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Comment by bergwerf | Hacker News Reader

My feeling is that Google is not capable of fixing fundamental problems of Android. Every year they change some colors and rounded edges (it's starting to get hilarious seeing the design of their apps being revamped over and over again), and add features invented by their designers nobody asked for. But the keyboard lag, the storage footprint (why must an ever so slightly older phone with 16GiB internal memory be discarded because His Majesty Android demands almost all of its space for itself?), those will only get worse every release. I think they simply don't care. It's all about futuristic colorful stuff that sells. Android will never be a humble, efficient, reliable platform.

As for this issue. All I can think of is the tragedies it may cause. It's a cliché: software developers are not responsible, except when their PR forces them to take action.

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Google has popularized the practice of keeping hordes of UI designers on payroll and changing the UI every single release. It's fucking cancerous. Nothing can ever just stay the same and work. Users have to be in a constant state of headache to relearn shit for the nth time.

Software didn't have to be this way...

I don't know. This morning I had to watch a YouTube video to find out how to turn on an induction cook top.

Hopefully the process wont change in 6 months when a new UI "update" is released.

At least i hope not, I wouldn't be surprised to find a cooker controlled by a phone style touch screen running Android.

I used a couple of induction hobs and couldn’t get used to them because the interfaces just didn’t work with my brain. Press a ‘button’ - maybe it will work. Move a pan slightly - now you’ve pressed a ‘button’ with and something has happened but you will have to figure out what. Spill some water? Now another change has happened. Maybe the whole thing has switched off and you’re wondering why everything seems to be ruined.

I tried to buy one with physical knobs but was told that the manufacturers who make them are moving to the touch controls.

So I’m going back to gas.

I have a cheap one. The slightest hint of grease on it or on my hands and it doesn't detect my touch. Sometimes it needs several pass from different dry clothes to activate.

I'm mad at the thing just writing this!

> Spill some water? Now another change has happened.

That's exactly what happened to me while staying in a serviced apartment. It's hilarious, ridiculous, and sad all at the same time. As a software developer I died a little inside that day. Fortunately I haven't had to put up with that crap once I checked out of there.

We decided to upgrade from a terrible old coil range to induction. Since our wiring is old, it was just barely the minimum amperage for a lot of the brands, but the one brand we liked with knobs needed more power. So we're paying an electrician to come upgrade our wires, because touch controls are that terrible.

> Move a pan slightly - now you’ve pressed a ‘button’

With mine moving the pan on the wrong plate will trigger a lock button, in other words it locks the whole interface. So even if you want to switch the whole thing off you first have to press a button that's now as hot as your pan.

There's no escaping horrible user interfaces.

Planned obsolescence. Ford did exact same thing with their cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

Software industry has become fashion industry.

Funnily enough I was reading the other day how some BMWs will come without a touchscreen due to the silicon/chip crisis and I actually thought that was a plus. Seriously, whomever thought it was a good idea to make cars use touch controls and going through 5 menus to turn the heat down should be just shipped to Antarctica to explain their thought process to the penguins.

I saw a car commercial where the driver appears to divert their attention from the road, lean over the center console towards the passenger seat to swipe across a large, wide touch screen while operating the vehicle.

Meanwhile 10-12 years ago my cousin was ticketed for distracted driving in the midwest because the trucking company he worked for bolted a laptop to the dashboard of his semi tractor. Though somehow these mostly useless screens are okay to have? I dont get it.

There was actually a court case in Germany, where it was ruled that enabling/disabling certain functionality, on some Tesla Models (I think it included even changing some wiper settings?) was illegal while driving, as you’re not allowed to operate devices that require looking at them (e.g. touchscreens) while driving.

This is like the biggest thing pushing me away from getting a Rivian. I have no desire to screw around with a touchscreen while driving.

You're not wrong, but the intention is to keep users confused. It makes users feel lost and powerless. Then to find something they have to "discover" it; which I'm pretty sure involves endorphins.

> Google has popularized the practice of keeping hordes of UI designers on payroll and changing the UI every single release.

But but but how else would you get the gigantic digital clock take TWO lines of a lock screen?! Someone needed to design it!

Have you figured out how to change this? Per articles like https://nerdschalk.com/android-12-how-to-change-lock-screen-... there's no straightforward way.

