I'm part of this statistic. I've been an Android user my entire adult life, but it really has been a constant downward spiral over these past several years. My previous three phones from LG, Motorola, and Xiaomi all had major software bugs that were never fixed, the biggest being just incredibly poor network connectivity (across multiple carriers, mind you) resulting in at least several calls just not connecting to me. I switched to an iPhone SE several months ago and have had zero issues whatsoever. I resent that my money went to a company like Apple, but there really is no alternative if you want a decent cell phone in 2023.
I kind of went the other way, I have had androids since 2010ish, then tried an iphone at the beginning of corona since my old sony phone couldn't run teams properly. Had it for 2 years and hated it so much I went back to android.
I couldn't even install a separate browser like firefox that was not just a skin and the ad-block on safari drove me crazy. It only prevented items from being displayed but not the network requests etc.
Also, it was nagging me a lot, constantly asking for me to sign up to icloud and other things.
Back on a pixel phone now and couldn't be more happy really.
It's been possible to install ad blockers for the browser on iPhones for years, without resorting to a VPN. I don't bother anymore because I'm usually at home and have a pihole anyway, but I used to use Firefox Focus—not as my browser, but to provide ad-blocking for Safari. Worked fine. Open it once to set it up (at least IIRC that was necessary—I don't remember, but there was some very-simple setup step I'm pretty sure) then never open it again. Ads blocked in Safari. Tons of other options, free and paid.
You do need a VPN (or otherwise something network-level) to block ads in apps, I think. That's a fair point.
VPN apps are annoying. You constantly have to turn in on or off. I find battery leakage. There are speed issues etc.. .And, the purpose of VPN is different than ad blocking.
Sorry, I don't really follow their advertising campaigns. I just mean that they can't make a valid claim for privacy, unless you agree to the idea of being private only when Apple likes...
Sorry, I don't really follow their advertising campaigns. I just mean that they can't make a valid claim for privacy, unless you agree to the idea of being private only when Apple likes...
Sorry, I don't really follow their advertising campaigns. I just mean that they can't make a valid claim for privacy, unless you agree to the idea of being private only when Apple likes...
Having switched from Android to iPhone recently, it’s not even the quality of the phone. It’s the insane fragmentation, incomplete features, and random breaking features.
I finally gave up when a pair of Bluetooth headphones couldn’t pair with my phone. I realized that there are simply too many variations of Android for device manufacturers to test. With an iPhone, you know that most accessories are going to be tested against your specific model.
Now that I’m on an iPhone, the integration between various device is insane. Answer a call in your watch, transfer it to your phone, then move it to your laptop. Seamlessly, cast music to speakers/tv/bluetooth and it just works, every single time.
The Galaxy models compete with iPhones. I've got an old Galaxy S10 that I got like 4 years ago and it still works great, even the battery is holding up so far.
I also remember Samsung being bad in the past but I got a Fold 4 and the software is fantastic. Very little bloatware and many convenience/productivity features added over stock Android.
My limited experience using friends' and family's Samsung phones is that they are the worst out of all of them. Absolutely nothing but bloated, buggy software that you can't disable.
Samsung is disappointing than Xiomi. My Mi phone lasted 4 years and after switching to samsung, it didn't even last more than 2 years. After the battery died, samsung became useless.
I'm part of this statistic too, in a different way. Android worked perfectly for me, but the OS was increasingly dumbed down and Androids consistently threw out features I loved. (Headphone jack, expandable storage, full rectangular screens).
Androids threw away their market differentiation just to become bad iPhone clones. When I found myself needing a new phone, I had little reason not to consider an iPhone.
I bought an SE, then bought a Pixel 4a because of iOS issues, but I am here again considering an iPhone as my 4a nears EOL. I share your resentment of giving money to Apple.
I am also part of this statistic. I feel like android dumbed down the google assistant. Sometimes I am no longer sure what app is called on hey google. In comparison to Bixby, the tech became worse.
I would have switched to SE if my wife did not get me a pro for my birthday (to communicate in iMessage). And now I am on this boring phone no longer passionate about phones anymore.
> And now I am on this boring phone no longer passionate about phones anymore.
Oh man, I could not relate more to this. With how hard it has become to run rooted, for the first time in well over a decade I'm running stock Android with no root. It used to be so exciting! A computer in my pocket! But more and more Apple's (awful IMHO) vision of the phone as an "appliance" rather than a general purpose computer is becoming true, and it's depressing. I don't even really care about specs anymore, cause I can't do much with that horsepower anyway.
