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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow

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There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update.

iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin.

However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.

I still have to sync my music on my iphone using itunes on windows, and I beg to differ on the "it Just Works"...

Ditto . "Just works " doesn't seem to apply when itunes is in picture

That music thing is quite annoying. I can add books from Dropbox or other places into Books app but not add music from anywhere into the Music app? Long ago I heard this restriction was put in place to reduce music piracy, but over the years I’ve concluded that Apple wants people to buy music from it (or subscribe to Apple Music), and doesn’t give a damn about what users may want.

The problem for me is that there is a large spectrum of devices, some of them are shit. Especially if you don't do your research.

Ive had Apple-like longevity out of all my family's Samsung "S" and Sony Xperia devices.

If you met my daughter (destroyer of USB cables) you would know that the fact her Xperia has survived 2 years is some small miracle on its own.

Just avoid LG, HTE and off brand crap - they eventually have issues.

That seems to be the way these conversations always go:

1 "iPhones are too expensive, people should buy cheaper Android phones"

2 "I buy cheap Android phones and the quality is terrible"

3 "You can get good quality Android phones, you just have to pay iPhone prices for them"

Every time a conversation about price vs quality comes up, the conversation starts at the price, goes into the quality, and then ends up at the same price and quality as the competition.

This is the exact conversation I have had with myself and others multiple times. If I'm going to pay a lot of money, I'll just stick with my iPhone.

The Google Nexus line really could have changed things. It was inexpensive, a great phone, and ran vanilla Android. I moved from an iPhone to the Nexus 5. It had some quirks, but for the price it was great. Then Google started chasing the iPhone money, and pushed me back to iOS.

I had a Palm Pre then was with Windows Phone for a bit, but the only Android phone I've owned was a Nexus 4. I liked it (for the price) and would have stayed with the Nexus line if the prices had stayed in the Nexus price range. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the hardware, I actually still use the Nexus 4 today to test my app on older Android versions.

But by the time I needed a new phone, the Nexus 6 was twice the price of the Nexus 4. For that price, I switched to the iPhone.

I went from the Nexus to the Pixel line and I couldn't be happier. The main thing I noticed is that the Pixels pull you further into the Google ecosystem (the assistant, hard-integrated Google calendar/weather, etc) while the Nexus phones tried to be a "pure" (read: vendor independent) experience.

Depends on where you are but here iphones are the new "grandma" phone -- phones you can get for $0 and are idiotproof. They're simply not fashionable anymore.

> Depends on where you are but here iphones are the new "grandma" phone -- phones you can get for $0 and are idiotproof. They're simply not fashionable anymore.

Good thing I don't care about fashion or if I'm carrying a grandma phone (do I need a glittery case or something to be cool again??). I need something that is fairly quick, works, and I don't have to tinker with. It helps that I prefer iOS, and there is an Apple store within walking distance from my office.

I agree with 1 and 2, but really, you don't have to spend iPhone level prices, just don't buy the cheapest phone you can get.

I wouldn't say LG and HTC are the cheapest phones you can get. The parent comment recommended Samsung S series or the Sony Xperia series, which are $700-$900 phones which is squarely in iPhone territory.

I'm using the Sony Xperia XZ1 compact, a truly excellent device which launched around $580 USD and which I bought new for $450 last year. It's a bit cheaper than the non-compact version that more people know about, but has all the same specs and internals, just a smaller size and smaller screen. After a full year of use and updates it doesn't seem any slower than when I bought it, and because it has a microSD slot I will never run out of space.

Not true. Me and my family are on Xiaomis, they're on a different level.

I have a company-issued S8 and an iPhone, and I wouldn't trade them for my Xiaomi.

Best part is, they cost less than half of an equivalent iPhone, have better battery and amazing performance.

I used to buy Samsungs (and Nokias earlier before they suicided).

I have an iPad and it's a great piece of hardware, but I don't stand the Apple ecosystem (iTunes in particular is a piece of crap).

Currently waiting for the Pocophone F1 to be distributed by the local carrier. Another slam dunk by Xiaomi.

