It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.
Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.
The Moto G was never a fast phone, but a new thing it started to do towards the end of its life was OOM kill the mp3 player if you backgrounded it. At first it was if you did something heavyweight, like start a game. Then it was browsing an ad-heavy site. Then it was if you opened the web browser at all. This, plus the usual Android lag, bad battery life, intrusive Google Botnet stuff.
The tipping point was this. I walk to the coffee shop with music playing. I order, sit down, start reading. There's an amusing line in the book, so I take out the phone to take a picture of it, which kills the music player. Then a Google Maps notification pops up asking me to add the photo to the coffee shop's Maps page.
I think, why the fuck am I still using Android? I know Google tracks me everywhere I go, but do they have to be so obvious about it?
I recently updated the OS to CyanogenMod though, mainly because the phone stopped receiving security updates. I wouldn't say the phone performs better running CM, but it's no worse than when I first bought the phone. I really hope CynogenMod can keep the ball rolling. I wouldn't want to run the stock image after it's fallen this far behind security updates.
At this point, as much as I like Android, the UI, the open nature, etc. etc., I can't justify sticking with it for the next phone I buy.
Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again.
It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey.
As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.
I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.
My iPad Air on the other hand has severly dimished usability from the various iOS updates. Orientation change no longer works reliably. The idiotic change from swipe to unlock via double tap of home tremedously increased the frustration in UX (Try a double tap while the tablet is barely upright via Apple's magnetic cover.)
Microsoft is aware of it and has made many changes to help. For instance there is an official interface to remove an unwanted program or to turn off a process that starts when you log in. Similarly there was a time when windows machines were not at all adequately patched and Microsoft has come out with a solution that (i) worked and (ii) improved the performance steadily since then.
The Nexus phones were a great value, but if the Pixel is going to be priced as a flagship phone then I see little reason to buy it over an iPhone.
Why spend $800 for this? Really? Really? Is there a point to spend $800 on a device that in a showroom or a friend's hand was not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day?
Decent camera (would have been called world-class 2 years ago), battery charged once every 3 days, stock Android, 2 SIM card sockets, 64GB SD card, 5.x sized screen.
But there are still things the camera phone can't do: Longer range/landscape photos. Interesting to see which manufacturer is able to put a quality detachable lens on a cameraphone, or when Nikon/Canon put SIM cards and telephony in their already Android-enabled equipment.
While most people run Android the same way people run Apple, you can run Android and get your apps from f-droid, and you can run CM (and, if your into these things, Xprivacy), so while Google may still be getting your private data, random apps won't.
There are MANY options to choose from both paid and free that all prioritize different things.
Take a look around and see if any of them are nicer for you, and if it is you can set it as your default dialer in a second or 2.
One of the biggest benefits of android is being able to replace the built-in apps with 3rd part ones that act as default handlers.
I don't know how much stuff you carry with you, but with my 5'5" phone doesn't reboot with my keys on my pocket.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/12/02/sony-is-trying-to-pu...
On the devices I've worked with, that button handling is done by the power management silicon and not by software at all.
I guess they are extending support for it.
Over at Facebook people had to be ordered to carry Android devices because their app was lagging behind the iOS version.
The Pixel line of devices seems like Google's attempt at dogfooding their own platforms.