Android 13 requires devices to have more than 2GB RAM and 16GB storage
android-developers.googleblog.com
android-developers.googleblog.com
Then I remember KitKat OS came and it was all hell broke loose. Every OEM was just releasing different Android versions here and there every year. And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want
In my history of ~11 years of Android development, it's just hard to purchase a Google phone. I bought a Nexus tablet but I have to ask my sister in the US to ship it to me. The shipping fee is ridiculous high I remember. Then they introduced Pixel and Go editions but still I couldn't purchase officially from Google. I have to ask favor from someone in the US/EU to ship it to me.
What would you have expected them to do? Vendors are free by licensing to fork AOSP and do what they will with it. Ain't nothing Google can say to change that; any more than they can say what people can do with forks of Chromium.
> The "Android" name, the Android logo, the "Google Play" brand, and other Google trademarks, are property of Google LLC and not part of the assets available through the Android Open Source Project.
But guess what? This didn't (and still doesn't) influence the device vendors one bit. Instead, the device vendors worked around this constraint in the most blunt way possible: by stripping the word "Android" out of the OS in every place it appears, replacing it with some other term. That's half of what these Android-forked OSes (e.g. Xiaomi's MIUI) are about in the first place — giving the OS its own branding distinct from "Android."
The average selling price of an Android phone in the US is less than $300. The average Android buyer in the US is getting a less than optimal experience and don’t seem to care. They would buy any phone that could make phone calls, surf the web and watch YouTube and get on Facebook.
The first truly successful Android devices were the Motorola Droid and the original Samsung Galaxy. Even back then, in the Android 2.X days, they were making modifications to the style of Android, similar to the way Samsung and HTC and others had similarly customized Windows Mobile in the pre-iPhone smartphone era.
Android managed to get a stronghold thanks to Google’s aggressive investment and the fact that they didn’t charge OEMs a royalty to use it (which Microsoft did and Symbian did. Also, neither Symbian nor Windows Mobile were at all competitive to iOS and Android was after Google pivoted post-iPhone launch) and the fact that they let carriers and OEMs do whatever they wanted to the interface and add whatever bloatware they wanted.
It wasn’t until well past the success of the Galaxy line that Google started to try to rein in the diversions and UX forks. And Samsung, which has a UX that at this point many of its customers prefer, has received a light touch from a lot of these attempts because they are consistently one of the largest Android OEMs.
Android largely has a userbase because Google let the OEMs do whatever they wanted, similar to what Symbian and Windows Mobile had allowed before.
Wintel duopoly all over again. I wrote/maintain two Android apps. 20 years ago, I wrote/maintained some Windows desktop apps. It’s amazing to me how it’s all different, but yet feels so much the same.
Basically this:
__________________
| GMS Preinstalled |
Current |---------+--------|
GMS Status | Yes | No |
_____________|_________|________|
| Installed | OK | OK |
|-------------|---------+--------|
| Disabled | OK | OK |
|-------------|---------+--------|
| Uninstalled | NOT OK | OK |
+-------------+---------+--------+Many of them will show "X requires Google Play Services" warnings and then... continue working fine anyway. It's always the same wording, so I assume it's just a thing that the app-side libraries do when it tries to talk to the service and it isn't there.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/google-will-stop-bundling-it...
- Google most certainly can restrict how its products are used, in fact they do. Licensing comes with rules.
- Huawei is “free” to use AOSP, but can’t use Google’s APIs. See how far they got with that. No App Store and no Google APIs means a lot of apps won’t work. So you really need Google’s version unless you’re in China.
I don't think that's the main reason why Huawei cannot make phones. Sure in International markets it's an issue. But Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and other phones sold in China also don't have Google Play and Play Services.
> unless you’re in China.
You sell in China, you don’t need Google’s approval. Outside it you most certainly do.
No Play Store; alternative app stores exist. This can work; consider Amazon's Android devices which only support Amazon as their store.
Huawei has only been blocked from dealing with the US, but as a result it’s been killed around the world after being one of the leading low-cost brands. Why? No Google.
Take out the Play Store and Play APIs and now you’re just a random Chinese Android manufacturer.
I have an old-ish phone, but recently needed to update from android 9 to android 10. And have been plagued with issues ever since - volume is somehow lowered on bluetooth devices, and the battery doesn't last as long, and occasionally there are crashes that force phone to restart.
You can turn off a setting called something like 'unified volume control', to go back to the old way of having separate (and redundant) volume control on both headset and source device.
This is something I set religiously on all the Android devices I use for audio-only media.
I remember KitKat being great because it was the version that introduced Chrome based WebView, which made a huge difference for compatibility if you needed it. However the WebView component only got auto-updating in Android 5.0, so security double sucks.
And KitKat was the version that there was an explosion of devices for - impressive that 4.4.4 is still supported nearly a decade later (albeit without OS security patches!) It was released when iOS7 was released with the iPhone 5.
The sort of person who uses SHAREit and other platforms to minimise their data usage, often has to delete one app and install another to switch between them (due to lack of space), and certainly can’t afford a new phone every few years, is not included in these statistics.
I understand your point. It is like (me) linux user asking for a simple desktop - minimal GUI. Nothing flashy like winXP.
