Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android

xda-developers.com

28 pointsretskrad54 comments

I'm a longtime Android user, but I'm increasingly feeling a certain level of existential doubt about my choice. It's basically a choice between using a more open system (which I like) developed by the world's biggest data collection and targeted advertising company, or using a closed and private system (no third party apps, an anti open source attitude) which commits me to giving significant money to a to a company I think is anti-competitive and far too focused on control.

Or you go down the Android-without-Google route, which seems to be very impractical for even basic things like banking apps.

I honestly don't know what my next phone will be. But I've got to have one to participate in society.

I can tell you that it's a night and day difference switching to an OS that isn't actively trying to manipulate you. Apple isn't the good guys by any means, but once you've bought their expensive phone, you've largely already done what they want.

That may have been true at one point but not anymore. My iPhone - which I'm typing this on - is constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music or some other damn thing I don't want. The way I see it, Apple is trying to manipulate me as much as Google is and for the exact same reason: money. They want to make more money off me and if that means advertising to me in the settings menu then that's what they'll do.

> constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music

"constantly" seems like a strech, sure you need a icloud account for the app store to work, but thats it.

i don't recall having been nagged for anything more than once by apple. whatsapp on the other hand ...

I have a seemingly permanent notification for the settings app to, "finish setting up your iPhone."

All I have to do is punch in my credit card number and sign up for Apple Pay. I don't want that.

now that you mention it, i remember the "finish setup..." nag. iirc it went away after i started to setup whatever and then cancel/abandon the setup thingy

> My iPhone - which I'm typing this on - is constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music

That's interesting. I don't have any of these services (well, there is a free tier of iCloud you get by default) and I'm not pestered for anything. What is your phone doing to constantly try to get you to sign up for these services?

I'm just trying to use my phone. Apple Music wants me to subscribe to their streaming service. Apple Podcasts wants me to sign up for their premium offering. Apple News keeps telling me that the article I want to read is for subscribers only. It got to the point that I deleted them all so they'd leave me alone.

It might be I just don't use those apps. I use Feedly to read the news, I use Plum to listen to music, and I don't listen to podcasts. You're right though, Apple's apps shouldn't bark at you incessantly to purchase Apple's premium services.

> constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music or some other damn thing I don't want

this is not happening on my iPhone

Definitely not my experience, and I don't pay for any Apple services. I had the Apple TV+ app installed for a while and I thought it was a bit annoying they used notifications to advertise new TV shows, but I did have the free Apple TV+ trial at the time.

And you don't have to buy the "expensive" phone. Their phones last nearly 10 years so you can buy used or get a new SE for $400.

> choice between using a more open system (which I like)

You could consider a phone that actually uses and open-source system, GNU/Linux (and not Google Android, which is full of blobs): Librem 5 or Pinephone.

Is this a real option? Everything I've read about using the Pinephone suggests it's still very much a beta experience - missing drivers, buggy features etc. It also doesn't support any of the 3rd party apps I use - banking apps, maps, transit planning, whatsapp, spotify etc.

There's a more compelling argument for using an AOSP based build without the Google apps - at least then you've got a pretty solid operating system. But you again are excluding a lot of apps - eg banking apps, which do security checks and don't like running on that environment. I was at a pub recently with a colleague who does that, and to install the pub's ordering app (without which he couldn't order a drink - thanks covid!) he had to download an APK from a forum. Hardly a secure operation.

> missing drivers, buggy features etc.

It works fine 95% of the time. For many people, it can already make a daily driver (I daily drive mine). Sometimes it's slow though (which is why I recommend Librem 5, waiting for mine to arrive).

> It also doesn't support any of the 3rd party apps I use - banking apps

The real problem is that banks and government are forcing users into the duopoly. You should complain and change your bank if this is the case.

> whatsapp, spotify

Working, if you use Anbox and/or Waydroid.

> maps

Maps are working good enough for me.

> transit planning

This is actually a real problem.

> It works fine 95% of the time.

A phone is a frankly critical device these days. 95% is not good enough for daily driving. I need >99% guarantee that phone calls and text messages will come through and behave appropriately. I need modern apps like Lyft, Spotify, Tesla (“car key”), and banking.

Part of the issue with librem/pine is absolutely 0 way to monetize apps for the phones besides ads. So even if a developer wanted to put in the effort to make a niche app for a tiny market share there's basically no way to make money on it besides charity.

