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Comment by doubleshadow | Hacker News Reader

I switched from an iPhone 6+ to the Google Pixel. I've had two problems, but overall love the phone.

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.

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I use both Android and iOS and conversely, I think some apps are a lot better on Android due to the UI conventions (esp the "back" mechanism). For example, I find the official Facebook and Twitter clients to be better on Android.

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.

Can you be more specific with your second point? I haven't run across this at all.

The Tesla app for Android has numerous bugs that wouldn't have shipped if Tesla leadership carried Android devices.

* 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.

I had an issue with the Chariot App. I signed up as a user using facebook connect and the Android app doesn't allow you to login with Facebook...which led to some problems.

I think your second point may have more to to do with the diversity of hardware that Android runs on than the developers simply putting less effort into it. Android runs on so many different devices. It is more difficult to develop and Android app that feels totally polished on every device

Are there specific devices or manufacturers that seem to fair better here? I'm on the fence on switching to Android (probably the Pixel phone), too, and I can't imagine testing for all the different phones and android releases.

I wish developers would explicitly say what devices they test on. There's no reason an app shouldn't be totally polished on at least one device.

I doubt that would help. Some developers do the tests but aren't very good at testing. Others wouldn't do the tests but would copy and paste a long list of "tested devices", and with two million apps, you would never be able to tell the former cases from the latter.

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.

There is less incentive to polish on even one device when you know it's <1% of the market. Seems better to put more effort to get it running reasonably well on more devices.

You would think they would at least polish it on their primary 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.

I agree it's slippery. I never dropped my Nexus 5 over the last 3 years. Pixel's been on the floor at least 3 times and once it just slid out of my pocket on a reclining cinema seat. It looks like I'll be getting a rubbery cover soon.

On number 2 I think that's just your lack of experience with Android apps. Me I've made the switch from Android to an iPhone 6s which I've had for a year already and now I also have an iPad Pro, both received as gifts, as I'm an Android guy :-) And let me tell you, I like Android more because of the apps.

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.

Re: files on iOS.

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.

Every app you listed is a 'power user' app. Naturally they will be better in Android since the platform is more open in this area.

But in the sort of everyday apps most people use there isn't really a contest. Android lags far behind in overall polish.

I'm a heavy app user and imho that's a myth, because people end up being naturally biased towards the platform they've been using, once they learn about what's good or not.

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 :-)

I spent years as a mobile developer and have commercially worked on top tier apps for Android and iOS.

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.

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