The world on the other hand (incl. many developers) want tons of features - bling etc. This is rampant in developing world (especially phones non-motorola phones).
BTW, you could have bought moto G, E editions in India. These are so close to stock pixel experience.
> er vividly since I have to code for 23 hours straight just to beat that deadline.
Lets be honest. That indicates app ecosystem matured. It is as big as OS. People that we ask to build apps charge tons of money.
> TV by plugging an Android USB.
For you it is a feature. For others it may be a security issue.
Sites worked faster for a while on my very old device.
Android is an open source project.
But it isn't what regular people mean when you talk about Android. In the say way you could say that MacOS would be Open source if they had almost the same name with Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
Also Google IO is not fun any longer, knowing that I will only get to play with those features when my phone dies and is time for a replacement.
And even when buying one needs to take care, for example, plenty of Android 10 phones still on sale.
But that code was written in the times when there was no widely used non-NDK APIs for media. Right now landscape is very different: NDK is very niche, and if you’re seeing it everywhere, then either you’re in the gamedev / IoT / etc, or doing something in a very strange way.
What exactly do you use NDK extensively for?
I mean just look at this: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android . No recent version ever even hit 50%.
Maybe it would have been different if I was part of a large team with more time to spend on somewhat frivolous efforts.
It all works so well with older versions now that on an evaluation from the mobile teams of the new UI frameworks Jetpack Compose and Swift UI, we decided fully in support of Jetpack Compose because it worked very well out of the box with older versions and was getting tons of updates.
We decided against Swift UI since it was tied to the iOS version, and although most people who can update their phone do, significant numbers of users it seems don't immediately buy new iPhones anymore when they don't get updates anymore. As much as the dev experience would have been improved using the latest Swift UI on latest, the lowest version we support is stuck with one of the terrible first iterations. For something like UI, it just wasn't worth losing so many users.
For example, when you run an app made in the iOS 15 era on an iOS 13 device, the app can’t use any runtime features that are not included with iOS 13. Given that swift is still rapidly evolving, that amounts to a lot of useful features. This year, iOS 16 apps get to use the cool new Regex features.
> AppCompat, AndroidX, and their other library projects have basically made SDK concerns something you rarely have to think about at this point.
I kinda wish this meant they would spread out the releases a bit more, say 2-3 years apart. At least then they'd have even more motivation to ensure that the support libs et al offered compelling features that don't require manufacturers to stop being lazy.
MTP sucks hard and is slow and easy to overload with many files.
My 4.2 device was Umi X2 Chinese phone and I even hacked together couple Roms for such Meadiatek based devices back then. I remember my lightest ROM was like 250mb. With working PlayStore and all, but obviously only bare minimum included. Nowadays even the lightest custom Roms are 700mb+ . With Google apps and all easy 1.5GB and more.
forked from https://github.com/google/adb-sync
Uses a syntax like rsync via adb.
You might be romanticizing the situation. Before Jelly Bean, it was still completely a Wild West. If anything, custom skins from manufacturers were even worse back then.
It's open source, what do you propose they do about that? Close source the OS?
> For me the deterioration of Android started after Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean for me is the best Android OS in history.
This is definitely where I lost you. That's a 10 year old OS, basically an OS that represents the the infancy of consumer smartphones. Anyone who actually goes back and uses an OS that old will quickly discover just how little "vital" functionality it has.
One that's particularly funny to me: Android added native printer support in 8.0. That's something we've had on desktop computers for decades!
We didn't even have fully fledged notification controls and do not disturb before Android 5, something that's considered a basic necessity now. Couldn't search the system settings. The list goes on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history
* Privacy
* Security
* Efficiency
I have a personal Android S22+ and an iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone gets better with every update, whereas there's always something funky going on with my droid. Every update does something weird, fixing one thing and breaking something new, and managing to offer no significant privacy improvements.
In fact, today it is Samsung, the world's second largest phone vendor (outside of China), who is the one getting hit by data breaches, leaks, and hacks on an ongoing basis.
while it may be an outstanding pun, commenting that it is doesn’t really add to the discussion. it feels rather like a reddit comment chain, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but also isn’t really the culture on HN
My wife won't switch to iOS device due to UX in iOS
I had to help a family member open a PDF file of a ticket sent via email on an iphone.
It was opened via webmail in safari, it just downloaded the file, that was it. No way to open it. No way to find the downloads from Safari.
Eventually I figured out how to drag down from the home screen, search for downloads, scroll down a bit, then found the downloads folder with the file inside it to open it.
Contrast to android where it downloads the file, then offers to open it.
The whole "iphone is easier to use" seems like a bit of a myth.
However, using an anecdote of an uncommon use case being bad hardly supports the conclusion of your last sentence.
That's when you actually have to guess about what's happening.
If the UX falls apart whens you leave the 3 most common patterns, your thing isn't easy to use
I really don't think this is an "uncommon use case", people do download files and stuff all the time, people wanna move their files around too.
They’ve both got their pros and cons, innovations and derivatives. Neither are really ‘underdogs’.
Apple is the one pioneering features at this point, especially in the privacy space. Does Gartner cover this? If not, I wish they would do a quarterly feature matrix analysis.
The Apple pics might not look as good, but the Apple camera app is far smoother than flagship Android and the Apple pictures look more realistic.