I hate the new color palettes as well, I wish I hadn't upgraded

I have not been able to. I don't want notifications on my lock screen, i just want time. Small time. Like before.

I'm on a Pixel6. It is kind of an upgrade to my previous 4 year old phone and I sort of like it but no, it does not have a better battery and it barely has any better performance, but other Android phones are ad-ingested junk ( looking at you, f!cking Samsung ) or a joke of a software ( Looking at you, OnePlus), plus they arent whitelisted on major US carriers in Feb 2022, so Pixel it was.

The new UI is total junk compared to the UI of 11. To make it somewhat better I replaced the launcher with ActionLauncher 3, disabled gestures and disabled Google Assistant.

What I want to know is if "Now Playing" can be made into a widget/app-tap, because no, I do not want it always listening.

Is there any product being developed by a giant company for >10 years that isn't a bloated mess at this point?

I see feature creep and sloppy functionality in the core as a symptom of the usual tech project management style, where there's pressure to make up random metrics to have flashy results over maintaining existing functionality.

Proper testing has the same impact for your performance than just ignoring the metrics you are supposed to test. You can also get praised when you fix the problem your sloppiness caused.

iOS?

Yep iOS changes but not in a way where it trips you up and with much fewer features that overcomplicate or cause breakage.

Funny as how many change away from iOS because of its strange changes.

What strange changes are you referring to ?

In my experience, major iOS updates don't contain drastic changes and at first glance they don't look too different. Each update feels like a refinement of the previous release, especially compared to Android.

I'd like to meet some of those people. iOS changed, but not in a way that it hampers usability - and by this I mean basic usability. Texts, calls -> these are the important bits in a phone, not 5000 weather apps that do the same thing and flood you with ads as a bonus.

Android is a bloated mess and this bug should be a giant red flag for both Google and MS to get their shit together. Windows is currently a huge mess as well, bloated beyond repair and with "features" nobody ever asked for, but hey, who doesn't like advertising on their login screen and unrelenting telemetry?

My SIL is one of them. She is a graphic designer and has been a 100% loyal apple user for 15 years. She had everything apple, including an iPhone. But for her last phone she decided to go for an android because she was fed up with several things on IOS.

She still uses Mac thoug.

As someone who did the same move with the release of Pixel Pro 6, I deeply regret it. Google Maps in a minimized view fared worse than my iPhone 8 plus for multitasking, that is bound to cause some traffic accidents if a driver tries multitasking while on a car mount.

Frustrating how the best software engineers can't compete with a hardware company (Apple Inc).

> Frustrating how the best software engineers can't compete with a hardware company (Apple Inc).

Allowing for a moment for a moment the premise that Google has the best software engineers, the company seems to be structured to ensure they output mediocre work. Awful performance, poor to terrible UX, poor documentation, weird or ill-advised implementations of public-facing interfaces (say, libraries), et c. There are exceptions, but "high quality software" is not something I associate with Google.

Give her a cycle or two of getting used to something, then having the rug pulled out from under you with a cancelled product or service, an inferior UI overhaul, etc. and she'll be back.

I went through that over and over again for the better part of the decade before finally jumping to an iPhone and swearing off joining any new Google services. Being a Google user is being in a perpetual state of beta testing where you pay them with your data. I'm convinced they're never gonna learn their lesson.

Even MacOS, honestly...

Excel?

I developed on Android in ~'11 and it was a mess then. Again in ~'17 and it was... also a mess.

There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with it that resists change. Plus in some cases Google simply doesn't seem to give a shit about the platform, letting it lag behind JS versions of their service SDKs for fairly basic functionality, or announcing big UI overhauls but then severely half-assing the developer-facing side of those features.

Well, it's a walled garden. Half of it locked down in the name of security. (While "free VPN"[0] apps steal your data while you play 30 seconds of some "game".) The other half is for performance and "consistent user experience" reasons. Oh, the remaining is just the battery saver killing everything for good measure. The docs are shit. The IDE is okay, but the build system, tooling, emulator and everything provided by Google (Flutter stuff! Flutter web!) always turns out to be just a bunch of interdependent unfinished binary blobs with a laughably DIY "installer".

