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Comment by nmridul | Hacker News Reader

'Localization' not just language customization. But also what locals want.

- Dual SIM phones. Most people have multiple SIM, mostly prepaid and recharge them based on the cheapest offer. Incoming calls are free. So if a provider has better offer on outgoing calls, that sim is used that month for making calls and next month they use the other number.

- SD card support. Best selling phones support this. People carry lots of movies and music with them, mostly pirated and takes lot of space. And you can normally buy SD cards pre-filled with popular songs and movies that you just insert into your phone when traveling.

- 3.5 inch headphone jack. Yes, people need this. Bluetooth sets are costly.. $30 for bt headphone, compare that to a $100 xiaomi phone.

- And of course, side loading of apps. Android allows this, iphone no. So you get apps from some one and just use it, without going to play store.

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Some of these aspects are rapidly changing. Since a new player, Jio, entered the telco market a couple of years ago prices on prepaid subscriptions have dropped significantly. All the telcos have be forced to offer cheap monthly packages which easily contain over a gigabyte of data per day plus virtually unlimited calls and texts. This for a mere 2-4$ per month which many people actually can afford. With the unlimited calls to all operators there's no need for dual SIM cards any more. Telcos also offer their own video and music streaming services (such as Jio Music) which are included in the monthly plans, reducing the need to pirate music as storing them locally. With extensive 4G coverage and over a gigabyte of data, per day, there's little need to download everything.

> SD card support. Best selling phones support this. People carry lots of movies and music with them, mostly pirated and takes lot of space. And you can normally buy SD cards pre-filled with popular songs and movies that you just insert into your phone when traveling.

With Android phones already being much less secure than iPhones (and doubly so because the cheaper Androids often run older versions) that seems like a terribly easy exploit vector.

Now SD cards are a security vulnerability? You sound ridiculous.

Sticking an SD card preloaded with files of unknown, shady origin in your phone is not a vulnerability? You sound ridiculous. If you were visiting some random street stall in India or China and they offered you a USB stick that pinky-promise only contains clean warez, would you put it in your laptop?

If Android is so insecure that reading media flies from an SD card can cause issues, that’s not a glowing recommendation of Android.

On second thought, you can’t even read media files securely on Android....

https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/...

Every feature that gives any sort of flexibility to the user is an attack vector for the lazy developer.

Yeah that's a great truism but using that as an argument against a feature doesn't help your case.

Why not? There are plenty of “features” that Android has that has caused vulnerabilities due to Googles not thinking through how the features need to be implemented.

A simple one is why is there even a permission to let an app read and write all contents on an SD card instead of only allowing apps to read files that a user specifically chooses from a file picker? Or worse case read and write from your photo library or music library.

That was my point. Apple is so afraid/lazy that they don't implement useful features and cut out widely used ones.

Apple isn’t ‘afraid’ or ‘lazy’. SD cards sound like a good idea, but the problem is phone manufacturers can’t guarantee the quality or class of a card, which can bog down the whole phone or cause corruption of files. Apple being typically Apple wanted total control over the performance of their phone, and thus the iPhones never gained an SD card slot.

Those problems are pretty easy to solve. By your logic apple should not allow 3G sim cards in iphone either, but they do. And shitty wifi networks should be banned, but they aren't.

How are they easy to solve? Most people (decidedly not the ones browsing HN) will just buy an el cheapo microSD from some random phone repair shop or google for ‘cheapest microSD 64gb’ and end up ordering some crappy card from AliExpress. If you do what Sony did with the Vita and PSP and force people to use proper (read: your) card then the cards turn out horribly expensive because economies of scale don’t kick in. It’s also decidedly an Apple-esque move.

Besides that, Apple can’t control the entire worlds cellular and WiFi coverage. Some parts of countries only have 3G, some buildings only have shity WiFi. However, Apple can control how their iPhone’s storage performs by not allowing you to use crappy SD cards and just having you opt for more internal storage.

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