That said, some of the stuff Google has pulled off with the Pixel cameras is very impressive. Like the ability to shoot simple astrophotography.
Really I think the term “underdog” can only be applied to some individual Android manufacturers or any non-Android non-iOS based phone.
Mindshare, sure.
I'll keep buying phones that only use cloud services that spy on me, instead of spying on me directly. At least that's somewhat defensible as it's not my hardware acting against me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
As of now, Apple does nothing as they backed down from that plan.
And google reports you to authorities and never stopped and also never went public about letting you know they were doing it (at least apple published a freaking press release to announce it and ask for feedback!)
And somehow that makes Apple worse.
Apple additionally has said that they will (though have backed off on the timing to "some time in the future") said that they will use your hardware to scan your photos and have it report you to the authorities.
Actually, they don't, at least according to Hacker Factor. There's definitely not only 160 images of CSAM uploaded to iCloud Photos every year.
> Of all of the companies identified by NCMEC, I only saw one that had an unexpected decrease in reporting: Apple. According to NMEC, Apple submitted 205 reports in 2019 (a third my my reporting volume). Apple increased a little, to 265 in 2020, but then dropped in 2021 to only 160 reports. That's nearly a 22% decrease over two years!
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/955-NC...
My understanding of iCloud photos is that they're encrypted, as in Apple can't scan them on the server, but I'd imagine across they're cloud services they ought to be seeing more unencrypted content than that.
I also don't care nearly as much about their servers scanning content that they are in possession of, as my device scanning content that I am in possession of... so I probably should have stayed out of this part of the argument a bit better. Oh well.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ (See Apple's Use of Personal Data)
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/23/apple-scans-icloud-mail-for-c...
Adding an encrypted hash to every photo instead seems way better than having access to every photo on iCloud without any encryption.
iCloud Photos currently aren't encrypted this way, just "in transit and on server" [1].
> iCloud secures your information by encrypting it when it’s in transit, storing it in an encrypted format, and securing your encryption keys in Apple data centers. Both Apple and third-party data centers may be used to store and process your data.
This contrasts with services marked "end-to-end" where Apple doesn't have the key.
It’s something of a tradeoff as encrypting backups on device runs into issues if you lose the device. However, if companies have unencrypted data the US government and possibly others will require them to check for specific things.
Generally search "CSAM apple" and you'll find endless articles about this.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ios+report+photos+to+police&t=fpas...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/apple-explains-h...
Which is an entirely optional and opt-in service.
Because they want to scan files that will be encrypted on your device and not transferred to the server as plaintext. No doubt they'll continue to scan unencrypted files server side.
> no one asked Apple to do this.
If someone asked them to it would turn it into a warrantless search with Apple acting as the state agents to search your possessions. It would almost certainly result in the evidence being tossed by any US court. This kind of warrantless search only works if Apple does it of their own accord, instead of on the governments behalf.
Note that this doesn't apply to searches done on Apples servers to data you uploaded, there it's their possessions that they're searching, not yours.
Apple is very pro-privacy and probably doesn’t like having access to unencrypted customer photos. But if they just encrypted everything it would be a child abuser’s dream because suddenly they’d be safe on iOS, and when people found out Apple started protecting them it would be a disaster for PR and law enforcement.
After much consultation their solution was to scan for known abuse images on device so they could be kept in the cloud in an encrypted form without providing abusers a safe haven.
On Android, you have a dad reported to the police and his Google account locked (including his Google Fi cellular plan) for taking photos of his toddler to send to the doctor https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
Apple has not done this.
IMO the more logical guess as to the actual reason Apple wants to do this - to approach e2e encrypted iCloud photos in a LE-friendly way.
And I don’t think anyone was suggesting that Apple would secretly betray users. The concern is normalization of the notion of on-device scanning before (publicly) expanding the scope to all images.
In any case, I think this concern of yours is unfounded, as echoed by many in the other comments below, and you should rethink it before continuing to push it.
The amount of scanning has not changed since the invention of corporate image hosting on the internet; you still cannot use iCloud to host known illegal content - they just moved where the scanning takes place. I don't see how this makes it any more likely or normalized to scan your non-iCloud photos.
Since the photos are decryptable by keys in Apple’s possession, there is no real advantage to scanning on-device unless Apple/the government wanted to increase the scope of the scanning beyond iCloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web
Apple didn’t propose this, and the scheme that Apple did propose was very inconvenient if they actually wanted to do this. They would have had to redesign how the system worked to do it, at which point most of the system would become completely useless. Nobody would come up with a system like Apple’s if they wanted to do what you describe. There are much simpler ways to do that which would have saved Apple a lot of time and effort. The only reason to design a system like Apple’s is to limit knowledge in all directions as much as possible.
Nobody was rightfully concerned about this, they got outraged because they would rather jump to conclusions over headlines than take the time to read about how the scheme worked.
iCloud photos are not e2e encrypted. If only iCloud photos were the true final target, there is absolutely no need for on-device scanning.
This doesn’t make any sense because this system cannot be rolled out to non-iCloud photos. They would have to redesign how it worked. So the whole idea that Apple designed it this way for reasons that only kick in when it’s rolled out to non-iCloud photos is incoherent. If Apple were designing it for that purpose they would have picked a design that actually worked in those circumstances.