If pine/librem owners were willing to shell out $30 for each app you'd have people sitting up and taking note. But as is it's focused on the best efforts of very smart and charitable people, which is unfortunately too small a group to make things stable and widely supported.

If someone's already ruling out the Android-without-Google route because too many apps don't work, this seems like it would be a complete non-starter.

I used to be a kind of "power user" that was constantly tinkering my phone, but late settled down to basically just install apps, use apps like everyone else.

Despite this, I still found iOS way too restricted even for average user. The fact you can't install 3rd party app alone makes certain daily task very miserable. I can't use Youtube vanced to skip ADs on YouTube, for example. The browsers suck due to forced webkit engine too.

I do think Apple's hardware and HW/SW integration better, and I think Android should be more open (every major version, you have fewer and fewer things you can modify without rooting).

My major complaint with iOS is multitasking. Apps don’t run in the background, which is terrible for apps like OneDrive that need to run backups. You have to leave the app open to run an upload.

Also, Android has split screen, which is pretty useful. For these reasons alone, iOS feels outdated.

Other things I hate are all the hidden UI elements. You have to do a Google search to find out how to do things. For example, to close all Safari tabs, you have to press and hold a button. There’s tons of stuff like this. Searching for a word on a Safari webpage is incredibly fickle and still hard to get to. Text editing and the keyboard are awkward and frustrating as well. In general, I find a huge amount of hidden friction on iOS that I don’t find on Android.

> Apps don’t run in the background

afaik there's a setting for that (feature not a bug :)

There is, and it’s turned on. Still doesn’t work unless I leave OneDrive open. “Just works.”

That's the OneDrive app failing you I'm afraid, plenty of apps do this without issue.

Doesn’t have the issue on Android, and doesn’t negate iOS having poor multitasking. This happens a lot for other apps too. Also, Android has picture-in-picture for many apps.

So does iOS.

I don't agree with this. I use Google Photos to upload all my pictures and videos and it also gets killed when in background. Apple's iMovie app literally asks you to not put the app into background when rendering the video. This shows that apps in background will get killed mercilessly. Some Apple fans might argue this is better for battery, but it feels so primitive for me in 2021 to use a "smartphone" only to use one app at a time.

Try sending media in whatsapp or post a media in Instagram/Facebook in low network condition and putting the app in background. It is literally impossible to do this in iPhone.

You can pay for YouTube, and not have to see ads.

Wrong website?

yesterday I wanted to transfer some photos i took using my iphone to a family member's PC

turns out you need to toggle a setting in photos with the least helpful label ever. there is no indication this is the fix from the ios or PC side, and you can even transfer a few files over before the error pops up: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8351572

that post was made 3 years ago

on an android phone, the phone just shows up as a drive and lets you transfer any photos normally, "it just works" lmao

Having switched from Android to iOS ~1.5 years ago, the things I miss the most are Google Assistant and more customizable notifications.

In terms of Google Assistant: Siri is nearly useless when trying to do things "hands free" (or eyes free). If I ask a simple question like "what is a safe temperature to cook pork", it gives me "I found this on the web", where Google Assistant verbally gives me an answer back.

As to notifications.. It just seems like notifications are just harder or worse on ios? For the longest time, Gmail refused to allow a different notification sound per account (looks like that's fixed). On android, my Garmin watch could allow on-watch notifications from a list of apps you select; on iOS its all or nothing and I even get the notifications from apps that I've tried to silence on the phone.

i guess if your notifications make sounds you have bigger problems than not getting a spoken reply to emergency cooking advice

That flew right over my head.

I'm 51, I need reading glasses these days. My goal is not to have to search for my glasses each time my phone makes a noise, so differentiating notifications by sound is important to me.

The Garmin thing is Apple frustratingly limiting non-Apple smart watches. Apple Watches have better control over notifications and allow for things like replies from the watch. It's such bullshit that they are allowed to cripple third parties to make their devices more appealing.

Coros claims to have worked around this. I was shopping for a new watch a few months ago when my old Garmin died due to physical damage. They got back to me too late, but they claim to be able to filter notifications on iOS. Had they replied sooner, I probably would have gotten a Coros rather than another Garmin.

On Android I can install real Firefox, on iOS I can't. End of story.

Same here.

If this is the most important thing to you, then I'd like to say that on a GNU/Linux phone you can install desktop Firefox with any desktop plugins.

As fun as that was to do on my Palm Pre for about 5 minutes back in the day I doubt it's much more practical on a modern phone even with the bigger displays and faster devices. Can you use the mobile interface on desktop Firefox?

