pick and choose what you like.
The Nexus 5 is for people who don't want all this complications. Its a very barebone phone designed for devs. But if you get an Android with a third part skin like the HTC One, most of these issues are solved (off the top of my head I know it has #2 and #3).
I've had an iPhone for two years, and never even heard about undo before. I almost couldn't believe it when I tried shaking, and it actually worked. Talk about hidden features...
But typing is so much slower with an on-screen keyboard anyways, and I so rarely select text for anything but copy/paste, it has never once happened that I wished there was an undo.
Undo is not only for text! Delete an email message by mistake, or move it to wrong folder. Shake iPhone/iPad. The message is back... It's a killer feature for my 67 years old mother.
The complaint about backups is inaccurate. Preferences like sound or vibration on type and (infamously) wifi are backed up automatically and restored on boot. Many apps choose to save user preferences on their own servers in lieu of using the Shared Preference manager, but many others do not - those preferences will also be restored.
Inaccurate? He turned on backup, and most of the settings didn't come back. Apps don't opt-in to the backup feature in iOS - they opt out. This is a design decision that results in a UX failure, and not an inaccurate complaint at all.
I have to admit, my jaw dropped when I found out I couldn't undo a text edit on my Nexus 7. This was last year; I assumed it had to be something that would make it into 4.3 (no) or 4.4 (still no).
iOS's shake-to-undo still feels a bit gimmicky to me (I prefer the keyboard undo button on iPads), but it's something that should have come immediately after clipboard support on Android.
"While nearly all of our consumer audio devices share the 3.5mm headphone jack (and have since before I was born), my Apple “earpods” don't function properly with Android phones!"
Welcome to Apple world, where everything interesting is patented so it works only with your iPhone.
"Even my Mac computer can accept remote commands from and utilize the microphone of these (for audio/video calls)."
After a year of using Samsung Galaxy S 2, I realized that the most common reason that my phone shuts down (i.e. crashes) and restarts is copying to clipboard. After 20 clipboard uses, it just crashes, and Samsung, the biggest and richest Android vendor has refused to fix this issue for almost 2 years!
You can undo in Android, just not with the stock keyboard. Try out A.I.type Keyboard. It may not be the best solution as it should be built in, but it does work.
Concerning the SIM card, that sounds more like an issue with using a Verizon phone overseas than any issue with Android. I believe any non-LTE Verizon phone (including pre-LTE iPhones) would have the same issue.
Article points out missing features or presumed flaws in Android, but not The inverse (IOS flaws and missing features). How does this add value for anyone thinking of switching? or wanting to debate which phone is better for whom and why.
As such, it's nothing but another uninformed rant.
It's likely that most people who own an iPhone don't even know about this feature.
He owned an android phone for a week and did not even see half the features that Android has and IOS lacks. How can you adjust to a totally different UI (and begin to appreciate many of the features and differences) in such a short period of time.
Wow, I did not know about that undo feature. That would be a great addition to Android.
One way they could do this pretty easily in my opinion (if they wouldn't do the shake feature) is to have it included in the contextual action bar when you highlight text.
Interesting, I just tried Android for the last week as well. None of his complaints bothered me though. I actually almost switched, but ended up going back to iPhone as well. I will miss some things (widgets) but in the end the iPhone is better at being a phone IMO.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] thread#5 - I might be misunderstanding this, but it reads like: Apple-specific hardware does not work on Android, and this is the fault of Android. I would say the fault lies with Apple, who force proprietary interfaces and not open standards. Then again, for headphone interfaces (which I myself don't use - I have a decent pair of Sony headphones which just have a standard audio jack for audio only), I suspect that other manufacturers are dropping the ball too.
I'm glad we've agreed on USB, but I don't understand the need for proprietary 3.5mm remote protocols at this point.
I agree such functionality should be included with any Smartphone at this point, but it appears that only a small percentage of Smartphone consumers seem to care.
Android has plenty of deal killers; slow scrolling response, too many crap apps in store, bloatware, cheap hardware designs, music players that lack complex playlist algorithms, lacking mac integration, limited upgradability, dumb OS features (samsung, ei: eye tracking?!), OS updates delayed up to one year after release, short battery life, etc.
The best experience you can have of Android, IMO, is to get a Nexus device. Anything else is asking for disappointment.
If companies (be it Apple or Google) want users to switch to their platform from their competitors, it's critical for them to maintain feature-parity and push the boundaries on their strengths. Case in point: Apple adding notifications and copy&paste to the iPhone. Both were gripes from non-iPhone users. But at some point, Apple had to bite the bullet to follow suit. Whether their implementation was a success isn't the point, but rather keeping up with the competition in feature parity.
