I’m with you, however mac os remain the best dekstop OS and iOS remain the best mobile one, even after all those years. So, they must be doing something right..
Resting on laurels, while trying to figure out how to destroy everything good about macOS by making it more like iOS.
Android variants all have things that iOS can only dream of having in five years (notifications was a fun one), just spread very unevenly throughout manufacturers. Samsung currently has a very good Android build.
Calling it the best is very far fetched.
When I switched from Android to iOS in 2016, I was shocked at how little was different, and I can only assume gulf has narrowed since then. A lot of features Android users just assume iOS users don't have are there: vendor-agnostic password manager integration, Safari browser extensions, Safari content (ad) blocker API (Chrome is restricting ad-blockers soon!), more complete home screen customization and widgets, lock screen customization and widgets (iOS 16, upcoming), custom third-party keyboards, grouped/customizable notification system, native console wireless controller support from all three consoles.
Features like granular privacy controls and screen recording (with the exception of some obscure Android OEM builds) debuted on iOS first.
I'd be skeptical with anyone declaring either platform "best," I think they're both roughly equivalent.
However, I do think that anyone who uses macOS is insane to go with Android. There are simply too many useful integrations between the platforms to ignore, combined with the fact that, even if the iPhone isn't the best phone, it's usually in the top handful of choices in terms the overall package.
(Tip: you can tap the screen on the right side to go to the next page.)
I'm well aware of different ways to swipe pages. The reason why the hardware volume buttons are so convenient for reading is because you just put your thumb on the volume/page down button, and you no longer have to move it at all - only press down slightly every now and then. It's much more ergonomic for long-term reading than having to raise the thumb every time, even to tap.
You can imagine that someone might create malware or otherwise hostile app that plays a loud/embarrassing sound and hijacks your volume buttons.
Having to lift a finger to turn a page seems like a really small problem in comparison to that one.
Smartphones are general purpose devices and have to make tradeoffs like this all the time. They can't just greenlight every useful function that every type of app might want. IMO if you want an e-reader, get an e-reader.
For example: Let's say I'm a private detective. It might be nice for there to be an app that records audio and video at all times without any visual indication of my phone doing so. However, having that kind of OS level permission available to apps on an app store is probably a bad idea. I'll need to go out and buy a dedicated recording device.
Sure, we can argue about where the line gets drawn. If you like Android for allowing apps to modify hardware buttons, fine. But, I would prefer a device where physical buttons perform consistent functions. A middle ground might be some kind of buttons dedicated toward custom or app functions – but, to me, why bother when the entire screen is a customizable button?
Either way, this was meant as an illustration of how small factors can affect decisions. I have had an iPhone as my primary phone for a few months, and this one thing was the single biggest issue I had with it at the end of the day - not that there weren't others, and some were actually more annoying when they happen, but this one is at the top because it's something that's constantly in my face. Thus, I'm not going to buy another iPhone for this reason alone; my response to "you're holding it wrong" is "you're making them wrong".
Desktops, and Android, have allowed you to do this for decades.
Icons are lined up left to right, in a row.
You need to insert icons inside a row and then all the other icons to its right will be pushed right and/or down.
Just talking about being able to grab an icon and position it anywhere I want on the screen (possibly snapped to a grid).
Right now, icons have to be aligned in rows anchored in the top left corner, so that whenever you insert a new one, all the ones after that get pushed right or down, messing up your entire layout.
We've had this ability on desktops since Windows 3 thirty years ago, and Android has had it since day one. As does macOS. Why not iOS?
Here is a thread on reddit describing it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/r2vs1x/why_cant_you_pu...
There are a few solutions around it, some require a jailbroken iPhone, others use empty widgets to create "fake space".
Do you have a screen shot that could illustrate what it is you want to be able to do?
They're not all stacked up starting at the left corner, are they?
Imagine that all I want is three icons on my home screen, all lined up on the right edge of the screen, where they are easy to reach by my thumb.
You can't do that on iOS.
But now that you finally gave a concrete example of what you want to do, I can at least picture it.
And, yes, it would be really nice if Apple had a system to install third-party launchers, there's no denying that.
I know this is really silly, but you can definitely workaround the issue and effectively have the same end result as Android if you really want it:
Overall, every individual omission from one platform to another is going to be a question of what is important to the buyer.
For some, it might seem ridiculous that, in fifteen years, Apple still doesn't offer a truly customizable home screen. That's a fair criticism. At the same time, it's a fair criticism that it took until 2021 for Google to release a phone that will get 5 years of security and feature updates (Apple never guaranteed this directly, but the iPhone 6S delivered that level of support from when it launched in 2015 until the release of iOS 16 this fall that will drop iPhone 6S support: 7 years of full feature and security updates).
Meanwhile, if you bought a Pixel 3 in 2018, you got your final update this year. I personally think that's downright unacceptable considering the maturity of smartphones when it was released.
The problem with me making comparisons like this is that they'll always seem like a cheap whataboutism, but that's generally how these feature-to-feature comparisons work. For me, in 2016, I saw a situation where Google was not delivering everything I needed in a smartphone, but I also recognize that other people have other needs.