A known CSAM photo gets added to photos on an iPhone with iCloud disabled – what happens next? What do you think is the mechanism for that getting reported?
Apple planned to look for known abuse images. People freaked out and they had to back down.
Google already scans for possible abuse images including new ones using AI. Thus it found and reported a father for a pic he had just taken.
And Apple is somehow the worse of the two.
The courts at least all agree that a company can be compelled to scan content in their possession, the creator of the content has no significant privacy rights. This is known as the third party doctrine. All Google is doing is doing this kind of scanning.
Apple meanwhile, wants to take your device (something that they cannot be compelled to do, due to the 4th amendment restriction against seizures) and use it to scan the content on your device (something they cannot be compelled to do, due to the 4th amendment restriction against searches) to decide whether or not there is illegal content on it.
The company violating you worse is pretty obviously the one doing things to you that the government couldn't compel them to do, because (if compelled) it would violate your rights.
It seems like hair-splitting to me. In both cases your photos are getting checked if you want to use the cloud storage service. Why is it worse to do on device (where it’s private) instead of on Google’s server (where you have to give them a plaintext copy of the photo)?
“Oh but Apple could change that with any update”. Couldn’t Google do the same with any update to Android, or even a Google Play Services update?
Suppose you go to a public restroom and someone has installed a camera in there to perv on the people using it. That would be an invasion of your privacy, right? Now suppose someone installed a camera in your bathroom at your house. Would you say that's an equivalent invasion of your privacy?
I think once you give someone else your unencrypted data, anything that happens to it afterwards is fair game. I assume at some point a human will snoop around my files.
First: this was all, quite literally, about Apple wanting to NOT have access to your unencrypted photos.
In Apple's proposed plan, we would only be talking about hashes of pictures, and the comparison would be done by your device.
A fitting analogy would be if the "public restroom camera" snapped a Polaroid of you and asked you to compare it to a binder of known child porn, except somehow did this in a way that did not expose you to child porn and would not inconvenience you in any way and was guaranteed not to transmit the Polaroid somewhere else, and you had opted in to the whole process and there was another bathroom right next to it that required no such participation.
It's important to understand that Apple's on-device scanning plan was in the service of allowing E2E encryption.
The idea was to create a path by which they could comply with various current and upcoming CSAM legislation while still maintaining an E2E encryption flow.
Incidentally, this scanning using hashes is indistinguishable from malware. Someone other than the user is instructing the device to perform operations that under no circumstances will benefit the user. Would this be tolerated if the list of hashes included copyrighted files, or prohibited books? I'm constantly disappointed by how effective "won't somebody please think of the children" is.
Why? That’s the part I don’t get. People state that like it’s obvious on its face and it’s not to me.
If you perform an identical operation on a server, why is it better than performing the same operation on my device?
The result is identical. The inputs are identical.
On the other hand, when you transfer your data to someone else's computer, you're relinquishing some control over it. Just like how your computer should serve you, that computer will serve its operator, and that operator's interests may be adversarial to you.
I hear you. I really do. The world you describe is the world I want to live in.
But it’s not the world we live in. Your device is so complex, does so many operations per second, has so many sensors, sends so much data, receives so much data, that it is functionally impossible for a person to consent to everything that their device does. For all intents and purposes, you own the device, but have very little control over it. This has been true since smartphones came into existence.
So to take a stance like yours — and all-or-nothing stance, a declaration of sovereignty from the The Way It Works — is, I’m sorry to say, delusional. Demanding that perfect be the enemy of the good is exactly how we will sleepwalk into the dystopian surveillance state.
The problem is that a lot of people don't understand why privacy is important and why compromising it for what seems like good reasons is dangerous. Such people don't understand that some laws that make it easier to get away with crimes can still be good.
(And tangentially, I'm not even sure that spotting traders of known CSAM is even a great way to combat the extremely real problem of pedophilia. Feels like another "war on drugs", where we target end users, as opposed to addressing the actual roots of the problem)
In a way, Apple is the victim of that here - they need to comply with laws based on "think of the children" rhetoric.
There are various current and proposed laws in various places around the world that compel Apple to share cloud content with various law enforcement agencies. Various current and future laws may compel Apple and other cloud hosts to actively scan for and report various things on behalf of government. This is... not great. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think we agree on that much?
We also agree that it is at best impractical for Apple to flaunt the law of nations, yes?
They are powerful, but they can't just defy federal law in a brazen and public way.
This is the context in which Apple's on-device image fingerprint scanning was conceived. They would like to enable E2E encryption for users for privacy's sake (because privacy is also a unique selling point vs. Google) while simultaneously complying with law.
If you want to argue that it sucks: sure. That's totally valid. The alternatives are certainly viable and even commendable: running your own "cloud", eschewing cloud storage, shunning smartphones entirely, etc.
However, it seems like most people like and want cloud storage.
Working within the constraints of "people want cloud storage" and "we can't openly defy multiple world governments", Apple's CSAM scanning proposal felt like clearly the best possible (least evil, if you prefer) cloud solution that doesn't involve exiting the market entirely or establishing their own offshore data centers and declaring them sovereign nations.
Agreed.
>We also agree that it is at best impractical for Apple to flaunt the law of nations, yes?