Exactly, and this goes both ways. I switched to iPhone a little over a year ago (because apps) and the new car smell lasted about a day before I was annoyed by quirks like lack of a swipe-keyboard, inability to get a piece of information from one app into another app, and bad app switching. I returned it after about a week of frustration.
And I quote from the article:
> Here's the thing: Typing a password to unlock your phone every time you want to use it is annoying. The root theme of this blogpost is smartphones ideally not wasting one's time, but by typing a password every single time you want to access your phone you're sure wasting a lot of it!
That's why Android phones let you customize a time-out before you have to type the password in to unlock the phone (e.g. when you type your password in, you can set it so you don't have to enter it again for the next X minutes automatically)... So I'm going to agree with the original comment and conclude that this is another case of misrepresenting 'facts'.
Also, regarding point #5 and the inability for him to use his Apple earphones with his Android phone, he clearly hasn't heard of standard TRRS connectors. At minimum, I find the author's titling of this section "External Hardware Incompatibility" - in an article comparing Apple products to others, no less - to be quite humorous. Or maybe this was intended as satire...?
I'd like to point out that in my next to last paragraph, I state that I want to use Android. I'm not some Apple "fanboy". I believe that setting the disk encryption password separately from the device's is a valid request and the fact that an App has existed for it since Android v3.0 validates that. If you want more of a reason to do so, read this: http://nelenkov.blogspot.com/2012/08/changing-androids-disk-...
Which sports are you talking about? Because in most sports where you directly face your opponent (i.e. no lines or nets in between), it is completely legal to use minimal body contact (in football, shoulder bumping is okay, for example) to defend or obtain the ball.
"Fanboy" is merely a convenient and quick way to annotate someone who is really into a certain company/product and actively defending it. I don't see how he is playing the man. If he would have said "you lil Apple faggot wouldn't accept Android if it were given to you for free" it would indeed be overly verbal, but "fanboy" is completely acceptable.
I disagree, I think relying on a rally call of 'fanboy' doesn't do anything to further discussion of the points, and it's now used on both sides to immediately dismiss the points of someone as they're a 'fanboy' and implies they're overly blinded.
The point about the camera is true though. I moved to Android from a Lumia 920 veeeeery begrudgingly simply due to the camera. The camera on my Nexus 4 is about on par with the camera on my old Samsung Focus: junk when compared with the Lumia 920. Now I'm back to the old days where I'm carrying both a phone and a camera (Nexus 4 as a phone, Lumia 920 as a camera).
I would pay Nexus 5 money for a Nexus 4 with a Lumia 920 camera, and I know I'm not alone on that.
Consider that we're getting smaller, faster, lower powered, and often cheaper devices with more features every year. We got this level of progress in PC hardware for a while (1990-2003 or so) but software progressed far more slowly. Right now, literally everything is up for grabs, and everyone is benefiting.
Am I remember wrong? It's been 12 months since I last used my Xperia, so I probably am.
I'll be honest. I love Android, but little annoyances added up. I now have an iPhone... And am running into little Annoyances all over again. Like how that "a" is capitalised by accident, but is a pain to replace. Or how "Undo" on Archive for email doesn't work properly.
I miss my Nokia N9 :(
I'd never heard of a shake-undo feature on iOS, but it does sound awesome.
Then again, I'd take Swiftkeys over undo any day.
And people realize that other products are lacking that after they drop iOS.
The Nexus 5 is for people who don't want all this complications. Its a very barebone phone designed for devs. But if you get an Android with a third part skin like the HTC One, most of these issues are solved (off the top of my head I know it has #2 and #3).
But typing is so much slower with an on-screen keyboard anyways, and I so rarely select text for anything but copy/paste, it has never once happened that I wished there was an undo.
Text undo - now you mention it, that would be nice to have. I can't say I've ever cursed it's absence though.
He's just wrong on the camera focus. Just tried it.
I don't use disk encryption although what he says seems to make sense. I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker though.
Finally - regarding hardware compatibility? - sounds like a gap in the market for an enterprising chap!
iOS's shake-to-undo still feels a bit gimmicky to me (I prefer the keyboard undo button on iPads), but it's something that should have come immediately after clipboard support on Android.
Welcome to Apple world, where everything interesting is patented so it works only with your iPhone.
"Even my Mac computer can accept remote commands from and utilize the microphone of these (for audio/video calls)."
Guess who makes Macs? Apple.
http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/7762/zm0t.png
As such, it's nothing but another uninformed rant.
It's likely that most people who own an iPhone don't even know about this feature.
He owned an android phone for a week and did not even see half the features that Android has and IOS lacks. How can you adjust to a totally different UI (and begin to appreciate many of the features and differences) in such a short period of time.
This post was not worth reading.
One way they could do this pretty easily in my opinion (if they wouldn't do the shake feature) is to have it included in the contextual action bar when you highlight text.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6777363