You just need to unlock Xiaomis and install Lineage OS. The unlocking process is the most ridiculous I have seen, requiring a windows tool that works only after you've tried their Android version a week. And the tool requires some black magic to even work. The Xiaomi OS talks to many Chinese tracking servers all the time regarding to Blokada reports.

I have a Mi Mix 2 and I love the phone. Just be aware of the unlocking procedure before buying one of their phones.

My partner switched to a Pixel because she got tired of having to restore her old iPhone from backup every 6 months when it complained it was running out of space - inspite of the fact that she wasn't doing anything that should be gobbling up space.

I've been android forever, and my experience of Android phones has been they are solid for about 3 - 4 years, and then they start showing their wear. But I'm pretty hard on them. There are lots of significant drops that occur in that time. Drops that would shatter most iPhone screens.

> when it complained it was running out of space - inspite of the fact that she wasn't doing anything that should be gobbling up space.

The reason could’ve been found by going into Settings and looking at the storage usage. The only case that annoys me on iOS is the download of a new version of iOS without permission and taking up space. But even that can be deleted from the same place in Settings (though this behavior shouldn’t be there in the first place).

Trust me, she tried that. She tried pretty much everything. There was nothing listed in settings as taking up the storage. She took it various apple repair shops and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. They were the ones who told her to just periodically do backups and factory resets.

>People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good.

This is quite the overarching generalization. Especially on a site like HN where there are tons of financially well off people choosing to use Android. Do some people buy Androids because they are a cheaper alternative to iPhones, sure. Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down, like having access to things like Termux, the ability to flash their own ROMs and root, etc? Absolutely. I don't even want to make this an Apple vs Android thing, but please don't reduce a valid choice down to people's financial situation.

Statistically the average selling price of an Android phone is $200. Even Samsung’s ASP is $250.

An “overarching generalization” doesn’t mean there aren’t outliers. But most people aren’t buying Android phones so they can flash ROMs and run Termux.

On the other hand, the “slowing down phones” meme is outdated - it was a choice between slowing them down and then shutting off completely. All batteries degrade over time.

It was a choice between telling the users that they do and don't telling them. They chose... poorly.

I don't want to argue about Android vs iOS at all. You should buy what you like, I just provided a couple reasons why I use Andoid. I'm assuming your numbers are worldwide since you did not provide a source. If they're US centric, I'd be very surprised. Living in the US, I know plenty of people with Pixel 3s and S9s. These people did not buy these expensive flagship Android phones because they were cheap. There are plenty of valid reasons to buy them.

I don't know how many expensive phones Samsung sells, but Google hardly sells any Pixels at all. Last time I checked, they made up less than 1% of Android handset sales.

We have real numbers for the US also as far as people who bought Google Pixels.

https://www.recode.net/2017/10/4/16418170/google-pixel-marke...

If Samsung were selling high end Android phones in volume, how many cheap crappy phones are they selling for the ASP of all of their phones to be $250?

The high end Android market is minuscule.

Simple, effective, cheap and ecological solution: make phones with batteries that can be swapped easily by anyone.

Radical concept, isn't it?

So in the case of Android, you would have phones with replaceable batteries running old OS’s that the manufacturer abandons unpatched security holes.

Give me a phone that can run the latest OS for five years that I can take to the Apple store and get the battery place for $79 ($29 until the end of the year) any day.

Besides, the processors that are in most low end and midrange Android phones are so horrible compared to 4 year old iPhones, I can’t imagine them keeping up with new software.

No updates is another issue. But it is a problem created artificially. Somehow my 10 year old Core 2 Duo I'm using as HTPC is still getting updates and is working perfectly fine.

> Besides, the processors that are in most low end and midrange Android phones are so horrible compared to 4 year old iPhones, I can’t imagine them keeping up with new software.

Again - it's mostly software problem. I have Motorola Moto E LTE(2015 - 2nd gen) with 1GB of RAM and it's working perfectly fine with Lineage OS [without google services] + F-Droid. I'm using it for Jabber communication (Conversations), podcasts (AntennaPod), GPS (Osmand), e-mail checking (mostly notifications from my bank ;)), calendar (DAVDroid), searching web (Firefox) when I want to check something on the go (bus/train timetable, address etc.) and everything works fine.

