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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

After 7 years Android user across three phones, I decided to try iPhone. Now 2 years in, on my 2nd, and never going back. Android tends to slowly slide into glitch land and demands you throw away your phone far more aggressively than iPhones do. The 911-crash on Android was the last straw. That's when you call 911, and the phone crashes instead of, you know, calling for help.

iPhone might not be latest and greatest. But the overall package is better. Definitely not perfect - I've experienced a disabled Phone app on iPhone where I would not have been able to call 911 had I needed it - but all my i-devices have been glitch resistant in a way none of my Android devices ever were.

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I think sometimes it's a grass-is-greener situation. I had an iPhone bug where the camera/gallery would just crash on startup or basically anytime I had to do anything camera related. I eventually fixed it (after months of trying) by connecting to a PC with a 3rd party app, navigating the file system, and deleting a bunch of thumbnail cache files.

I had plenty of problems answering phone calls on my iPhone -- it would be glitchy and unresponsive and I'd miss calls.

Even more annoying about the iPhone is the always growing "Other" space on the phone. I was constantly short on disk space with no way of knowing what the cause was or how to clean it up.

The bluetooth stack would crash every week disconnecting all my bluetooth devices temporarily. Very annoying when you have a smartwatch.

My wife's iPhone screen doesn't turn off after she uses Siri sometimes -- it'll just say on all night long.

The entire iPhone 6 (non-S) line was total garbage. Tons of people bought these and had nothing but problems.

My point isn't so much to rag on iPhones -- they're actually really solid devices -- and I highly recommend them to non-technical users pretty much exclusively. They are hands down better than the vast majority of Android devices.

But I switched from iPhone to Android on this last cycle and couldn't be happier -- this article covers much of what's good about it. But I love the flexibility and a lot of little touches that iOS devices don't have. And I think all devices have different problems. My Android phone is not glitch free either.

I have beefs with my iPhone and iPad but not those.

1. Nagging for Apple paid services

2. Gestures changing every month and becoming increasingly complicated with small variations doing different things, inconsistent experience between iPad and iPhone

3. Audio jack

4. Anything that involves editing is a catastrophe. Selecting an element of a table on a web page or trying to copy the text of a link (not the url) is nearly impossible.

5. Auto correct introducing more errors than it corrects.

6. iTunes on Windows which is still the only way to sync my music to the iPhone is just completely broken.

Which is why I am tempted to move. I can see some candidates for an iPhone replacement but the iPad Pro 10.5 doesn’t seem to have any competitor (large-ish screen with high refresh rate).

I was specifically replying to the idea that iPhone are glitch free rather than merely what's wrong with the fundamental design of iOS. That's an entirely different kind of post and after being an iPhone user for many many years I do have a long list of those too.

> Gestures changing every month and becoming increasingly complicated with small variations doing different things, inconsistent experience between iPad and iPhone

Why would the phone's gesture controls change for you every month?

He might have meant, e.g., that iPhone X has a wildly different set of gestures and shortcuts. Like, guided mode being triple-power instead of triple home, battery/volume/etc menu swiping from upper left corner instead of from below, apps being minimized vía swiping up instead of home button, etc, the list is long.

That's hardly going to be an iPhone only thing though. Any phone that does away with one or more hardware buttons, especially the home button, is going to have to present a new command interface. It's not like going into getting an X that this is going to be some unexpected surprise, and certainly not every month.

Even the ipad changes gestures regularly.

Android phones got rid of hardware buttons in favor of SW ones. Making the entire interface gesture based isn’t the only option.

I have definitely known too many people to experience issues with missed calls on iPhones to ever consider buying one. I have had android phones since the HTC Dream and I have never had something as simple as that go wrong - although the 911 bug seems far worse; I've just never met anyone with that problem.

I know plenty of people including myself that experienced it with Android phones. Weirdly, one of the most stable Androids I owned in terms of phone use was my Xperia X10 — one of the first android phones out! I miss that phone. And my Nokia N9.

My Nexus 4 developed an interesting one after the update to 5 and 5.0.1. Incoming calls would crash it half the time, or 5 seconds of silence on calls that didn't crash. The dialler was almost unusable.

Was widely reported but never properly resolved, so that was the cue for replacement.

My Samsung Note 3 got so laggy that I couldn't get the unresponsive phone app to actually pick up the call before it flipped to voice mail. Reboots would fix it temporarily, but it would come back. You have failed at your primary purpose, phone. Android experiment over, back to iOS.

> I've just never met anyone with that problem.

That's because they are dead.

