One week with the Google Pixel
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This is my main sticking point with Android lately. I would much rather have a stock Android OS + device from Google, and then add the few Google services I want. Instead Google is getting more and more baked into everything, and understanding how my data is being used is becoming more difficult - and this has me worried.
You are among the few (yes yes even here on HN). And google doesn't make money with you. So who cares?
People have pushed this "You are paranoid, no one is out to get you" narrative since the 90s. Everyone has something to hide, even if its just their sex life or beliefs that aren't politically favored that might affect your employment.
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I don't have a single bad thing to say about Google, but that doesn't mean that I am not afraid of their power and I don't dread the day that the current management will not be there to keep them in check. And sooner or later that day will come.
Which one? In which way is it a fallacy?
You have no specific insight on the behavior of Google's future leadership team, so the assertion that Google will necessarily start abusing their users at some point in the future is unsupported.
(Apologies if this is coming off a bit blunt, there's just not much else to say)
The threat I'm worried about is the surveillance arm of the US government. The small glimpses we've seen are frightening - for example, they spliced a cable between two google data centers and recorded (some? all?) of the traffic travelling between them. This particular hole has since been plugged (google encrypts between-data-center traffic now), but we simply don't know what the US government's capabilities are. This isn't paranoia stuff - they really do this kind of thing.
And even if google manages to 'go dark' to the NSA, the US government can just legally demand access to all of our data. And block google from telling us that the data intrusion happened.
Its funny you mention FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is exactly how I feel about trusting google (and by extension the US government) with every email, search, voice, in-app text in android, phone call and so on that I've ever made.
As a non-US citizen, I have even fewer protections and I can't fight this politically. But I can give my money to Apple instead. So thats what I do.
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http://www.theweek.co.uk/google/11581/google-worker-fired-fo...
> But further examples of Barksdale's abuse of his privileges were more serious. Earlier this spring, he viewed call logs from Google Voice in order to identify the girlfriend of a 15-year-old boy, who had refused to name her. Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call his girlfriend.
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Not a single instance of a Google employee misusing info? Not one you say?
A failure of internal controls qualifies as a problem just as serious as intentional abuse of it.
Then you shouldn't have replied to me and changed the context?
The context was information in Google's possession.
You tried to narrow it to advertising after I replied which is, at best, silly.
EDIT:
> ..did you read the original post?
You replied to me and tried to plays devil advocate. The context of my words is the one that is relevant, not your attempt to shift the goal posts into some narrow land of the absurd where you get to pretend the fact information Google collects ultimately gets abused isn't a privacy problem.
So just stop, honestly. Your position as absurd as storing plain text passwords because "Well, there has never been an official policy of abusing that information."
Rogue admins, hackers, etc. are all valid threats to privacy when the information is stored in an easily transportable form and the fact that isn't obvious to you terrifies me that you are somehow a professional sysadmin.
My original words are: "And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists."
And nobody has got you since the 90s. When will it happen? And when it does, what will 'it' be?
There are a few technical issues I need to work out before I make the change though. First, I need to get macOS running natively on my workstation so I can install my own software on the phone, as I'm not running out to get a MacBook for this single need. Second, I need a root shell.
There's Ubuntu Phone, KDE Plasma, Copperhead and others but they don't feel like a good solution. The problem is always the same: no apps. It doesn't matter if I can install 99/100 apps I need but the one I can't is a messenger one of my clients requires me to use. Or if I can't really rely on a compatibility layer like MicroG, since Android is not that open anymore.
These OSes exist today, and I'd like to use them, but they're typically limited to a very small handful of (typically obsolete) devices. As long as this is the case, they'll have a lot of trouble finding enough developers and users.
If we could simply link our own kernels against these drivers the way we do with the nvidia driver and DKMS on desktops, it would be a revolutionary step forward for alt smartphone OSes. We could start working on userland instead of spending so much time devising hacks to simply get graphics and radio working one handset at a time. Unfortunately, the OEMs couldn't care less and would much rather our phones become e-waste than eat into next year's sales figures. Until then, we're pretty much at the mercy of Apple and Google :(
Secure enclave. App sandboxing. Fine-grained revocable permissions. TouchID. Differential privacy. iMessage encryption. Find My iPhone. On-device models for photo recognition.
The question is how to spin it in a positive way.
The developer looks at the app sandbox and fine-grained permissions and thinks "I can't run my code on my own device," and walks away.
The police officer looks at TouchID and the secure enclave and thinks "I can't gather evidence," and walks away.
The marketeer looks at on-device models and differential privacy and thinks "I can't understand what my users want if the device doesn't report it," and walks away.