Sure, devs get used to it fast and can be productive in no time. But it's ridiculous how much hoops they invent out of sheer corporate-ness. (Importing projects? Nah, it never works on the first time. Upgrading projects? That basically only works if you recently sacrificed someone's firstborn. Adding some 3rd party library and getting the build system and the IDE work without spending hours fighting them? I hope you started this journey with two kidneys.)

[0] I just made it up, but wouldn't be surprised if someone does that

> it's starting to get hilarious seeing the design of their apps being revamped over and over again

I can't stand that anymore. Every single updates make things more and more unusable, they hide settings, they make buttons bigger for no reasons, &c.

They even managed to butcher the alarm app... it looks like an app designed for visually impaired people (which would be fine if it was an option and not the default/only choice).

At least they changed the options when an alarm is going off from icons to text. I swear every morning it was a challenge to figure out which button was snooze and which one would turn the alarm off completely.

Even gmail, every week it seems I have to search for the compose email button.

When has the compose button ever been anywhere besides in the left sidebar near the top? Or are you talking about on mobile?

Android has grown too big for google to maintain, which is why most change seem to be looks and user-goodies, rather than focusing on bug fixes or stability.

I've experienced the severe decline in stability over the last 10 years of use, and on flagship phones, not outdated.

Currently my Pixel sometimes displayes an open app partially off screen, or scaled wrong and clipped --- this is basic UI that worked for years and is now broken again.

Yeah, I'm seeing the same clipping issues since upgrading to Android 12. Lots of other bugs too.

For example, since upgrading when I use my "<Car Company Name> Remote App" to lock my car the phone will crash to the lock screen and get stuck there. The only way to get out of it is a hard reboot. Shocking.

I've luckily not seen a crash-to-lock-screen, that really sucks. And of course these things usually happen when you actually need them.

While driving to NYC recently, I briefly lost all signal between two bridges; the whole phone slowed down rapidly and hung within a couple of seconds, google maps frozen on screen.

You should NEVER upgrade to a new android release before the mandatory 6 months of bug fixes.

"Release" is the Google terminology for "it compiles, let's see if it works".

That's why most people are okay with the 3-6 months Samsung lag. They simply get a much more stable OS compared to Pixel users.

Source: owner of multiple Google devices.

The thing that has frustrated me for a long time is google discover showing the temparature in Fahrenheit. Predictably there is a support issue with all sorts of people saying they suffer from the same issue and no resolution[0].

The problem is that there are about 5 different ways to get the temperature through google now, probably all built by different teams, so everyone suggests a different way to set your temperature units, but they're all wrong.

Pretty sure the same thing is happening internally at google with every team just trying to blame each other one, and no-one caring enough to fix the issue.

It just feels like shoddy coding.

[0] https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/105615277/temper...

> Android has grown too big for google to maintain

My theory is Google was never setup to maintain such a thing.

I think an operating system running on customers hardware requires quite a bit different, more stringent, responsible approach to development and release process. Microsoft seems to have it (albeit with their own flaws and in recent years they went rogue - when they fired their testers, shoot it was almost 10 years go).

Google is not setup in same way and internal incentives are not like that, judging by hoard of messaging apps. They are simply setup to make very short projects that do not require long-term commitment. When people move on, projects get abandoned, neglected and killed. Their incentives structure is like that. It is one thing to change a webapp willy-nilly and another thing to change and support code that you ship to millions of devices you know nothing about.

During 90th Windows had a lot of growth problem that Microsoft was figuring out, now Google's doing the same with Android but I don't think that they will succeed unless they change their incentive structure.

Now having said that about Google, one has to admit that it is _vast_ and there are a lot of different teams and I suppose there are plenty of teams that work in different way. But still, they can't be shielded from corporate overall culture.

Every Android device I’ve ever had since the early days lagged like crazy. I got my first iPhone recently and it’s smooth as butter. I was a fool for sticking with Android for so long.

The latest Android OS is such a disappointment.

Basic aspects of the display, like the clock, cannot be customized at all.

I don't use Apple products because they feel locked-in, but Android is almost worse sometimes.

For Android most of the lag (IME) is artificial. To disable it, enable the Developer Options panel, and set "Window animation scale", "Transition animation scale", and "Animator duration scale" to off (or minimum value if you still want some animation). Suddenly it's much more responsive!