2. is a real issue. I had to google how to turn off an iPhone X, this is after there being an iOS product of every gen being in the family since the iPhone 3

Well, that's the thing: you're obviously not supposed to turn it off :)

> Even more annoying about the iPhone is the always growing "Other" space on the phone. I was constantly short on disk space with no way of knowing what the cause was or how to clean it up.

Hm? There is a very simple Storage page in the Settings that shows you exactly how much storage each app is taking up (including things the app is storing) and it is ordered by size so you can immediately see what's using up your space and delete it if necessary. I have an old 16GB iPhone that is still chugging along after 7 years and is my daily phone but it is a bit lacking of space and this Storage area is a simple fix.

iTunes will show you the space taken by apps, by music, by videos, by documents, and then "other". My other just got slightly bigger all the time. This isn't unique to my phone either.

I find this area the single most useless display of information on an iPhone.

Yes, you can see which app takes how much space. Then what? There is no way to control or clean up that space. You can hope that an app has a setting somewhere that let's you delete old data, and that's it.

The biggest offender? Apple's own Photos app especially with iCloud and Photo Stream: there's exactly zero ways to make it give up space (unless you "want to delete photos from all connected devices")

On the General > Storage there are some options I have on my iOS (v 11.3):

- Offload Unused Apps

- Auto Delete Old Conversations

Or I can manually offload apps one by one.

I think you are referring to the iCloud Storage settings on the iPhone when talking about deleting photos from all connected devices.

Probably the confusion is because they decided to put two storages: General > iPhone Storage (managing local storage) and Accounts > iCloud > iCloud Storage.

The last one (iCloud Storage) manages the iCloud so if you delete something from iCloud it will delete it from all devices.

edit: formatting

Both of those options are next to useless because unused apps rarely take up much space, and old conversations don't take up much space either.

And then you have stuff like "Photos X GB", "Facebook X GB" etc. There are no ways to control that.

Old conversations actually used to be the worst offender for some users - it included all media sent or received in those conversations which could be really hard to track down.

What's stopping you deleting photos and videos, or even whole albums in the app? Or syncing photos off and deleting on sync?

Anyway, I'd genuinely be interested in how Android or Android apps solve his problem in better ways.

For a lot of the other issues, it seems like this is a problem with the apps though, not the OS. If Facebook or a podcast app is hogging space, it's up to the app to provide options to manage it's data.

Android has an overview by app where you can a) delete the app entirely, b) delete the app's data entirely or c) delete the app's cache. C solves most issues described here.

Why doesn't it delete / trim the caches automatically? If they are safe to be deleted by the user at any time, the device itself should be clever enough to clear the space.

Caches are there for a reason. You're essentially saying applications should not have caches.

Apple's Photo app's interactions are so incredibly broken that is nigh impossible to figure out how to properly remove photos from a service without accidentally deleting them across all devices you own.

Heh, I'm a programmer, and I'm scared to touch anything in that app :)

Yes, that page is very simple, and very wrong. On my mom's iPad and iPhone, the app numbers on the storage page simply don't add up. Many gigabytes of space are unaccounted for, yet unusable. As far as I can tell the only way to recover the space is a factory reset, and it's only a temporary fix.

Tbf, my last phone(Xperia Z5) did the same thing - it would show me that apps were taking ~22GB, but when you displayed them and actually added up the numbers it was about ~12GB. I actually went and uninstalled pretty much everything I could, and "apps" were still showing as using nearly 10GB. I only got it back after a full firmware reset.

On Android, you can install any random file manager and explore & clean the filesystem yourself (many apps litter on the virtual sdcard). There's also a DiskUsage app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...), that will scan the device and tell you, where are the files that take up the space and allows you to delete them.

With iOS device, you can't really do that.

Unfortunately iOS tends to group everything that's outside an app's container into a big lump that you have no permission to modify or even view to see what's taking up the space. Often the only solution is to perform a full wipe and restore from a backup.

> the always growing "Other" space ...

Lol, I had an "Other" folder for the growing set of iOS apps that I didn't use but couldn't delete.

You can delete nearly all default iOS apps now as of iOS 10.

“delete”

Which actually means “hide the icon”.

Kind of exactly like “disable” on an android unless you know the magic incantation for your device to get a third party OS installed.

I deleted iTunes, music app, the games center, and other built-ins on my iPhone and I cannot re-open them again without reinstalling them, so this seems to do more than just remove the icon.

On my iPhone 4S Wi-Fi dies after 2 years and was not working since. Phone performance had been crippled by iOS7. Power button almost broke after 2-3 years (no click).

iPad also crippled by iOS7.