But the user (arguably) benefits from each of these things. App sandboxing, permissions, and a lack of background tasks remove the ability to run malicious code without my consent, in theory. Secure enclave and encryption remove a malicious third party's ability to intercept my communication, in theory. On-device recognition models allow me to benefit from better organization without sending my photos to some cloud vision service, in theory.
I agree that this would piss off developers who value this kind of data robbery - but Apple is in a much better position to double down on selling quality apps that treat their users as customers instead of products than Google (based on the statistic that iPhone users purchase more apps).
So yes they do feel the need to collect as much data as possible.
A year ago when I got my iphone I deleted all of the historical voice data that google stored. Just now, In the process of finding the google activity link below, I've learned that all my deleted voice clips have magically undeleted themselves.
I've been very happy with iOS - there's some little UI gripes, but for me the biggest feature is Tim Cook standing up to the US government on behalf of privacy. I'm convinced that as an organisation Google just doesn't understand what privacy is or why its important to people. With all the new deep app intelligence features in android, I shudder to think about simply how much data google might be storing about its users. I'm very happy to be out.
Apple have gladly handed over user info on dozens of occasions (in accordance with the law).
There are tons of stock Android phones you can get from "off market" manufacturers
The Nexbit Robin: https://www.nextbit.com/
The OnePlus two or three: https://oneplus.net/2 , https://oneplus.net/3
Xiomi Mi Note: http://www.mi.com/en/minote/
ZTE Axon 7: https://www.zteusa.com/axon7/
Obi SJ1.5: http://www.obiworldphone.com/global/sj1.5
VeryKool (InfoSonic): https://www.verykool.net/Products/Smart_Phones/
As far as I know, these are all "stock" and only come with the smattering of Google apps, and absolutely none of the carrier bloatware you usually get. When I got my OnePlus Two, all it had on it were maybe 6 Google apps and that's it, nothing more, nothing less.
I've been ecstatic with the performance of the phone and only having the apps you really want on the phone makes it much easier to use. Plus, you can completely customize it, put a custom ROM on it and turn off all the Google tracking stuff. I have way more piece of mind since I got it.
Like don't use the google "now" or "pixel" launchers. Turn off google on tap. Etc..
1.) The phone is extremely slippery. I don't agree with the author on this one. My old iPhone was way easier to grip, and the iPhone 7 is even better. I bought a case which fixed this issue.
2.) I think this is pretty important. Android apps are second class citizens. A lot of applications don't work properly with Android and you can tell that there just isn't much developer time spent on it. I hope as the Pixel and Google phones become more popular at the high end, more developer time is focused on these applications. Most applications work fine, but sometimes it can be frustrating when an application you expect to work has major bugs.
Google could probably address this more effectively with some variant of: dev technologies making it easier to design for varied hardware profiles, test suites in the simulator that automate many types of testing across a set of standard profiles, specs for hardware makers showing them what the requirements of each standardized profile were, extensive test suites for hardware makers to make sure they conform to a standard profile, and a Google certification that a given device matches the such-and-such profile in all respects, so that if you test your code against the such-and-such profile in the simulator, and it works, it will work on the certified device.
I think there's a cultural difference between the two platforms as well. The developers that are inclined to want to make their application perfect and beautiful seem to be attracted to iOS.
* The app must be closed in a certain way (back button or swiping away, rather than home button or switching to another app) or else it'll permanently lose network connectivity after a few minutes. I think this is because they keep the socket object in their main activity, and they don't deal with cases where an idle connection gets evicted from a NAT table or similar. But that's just speculation.
* If you launch the app in certain connectivity states, it will not just put up a no-connection alert, but it will flush your stored password. This could leave you in a pickle if you use a strong passphrase that you keep in a password manager, and you were relying on the app to unlock your car.
* The app doesn't support fingerprints. This isn't a bug, but it's something that enough apps support nowadays that it feels strange they're so far behind.
In addition, I'm told the iOS app has more features than the Android version, but I've never seen it myself.
Now granted, there are a couple of nice, polished apps on iOS. But there are also entire app categories on iOS that simply suck. Some random examples:
1) For my big ass iPad Pro, I can't find a Torrent application and given how common torrent apps are, I have a feeling they are banned by Apple. On Android I have uTorrent, Bittorrent, BitTorrent Remote, you know the real deal.
2) For iOS the one KeePass port that's available and usable sucks compared with Keepass2Android.
3) For Android you've got a really awesome XMPP client, see https://conversations.im/ - for iOS the XMPP clients I tried sucked.