Totally shit design. And could still have lower input lag. But instead of reducing it they added slow animations to try to hide it, which makes it take even longer!

What to expect from a company that systematically goes above and beyond in effort to avoid having to answer support requests from their largest user base; the common end user...

> Android will never be a humble, efficient, reliable platform.

A phone needs to be able to make 911 calls even if its the most unhumble, inefficient, unreliable platform. This is completely offtopic.

Thats exactly on topic, and the current issue. Google doesn't care about performance or testing, just new features to advertise, a new clock face, and phone sales. They've left functionality by the wayside

I mean this is essentially the crux of reliability for a phone, no?

My point is that, instead of being a sign of a reliable phone, it is a feature that is required as a bare minimum.

Another example is the fact that it has some sort of human input device and output as well. That's also a "bare" requirement, regardless of how bad the phone is and how unreliable it is.

In the same way, food needs to be edible, a mirror needs to be in some way reflective, etc.

I've owned multiple Android phones starting with the Nexus S, Nexus Galaxy, various Samsung and LG devices but I'll never forget my experience with the Nexus 5. After a poor experience with an LG phone, I decided enough was enough. I dropped a bunch of money for a brand new Nexus 5 on day 1 of release. I swore not to mess with the phone, (no root, no custom roms, nothing) because I was tired of unexpected surprises from my previous phones and just assumed that since I was not following the mainline it was my fault.

Well one day when prepping for a life changing trip across Europe, I received an upgrade to the latest Android. I just went ahead and updated and then went on the trip. Little did I know, there was a bug in the firmware such that all video recordings were put through some sort of audio filter. That bug essentially garbled all the audio of all video recordings. I only realized to my utter horror after getting back that all my videos were ruined. I couldn't believe that Google didn't properly test basic functionality and released this garbage update. During the trip my friend had an iPhone 5 and it continually lasted her through the day. Meanwhile my Nexus was running low after 1-2 hours screen on time. It was a constant headache that I never realized before because before this trip I always just took the phone to work where there would be a charger and then back home where there would be a charger. I never realized that real world battery life of this phone was utter garbage.

EDIT: I also want to add that I recall watching a bunch of reviews of this phone by the "tech vloggers" and I am dumbfounded as to how they praised this phone or only lightly criticize things like the battery life. I received a totally false impression of this phone before purchasing. This experience basically put me off of tech vloggers as well. I still watch them but only for a cursory view on a product I am already considering getting. Looking back at MKBHD and others after dropping this phone I am just disgusted that I felt like I was duped.

After I got back I was fuming for a while over what had happened. I asked about this on the Nexus5 and Android forums and was met with a lot of hostile responses when I complained about how badly Google messed this up. I just couldn't stop thinking about my friend's iPhone 5. I never bought an Apple product in my life because I was conditioned to believe that they are just lifestyle devices for dumb people with too much money. I took a risk and ordered a pre-owned iPhone 5S. WOW what a night and day difference. This phone lasted me another 4 years and caused me to fall in love with phones again. I never realized that I was unconsciously avoiding having to use my Nexus5. With the iPhone I looked forward to using it.

This was a gateway drug to me taking a chance on an Macbook. I really wanted to continue using a *nix based environment but I HATED the constant challenges with keeping my Ubuntu environment going and the the equally toxic Linux community (I bet the terrible Android community overlaps with Linux).

I took the risk on a Macbook and there was moment where I felt like my mind jettisoned some dead weight. I could finally just walk away from both communities and not have to depend on them when my system/phone messed up. I occasionally load the latest Ubuntu/Ubuntu MATE/Linux Mint on a spare PC, find that some serious bug either didn't get fixed or reintroduced and then put it aside for another year. I'm not sure how to explain this feeling but Apple has given me the freedom to "not" be a part of the Linux/Android ecosystem and that freedom is the most valuable thing they provide.

I always dread whenever Google pushes an update to any of their products. I try my best to use extensions to remove their web based updates but sometimes I don't have a choice for their web based products. They have pushed so much useless garbage onto me over the years that I utterly despise their engineering groups. The latest screwup is "Reading Lists". Like come on man, Bookmarks worked perfectly fine! They had to muck up bookmarks?! Now I am stuck setting a flag to disable it(and repeat every time Chrome updates or I switch computers).