It's unclear to me what law would be violated by both storing encrypted data on their systems that they don't have the keys for and not scanning client devices.
The scanning on device was adding a hash to each photo only readable
- if it matched a known csam image
- multiple photos within the iCloud account match known csam images
- the image was uploaded to iCloud
If you want to act practically, scanning on your device is slightly better for privacy.
Additionally, scanning would happen on-device at time of upload and not on Apple's servers.
Google meanwhile scans for algorithmically determined new content and ruins people’s lives without any ability to appeal (even after national news coverage): https://stratechery.com/2022/rights-laws-and-google/
Also Apple was clearly doing this so they could enable e2e encryption on iCloud.
Yeah, but the big question still remains, do they protect me from terrorists as well?
At first. Then some legislator gets the bright idea mandate on-device scanning or someone adds a dark pattern to trick people into uploading to iCloud without realizing the ramifications. Having that capability is a threat to privacy even if it is initially configurable.
So in the same situation Apple’s proposal (which was designed with the input of many experts to avoid false positives and respect privacy) COULD NOT have flagged the father.
In which case, (a) you are not required to use iCloud Photos and (b) it is not out of the ordinary for US-based photo hosting services to scan for CSAM.
There is no evidence otherwise that Apple is "spying on you" whatever that specifically means.
But, as you noted, Apple backed down on the proposal, so assuming that you still hold that cloud scanning is ok, Apple's approach, at least in this regard is at worst equal.
> Of all of the companies identified by NCMEC, I only saw one that had an unexpected decrease in reporting: Apple. According to NMEC, Apple submitted 205 reports in 2019 (a third my my reporting volume). Apple increased a little, to 265 in 2020, but then dropped in 2021 to only 160 reports. That's nearly a 22% decrease over two years!
note: later on they say:
> Granted, Apple only rolled out this new functionality in mid-December 2021. However, based on their volume of traffic, I would expect them to (at minimum) submit a few hundred reports to NCMEC each week. I cannot fathom any legal or technical reason why Apple is not submitting more reports to NCMEC. It's as if these laws apply to everyone except Apple.
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/955-NC...
This doesn't happen with Google, my android phone does not act against my interests. Meanwhile Google's servers do act against my interests (as do Apples servers - though not as effectively since more content is encrypted), but I don't own them, so what can I really expect?
Apple only backed down temporarily, their communication has been "we still plan to do this, but later". Given the nature of OS updates, that means you can't buy an IPhone today and be confident that it won't decide to start spying on you tomorrow.
Google used AI to try to find CSAM, thus it flagged the father’s picture taken to send to a doctor.
Apple’s solution was to check against a database of known abuse images. It would not be capable of flagging a new photo someone took.
Of the two solutions Google’s may find more offenders, but it would clearly find FAR more false positives.
The only way for a false positive in the Apple system is for two unrelated images to have identical perceptual hashes (with multiple algorithms?). Plus there was no reporting until a threshold of multiple (10+) matches were found, so one false positive wouldn’t do it.
Not even that, the photos were not visible to some trusted human party until 10+ matches were found. That is, photos were not auto reported, they were only decryptable after the threshold was crossed and then they are reported after being reviewed by a human
So the question is how to improve privacy and control while using computers.
>Eliminating computer usage isn't a valid solution.
Computer's promise is to be bicycle for mind. Computer usage does not deserve to be eliminated. Smartphone is something different. For me it feels that the promise of smartphone is to gather all your personal data which is possible.
A smartphone is also not something you really need to use a lot to get by in life -- sure, it adds a lot of convenience, but almost everything it does can be replaced by a dumbphone and a general purpose computer. Personally I still use one but if I find myself using it for anything other than calls, texts or food delivery apps I usually set it down and walk over to my Linux PC where I can do it equally well.
Pedantic correction: while the phone would spy on you to pre-calculate + embed "you are a bad guy doing a bad thing" metadata into photos, the phone wouldn't then report you to the authorities. You had to choose to sync your photos into iCloud Photos (i.e. expose them in cleartext to Apple), for Apple to then discover the embedded "you are a bad guy" metadata out of them, and use it to report you to the authorities.
Google is a myriad of services and their money is made from advertising and cloud. Android is just a very small part.
So when you compare smartphones then Google is the smaller player, it‘s only a small fraction of the company while the rest is doing totally different things.
Truly the data scraping could be enormous, needing resources and lots of them.
Yes it exists, they add features.
But they used to trumpet it a ton, add tons of new stuff. Try to keep expanding it like to tablets and other things.
Now it’s basically phones, they don’t seem to try anymore on tablets. Phone makers come up with the new things (like folding) not Google.
It sort of seems more reactive than proactive.
I don’t know. I’m sort of spitballing as someone who doesn’t follow Android closely.
Sorry my memory is hazy too.
Crazy statement. I have iPhone for work and it is horrible to use. I haven't met a single thing from UX point of view in iOS that is better than whatever is in Android. It's a complete downgrade IME.
It's the most used mobile OS worldwide, by far. Owned, developed and release by the world's largest ad and web company.
A Galaxy Z Fold4 - Samsung costs $1800 before tax. Form factor only available on Android. Even a Xiaomi 12 Ultra Phone costs over EUR1000 in Europe.
