Android: Choice at every turn | Hacker News Reader

Android: Choice at every turn

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32 pointsMaurizioP15 comments

OMG so much bullshit. I get the same taste as reading political posts from the past US election: blatant lies to influence audiences.

Choice? Ok, so I disable Google Play Services (b/c among other things I want to stop all the damn tracking you do with it) and the phone breaks down. Literally useless.

Just swipe away pre-installed Google apps? Yeah right, by clicking a disabled uninstall button? Right, so you just want me to disable, not wipe'em off. Great! More choice.

Using only a tiny space to store Google apps? Again, I have seen Google Play Services hoarding 30% of my 2GB storage.

Worried about developers dealing with a fragmented ecosystem? It's called web apps (you call them Progressive Web Apps). Just give more power to the browser and developers will be super happy to use a common framework to target ALL devices.

Truly open, choiceful forks like CyanogenMod exist precisely b/c everything you've written here is bullshit.

Couldn't agree more, and all good reasons why I've abandoned android.

What alternatives have you found with more choice? Ubuntu phones?

As sad as it is, iOS. I choose not to use any google services and store my stuff in the cloud, and my iPhone works just fine. This is not a practical choice with Android.

I guess being "open source" isn't the panacea I thought it was back when android launched. sigh

> alternatives with more choice

> iOS

iOS supports stuff like CalDAV, CardDAV, etc out of the box, which lets me choose any provider out there. Android doesn't. And most apps require payment and end up loosely integrated.

I recently tried an iPhone 5s with iOS 10.x just to see how it would work for me. I quickly ran back to Android. Here are some reasons why:

* browser choice: while I could install 'Firefox', none of the plugins worked since it apparently uses Safari underneath

* clear message that this isn't my device: when the phone is charged it is automatically removed from 'low power mode', which is what I leave this thing at all the time to ensure the battery doesn't drain down every 3rd day. Also, when low-power mode is enabled, the screen power off time is locked to 30 seconds

* swype-like keyboard: the best I found was one from MS (unfortunately not available for Android) but for anything 'significant' the Apple default keyboard took over

There were tons of other restrictions and nags which convinced me that I am not in the right target audience for iOS. Instead I updated an older phone to the latest Cyanogenmod (13.x) and was pleasantly surprised to find that they offer GApps by feature (nano, micro, etc.) which enables you to install the absolutely minimal GApps/Play for your needs. Install XPrivacy to deny (fake) tracking power to GApps and I am pretty happy with the experience.

Clearly Android offers you the flexibility YOU need, while iOS offers me what I need.

Firefox work pretty much as I expect it on iOS, and I really don't care about the low-power thing (though I do understand why that might be a pain). The keyboard? The default is fine for me.

I really care a lot more about having my email/calendar/contacts properly synched (which is a lot easier).

Maybe it's because I don't "hack" my phone, I'm just a "normal user" for it (contrary to the desktop where I'm a developer/power-user). But there's definitely difference flexibilities to both iOS and Android, and valid points to keep each.

Agreed, I was merely describing my experience in response to your description of yours. I want to add that the way I currently handle syncing of calendar/contact is via a desktop application - I had been a Windows phone user before Android/iOS were prevalent and kept this old habit of syncing with Outlook when I moved to Android: I have never knowingly synced my contacts and schedule with Google servers. I want to add that there are open-source CardDAV/CalDAV options for Android but I haven't bothered with them yet. Would you mind listing what you use on the server to keep your contacts/calendar? I need a recommendation to finally make the move away from Outlook-based sync.

But I think most of the manufacturers, and OS providers (MS, Google, Apple) mandates there essential apps pre-installed and cannot delete it entirely.

If you blames Google, I think you also needs to blame all the above companies in addition to wireless providers.

CyanogenMod exists because Android made the choice to be open source.

>30% of my 2GB storage

I'm going to assume you mean memory? On my phone Google Play Services uses 120 MB on average.

>give more power to the browser

Could you elaborate on what you mean?

They count "only 11 of 38 apps" are from google, however that's a half-truth. Most of those DEPEND on some proprietary google app that's not part of AOSP.

Google has also consistently abandoned functionality from AOSP and added them to some proprietary Google app (eg: mail -> gmail, etc).

Android is also the only of the three mentioned OS that doesn't support open standards out of the box: CalDAV (calendar/reminders/todos), CardDAV(contacts), IMAPS(email), etc. While their core is FLOSS, I then need to buy some app to sync my contacts, etc, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

> Most of those DEPEND on some proprietary google app that's not part of AOSP.

Do you have something to support this ? Many apps use Play Services (I guess that's what you are referring to but can usually also work fine without it. For example on the app I work on, we are integrated with chromecast if you have play services available, if not, we just never display the icon.

It's amazing how many extensions Google claimed it needed to respond to the charges of the EU case, just to come back a day before the final deadline with a "nuh uh" response like this. Google is just trying to run the clock as long as possible before their business practices are banned from one of the biggest regions in the world.

google are so committed to choice that they release a new messaging app every three days

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