My friend had same model and he replaced it because everything was slow with "official" android.

I also have to change my phone. Reason? Battery. Changing it is difficult(https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Motorola+Moto+E+2nd+Generation+...) and paying someone to do it doesn't make any sense (labor + new battery would cost more than this phone is worth...).

No updates is another issue. But it is a problem created artificially. Somehow my 10 year old Core 2 Duo I'm using as HTPC is still getting updates and is working perfectly fine.

The issue is not artificial. Before around the Core 2 Duo, processors and hardware were getting faster at such a rapid clip and the software was taking advantage of it that you really had to upgrade often to use modern software.

My Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop from 2009 has:

8GB RAM - still the standard amount of RAM on most consumers.

A 1920x1200 display - it was one of the last laptops that had screens with that resolution before everyone moved to 1929x1080 and that resolution is still better than the average consumer laptop.

Gigabit Ethernet - most laptops these days don’t come with Ethernet at all and for those that do, gigabit Ethernet is still the standard.

250GB hard drive - of course now hard drives are SSD but most laptops still only come with < 500GB hard drives.

In 2009, an almost 10 year old computer would have had much lower specs than what was then a modern computer.

You see the same ramp up in mobile hardware that happen with computers. It just happened a lot faster.

And it doesn’t matter why the Android ecosystem is such a mess when it comes to upgrades. But it is.

Not only is the 6S from 2015 still getting official updates - so is the 5s from 2013.

Also, the processors in iPhones are so much better than in the typical Android phone, the phones have more headroom for upgrades.

For instance, this is where things stood in 2015.

https://hothardware.com/news/performance-preview-apple-iphon...

> Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down

Please read up on this point in detail instead of going by sensational headlines. You’d get a more comprehensive picture about how batteries work the same on iPhones and Android phones, and why Apple put in some software changes.

>In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit.

As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.

Are there any devices that have five years worth of OS upgrades?

While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.

I do think that people buy new phones when they break, or become unusable. And that does seem to be 2-3 years on Android, but iPhones last longer - and with battery replacement, which this year has made very popular, they last even longer. iPhone 4,5 and 6's are still the majority of iphones in my extended family and less techy friends - and they were bought new.

Anyhow - the main reason I even commented was that people in the antique iPhone camp /regularly/ say they'll never go to Android cause the phones don't last. I really think people would like to keep their phones for as long as their laptops. And iPhones are the way to do that and that it is a selling point.

Most of my upgrades except for the 5 were not hardware related - directly.

The first iPhone I bought was a 4 in 2010. I “upgraded” to a 4s because I got a much better deal through my employer to use Verizon and the 4 had separate GSM/CDMA versions. My son used the 4 from the time I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile until 2013 and upgraded up until iOS 7.

My next upgrade was to the 5 and again it was because of a change of carriers and Verizon wouldn’t unlock the GSM part of the phone for domestic use. The 5/5C were the last 32 bit iPhones.

I consider the first 64-bit iPhone to be like the first Core 2 Duos. At that point the phone was “good enough” and fast enough for most people.

My first 64 bit phone was the 6s in 2015. My son is still using it now with an Apple battery case. I would have kept it, but I needed a larger screen (iPhone 8 plus) to watch text heavy technical videos and the battery life is much better. I don’t see any reason unless I physically damage this phone that I won’t keep it for another 4 years.

I’ll probably replace my 9.7” iPad before I replace my phone and I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon.

If you spend $200 on a phone instead of $1000, you get five years of OS upgrades by getting a new phone every year. If you luck out and one of your phones does have upgrades, you can skip a year.

Because the Android ecosystem doesn't have a strong upgrade ability, app developers generally target a wide variety of OS versions, so when you do get cut off from app updates, it's really ancient versions, like gingerbread.

You don’t have to spend $1000 on an iPhone. You can get an iPhone 7 right now for $449 and if history is any guide, it will still be getting OS updates for at least 3 more years probably more.

Seeing that my iPhone 6s bought in 2015 for $750 is still faster than most modern Android phones, I don’t think OS upgrades are going to be a problem.