I'm thinking there's no point in owning an Android phone anymore. They aren't trustworthy devices, they offer increasingly less user freedom at the cost of a less refined experience. It seems like they're just gonna become worse iPhones, all the problems and none of the benefits.
On Android I can run proper Firefox and get uBlock Origin.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
I've read android has some malware that you need to click "allow from web" and manually install.
I have some sensitive stuff on my phone so security is my number 1 reason for getting an Android.
1. almost every generation has some kind of hardware defect that you only find out later that lots of people report in enthusiast forums. Be it the loading cable, display bending, weird issues around refresh rate straining your eyes.. it never ends. And no, the hardware doesn't even feel better than the competition anymore. I had the iphone 13 in my hands and it felt like any cheap plastic phone.
2. The UI is horrible, the false perception of iOS being "simple" is perhaps the biggest marketing success in human history. I had an iPhone 13 for a few hours and there were already countless things I found incomprehensible. E.g Undiscoverable gestures or extremely hard to achieve gesture to swipe up to remove an opened app. For one ui menu on the right middle side I had to press part of the hardware button on the right (what on earth, a hardware button to activate a touch ui!). Since when is the point of using a touch device to: ignore the touch interface and instead use a hardware button. Not even considering yet the weird annoying popup ui in the first place, why would you ever put something like that on the middle of your screen.
3. scrolling is slower, they have some kind of terrible human-like algorithm where you have to gear up the scroll speed as if you're manually accelerating a dial every time you want to scroll down. This is why they had to invent all these little tricks to scroll back up to the top of a page with a shortcut. Scrolling is just too slow, on huge pages it's fingerhurting work to get to the bottom.
4. The notch is objectively terrible, it was never good, it was never acceptable to put camera holes or notches into the display but the notch is the worst, most biggest affront to visual consistency. It almost has comical qualities, "oh yes, please put a huge black block directly into my visual field and make it so I am forced to look at it, I can't even install an app to hide it".
5. The amount of popups when I open any kind of app or the appstore is incredible. I think I had at least 4 consecutive popups before it lets me do anything.
6. The prices are a riot, it's a designer luxury item. I guess in the US the prices seem somewhat acceptable but anywhere else in the world the value for this phone does not match the money you pay for it.
7. [insert here every other criticism, e.g about iTunes being required or any other of the dozens and dozens of legitimate problems]
This list is nowhere near complete. Meanwhile when I use my Android, my only complaint is that Samsung installed some default apps I don't want. That's literally it. Everything else works fine for me. I had an iphone 5s for years, while I was using it I liked it but nowadays when I have a comparison with a fluid, new android phone it cannot compete. To me it is clear that the success of Apple is a psychological success of two things mixed together: speed and beauty. The ui is always fast, therefore there is a false impression that it's simple and good. Beauty likewise gives a false impression that the ui is good in a general sense when in reality it's not better.
> The prices are a riot, it's a designer luxury item
Yeah they’re expensive. You’re not entitled to buy everything that exists. An iPhone is not a need. Plus, price is not an issue since you hate them anyway.
> The amount of popups when I open any kind of app or the appstore is incredible.
I have no idea what you’re even talking about. There are things that suck in the App Store (the sponsored apps that appear before the searched results for example) but popups? The only time there are popups is on install when you try to install an app and your iCloud account is not linked. FYI it’s the same on the Play Store.
> The notch is objectively terrible
Subjectively. It doesn’t even lose screen real estate since the space around the not h is used for icons and clock.
You perhaps never scrolled with ublock origin and firefox. Do it once and you will note the difference. (Unless you work in adtech).
Not sure what it has to do with adtech either. Or how scroll speed is a limiting factor in a day to day workflow.
If it's significantly cheaper then you can put up with something being worse. In this case only one of the two apply.
Interesting how do you came to the conclusion, that they cannot afford it. It's possible to have money and still believe that something has poor value for its cost.
I would argue that is true for the iPhone, given for eg Pixel or other flagships are easy to buy at half of the cost of the iPhone.
Efficiency, esp when it comes to UI animation not stuttering is where iOS has done a tremendous job.
Never a slow down or any glitch, except for connecting some Bluetooth devices.
As with all software, YMMV. At least Google is not throttling its CPU behind my back.
Also, Snowden has outed Apple as one of the corps complying with any government for customer data so don't get too high on your horse.
Compare Zerodium's payout for iOS vs Android:
https://www.zerodium.com/program.html
iOS security was bad enough in 2020 that it even lead to:
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/14/zerodium-pauses-acquiri...
> Zerodium this week announced that it will not be purchasing any iOS exploits for the next two to three months due to a high number of submissions. In other words, the company has so many security vulnerabilities at its disposal that it does not need any more.
Android FCP zero-click has been keeping higher price than iOS for a few years now. iOS iMessage RCE+LPE has been lower price than SMS RCE+LPE on android for a few years. In almost every comparison, iOS has the same bounty as android or cheaper.
This, despite the fact that iOS bugs have more demand because of more premium targets.
If you install 100 + apps in iPhone it is also terrible.
Both 256GB versions.
The Android does get more use, but there's no denying the camera lag has been there since day one with the S22+.
Previously I used (and still adore) the S10e. It's camera lag actually seemed slightly better than with the S22+, but still inferior to any recent iPhone (10x or newer).