I can't fathom how a company of Google's stature has such a poor design and QA culture. There must be a lot of grifters who have spent so much time trying to get through their tough interviews such that all they know well is how to pass those interviews but not actually how to make great products.

Just a small snarky comment, funny you were done with your LG phone, and bought another LG phone :).

I actually enjoyed nexus 5, nice form factor, awesome weight.

Honestly my thinking was that this was a "Google" phone and it was advertised as such. All the software came from Google...or so I thought. Turns out as with everything from this trash company(Google), I was duped. The bug was eventually traced to a fault in the way the Qualcomm driver handled mixing and I guess they introduced a regression in the firmware. Yeah...I was super pissed so I looked into where the failure was occurring. I seem to also recall which file in the Android source was causing the problem. All they had to do was record a video and play it back! They obviously do not do real QA testing on each firmware release. Or maybe they automated it(like they do with all their crap) and their test rig missed this bug.

It was eventually fixed in subsequent firmware releases(while other things broke). After getting the iPhone as my daily driver, I opened up and started using the Nexus 5 as a tinkering testbed for custom roms. The smoothest firmware I have seen was a Cyanogen Mod release in late 2015 although it still had rough edges compared to my iPhone from what I recall.

My history with smartphones goes:

Original iPhone (2007), iPhone 3GS (2009), iPhone 4S (2011), HTC One X (2011, not because the iPhone broke, a friend convinced me I should try Android, and on paper it seemed like I would love that so why not?), Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE (2012), Sony Xperia Z (2013), Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (also 2013), (LG) Google Nexus 5X (2015), iPhone SE (2016), iPhone X (2018), iPhone 12 mini (2020).

I actually knew I was done with Android by the time my Z1 Compact broke in the same way it had already been repaired for once (small crack in the display glass which the digitiser was glued to meaning touch stopped working on one side of the crack, unfortunately about 90% of the screen), but I figured maybe I've just been buying the wrong brands and figured I should give Google, the premium brand, a chance before I went back to iPhones for good.

Alas, the Nexus 5X was so bad (laggy, terrible battery life) I actually went back to my iPhone 4S (which I had also been using between the Z1 Compact and the 5X) within the first year, and then bought the iPhone SE when it came out and never looked back. That iPhone SE actually went to my little brother when I bought the iPhone X, and he stopped using it in 2020 after the screen finally cracked (still usable because Apple doesn't glue the digitiser to the display glass like many Android manufacturers do, a practice I personally think is to force repairs since it becomes impossible to use them without a repair).

Maybe they're better, but Apple updates are not all sunshine and rainbows.

Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones - BBC News – https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

But that was to stop them restarting because the battery wasn't powerful enough after being so old. Android phone makers barely remember they made a phone 3 days after they stop selling it

They mucked up the delivery, but the feature that patch provided to the iPhone 6 and up is really great. It's just most people don't know enough about how electronics behave under unstable voltages that they only see the top layer of "Apple made my phone slow!", and ignore the fact that what Apple did was to ensure that the phone could continue working (albeit a little slower) even though its battery had degraded.

What they should have done is include the toggle from day one, clearly explained why the feature was built, and then presented users with a prompt to enable it if the phone detected it may be necessary. Shoving it down peoples throats just made for terrible optics and "planned obsolescence" was a very well fitting and easy explanation in the absence of the real one that few understood.

Like, people still talk about it like it was a bad thing, see this thread for evidence, and this is one of the places where I would expect to find one of the largest concentrations of people that do understand what that patch did and why it was necessary.

No, Apple got sued because they deserved to get sued. At no point did they do what courts determined would have been the right thing, which was to tell the user to get a new battery. And make 50% margins or what have you, that kind of profit, like what they get for their chargers, that would have been fine. They did not want to do that.

I mean I'm just voicing my own opinion here, and I respect yours and even agree with you on some level. Apple has been charging through the nose for battery replacement for a long time, though at the time all this happened (or shortly after at least) they did have a very good battery replacement program, and they recently announced a new replacement parts program which hopefully ends up doing some good on that front, but we'll see.

Personally I think it's pretty great to know that I can use my iPhone even with a degraded battery and not have it shut down unexpectedly.

