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Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

Also not to be underestimated: Android.

Personal anecdote: I broke my iPhone and have been using Android for a bit, and I must admit: at first I thought I'd switch back but nowadays Android is pretty good.

Hardware at a comparable price-point is solid, the UI is smooth and better-looking than it was before, the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close, and there's features I would actually miss on iOS (a calendar widget on my homescreen, unlocking my device without touching the screen and Google's Night Sight).

I miss my to do app and my email app, both of which are not on Android (Things and Spark). But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.

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My last two phones were Samsung Galaxys. Samsung only updates your phone for two years. I'm not about to have an internet connected device that doesn't get security updates any more, that just seems crazy to me. My new phone is an iPhone, which apple updates for five years.

3 years for Samsung flagship devices. 2 years for budget models.

I've also noticed Apple supports their devices for a long time. But does Apple guarantee that five years anywhere?

I just installed a security update on my S7 this week. The phone was released in March 2016, so we are nearing the 3 year mark.

I bought it a year after release and it was less than half the price of a similar iPhone.

> But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.

There's one place that iOS is miles behind though, and that's file handling. Having to go through a desktop and iTunes to receive music from a friend is a pain in the arse.

Not if you use Decoupled ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

https://www.decoupled.app

Unbelievable! In all of my searching and asking around for exactly this I was unable to find a suitable app. Thank you for sharing—and, to the author who may be browsing this, thank you for sticking up for us digital dinosaurs who refuse to integrate into the “library as a service” dystopia. Let me know if you ever need a helping hand.

The author is indeed browsing this, and is very glad you've found Decoupled useful :)

> the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close,

It's interesting you say that. I've been looking at de-googling myself and getting off Android, but I cannot find a decent replacement in the App store for my password manager of choice (KeePass2Android, cos I use KeePass everywhere).

Other Apple owning friends of mine say I should be using whatever it is that iPhone supplies by default, but the problem is I want to de-google myself, not move entirely into Apple land, so having something which only works on the phone isn't going to fly. I've got Windows and Linux machines all over the place that I want my password manager to sync with.

Edit - spelling.

There are a few keepass clients for iOS, but most of them are pretty serious abandonware and don’t support newer features like autofill integration. https://keepassium.com/ is supposed to come out soonish, and will probably take the crown when it does. For now, your best option is probably https://strongboxsafe.com/. No affiliation or experience with either, but strongbox seems to be the favorite for now and keepassium looks like it’ll be better when it’s out.

Thanks for the pointer to keepassium - it does look a lot like what I'm after - I'll keep an eye on it!

Just a quick comment: I use MiniKeePass on iOS. It is not that nicely intergrated etc., but you can at least keep using your files etc. You will have to manage the file on your "cloud server" though, two-way-sync is not there yet.

Yes, this is more or less what I found - a reasonable number of implementations of apps which can read/write a keepass database, but sorely lacking in all the nice bells and whistles features that I like in the Android app.

It's not ideal to suggest wholesale replacing your trusted system, but I can recommend Bitwarden. It's open source, free with a premium option and has clients for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, Mac as well as CLI options and browser integration.

https://www.bitwarden.com

privacy

For me, this is the #1 reason. Sure the Apple ecosystem is fantastic (lastpass on my iphone can prefill passwords on my apple TV!) and the level of polish and quality is high, but the one single solitary thing that would truly prevent me from moving to Chromebook or a pixel is the privacy aspect.

Apple has done well to make privacy one of their prime offerings.

If you are willing to take total control of your mobile environment, Android can give you very good privacy. Arguably better than Apple.

Simply buy a Pixel (or any other device that supports AOSP). Build your own AOSP image (which is quite easy). And you are ready to go. Use applications from F-Droid only.

Admittedly it's not as straightforward as running your favorite Linux distro, and there are some caveats, but it's quite close.

This reads a lot like the HN-famous Dropbox comment.

Im sorry man, you are misinformed

https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

Neither of these articles relate to a pure AOSP install without Google Play services, which is what the poster was talking about.

Sorry, my bad.

Both of those apply to iPhones as well. The only difference is that on iOS, you cannot turn off AGPS location collection, while on Android, not only can you turn it off, it's opt in.

And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.

> transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do

I really hope this is untrue. My instinct is that you perhaps can't be a big behemoth of a company if you don't behave like Google and Facebook, but Apple occupied that middle territory successfully for a long time.

I don't think so. They did a bunch of extra engineering work to do machine learning on photos in a way that respected people's privacy. iCloud Photo Library has been working great for me, and the photos are encrypted on my devices before they land in iCloud. The current implementation has the drawback that all of my devices need to do the ML work independently as a result, but it still works okay.

As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.

> As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.

I would also add that Apple is actively working to close the gap. Look at last years hire of Giannandrea from Google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...

According to recent tests, Siri has already improved a lot.

For state-sponsored privacy, sure. But for ad-tracking privacy, I don't think you can do comprehensive ad-blocking in browsers on iPhones, right? It's still either VPN-based or the capped blocklist api, right?

I would love to switch, but Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience. The moment I can do what uBlock does on an iPhone, I'll switch.

What do you mean by the “capped” blacklist API?

There is a limit of 50,000 URL filters.

Which is perfectly fine for me but if you have a lot of subscribed lists it is possible to go over it.

At the moment my 1Blocker X installation is sitting at ~93,000 rules and I haven't seen a single ad or social widget in almost a year now.

Sure, part of them aren't domain/URL based (they are CSS/XPath based) so I might not actually be disproving what you said.

I believe 1blocker X made a new app with more categories so they could get around the cap. Like the cap was category based, but not hard to circumvent.

Oh, that might explain it. Thanks for the tidbit.

Firefox Focus (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios) claims to block ad trackers.

A few days ago my friend complained that her phone had randomly started popping up ads on its screen as she was just using it. She had to dig through the play store and find the 'recently used apps' to identify the culprit, which was a random app she'd downloaded that after a few days updated itself to start pumping out ads.

That is a distinctly android problem, and is an example of one I'm glad to avoid by sticking to iOS.

> random app she'd downloaded

Perhaps she should be more selective with apps she installs? Also, how would this be exclusive to Android? iOS apps can have ads on them. Even if the feature is added with an update.

The ads weren't only displaying in the app, they were appearing over other apps. This is something that simply can't happen in iOS.

How does a standard user know whether a small app to e.g. manipulate photos (as in this instance) is going to be updated a few days later to show ads when it's not running? Shouldn't an end user be able to trust Google's app marketplace to not feed them junk like this?

There's a permission "draw over other apps" which has legitimate uses but is also used for crap like this.

> Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience

I use BlockBear on safari. Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS. Hell, hacker news loads faster(less than a blink of my eye) on my iPhone than 2017 MacBook Pro.

> Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS.

Depends on network performance, how heavy your typical sites visited are, and what type of configuration you're running on uBlock.

Anecdotally, I find my Snapdragon 835 phone with Firefox/Ublock Origin to feel somewhat faster than my A10 with Safari/1 Blocker X. (Plus Firefox/uBlock gives various QOL improvements over Safari, like customizably removing cruft from various sites, and not autoplaying video.) My biggest complaint with Firefox/uBlock Origin is that the UI isn't very nice for whitelisting scripts on mobile.

this guy gets it!

Today Android and IOS are on par using an AdBlock VPN. A Solution with OpenVPN, DNSmasq, Ad, Malware and Tracking blocklists.

For example a turnkey business service is https://ba.net/adblockvpn

That ignores the privacy threat Google itself poses. There's a lot of things I don't like about Apple, but using a phone whose operating system contains unlimited amounts if closed source Google code is really scary to me, simply due to their business model and their disrespect of privacy.

See now, I'm like everybody else. I don't care about privacy.

What I do care about is being manipulated. I don't want to be persuaded to buy stuff I don't want or need.

Google can know everything about me, but I don't want the ads thanks very much.

Oh, and I want a news feed of things that are actually important, not what some algorithm thinks I want to see.

> I don’t care about privacy. What I do care about is being manipulated.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those two sentences contradict each other. ;)

The main publicly visible application of personal data is advertising, so if you don’t want ads or manipulation, then you actually do care about privacy.