Apple's entire platform is so locked down, it definitely comes off as somewhat user-hostile to me. That said, my mom doesn't care about this aspect in the slightest.
The web with uBlock is entirely different. I've grown used to it and I'm not going back.
The company that wants to force CSAM, doesn't encrypt iCloud backups so it can remain as a backdoor to WhatsApp, cares about your privacy?.
I can't even install and app without an apple account.
Apple doesn't care about your privacy, its just marketing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Epj6ldKU
On android I can use it without a google account, with newpipe for zero ads on YouTube, infinity for zero ads on reddit, glider as a client for HN.
I use CalyxOS for better privacy with usability, and you can switch to GrapheneOS which is one of the most secure mobile OSes. (Only on Pixel).
While on iOS, there is nothing even close to it, and the FOSS scene is totally dead.
However I only like stock android, Samsung, or the million other IOS clones from Chinese companies almost all suck.
> Security
IOS has more vulnerabilities than Android
I used to like stock android but since 12 it's been going down the drain in terms of looks and feel. Now I prefer the Samsung UI since they're at least consistent with previous versions and don't make huge changes for the sake of changes like Google does.
So this is one of the main advantages of android: vendors can rejected Google's ästhetisc choices and just keep the under the hood improvements.
Even a stock Pixel is more private, because there is no third parties or bloat to track you other than Google services(which are on every phone anyway).
Every big company forces it, Apple tried to make it better but it was PR failure. Nobody bothered to understand their papers properly.
> doesn't encrypt iCloud backups
CSAM scanning on device feature would have allowed that, now they need to keep scanning in cloud.
> I can't even install and app without an apple account.
How easily average users can install app safely without Google account on Android? Underlining the word safely.
You are talking from the perspective of 0.01% users.
What do you mean by "safely" here? What is unsafe about going to a trusted APK source and downloading it and running it?
EPIC literally offers fortnite this way and users seem to manage fine: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/mobile/android/new-...
Before the walled gardens of the Mobile app stores it wasn't only 0.01% of users able to install software on their computers without screwing it up.
99% of the users do not know what is actually trusted or not. If third party sources gets popular, it gets even more difficult over time.
Epic one very big well known company and on that case you might trust their APK, but it is not the case for other thousand companies.
When the habit of downloading APK:s gets more popular again, as it used to, then malware spreadingg and phishing gets more popular as it used.
It is easier to get people install software from random sources since it is not uncommon. At the moment, it is uncommon and phishing is harder.
> 99% of the users do not know what is actually trusted or not.
Before it was only 0.01% of users know what they're doing and now it's 99% of the users do not know if it's actually trusted or not, that's a 100x difference, I don't suppose you have a source on any of these numbers?
Your arguments are all hypothetical, yet we don't have to be as people literally download much of their software on PCs today outside of the Microsoft store and most users manage fine. Other mechanisms have been put in place at multiple levels (the search engine, the browser, and the OS) to make it safer for users, and the majority of those users don't get confused about trusted sources.
I thought I made it clear at least on the last phrase. ”Safely” simply means that software is what it is supposed to be.
My arguments are no hypothetical. Android used to be like that in early days, if you followed infosec in that time. It was common to downlod .apks from third parties and phones were full of malwares.
Android does not have same mechanisms like PC. It does not make signature checks for trusted sources or have Windows Defender build-in. Two primary reasons why it is safer to download arbitrary files in these days. MacOS has similar checks.
What does CSAM have to do with encrypting backups?
Its my device, you dont have the right to control what I do with it.
> How easily average users can install app safely without Google account on Android? Underlining the word safely.
> You are talking from the perspective of 0.01% users.
This doesn't matter, it should be an option regardless.
And I download apps from the play store safely just without using account.
Using Aurora store, an interface for the play store.
- you cannot simply install applications outside the AppStore
- developing applications even for personal use requires macOS, an Apple developer account, etc
- it lacks of decent applications, such as an email client that works, thanks to limitations imposed by Apple on what the applications can do in background
- it comes with stupid limitations. Such as you can't to a software update on a mobile network (why? To this day with cheap plans that gives you 50G or even unlimited data for 10 euros at month a lot of people no longer even have a landline internet connection and thus Wi-Fi at home, and have to use another phone in hotspot mode to download an update, this is pure insanity of Apple!)
- it works well if you are all-in in the Apple ecosystem, for example you have also a Mac, but it doesn't integrate with Windows (the Windows phone companion that lets you to receive notifications on the PC and other stuff is only available for Android, since iOS doesn't have APIs to do that stuff such as read notifications).
- the only browser allowed is basically Safari and this to me is very wrong for the open web (it's true that in Android you have Chrome, but you can install whatever browser you want, such as Firefox). Safari doesn't support progressive web apps for example for no reason, so you are forced to install an app while you could have used its PWA enabled website.
- you are forced to use Apple services, while in Android using Google services is an option (you can have an Android OS without Google Apps, even if it can be impractical I like having this possibility at least in theory). For example the only way that I found to backup my photos was to pay iCloud, since Google Photos (that did give you unlimited space back then) didn't work in background and thus you have to open it to sync (something that is pretty useless for a backup tool that you want to be always running...)