I've had both iPhones and Androids do that in the past, often in cold weather and during bursts of high load (like on a chairlift at a ski resort, which my example here is based on).

Cheap battery replacements, the option to disable the "feature", etc, only happened after they were sued.

The idea was good, but it was implemented in a way that created issues for some users (eg: my iPhone 5 being sluggish all the time) and benefited Apple as most users would simply buy a new iPhone because no one knew what was going on.

Yeah, my initial reply in this thread states as much. I agree wholeheartedly that they should have rolled it out differently.

Yeah plus their geniuses, lol like every one of their entry level employees won a Nobel prize in order to become a sales clerk, were scripted into shunting customers to buying new iPhones. Oh oh the gadget is fucky? Hmm what could possibly motivate such a malfunction? Oh I did just so happen to witness one customer, very peculiar, the device was clearly rotten. Happens after one year. I'm afraid a new battery, which MAY SEEM AT FIRST GLANCE like the OBVIOUS SOLUTION, but COUNTERINTUITIVELY is not, will not work. You need a new battery, but as a part of a comprehensive unit, complete with a new CPU, a new screen, a new chassis, in short, a new thing of every part of this device. You need a new device.

It's not just battery decay. It's also MORE software forced into the phone via updates, requiring more resources. You can't opt out of new features while getting the security fixes.

This is working as intended. Imagine your phone restarting during a 911 call. It was 100% the correct decision.

The idea was good, but the implementation was terrible. It slowed down some phones a lot (my iPhone 5 was always lagging), there was no information about the feature, no setting to disable it, etc.

I actually started to hit this problem on my iPhone 5S. Not the slow down but the original issue that caused Apple to slow down phones. Old batteries that were really degraded would cause the phones to just die and shut off when the CPU had a spike in usage. I'm sure thats not great for the file system when that keeps happening. However it must be noted that it only started to occur after the phone was 5 years old and the battery had dropped to about 50% of its original design capacity. In fact this was one the reasons I eventually upgraded the phone...that plus I got a new job so it was time to finally upgrade the iPhone 5S to something better (a 1st gen iPhone SE ha ha). I could have just replaced the battery and continued using the 5S for another 1-2 years (as it had 1-2 more years of software updates from what I recall).

The 5s has been given security patches for iOS 12, the last being September 23rd.

That's 8 years of support if it's the last. It was the first 64-bit ARM phone, and the first to have a Secure Enclave, so it might be a bit of a favourite child.

> Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones

Apple messed up the explanations and messaging on that incident big-time, but I'm convinced that they made the correct engineering tradeoff, and I feel like not enough people (even techies) really understood and appreciated that.

As this thread illustrates, a phone is a life-saving device. The priority must be to function when you absolutely need it. You will literally die if you can't call for help when you're stuck in a blizzard and need to call for a rescue.

Apple slowing down phones with weak batteries so that the CPU always has enough juice and doesn't crash is 100% the right engineering tradeoff for a life-saving device.

The last thing you need when you're bleeding out on the kitchen floor and dialing 911 is for your battery to not supply enough power and then force a phone restart or worse when seconds are counting down.

prepping for a life changing trip across Europe,

Not sure what you mean with life changing, but from experience: if you ever find yourself in a situation where you go on a trip and your health might depend on the ability to call or navigate, don't ever use a smartphone for that ability :)

No, it was a life changing trip in the sense that I made so many memories and redefined the direction I wanted my life to take. Not physically in the sense of health being damaged.

Out of sheer curiosity, would you mind sharing in a few words what was so life changing? (I am French and curious what you found great over here :))

First of all, I love you French people. Paris has a reputation for being cold and hostile to outsiders but it is not true at all for me. I've met so many wonderful people there that I still keep in touch with. Walking around the streets of Montmarte at 3AM with my friend just somehow helped reset the mind. It was life changing because I was stuck in a dead end job not even in the career I studied for. I was a CS major but ended up in tech support and then software QA. It was a really depressing time for me and my friend who was also going through the same issues as she was an Engineering grad but ended up in marketing. It was also this feeling of no real goals in life. Just traveling, meeting people with different lifestyles and breaking that chain of daily driving 1+ hour to a terrible underpaid job helped to reimagine what was possible.