I haven't gotten to the point of giving Apple any money yet, and probably won't as the Pixel A is affordable and does everything I need, but I miss the good old days so much. I've been hearing people say I should try GrapheneOS, maybe it's time to finally try it.
Graphene on a pixel is great. It's easy to install, with an online, real time(live) install and load.(Do not adb, a computer, USB drive, etc etc.)
It does add a bit of 'let's install a MacOS on an Alienware' feel to computing without the pain. Then f droid and infinite other sources for apps.
Yup, for something so critical in my life, I just want the damn thing to work. While I would love to tinker with an Android, I just don't have the energy for that (I did a decade ago) nor the time to troubleshoot problems that come up.
Android gets shittier with time in my experience, phones get buggy and unsupported in like 2 years. iPhone software works consistently, and the phones are supported for like 5/6 years by Apple with software updates.
Same. I had to make around 300 phone calls for a recent health ordeal by my rough estimates^. I went through 3 androids and settled on used iPhone after learning my lesson. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to drop calls/not be heard/screen freeze/no ring. A cheap 3 year old iPhone worked so, so much better.
^if you’re on “Obamacare”, which is a godsend, finding a specialist on your own equates to being given an excel sheet with extremely uncurated or simply incorrect listings. Then finding a specialized occupational therapist after surgery, etc, etc.
Funny, my last android was samsung which I had many of the issues you describe above, and in particular it felt very bloated.
I've been getting older generation Pixel S and they are very good for the price. usually 1/4 the price of a comparable flagship iOS and I never have any issues.
Nothing. The iPhone SoC blows every android out of the water. Apple has been dominating mobile performance ever since they went to 64-bit in 2013. That's a decade of leadership in silicon. No android comes close. Not sure what OP is thinking.
So what? The OS is totally locked down. There's nothing to actually do with all that extra compute. Are iPhone games better than Android games? Probably, but I imagine most of the HN crowd isn't into mobile games. Other than that I can't even think of what the better iPhone SOCs would be used for.
I'm saying it's good enough for my use, which is watching YouTube videos, using apps, taking pictures, having a reasonable battery life, making phone calls, sending texts.
It might not be the best possible soc etc. But for $349 it serves me as a daily driver for 3 years without shelling out over $1000
Because each one of those has 3 (Samsung) or 4 (iPhone) major models with wildly different specs, and each of those specs has often times major differences in quality between the two lines.
I’ve read a biography on him. He was definitely an asshole. But tbh he’s nothing comparable to someone like an Elon. Jobs fired people unceremoniously, but he didn’t buy a huge tech company and fire 2/3rds of staff and make them work weekends and holidays to get things working again. Jobs was shitty to his daughter, but if you learn about how he was disowned as a child it all starts to make sense. Not that what he did was excusable, but it’s not quite “americas greatest asshole”
Why do you resent that your money went to a company who put a good device in your hand? I'd resent giving money to a company who can't be bothered to make a device that makes me happy.
I'm pretty sure you could fill a library with how much this topic has been discussed over the years, but iOS doesn't make everyone happy. It's entirely possible to enjoy the stability while also being frustrated by Apple's software design choices.
Interesting you didn't name the two brands that are true, non-Chinese flagship Android: Pixel and Samsung.
If you want true software freedom on a phone, there is GrapheneOS on Pixel. I think Samsung is the better UI of the two, but if my Samsung breaks I think I'll go pixel and go graphene.
I've been using Google Fi as a wireless provider for years and have been using their phones as a result. I've only once ever had an issue with one of the phones from a software standpoint and it took me a while to figure out how to port over my contacts (I had to export them to an Apple format and then import them). I've stayed away from Apple products because (1) the Google products don't have a ton of corporate fluff like Samsung products, (2) Apple phones tend to do "magic" things that just annoy the hell out of me, and (3) Android Auto just works.
I've been thinking about switching to an iPhone because I'm tired of never upgrading my phone to avoid it breaking, but the fact that I can't install ReVanced or an adblocker stops me. I don't know if I'll ever change my mind on this, lack of good ad blocking really is a dealbreaker for me.
General purpose computing is a concept that computer scientists appreciate. The vast majority of consumers buy products based on their cost/benefit of their features and overall experience, not ideology of their technical construction.
You won't see too many people who decide to hand wash their dishes because they can't find a dishwasher with an unlocked bootloader. It either satisfactorily washes the dishes or it doesn't. Most people buy phones the same way.