I can use desktop Firefox on my Pinephone just fine. It scales very well to the screen size.

this and the fact that browser engine updates are not bound to OS updates. Android phones may not get such very long term OEM support as iPhones but the browser is a big attack surface and being able to update it frequently without full OS update is a big plus.

I've used both Android and iOS pretty extensively over the years. I'm currently on iOS, but just picked up a Pixel 4a for app testing. It's a fine device for $350.

IMO, phones have mostly been commoditized. Not necessarily in pricing (see flagships), but in features. They run the same few apps people want to run and work fine. Where iOS I think shines is in the total ecosystem. AirPods and Apple Watch integration comes to mind, though some Android specific alternatives are out now. Then there's iOS and macOS integration. Things like copy and paste between devices just works as expected.

I'm not going to argue about Apple and absolute privacy, but if you look at relative privacy between Apple and Google, Apple also comes out ahead.

But for most, for just a phone, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter.

For a technically focused site they sure do present an awful lot of misinformation. Android may have more malware hiding in apps but that's not the same as claiming iOS is more secure. Some security researchers have stated that Android is actually more secure than iOS and the fragmented nature of the ecosystem is actually something of a benefit at times. Android isn't being hit with something like Pegasus.

The privacy claims are laughable. As we've seen recently Apple and Google are collecting virtually identical data on you but only Google is open and transparent about both the collection and the use. Apple likes to be secret about everything. The upcoming CSAM scanning is going against everything Apple has claimed to be about for the past ten years. The way I see it they're both equal these days but at least Google is open about it.

Lest anyone claim I'm some Android fanboy defending my platform of choice, I've been using both side by side for years. I'm well aware of their strengths and weaknesses and Apple's claims of being the most secure and private OS have been shown to be nothing but marketing fluff as of late.

I do agree with the premise of the article. iOS is still what I recommend to non-technical people who want something that's going to mostly stay out of the way and mostly stay the same over time. It's still the best option for long term and third party support.

The real gold is XDA's forums, where users and developers talk about rooting and hacking their devices. In contrast the articles on the front page are low on content, like this article on Surface Pro 9 rumors one day after the release of the Surface Pro 8 [1].

1: https://www.xda-developers.com/surface-pro-9/

I used to spend a lot of time in the forums back when android was new and I was flashing custom ROMs every other day. I haven't felt the need to do that in years though. I remember the front page having more substantive content though.

its still good but it depends how mainstream your purchases are and how much free time you have. if you buy chinese smartphones, tablets and wearables you can find a lot of people there with the same devices trying to hack them.

I wonder what would happen if both OS were run through a Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things test.

My bias is ten years of Android before I switched to iOS, and I failed spectacularly to select multiple images in the Photos app and delete them. It seemed to work sometimes, and sometimes it would only drag the picture under my finger until I noticed a "Select" button in the upper right corner. Doing the same thing in the Google Photos app for iOS is so much easier, and it just works.™

Text input and editing are still my biggest hurdle on iOS. I make more typos than on Android, and editing text in input fields is always a strange experience. Selecting single words and correcting some letters still feels "alien" after over a half year on iOS.

If you hold down the spacebar in iOS, you can move the text cursor around pretty easily. You can also double tap a word to select it. Sometimes it is a little clunky though…

In the context of Don Norman's book, this is a bad design with hidden affordances and missing signifiers. How should a new user discover that they have to shake their phone to undo some text editing?

This may be true, but the average user isn’t a very interesting one. The average user installs three or four apps and that’s about it. The customization they do pretty much ends at choosing a ring tone and wallpaper.

The average user doesn’t really care about privacy, side-loading, customization, developer access, or most of the other things we debate here.

A Honda Civic may be a better car for average user than a Porsche 911 or Jeep Rubicon, but that doesn’t mean it’s that interesting to enthusiasts or people who really care about cars.

That is a pretty bad metaphor because many, many car enthusiasts love the civic.

And lots of phone enthusiasts love the iPhone.

The average user definitely stays with the default ringtone, to the extent that when it sounds, you see half the people around you checking their devices.

> Like it or not, iOS is a better OS than Android for the average user.

It seems the original title itself painfully admitted defeat that iOS is the clear winner for the average user which is a first from XDA developers.

The case is true for Android, but we'll see if this is the case with Fuchsia when that eventually replaces Android in the foreseeable future.

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