Also got to do a lot of deep thinking while traveling across Europe. Wish they were more united. There are so many unbelievably talented people in Europe. It would be interesting if they could compete head on with the US and help to keep us more on our toes sort of like a second super power. I think that would be good for the world. Alas I saw how things like this are just not possible because people do not believe in it. The same problem I had before I came to Europe! Its unfortunate because Europe has all the components to be just as competitive as the US (in my opinion). :)

What a weird response. Modern smartphones are absolutely valid lifelines. You might as well tell travelers to leave their money behind because they should be able to build their own shelter.

Hmm, I see what I mean wasn't super clear. Of course they are valid lifelines as long as they work. My point was about that working condition though; think battery charge not being exceptional, seems to drop dead easier than when dropiing a brick phone. Then again maybe I just had bad luck.

IMO that's why people pay good money for good smartphones, and travel with battery packs etc. They're essential to our day to day lives.

Sure maybe circa 2010 but Apple’s latest & greatest will get you through hell and back, let alone a simple trip through Europe

IT 101, if you can't afford it being broken, don't update until you can.

I always prepare the possibility of fresh install / factory reset when upgrading.

Which is why google play's auto update when I'm outside made me angry.

That behavior only occurs when you learn to distrust your device enough that you learn that lesson. In IT you learn it when an update borks your production. In Phones you shouldn't have to learn it. Yes it is a computing device but it should be built like an appliance that does not need to be rolled back. Thats where the disconnect between Android and iOS is. Sounds like you haven't given iOS an honest look. (As in actually owning a device and using it in real world usage for a while).

The Nexus 5 was probably the best (in an exciting, non-practical way) phone I ever owned.

However, I found myself in a similar situation as yourself with my Nexus 6P. Newlywed on a beautiful island all by ourselves ready to record some memories. 6P took phenomenal pictures and we were all ready with tripod and remote clicker. 6P just died. Luckily still had the wife's old iphone which managed to capture the moments, but not in all its glory.

Went through one more iteration of Android with a Motorola, that they stopped supporting about 3 months after buying.

As I've said in other posts, the amount of ewaste I generated while in the Android/Google ecosystem is criminal.

Switched to an iphone and haven't looked back. I'm still on the same iphone years later, still getting updates, still chugging along.

In all honesty, I preferred the Android OS, but it's too expensive to tolerate in so many ways; money, time (learning the new UX every time there's an update), environment/ewaste, privacy (google and affiliates vacuuming up all my personal information), convenience (it doesn't breakdown when i need it the most).

This might sound odd but you should try a mid range Samsung next.

Much cheaper than pixel and iPhone and Samsung has a design language that many prefer to stock android and ios.

Samsung installs Facebook services you can't uninstall without using adb or rooting your phone and lots of other bloatware too.

This is where I struggle to agree. Cheaper how? The way that I look at it is that the iphone is cheaper bc it's going to last 3-4x longer than the android phone. (3-4x less ewaste)

Moreover, when it comes eventually replacing the iphone, I'm going to get a better trade in value than the android even if it's 3-4x older. Thus lowering the cost of my next phone. (less ewaste bc i know the iphone will end up in someone else's pocket, not in a landfill)

Maybe Samsung is different, but when I went to trade in my $7-800 Motorola after 8-12 months of use, I was offered $28 trade-in value.

My time is also worth money. I don't have time (money) to waste on dealing with android.

This feels like a false narrative.

Samsungs provides 3-5 years of updates for current mid and high end phones. Does your iPhone last 5x4=20 years? Will it be worth much even in 5 years? But if you trade it only after one year, how does that in any way reduce ewaste?

When I got my current phone it was 1/3 of an iphone and 1/5 of the most expensive Samsung (the fold thingy). It works well and is guaranteed at least 3 years of updates. But I plan to use it as my daily driver for 2 years, maybe 2.5. After which I will probably keep it and use it for something else around the house.

Like I said, I don't know if it was a Motorola thing and Samsung is different. Seems like that is the case since Samsung is considered the high-end option for android.

> This might sound odd but you should try a mid range Samsung next.

I have zero interest in a f!cking OS pushing ads into my face.

>As I've said in other posts, the amount of ewaste I generated while in the Android/Google ecosystem is criminal.

