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Comment by trzeci | Hacker News Reader

Writing that as a mobile game developer: As long as supporting variety of devices on Android makes me suffer during long debugging evenings - I think that open nature of Android makes the mobile innovating much faster.

Competition between Android phones is enormous - which results with such great hardware features like 90Hz+ displays, truly full screen displays, under-screen fingerprint reader. Picture-in-Picture, Split view - those things were available for a long time on Android - and I loved to add support for them.

I think iOS would be never like nowadays if no Android was released, without Android will never innovate as much - due monopoly of one company using that OS.

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> I think iOS would be never like nowadays if no Android was released, without Android will never innovate as much - due monopoly of one company using that OS.

The same would be true the other way too. Without iOS and Apple, Android-the-OS would be stuck with data sucking, data slurping, battery draining apps and users being buried in an ecosystem that thrives on this right from the company making the OS (most Android users wouldn’t know what rooting is or how to avoid all the data being collected and exfiltrated). Google has also started to change its tune and some of its behaviors on this front (though it’s still not as much as iOS).

I think the idea is that there's competition in android lands because of multiple companies providing hardware and android custom roms to go along with.

The $399 iPhone SE is faster than any Android at any price.

Unfortunately it is as closed as other iOS devices and as such a no-go for those who value their freedoms. If Apple were to open up iOS to the same extent as Android is open - i.e. the basic system is open, on top of which proprietary services can be (but do not have to be) added - it might be more interesting. It would also be nice to have the possibility to add a microSD-card to the device. Add these options and a substantial number of Android users will consider iOS as a viable option.

Everything that makes Android Android outside of China is closed source Google Play Services. Google has been abandoning AOSP for years.

That's odd given that I've used nothing but AOSP-derived Android distributions since I got my first Android device. There is no Google-proprietary software on any of my devices, most software comes from F-Droid, some of it I build myself, two apps come from Aurora Store (an alternative front-end to the play store repository): Firefox Preview and Bank-ID (Swedish electronic ID app).

...and now you tell me I'm not running Android? Oh well, a rose by any other name...

You and I both know that most people in the West wouldn’t go near an Android device that didn’t have the Google Play Store. How many people do you expect to do like their own apps.

No, I do not know that, actually. It seems to depend on whether those people have someone at hand to introduce them to alternatives for the play store and the Google Services Framework (et al). Show them an Android device with F-Droid (or Aurora Droid pointed at the F-Droid repository) and Aurora Store and they'll feel right at home. As to whether that device runs microG [1] or GSF is of secondary importance to them just as long as it works.

[1] https://microg.org/

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