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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

I have an iPhone 6S since its first month. Just thought, you know, test it once. But I always look jealously at my friends who run Android phones for half the price. You can just do more with Androids, it's more efficient, the keyboard is more efficient, apps can run concurrently, and to my surprise even the cameras seem to be way better. Besides the brand I really don't know what reason there is to buy iPhones. So to me it is no surprise that the sales drops. Just means people still vote quality over empty brand value. (The same doesn't apply to Macbooks afaik)

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I had an Android excursion from 2013-2016 (Nexus, Moto G, two generations of Moto X), because the grass is always greener on the other side.

It is definitely true that there are great Android phones at half the price of an iPhone. It's also true that the latest Android versions are pretty good and material design is great.

However, upgrades and handling of warranty is a complete nightmare on Android. Even Motorola, which used vanilla Android, was rolling out updates at a snail's pace. And when updates came out, they were incredibly buggy (e.g. Android 5.0 for Moto X 2014 had terrible memory leaks and it took them half a year to release a fixed version). When you have an issue with your phone (e.g. my Moto X 2013 would spontaneously reboot), you are basically without a phone for 1-2 weeks. My Moto 360 had a crack, and long story short, I had a replacement after 2 months (!).

Life is too short for that nonsense. With an iPhone, you can just bring your device to an Apple store and usually have it fixed within a few hours. (E.g. my iPhone 5S recently had a screen issue, it was fixed in 2 hours, no questions asked.)

Yeah, the update problem was a big one for some time. They seem to have fixed that now to a big degree though. Warranty I'm unsure, but convincing me that Apple does that better is not hard. Haven't thought about that at all, since I never had an issue before using a phone for 2+ years (whcih meant replacing it with a newer one was the better option anyways)

Everyone has their own opinion and that's fine, but saying Android is more efficient than iOS just is demonstrably untrue that I'm not entirely convinced you typed that with a straight face. There's also only one phone that has a camera as good as the iPhone, and that's the newly released Pixel. Every other camera falls short in independent testing.

About the camera: That's what I thought as well. So I presented my phone proudly in a bar to friends, all of them having Android. We shot some photos, and each and every photo was better than on the 6S. 100% and live.

About the efficiency: Agreed that it's a hard thing to argue. But the reason is less that it's not measureable, but because it's hard to convince people of efficiency that they don't even deem possible. Best example for me is Vim vs a random simple text editor. People who use the latter are hard to convince of why Vim is way more efficient, since they can't even imagine what you can do with Vim. In the same regard I know few, really few people, who even try to achieve some level of efficiency on their phones. But in fact since I have paid for the iPhone now I would love to be convinced from the opposite myself. So if you have some neat efficiency tricks (e.g. how to get a typing speed of not lifting your finger at all + good word guessing on an iPhone) I'm happy to admit being wrong.

As a counter to just one of your points, you can also run apps concurrently on iOS, in fact you can have them side-by-side, and for audio apps, multiple separate apps can generate synthesizers and other music simultaneously while another app mixes and records them. It's pretty neat stuff.

Can you link to a guide, YT video or something? I've never seen it in action. I just see a lot of my apps only get active when they are the front app. Side by side mixing and and generating sounds like the same direction I want to go when using a modern smart phone.

> you can also run apps concurrently on iOS

Only for use cases Apple has approved. E.g., an IRC or SSH app will always lose it's connection after 10 minutes in the background since that's not an approved use case by Apple.

> in fact you can have them side-by-side

Only on the Plus models and iPads

I have an iPhone and an Android phone. I use both on a regular basis. I see a lot of friends with iPhones looking jealously at people with Android, and vice versa. The grass is always greener. I've talked people out of switching—on both sides.

I'm far from the only one—before I got an Android phone, I asked my Android-using friends about it. They told me it was a bad idea.

I'm in a cynical mood right now so I'm going to say that both platforms suck, just for different reasons, and switching platforms sucks even more so don't do it unless you have a very good reason. Android has a ton of problems with software, ecosystem, and hardware. iOS has a ton of problems with software, ecosystem, and hardware. If you like the assistant and cloud services maybe Android is the right choice. If you like battery life and app ecosystem then maybe iOS is the right choice.

I also had the experience of dragging out an obsolete (5 year old) phone recently. I was surprised how well it compared against modern phones, except for the fact that a 5 year old lithium battery doesn't hold much of a charge.

I still use my iPhone 4S every day as my main phone and it is well over 5 years old now. It still works great for me!

it's more efficient,

It would need to be to run on the slower processors available to non-Apple companies.

You can just do more with Androids

What more, specifically?

My biggest examples are:

Notifications. You can react immediately to notifications on Android (e.g. respond to a chat message without opening the app). You have them at the front and they are not gone after seeing them once hidden somewhere in a back menu (whcih is kind of important for reminders).

Keyboard. I have this phone for a year now? It still doesn't know sh*t about guessing my words. And you can't just slide words, you always need to type them. Combining bad guesses with wild, error prone typing makes typing on the iPhone really, really slow. Afaik you can't even change the keybord if you hate the stock one, right?

Interface control. You can't really control the interface as much. Like on my Android I always had side menus with widgets and app overviews (e.g. last few mails)..

Background processes. There seem to be a few apps that have background notifications like chat apps. But most of them don't do anything if they are not the front app (e.g. my photo backup app). I even had personal hotspot shut down if it's not the "active" app after some time.

Notifications: You can slide down on, say, a text message notification to open a text box where you can immediately respond. Otherwise if the phone is locked you swipe, unlock the phone, and it takes you to the app. You can also swipe down from the top edge to get a list of recent notifications and things on your to-do list.

Keyboard: Apple's autocorrect is actually really good for me. There are times where I have typed completely garbled things and it was able to figure out what I Was actually saying. You can also add third party keyboards if you want. You might think it works less than it does because of selection bias.

Interface: whatever man.

Background processes: Personal Hotspot is the only one that's been finicky for me, but usually other apps work fine in the background for me. For example, I'm usually able to get Reddit/Messenger notifications pretty quickly.

I feel like your comment is from 3 or 4 years ago. It's been at least a few versions of iOS since you can respond directly to notifications, replace the keyboard, add widgets to the 'today' screen.

Background processing works fine, and was implemented in a way that doesn't completely drain the battery. The hotspot is designed to turn off if the clients have not been transmitting or receiving data for a period of time as a battery saving measure. It doesn't do this if you tether over USB though.

May be true, but I don't see how. I could agree to just having less knowledge about what you can do with your iPhone in comparison to what you can do with your Android phone.

Fair points. You can react to iMessage notifications inside the notification overlay on iOS 10 ... and it's dog slow and inconvenient and I don't like it.

The keyboard and autocomplete is really frustrating. You can custom keyboard, but even with NinType swipe-keyboard installed, it's slow to startup, and I don't use it because it wants me to type whole English words in whole English sentences - and that's not what I want to write in iMessages.

Also, phones like the Pixel (which i hear many are having issues with tho) have the Google Assistant built in.

Siri which i have used since 2011 is junk comparably. For me having the best AI assistant on my phone is as important having the best camera. Such makes life a lot easier!

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