App developers being forced to support older OS’s is not a good thing for the platform. iOS Developers can target the latest OS and all of its features and still support 5 year old phones.

I love how this thread is acting like 5 years of software compatibility is a lot. It shows how low our expectations are in the world of handheld computing. I have computers from as far back as 2000 that I can still run Linux on and use productively. I wouldn’t even consider buying a technology product if I thought I’d be replacing it in a year. 5 years should be a minimum.

Yes I can run a Plex Server on a circa 2009 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop running Windows 10. Back in 2009, I wouldn’t have wanted to run anything on a computer from 2000. In 2000, I definitely wouldn’t have still been using my 68030-16Mhz Mac LCII from 1991.

My mom is running the latest version of Chrome on a Mac Mini from 2006 that I put Windows 7 on. How much luck would you have had running the latest web browser on a computer from 1994 in 2006? In 1994, I had a PowerMac 6100/60 (PPC 601-60Mhz) with 24Mb of RAM and a 250Mb hard drive with a 486 DX/2 daughtercard with 32Mb of RAM.

Today, I can use a 5 year iPhone 5s. Back in 2013, I would have been masochistic to run an iPhone 3G.

5 years followed by an unlocked bootloader.

Like most people are going to “unlock the bootloader” and find a build that works with their phone.

On the other hand, the day the new OS version or security patch is released for iOS, anyone in the world can go to the settings app and update their phone.

I've used Motorola "Moto G" phones since I've had smartphones. My current phone is from 2015. They are low-cost, but seem well made. Never had any problems with the hardware. I've been happy with them. The downside is they don't get updates over the long term.

I could afford an iPhone, or a flagship Android phone, but the value proposition isn't there for me. Mobile just isn't a very important thing for me. I use it for basic communication with family and friends, navigating/maps and that's about it.

If you buy a cheap Android phone you are going to get cheapness. In my experience the kind of experience you have with an android device is pretty much driven by the cost of the phone.

I personally own a Sony Xperia XZ ( which is now over 3 years old), but it had a price comparable to an iPhone when i bought it with better specs.

1. Better front camera ( 13 megapixels ) and the rear one has a 25 mp sensor which captures great photos.

2. 192khz/24bit audio. Being an audiophile I hate the fact that apple does not support hi res audio. This phone had a headphone jack and is really good at playing flac music or hi-fi audio from Tidal.

3. Well designed - The back is made out of alkaleido which sounds like a marketing gimmick term, but it really does change colour in a subtle but nice way. iPhones haven't changed much in design over the years and they don't really look as attractive as they did previously.

4. Google cardboard - Android has some good VR applications which run on google cardboard. Heck you can even use TrinusVR on Android and VR stream games wirelessly from your PC . Can an iPhone do that?

> On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example.

What does this have to do with an ecosystem? Lots of other devices on the market support similar or superior features.

Apple hardware works well only with Apple hardware. Every day you pretend otherwise you will be reminded that your life is bad unless you bend over and accept the fact that you'll get annoyed by your own hardware constantly until you relent. People buy Android phones because the promise there is, at least, that you might get a device that belongs to you.

I think you are over simplifying the situation in assuming that if iMessage was open there would be a mass exodus from the iOS platform. The people looking for the cheapest phone solution have already switched to Android (or were always Android). iMessage may serve as some lock-in, but there are many other reasons that people prefer iOS and Apple devices.

As another datapoint, iMessage is probably the least useful thing to me in the whole ecosystem. Apple has nowhere enough market penetration around here (N Euro) for it to be useful as anything more than an SMS app.

I live in the US but have many friends from northern Europe and I've noticed the same thing. The only thing I use WhatsApp for is communicating with my European friends, and every single one of them prefers it over text or iMessage even though they all have iPhones.

Probably because it lets you communicate with everyone without being That Asshole who judges you over brand of electronics you bought.

I seriously don't think that that is true. Sure, you'd find some people who would. But not the majority. iMessage is great, but it's not the reason people buy iPhones. It is one of the reasons.

The irony there is I keep iMessage turned off since I want a platform agnostic, lowest common denominator (as in social availability) messaging system, and I can get that with SMS via a Google Voice number.

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