This is an unspoken downside of that ecosystem. I have also generated many phones worth of ewaste when I give up on them in less than a year. Its one of the reasons I stopped playing games with all these manufacturers and just bought an "official" Google phone and not touch it software wise. It obviously still wasn't enough.

I was recently cleaning through my attic and I found a lot of these old Android phones. Its amazing how many of them didn't get anywhere near the support that iPhones phones do. I told myself that I would eventually find a custom rom for them and then reuse them for something else but lets be real, that is just another time sink that probably won't happen. Now I am left staring at these phones wishing there was an easy way to deconstruct all the components into their base materials. I know that it is possible to break down the plastics via pyrolysis but no one is really doing this. Secondly there are the circuit board. FR-4 is ground up and used as filler from what I understand. What that means is that even if this phone is recycled, it will never really fully go away. Put in that context, the Android ecosystem just seems even sillier.

I've got an old gen1 Pixel xl 128g, which was working well. I'd been putting off the os upgrade nag messages for a long time, but in a moment of weakness I capitulated. Now the phone is basically a shadow of it's former self with an endless list of issues. I suppose I need to try a factory reset if I want to resurrect it, but not sure I'll find the time.

To be clear, I don't expect google to actively support such an old phone, but I do expect them to properly test updates if they decide to send them to a particular model.

My Gen1 Pixel is still going strong here. 2-3 days battery life with light use and monthly AOSP updates via Pixel Experience ROM. Hope to use it another 5 years.

That's where I was before the update. I loved that phone :-( Now about 7hrs bat life and a half working device.

> AOSP updates via Pixel Experience ROM

I'd be interested to know what this is! Is it something I can use?

Edit: Found it now - looks interesting. Was the installation relatively pain free?

Yes, it's "relatively" easy. They had over-the-air delta updates with Android 10, but not for 11. Here my current steps for each ROM upgrade. Installation would be similar:

- Connect USB

- Boot in Fastboot: Press and hold Volume Down, then press and hold Power

- Install TWRP recovery `fastboot flash boot twrp-...`

- Select to boot recovery mode using Volume Up/Down

- Format system and cache partitions ONLY. Leave data and internal

- Choose Advanced > Sideload, then run `adb sideload PixelExp...zip` on computer

Thank you, I will likely try this.

I've only just upgraded to android 11, and every single new feature, without exception, is a usability nightmare in some sense. I wouldn't mind so much if they redesigned often and the result wasn't so awful

They're particularly not capable of fixing the problems on the enormous mass of Android phones that are no longer receiving any updates and in many cases, due to manufacturer/carrier disinterest, never were.

Last time i looked Google posts updates for their apps every couple of weeks. Of course nothing more than "Bug fixes and speedy performance improvements". Now, if they need an OS update to fix dialing 991, they need to fix their development process.

On my iPhone each of those performance improvements requires downloading ~250mb of an app, so I try to wait and stagger them.

Got gmail, drive, translate, maps, and home? That’ll be a gigabyte of “bug fixes and performance improvements” every week or two.

Why not set it to update only over wifi?

It would be downloading gigs (tens of gigs?) of useless updates every week. Kills my aging battery, slows down my phone/wifi at inopportune times, etc.

I'm happy to download a quarter gig of gMail updates if they've actually updated something. Abstract "bug fixes and security improvements" doesn't seem like a worthwhile gig of updates every week.

> Every year they change some colors and rounded edges

We are going to... Material YOU!

Upgraded my Pixel 4 to Android 12 and told my wife to stay on Android 11. Bugs and questionable design changes. I do not think she will miss any feature ... erh actually what are the new features in 12?

> what are the new features in 12

In fact they stripped lot of features by trying to hide stuff in layers with that god awful UI. Sometimes I feel like Android tries too hard to be iOS and loses its identify completely. If I wanted an iOS experience I might as well use iPhone.

> what are the new features in 12?

* Clock takes two lines on a lock screen. Gigantic clock! Because we have poor vision.

* "Now playing" runs on a lock screen and a lock screen only

* Google Assistant cannot be fully disabled

* Native launcher uses VERY LARGE ICONS - 4 max in a row! A-la AARP advertised phone for grandma with big buttons.

* Can't remove Google search bar via native launcher.

* One tap disable?! That's for penguins! We are not penguins! We are senior citizens! Our fingers need exercise!

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