For example, I put the apps that I use the most often on the right hand side of the screen, where my thumb can reach them faster. I can't do that on iOS (well, I can, but then any new app I put on the home screen will mess the entire arrangement and I will spend another ten minutes calculating what to insert and where to get all these icons back on the right side of the screen).
I just don't understand how Apple, a company that prides itself on great user experience, is still putting their users through this UX hell fifteen years after the release of the iPhone, and they don't seem to think it's an important feature to add.
They trade blows in different security features.
This is a bit of a simplification but in broad strokes it is kind of correct. And it turns out this actually makes good UI!
You can install creaky old Windows on millions of devices with disparate hardware configurations on the day of its release, but Android users must wait weeks, months, or forever for their telcos to dribble out hacked, proprietary versions of Android for every model of device ONE AT A TIME. Seriously, WTF? And this is from the great "open-source" OS that was supposed to free us all from vendor and telco tyranny.
What a fraud.
Apple would have the same problem if iOS was open source and distributable by anyone, their chips being able to be made by anyone. Once again, Apple has picked the easiest (and least open) path, so, yeah, they can upgrade easily.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/hal-types
The big lift here was scrapping the Linux driver model which was at the root of most of the pain.
Power efficiency, absolutely, and a lot of this is due to them not really giving a damn for a while. Which was great! You truly could do anything with your phone, run things in the background forever, etc. Nowadays, Doze, Android Resource Economy and the need to go through Foreground Services/WorkManager makes it quite a bit harder to do.
No, it's just not important to you.
Garageband seems to be pretty popular on all the iOS form factors. iOS has for most of its life had a strong offering of music composition and production apps. iOS has had a high quality media framework for years, Android has not.
And if the need is so questionable, why did Android finally get around to addressing it?
And this seems like an odd argumentative path for an Android fan to go down - downplaying the importance of more niche needs outside social media and cow clicking as not important. iOS does just as well or better for messaging, Instagram and TikTok. If you only care about the smart phone basics for the masses iOS ecosystem is pretty hard to beat with better battery life and support.
I would say this is a matter of opinion.
It stagnated enough for android to come really close, while the other issues didn’t improve much (side loading will be on Apple’s dead body, default apps setting still being too few), and there is no end in sight to the constant nagging for more service revenue.
Nowadays both OS are mostly on par, for instance android 13’s per app language setting is one of those QoL things that were iOS’s turf but are now more prominent in android.
So I wouldn't consider iOS the best mobile one in that regard, as probably no one that suffers being brought sundenly to the home screen due to pointer errors in Objective-C.
Some of its features are yet to appear on iOS.
When the iPhone came out, that was the dominant landscape: PDAs and horribly incompetent phones. Internet browsing meant WAP (a clumsy attempt to dumb Web pages down enough to show on tiny, all-text phone screens) or a Blackberry. Blackberry rested on its laurels and a shitty, shitty browser until dead.
There are plenty of things that Apple remains bafflingly ignorant of, or just petulantly refuses to fix on its mobile devices. Great example: The iPhone, after 15 years, STILL doesn't notify you of missed calls. That's right: You don't even have the OPTION to get audible alerts of missed calls, but meanwhile you can get up to 10 alerts of missed TEXTS. That is simply stupid.
Then came the Apple Pencil... and no support for it in iOS. Every app developer had to implement handwriting recognition independently. WTF? Why didn't Apple simply allocate a square area in the on-screen iPad keyboard to accept written characters, which Palm OS nailed in the '90s?
Annnyway... I looked up Symbian because I work in Qt a lot now, and it was originally from Nokia. I knew it had been developed for phones, but could not imagine why. That's because I didn't ever interact with Symbian or see it in the wild and know it was from Nokia. So thanks for the note. I think Qt is pretty cool, and my team just made a good desktop app with it. I'm curious why the C++ Symbian experience wasn't good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPOC_(operating_system)
Symbian C++ had a couple of issues, namely several restrictions of accomodating C++ for a microkernel, before the days of C++98, and organically growing from there.
So there were several idioms and restrictions on how the language could be used, and the toolchain went through several iterations, MS-DOS batch files, Perl scripts, Metrowerks based compiler, eventually replaced by an Eclipse based IDE (after a false start), Carbide.
Qt came later into the picture as Symbian was being modernized, and after a POSIX compatibility layer (PIPS) was added into the platform.
You had the security rules that iOS "invented", C++, Java and Python toolchains, being able to run http server on the phone, 3D support for C++ and Java applications.
But Symbian C++ was a bit of a pain (see link below), it was being modernized via PIPS and Qt (as mentioned), but then Elop came to Nokia, the famous burning platforms memo came out, and everyone went away.
Nokia development culture was pretty much anti-MS, so most went elsewere, instead of bothering with Windows Phone 7.
http://symbian.tomuta.ro/GUID-C3206E31-251C-4AFC-90C2-04B38C...