Hacker News Reader

Comment by toddrossdiy | Hacker News Reader

I was a big fan and supporter of Android all the way from version 2.2 up to version 8. The final straw was when my brand new 800 dollar motorola phone, which was owned by google at the time stopped getting updates barely a year after I bought it. I also noticed that everything I liked about Android was slowly being stripped away, and Apple was slowly adding all the things I felt were missing. Still not the biggest fan of the fact that I have no headphone jack, but I'm still getting updates on my now 4 year old iphone, it didn't cost me any more than my last android did, and overall it just works so much better for me. Not everything is due to status symbols and affordability

View on HN

Unfortunately, many Android phone has no correlation between MSRP and quality. If your decision is based on that phone, it isn't really sound.

My decision was based on "Google owns Motorola, therefore something considered a flagship phone at the time of buying it should be supported for longer than a year". In my opinion, that's some excellent criteria for buying a phone, just a shame that Google treats everything they do, even owning large companies like a beta test, and shuts things down on a whim whenever they feel like it. Honestly my best android phone was a Xiaomi Note 3, cost less than 300 bucks and performed great up until the day I replaced it. Not sure if they still make phones as well as they used to, but I'd give them another try if I ever went back to Android

My moto was a stop gap when I thought I lost my phone and had to replace it. Moto was already known to be a poor brand at the time. The only thing I missed from it was shake to turn on flashlight. For me, getting flagship phones after 1-2 years it's been out has been a great value. They last for 5+ years if you don't drop it.

To be fair, Moto got sold to Lenovo and overnight went from poster child to black ship of the Android family.

Also note that your issue is not with Android, it's with moto.

That's fair, but when I buy a laptop made by Lenovo or Dell or whatever, that doesn't prevent me from upgrading Windows to a new version, so why is that the case with Android? (I know the real answer to this, but really, how is this still a problem?) If I bought a google pixel phone, would they support it with new versions for 5+ years? Just sucks that no android phone manufacturers have any incentive to try and keep a phone up to date for more than a year or two any more.

Like the majority of people here name issues about Android that are more or less exclusive to Samsung and other, mostly dying, brands.

Pixel, Huawai in the past, Xiaomi all allow to use stock android and remove any apps.

Opposite view: I will never ever buy an Apple phone after they have been caught throttling. At least on Android I can install another OS.

Their big mistake was how they communicated (or didn’t) that it was happening. The technical reasoning behind it was sound, and it resulted in actually prolonging the life of the device.

As the battery wore down, the phone would still function, just slower for peak CPU demand. Other devices would just die and people would buy new ones, so not throttling had the effect of people buying newer devices more often than needed.

The main issue is they should have alerted people that performance was degrading so they could get a new battery.

No, no. Not for their communication. They sell you hardware that basically isn't yours.

Can you overclock your Android phone? Force it to run faster at a cost to battery life and overall stability, just by changing a setting in the UI?

Assuming the answer is "no", then Android doesn't actually grant you meaningfully greater freedom in this regard than Apple does: you're just upset about the communication around a particular feature/bug-workaround that requires underclocking the phone temporarily in certain situations.

I can install on it everything I want, including a kernel that lets me do so. Don't rephrase my words, Apple does not want you to interfere with your own machine.

Are Apple laptops repairable by you?

You were complaining about a very specific incident, using wording that suggested you either didn't understand the background behind it, or were deliberately attempting to obscure that background in order to paint Apple as worse than they are.

If your beef with Apple is the lack of repairability of their phones and laptops, then you do you. Personally, I have no problem with it, because it's a tradeoff that gets me laptops with higher build quality in a smaller package.

But if your stated beef with Apple is something that isn't true or doesn't make a lick of sense, I'm gonna call it out, if only to help reduce the degree to which the false narrative about the throttling spreads.

Wait till you hear about baseband software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com