Your comment has nothing to do with what you’re replying to. He’s explaining (at someone else’s request) his own consumer choices. He can make his choices and the people you’re talking about can make their choices.
And I can point out that I think that opinion is just as silly as resenting my dishwasher for lacking a JTAG port on the front panel. iPhone's aren't Stallman's college mainframe. They are consumer products.
You have to go back a long time, but just the Apple II[1] technically, and maybe the Newton, but both would be less general than a pre-App Store 2007 iPhone because Safari is such a difference maker.
[1]: I, III, Lisa, too, but I mean you get the gist,
Enlighten me, what could you do an Apple II that you can't do on a modern Mac?
It has a real UNIX terminal. I can write code in nearly any programming language. There are thousands of packages that I can install easily with Homebrew. It feels general purpose to me.
If you’re asking me that question I think you misread my comment.
This is a list of general purpose computer platforms Apple has made in the past in addition to the Mac. The Mac may be the last one they’ll ever make as open and general purpose as it is, which is a damn shame considering what they showed off with their Vision Pro announcement and press demos.
The disconnect is that you're thinking about computers for their ability to do computing. Most people don't care about whether their computers are good at computing, but are instead trying to accomplish some other task. In fact, the more that the 'computer' disappears, the better in their mind.
how are they stifling imagination? You can still get a compiler and text editor like always. Those two things were all we had back in "the good old days" of so-called general computing.
A few examples from my own childhood. Some freedoms were good and some are bad, but my mom said they were all worth it for what I learned:
· My dad made a custom boot script that gave me instant access to my favorite games.
· I sent a computer to the repair shop for weeks after figuring out how to change the computer to use an unsupported screen resolution.
· My Palm Pilot had several video game emulators.
· Our Windows 95 computer got the Ripper virus from my friend's 3.1 machine. It replicates if you boot the machine with an infected floppy disk connected, but it doesn't affect 3.1, so he had no idea his was infected.
They don't care until they need to do something that they can't do because their platform doesn't allow them to do it. There's no reason why compilers couldn't run on phones. Modern phones are more powerful than computers were even 15 years ago. And yet you can't do the things on a modern phone that you could on that computer from 15 years ago. At least you can't do it nearly as easily because of artificial limitations.
> And yet you can't do the things on a modern phone that you could on that computer from 15 years ago. At least you can't do it nearly as easily because of artificial limitations.
This may be a con for enthusiasts, but these artificial 'limitations' are exactly why Apple has been successful with the mass market. 15 years ago, computers were plagued by drive-by downloads, malvertising, and other crap. People in the early 00s spent millions of dollars paying repair technicians to uninstall toolbars, adware, and other junk software they were duped into installing.
But Apple, Google and co do the same thing themselves. Here's an example from Android:
Mom gets a new Android phone.
The phone asks if she wants to back up pictures she takes (it even used a weird word in my native language that I had never heard before).
She selects yes.
A few months later Google tells her to upgrade her subscription plan for Google Drive, because her Drive space is full. If she doesn't upgrade then scary things will happen!! (They said she wouldn't receive emails anymore.)
So she comes to me with it. It's an annoying process to delete the photos, especially when you're trying to make sure it only deletes it on Drive and not locally.
A week later she comes to me and says her drive space is full again, because the phone will keep pestering her to turn on cloud backups.
I have no faith that Apple doesn't pull some similar types of tricks. People who don't handle computing devices well will fall for all of these prompts about this and that. The alternative is that they never update their phone and don't understand why things don't work anymore.
They make an awful lot of their money selling what I'd assume to be general purpose computing devices.
I run mostly mostly open source software on mine. Almost everything made for the linux ecosystem is also available packaged for MacOS or can be trivially built on MacOS.
Not really. They are bringing features out on all of their platforms at the same time, now, so where is more feature constancy. Some iOS UI treatments have been brought to MacOS and some MacOS UI elements have been brought to iPadOS. But MacOS is not getting locked down the way that a phone is.
For me it's things like iCloud Photos having no API to access them and no reasonable way to pull them out or back them up. So very much a trap. Among other things.
I will fully admit this is a big problem with Apple. God forbid you have two iCloud accounts and want to merge (not just the photos) My sister has two from living in another country for a decade and me, our dad, her husband, and her gave up after hours and hours and multiple trips to the Apple Store. I see there are some software out there but it shouldn’t require it to merge what are essentially files, and who knows if they will merge everything. I think we’d have to download individual documents, maybe in batches of 10, from what I remember.
