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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes feels like Communism vs Capitalism. I love the idea of an Android phone, but the "Samsung bloat" and the rest terrify me. Conceptually I hate Apple's closed ecosystem but it's secure, they seem to take privacy very seriously, and it Just Works Really Well, almost all the time.

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Wait, which one's communism and which one's capitalism in this scenario?

I'd assume that "capitalism" is meant to refer to Android, with its open competition among as many vendors as want to build hardware that can support the OS, while "communism" refers to iOS, whose ecosystem is by comparison strictly defined and controlled from the Supreme Soviet in Cupertino.

I don't think the comparison works, though, both because smartphone users are free to choose whether or not to participate in Apple's ecosystem, and because Apple's incentives are aligned with the desires of its current and potential customers in ways that those of communist regimes historically have not been.

An alternative perspective, only vaguely serious... "All Androids are Equal, but some are more Equal than others". [1] Android is open and free, and in theory, everyone cooperates, but in reality its just a cess pit of corruption. "Free" means "free to log your keypresses", "free to kill your battery" etc. And as with all good communist wonderlands, someone (Samsung) resents the ideals and is turning the place into a dictatorship. Whereas Capitalism is nothing without regulation (at minimum a police force). The iOS market is where commerce happens.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6466-all-animals-are-equal-b...

The "Samsung bloat" is a thing of the past .. The new phones come with more restrained and thoughtful touches that enhances the phone.

No worries, they listened and they got your back https://www.xda-developers.com/samsungs-partnership-with-mca...

Want some mcafee with your s8? No? Well sucks being you...

Good job you install your own preferred flavour of android on it, then.

Custom ROM's are an unstable mess on most Android devices, Samsung being particularly notorious for poor developer support. Don't be surprised when 911 calls don't work [1] [2] [3] [4].

[1] http://www.androidcentral.com/cyanogenmod-team-dropping-supp...

[2] https://forum.xda-developers.com/note-3-tmobile/help/tmobile...

[3] https://plus.google.com/+CyanogenMod/posts/ePeEX2TRTYg

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyanogenmod/comments/5lek7o/couldnt...

I don't care to compile my own, and I want a version I can trust; I want to be able to sue someone if it violates my privacy. What are my options?

Moto phones are pretty legit software-wise. Almost stock Android. They do have some very useful features however for what they offer (gestures and such).

They are owned by Lenovo though. Since ownership their OS updates have been much more regular. YMMV.

Well those first two points are completely contradictory so I won't even bother humouring the rest.

Pretty sure the bootloaders on branded devices are locked, are they not?

Not an issue I've ever had to deal with, I buy my phones, not get them on my contract.

The reason I switched to an iPhone from a Samsung S6 was that one day when I woke up I got a notification stating something like "We've installed you some microsoft apps". The same day I went to my local Apple store and bought an iPhone. What stops them doing this kind of things in the future?

Like Apple installing some U2 album on your iPhone?

Not dissimilar, but I wouldn't put them in the same league. U2 was added as a purchased album to iTunes accounts.

Right, unless you had auto-download of purchases explicitly enabled, nothing was pushed onto phones. And with the backlash it received, I doubt they'll ever do that again (they even stopped their 12 days of Christmas giveaways).

Non-executable content is really quite different from my perspective.

Defining "non-executable" is then an interesting exercise...

From https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/redux-comp...

> You’ve likely guessed it by now, but the Linux gstreamer media playback framework supports playback of SNES music files by…. emulating the SNES CPU and audio processor, courtesy of Game Music Emu. How cool is that?

I think the main difference (and I'm not saying Apple cannot do the same maybe at some point in the future) is between an app is downloading something inside that app and the OS is installing an app. A lot of app are connecting in the background to servers and downloading data without always asking permission. But in general the OS should not install something without asking explicitly.

To be fair didn't Apple stick a bunch of crappy music or something on everyone's phones and suffer quite the backlash?

I mean, I personally feel that it's likely they learnt from that but would not suggest it's not something they couldn't do again.

Edit: must not comment without refreshin page first

I don't understand the uproar about this. Giving away free music is vastly different then installing random apps in my opinion.

This is a rather empirical test, but it's the one that defines my view of smartphones at the moment.

Walking up to a demo Pixel in a retail store and flipping the menu slider opens the menu without a single dropped frame.

Walking up to a new S8 and dragging upwards opens the menu somewhat glitchily, with noticeable lag, and with a few dropped frames.

There weren't many dropped frames, and the lag was all but unnoticeable. I'd wager that a lot of people would never even notice the lag and glitchiness was there. But unfortunately my reactivity to smoothness becomes pathologically sensitive approaching the 95th percentile - so if something's hilariously horrible, I'll live with it, but if something drops a single frame, I don't want anything to do with it.

Sure, you can judge that as stupid, but the way my brain sees it, you either get sorted into the bucket of "you made no effort and you're terrible" and "ooooooooooooo." If you wind up on the edge of the bucket I get really bad uncanny valley. :/

(Another way to look at it is to say that if you put me on a moped that can't go beyond 60mph, I'll get used to it, but if you put me in an Autobahn simulator where traffic jams can abruptly appear beyond corners and then later on just as abruptly disappear... well... suffice to say I might start physically breaking things.)

I'll also acknowledge that I have absolutely no idea what was running on both phones - and that the Pixel's store demo mode had probably reset the phone and killall'd everything so it was nice and snappy.

But in my case that sells the Pixel to me hands down (I have no idea how responsive it actually is). Hey Samsung, implement a demo mode!

I am really looking forward to Fuschia. 120fps target? Yes please!!!

Backing you up as no idea why you're downvoted. Got an S8 yesterday and there is next to nothing on it. It comes with some MS apps preinstalled, a handful of Samsung apps (voice recorder, health, Bixby, Samsung's browser) .. and that is literally all the cruft I've encountered and it was all mostly avoidable.

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