4) Firefox on iOS is just a shell around a Safari webview and cannot do plugins, being handicapped by Apple's restrictions - it can't even do ad-blockers like official Safari. On Android on the other hand Firefox is the real deal, as it comes with its own engine and can do plugins.
5) On Android I could find a good and usable app for Pinboard.in (PinDroid). No such luck on iOS, so I use it from the browser.
6) Speaking of Firefox, on Android you have the "official" Tor browser and Orbot, the proxy. On iOS you have the "Onion browser" - better than nothing, but still, it's not even a comparison.
7) We have Signal from Open Whispers Systems on both platforms, but can you encrypt plain SMS on iOS? No you can't. But on Android you can, see: https://silence.im
8) On Android I also have apps that monitors my battery usage and gives me detailed reports about what is consuming my battery (currently GSam Battery Monitor Pro). On iOS you only get the stuff in its settings and that's not enough.
9) On Android you can manage your files with file managers. So for example I use Amaze File Manager and you can organize files, copy or share them. And given that you can copy files to/from an Android phone directly, without that iTunes monster, that can be pretty handy. On iOS people use freaking Dropbox for file copying, which is pretty dumb.
10) Once upon a time VLC wasn't available for iOS, then it happened, then it got banned by Apple, being replaced by copy-cats trying to fool people, without Apple lifting a finger, then it got approved again. Either way, VLC is a second class citizen on iOS.
But in the sort of everyday apps most people use there isn't really a contest. Android lags far behind in overall polish.
And even if I can feel my own bias, I really think Android is the more polished one, OS & apps. I could enumerate all sorts of reasons for why, but then you'd hand-wave it as not being relevant for moms using apps that could have been web pages :-)
It's not a myth. Product Managers do look at the demographic split and invest more into iOS development. Also the fact that iOS is a more coherent platform i.e. Almost all users are on latest version means more resources on polish.
Design decisions have led to the requirement that apps can only access files inside their app container sandbox.
This means if you want a "file manager" for iOS, it can only manage the files that you send into that app.
Documents by Readdle is a bit of a hack: a file manager that also includes PDF reading bits and media decoding bits and picture viewing bits, with plugins to copy to/from cloud services. Either way, the only files you get to manage are livinng inside of Documents' file system. It's not very UNIX-y, granted.
But the inability to create a "file manager" is a legitimate design decision with legitimate upsides.
The biggest issue I run into is Android apps are often more resource heavy. Amongst Android users I know, Snapchat is an app you really want to be quitting in between uses to prevent background CPU use.. which gets annoying fast.
I don't have any, but the side by side tests I've seen of real world pictures it is a complete wash between the two.
I find it silly to say that Apple didn't present a compelling enough camera, but Google did, when they are as similar as they are.
However, the invasiveness of the Pixel changes for "Deep Google Integration" in #3 is likely as much a pro as a con.
Only problem that I've had was getting the fingerprint sensor working. You're finger down for around 45 seconds and it vibrates to tell you that its got it. That wasn't working for me and the Google engineers blamed it on software that I'd installed. But it failed before I'd installed any software.
I found an alternative way to do it ironically while waiting for a callback from the engineer. Hold your finger down for 15 seconds, lift it up but keep it hovering over the sensor. Then it will show you it's 20% done and prompt you to put your finger down again. It takes five iterations to get a finger done. You can do more than one finger and I've added four.
The one thing that I don't like is the dialing directory. You can't get it to be alphabetical and instead of a standard list you end up with these big boxes on the screen. Looks great in the photos with a half dozen contacts but fails with hundreds. The UI is extremely awkward and I don't know how it passed user testing. Does anyone have a favorite alternative for me to try?
Two pluses - battery life is fantastic and I've actually gotten almost two days from one charge. I am usually negative on all assistants but Google's is fantastic and I actually find myself using it for all sorts of things. I let my 100 year old dad try it. He smirked and said Google what is the weather in Paris, France tomorrow. It gave him the weather report and there was this gorgeous look of complete shock on his face:<).
I'm not sure I understand this negative. I'd think any problems caused by this would be easily remedied by just charging your phone while you're sleeping, when you can't use it anyway.
Or is he saying that it needs to be charged once a day, even if you charge it overnight?
It means you can't go to bed drunk and neccessarily expect your alarm to go off in the morning.
It really just means that any time your life gets out of routine, your phone is probably going to die.
I wish he would've elaborated a little more on battery life, as there's a big difference between a phone that barely makes it from morning to night and one that can't quite survive until the night of the second day since charge, both of which would need a daily charging.
When things go wrong, you need to make calls, put out fires, keep trying to reach remote towers using full radio power for extended periods.