Thanks! I looked into it when that article got posted actually, and near as I can tell that isn't a solution to this problem - and that is fully intentional on Apple's part - because:
1) That article is for things in iCloud Drive, which is everything EXCEPT iCloud Photos. Though you can put photos in iCloud Drive (as files), they just won't be seen as photos, visible in iCloud Photos (or the Photos app), etc. without importing them on an Apple device manually into the Photos app. Where they'll then be synced into iCloud Photos.
The photos that are imported/stored in the Photos App on Apple devices also are not visible in iCloud Drive after being imported into iCloud Photos.
2) It only works on Mac/Apple devices. And only locally. So you'd need to sync to a Mac device, then backup the mac device, then hope it all works. No direct backup is available. So even if it did allow syncing iCloud Photos, it is a really awkward and brittle way to back them up.
3) There ARE APIs for iCloud Drive. But not iCloud Photos.
The web iCloud Photos interfaces also only does manual per-album level downloads (no Takeout or global download equivalent) of photos using the web interface), which stops working at scale VERY quickly.
Notably, Google Photos stopped providing the Google Drive interface to Google Photos shortly after Apple made this their standard operating procedure. So it's a common theme.
Though Google Photos does have APIs and Takeout, so it's lockin is less 'firm', and they're definitely less obnoxious about it. The Takeout data requires some significant massaging to get equivalent from what is visible in Google Photos though.
This is the kind of sneaky trap I've learned to be wary of, as Apple does this a lot for lock-in purposes with their hardware too.
The photo library on a Mac can be in any local drive. You could put it on iCloud Drive but that would be redundant.
You iPhone or iPad take photos and store them in a local cache that syncs to iCloud. It is separate from iCloud Drive but the storage comes from the same iCloud capacity that you have subscribed to.
On your Mac the files are stored in a library folder that can be on any local drive. Those files can be backed up like any other file. Any changes you make to those files, like in the Photos app, are synced to iCloud Photos.
The photos in the local library are accessible but they are not really meant to be accessed. The meta data about the photos is stored in a database, not the files. There are original files, modified files, and thumbnail files.
If you want to you can export some or all photos to separate files and do what you want with them.
I do the backups from my Mac. Photos on that Mac is configured to download all of the photos in iCloud Photos. It is the source of truth for my photos. The photos are stored in a library directory as discrete files and the backup software has no problem backing them up.
It would be trivial to restore the whole set of photos. It is more complex to restore specific individual photos as you would need to know the file name of that photo.
If you want to generate an alternate photo store you can export some or all of the photos but that is not necessary for backups.
Seems like as long as they all fit, that should work. But does require a non-iPad/non-mobile device with enough storage, as iPad/iPhones don’t have backup mechanisms besides iCloud.
I don’t have a Mac laptop anymore, and my library was starting to get too big to fit on any one device. That’s when I realized they had no other way of accessing/moving/transferring/backing up, so I moved it out using some special photo backup software before I got stuck.
Yep I get way better service on iPhones. Even with wifi calling. I get 0-2 bars where I live. With my iPhone I don’t even have a tenth of the same reception problems.
> My previous three phones from LG, Motorola, and Xiaomi all had major software bugs
I see this pattern with a lot of IPhone users. They tried the cheapest worst quality android phones and came away with a bad taste in the mouth. So iPhone is the only "decent cellphone in 2023". My dude you never tried the good android phones. Get a Samsung galaxy flagship. These are at par, if not better than the similarly priced iPhone model in all respects.
Me too. Love android UI more actually, the screens more, and the fast charging more, but a few things such as the photos/videos are what drew me to finally get a 13 pro max. I still use android on a wifi only phone and tablet and enjoy it but iphone is nice for daily driver and because the photos i can take and battery life post charge when full seems to be longer.
I've had both Pixels and iPhones (work phone). They're mostly the same to me, except that iphones are much more expensive for no good reason (besides branding). I like that they still make small phones though. Was super happy with my pixel 4a, but they don't make such small phones anymore unfortunately.
KISS launcher is one of the main reasons I gave my iPhone XS to my dad. On iOS I'm not even allowed to place app icons where I want to. The freedom to install any app I want is another main advantage.
Most people just want their defaults to be good enough but there's no reason to limit those that want something that works better for them.
Obviously iOS does some things incredibly well. E.g. gesture navigation on Android is objectively worse than on iOS.