Friend bought iPhone7 and 7plus, 7 had broken GPS out of the box, 7plus had power and volume down buttons break down after several weeks of usage.

Not the ideal quality for sure, especially for that price tag.

My experience exactly. I always said bad things about iPhone. Hay it is closed, it has fewer options, worse hardware than top Android phones, etc.. It was the time during which I fiddled with the phone much, installed Ubuntu on Android phone, etc.. But then my last Nexus started to glitch like any other Android top phone after 1 year of use. I was so irritated by it that I said well I will try iPhone now.

It was about 6 month ago and I could not be more happy. I have phone that just works, never glitched, not once in 6 months, never sttutered with animation or anything. Yes, it is less extensible, has less options, but actually I like that now better. I wan`t it to work good, work well and be reliable.

One major additional benefit is that I use iPhone less than Android phone, and it spams and pings me less. At first iPhone, notifications felt overly simplistic, but now I love them. There are no permanent notifications/icons that some android app can put there, and I can just scroll from the lock screen and see without clicking/opening everything that happened. Also, I can disable every notification/spam per app, disabled all bubbles (red circle numbers over app icons) except for messaging apps. This way I feel that I don`t expect dopamine dose from my phone, and I use it only when I really need something.

>>Also, I can disable every notification/spam per app

You can do this on Android as well

>> Nexus started to glitch like any other Android top phone after 1 year of use ... 6 month ago and I could not be more happy. I have phone that just works, never glitched

hmmm, Anyone else see a issue with these 2 statements?

I really don't know about that. I had the og Moto-X and it served me will for years without issue. I now have a Nexus 6 and didn't wipe the phone for two years after use. I only did so because I wanted the better system encryption that came with a newer Android and that was only available after a full wipe.

Also there's small stuff like: Photo map. I've traced back treasured photos that would have been lost in a sea of 44,000 photos by finding them on the map.

Google Photos doesn't seem to have this.

Notes also works really nicely for loads of stuff.

https://github.com/k3b/APhotoManager/wiki

It's good that someone has made that but it looks nowhere near as nice.

When you open the Photos app on iOS you have a beautiful map with clustered thumbnails.

http://tinyimg.io/i/d4DRgIT.png

http://tinyimg.io/i/0lVO6KC.png

It's useful enough that I could find out the exact spot I slept by the river Seine years ago based on scrolling around Berlin on the map for 5 minutes until I found the photo, taken several years ago on a completely different iPhone, then go back there recently and recreate the picture.

FWIW samsung's gallery does that https://imgur.com/a/Qgc3yUH (probably only on the S8 and above but idk )

> lost in a sea of 44,000 photos

You're taking too many photos. Honestly ask yourself, how often do you go back and look at old photos? Maybe you do, but for me, I realized that I never do. So I stopped taking them.

I agree. Frustrating and clunky as the iPhone might be at times, it's relatively reliable and stable.

I'm quite happy to use Android on a tablet. It's far closer to a "traditional" operating system in terms of the amount of control you get over everything.

Although I've got to say, the headphone jack might be the last straw for me ... my iPhone SE could be my last iPhone if a reasonable alternative materialises ...

I like small and light phones so I bought an Xperia X Compact at the end of 2016. It's more or less the same form factor of the SE and it still works very well. Unfortunately its ticker (9.5 mm vs 7.6 mm) and it weights more (135 g vs 113 g). The Xperia Compact XZ1 from 2017 is 2 mm less tick but weights even more (140 g). If I could make me like iOS I would have got a SE immediately. The Compact is probably the best small phone in the Android world but I stopped researching phones. I'll start again when the Compact will be about to die. I hope it lasts at least as long as my old Galaxy S2, 5 years.

Same. I’m holding on to my 6s until its last breath. I replaced the battery recently and that boosted its performance back to launch-day levels, so I’ll probably keep chugging along for another two years at least.

To me, no headphone jack means no phone.

Yep. Trying to hold onto my SE as long as I can and I'm really stumped at where to go next...

> Now 2 years in, on my 2nd, and never going back. Android tends to slowly slide into glitch land and demands you throw away your phone far more aggressively than iPhones do.

I doubt that an Android phone would become unusable in the first 2 years.

Each of my Androids have, with the exception of the absolutely brilliant LG Nexus 5.

I had a similar experience with a S7E but now have a Pixel 2 XL and that is the key. My Pixel is as smooth as an iPhone. Plus does not slow down over time.

In someways phones like the S7E give Android a bad name.

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