When things go wrong is when you MOST need your phone, so you need a battery that can continue to serve you a lot longer than it normally needs to on an ordinary day unless you can somehow be certain that for you every day will be an ordinary day.
Some airports make them impossible to find, highly coveted, surrounded by the territorial and ferroucious Horde, oodles of macbook MagSafe and ipad Lightning cables eminating from the wall like thin withering tentacles of some white goop monster emanating from the power grid.
Other airports lock the power sockets away behind "Employee Only" signs and caution tape, with menacing security guards patrolling the area should you even think about stealing those precious MWh from the institution.
Still other airports have rows upon rows of power outlets in plain sight, but every single one of them is dead, disconnected, dying like your phone battery.
This goes well and according to plan until you go to bed really tired one day and forget to put your phone to charge. And then it happens again a week later, and then again...
(This might be related to using your phone in bed)
95% of the time, though, I don't need that much charge, and would rather have the option of carrying an extra battery charger with me only when I need it, rather than having a much larger, bulkier phone 100% of the time.
If you pay 3d games or use it constantly, of course you'll need to charge it sometimes. But for casual usage with standard basic apps, I sometimes forget to plug it in at night and it's not problem.
Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?
I'm glad he's happy and the Pixel seems like a great phone but this list just felt half crazy to me.
I don't think they are probably doing that, but there's not really any way to prevent them from doing that.
That said, if you already use Messenger for talking to friends, adding SMS isn't going to make a huge difference.
He and 7 billion other people.
Edit: and which sites they visit and like.
App drawer, it's personal preference but personally I like having a single home page and the rest of my apps in my drawer. But again that's just personal preference, I'm sure a lot of people would call it a negative because they have to manually move an app out of the app drawer every time they install one.
The operating system shouldn't be paternalistically responsible for preventing this kind of preference. Some people do want to voluntarily give this information to FB in exchange for a simplified or more integrated messaging experience. I don't happen to be one of them (no FB account), but it's a meaningful positive that the OS allows this for a whole lot of people.
> Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?
Yes. I have an iPhone and a Pixel. The fact that I can't only keep 4, or 8, highly-used apps on my iPhone's primary home screen really does make it harder to use.
Imagine a Windows or a MacOS desktop that was literally covered in evenly-spaced icons. There's a reason most people don't do that.
After playing with the home screen on iOS for a minute I remember what was annoying. I can control how many apps appear on the home screen, but they always float up and to the left. If I want to use my phone one-handed most of the time, it's really critical that I be able to keep two rows of apps at the bottom of the screen. Currently impossible on iOS.
Honestly I'd probably pick one up if not for the poor, IMO, speaker quality. If you like to talk to your phone Google definitely has the best voice assistant
I'm not sure why this isn't on by default given that the sRGB option on pixel apparently has the most accurate color representation of any phone (can't remember where I read it) today.
Yup. I have an iPhone 6, and routinely go two days between charges. I can charge it overnight, use it all day, skip a night, all day again, and still have about ~20% charge still left by the time I plug it in the next night before bed.
I use Force Touch every time I pick up my phone and especially on list views it allows for far more functionality. Touch Bar is nothing more than a nice looking contextual menu. I assume toolbars are a gimmick too ?
With iOS 10, I've started using it frequently, many times per day.
So the answer, at least for me, has changed dramatically very recently. If I were already considering a move away from iOS, I would never have started using the new iOS 10 3D touch stuff to begin with, and therefore wouldn't know what I was missing.
Yeah, but then you ask it: "What is heavier, a cat or an elephant?" and it fails, because it is lacking in common sense. It only has a small-ish factoid knowledge base and lacks all the general common sense things we take for granted.
Edit: And yes, the UI/UX has changed remarkably little between Lollipop and Nougat, despite the popular memes amongst non-Android users... like the ones already repeated here.
Users care about the experience, and features are only a portion of the experience. That's what Apple really truly gets and other companies miss time and time again.
Again, none of this is new for people who are actually using a recent version of Android in the last 2-3 years, but go figure I get downvoted for pointing it out.
Just as your comment proves, it's a sad, tired and completely out-dated meme that Android doesn't have good UX. And then these blog posts come along and I roll my eyes because my old phone that is 2 major revs behind Nougat looks and behaves virtually identical to Nougat.
Ironically, there are good features in the last few major revs, but they're more about granular permissions and other functionality that isn't touched on by this article at all.
I really hate this "I'm only stating the truth that people don't want to see! Wake up sheeple!" attitude that some people seem to cop.
How would it go over if I wrote a blog post about how amazing iOS is now that it doesn't look all Aqua-themed despite that change happening years ago?