And are you certain you don’t care about privacy outside of ads? If so, why? Many people who’ve said things like that just didn’t even think at all about what happens or could happen to their personal information. Would it surprise you if you found out that insurance companies were purchasing personal information in order to increase their denial rates on claims? Would it bother you if your personal information was used to support a politcal party you oppose? Would it concern you if your personal habits were used to advertise to your neighbors or co-workers or friends or family instead of you personally?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

You need to work on your argument a bit I think. I get what you are saying, but your points are a little weak.

And I was being a little flippant, of course I care if somebody used my identity to commit crimes, that's a total pain in the butt for me.

> You need to work on your argument a bit I think. I get what you are saying, but your points are a little weak.

Okay, sure. I asked you why you don’t care about privacy, and you haven’t bothered to answer. I don’t really mind if my argument is weak, but yes I could certainly work on it and improve it if I had a reason to. I can’t read your mind, though. Do you want to provide any reasoning for your case or counter-argument at all?

Two things to think about. 1- I wasn’t attacking you, in case you felt like I was criticizing, and were just trying to criticize me back. 2- None of the examples I gave are made up, they are all real things that have happened.

> the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close

This may be right, but have you used fdroid yet? There are a bunch of great free apps on there as well. NewPipe comes to mind.

xiaomi phones are so good with the fraction of the price.

I like Apple stance on privacy, but the price of iPhone XR is not serious.

IMO I just reviewed all the phones and the iPhone XR is the best phone for the price (~$750). Battery life is great, security is a plus, waterproof, great CPU, etc.

I rotated through the pixel, iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy, and 4 or 5 other flagship phones (was able to get amazing two week return policies)

Ended up with the XR simply because it was an excellent solid phone, cheaper than the other flagship phones. Admittedly I didn’t checkout the Xiaomi phone.

For reference, I had to replace my nexus 6p because the battery was so bad it was dying at 50% randomly. Plus google was no longer pushing updates.

No 3D touch on the XR :( I didn't think I'd use it, but I do, every single day. It's also larger than the 8 I have, that was disappointing.

I was about to pull the trigger on an XR because of the colors, and then when I realized it didn't have 3D touch, space gray XS it was...

If you want a top flagship, I agree Apple is a solid choice. What Xiaomi and Android does well in general is midrange. I've got a ~$150 phone (Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, now superseded) that has fantastic performance (never had any issues with tens of tabs in browsers, multitasking, games, etc), fingerprint sensor, battery lasts for 2/3 days, etc. You can tell it's not a flagship: the camera is just tolerable, it's got a plastic back (which doesn't break after repeated falls); but overall it's insane value/cost.

It's nice to surf the wonders of billion-scale device mass-manufacturing if you don't need the latest and greatest.

The xs is not cheaper than the pixel 3, and it's a worse phone.

Xiomi phones are horrid in terms of privacy. Their MIUI sucks, constantly pestering me to use their app store. Privacy policy of their other stock apps like file manager, galary etc includes sending filename and other data to chineese servers. Not to mention some of their misterious 'analytics' apps always running in background.

However, they're requiring an account and a wait to unlock the phone you already own.

I switched the other way around and was mostly surprised that iOs had barely an edge over Android. In a few places downright inferior to it (e.g. keyboard).

I can at least trust iOs to provide software updates for my device until 5 years of age. But I find it hard to see that many people value this remotely close to the price difference.

I just realized today that the web push api isn't implemented in Safari. I'm trying to write a progressive web app and they're lagging hard there.

iPhones win in the security department. That's my biggest draw to switching.

I am thinking about going back to iOS because the general app quality on Android is horrid.

My main complaint for Android is that they are obsessed with copying Apple so they are always one generation behind. If Apple removed headphone jack, next year you can expect most Android phone to do same. Same goes for all good and bad features Apple introduces like notch, Touch ID, FaceId, slow-mo, memory capacity, AI selfies etc etc. Other way around also happens but much less often and is typically fragmented in niche devices instead of one all rounder. So buying Android always felt like buying last year’s iPhone. But last year’s iPhone usually cost same as this year’s Android. So what’s the point?

Not everyone copies Apple. Samsung and LG still have headphone jacks. If anything they had fingerprint sensors before Apple. Notches are the in-between bezels and full screen phones. LG experimented with fake notches on the V10 and V20, branded as a second screen rather than a notch.

This is exactly the issue. In Android world innovations are fragmented and there is no one package that has all of these combined. If you want Samsung features then you lose out on LG features.

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