- it's less user friendly, there are things that are complicated for no reason. This was confirmed by a lot of people that transitioned to iOS and find it more difficult to use
- to this day it's practically impossible to mod (jailbreak) an iPhone to overcome its limitations. In the past there was jailbreak that really did solve many of the issues, but this day it's nearly impossible
- lack of support for open standards, such as the usage of the proprietary lightning connector instead of USB-C (something that is now a requirement in the European union by the way)
From the hardware perspective, it's well built for sure, but I find it too expensive for what it offers. The iPhone that I actually have (an iPhone XS bought new for 600 euros) it seemed expensive when I bought, now to get an iPhone of a similar range (that is an iPhone Pro) you have to spend at least than double that price! A decent Android that is enough to me for my daily tasks can be bought for 200 euros, a top spec one for 600. To me the added cost of an iPhone is not justified.
All of your points about installing software outside of the app store are valid and if that's what you need, iOS is not for you and I think that's okay. Choosing the platform that best supports the software you need to run has always been how you decide what to buy. The other way around doesn't make any sense. It would be like buying an PS5 and then saying it sucks because you can't run Excel on it.
Anyway I don't usually sell phones, when I change a phone (that is not often, till now I only has 3 smartphones, two Androids and the iPhone that I currently have, on average I keep a phone 5 years, especially my first Android was born with Android 4.0 and I stopped using it with Android 7, changing trying out all the custom roms that were available) I usually end up giving it to somebody in my family anyway that upgrades its old phone.
> All of your points about installing software outside of the app store are valid and if that's what you need, iOS is not for you and I think that's okay. Choosing the platform that best supports the software you need to run has always been how you decide what to buy. The other way around doesn't make any sense. It would be like buying an PS5 and then saying it sucks because you can't run Excel on it.
I think it's not only that. I think that Apple practice should be considered illegal (and I think the European commission will need to take an action like they did with Microsoft and Google) since it's abuse of dominant position. You are forcing the developers to pass trough the App Store, and thus be forced to support payment trough Apple Pay and thus give a percentage (that is not small, by the way) of your profit to Apple. This to me is not right.
Having the possibility to install third-party "app stores" on Apple devices should be a requirement by law. I don't said that it should be simple, a user may do something difficult to do that (if the reason is to protect unaware users that would otherwise install malware on their phones) but it should be possible.
If they go down that path, it will affect Apple but it might be devastating to other closed platform vendors. These are interesting times...
Why are you pretending 1995 is like today?
I don't want those things, so who cares?
I guess you could always pick the librem phone and miss out on every modern advancement.
The "img src=con", and to a lesser extent, the "malicious attachment" thing could be solved on the same PC by running something not-Windows. 1995 might have been a bit in the teething era for Linux and BSDs but maybe some commercial Unix would have been viable?
The "3 minutes to boot" would be largely ameliorated by using a SSD and by the fact the phone is largely a fixed hardware tree that doesn't require significant probing and dynamically selecting drivers at boot time.
Getting to a higher resolution and colour depth-- okay, maybe you need to advance to say the specs of a decent 2005 PC (1Gb memory, early x86-64 CPU, DirectX 9 class GPU) to get there.
But beyond that, I think we're paying mostly for poor software design. How many apps are loading big full-featured browser engines when all they need is libcurl and some minimal optimized rich-text system? How many apps are relying on dynamically loading content that could have been permanently baked into the bundle (i. e. a shopping app's category tree?)
If you think that's bad or it makes you think that most developers can't write good software, that's the price we have to pay for innovation. As an analogy, it'd be great if manufacturing was always priced at mass manufacturing injection molded costs, but someone has to 3D print and hand assemble prototypes to prove that the idea is possible and worth making. In software, we just stop at the prototyping stage and make that the product hoping eventually we have enough time and money to redesign for mass manufacturing scale.
The security was different, but I don't think that's one of the major factors here.
I can assure you that in 1995, having 1024x768 was quite common.
Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com/
Regularly I can't even have two apps running at once without one of them being force unloaded and that's with all the "battery optimizations" disabled, because without it's even worse.
Love it
I had to upgrade a couple of years ago.
I think it's not just the OS, but the apps themselves, and even the web pages just got more resource-hungry.
It tickles me to think that there are others who think about (and name) smartphones this way :)
Compare that to writing web apps. You open an empty text file in a text editor and are ready to go.
At least it's cross-platform and it doesn't require you to buy special hardware like the main mobile competitor does.
I’m not aware of anywhere having a larger competitor to android though.
-edit: typo
Even then, it is like a construction yard experience versus iDevices, Windows or game consoles.
How after 10 years Google thinks that is a good development experience baffles me.
That's one of the most commonly heard complaints about native Android development from newcomers: "why does Android Studio is such a resource/memory hog bla bla bla..."
About a decade ago, when Eclipse was the default IDE for Android development, the situation was less worse. 2 GB RAM was fine.
One of the quick solutions is to use VSCode and install the required Android SDKs manually.
It’s really frustrating how Google has to slowly screw up damn near everything they create.
Is it just that it makes it hard/impossible to make super cheap Android phones by raising the minimum BoM?
2GB is the minimum RAM for iOS 16 as well, so this doesn’t seem crazy. If they said 4GB or 6GB I would understand better.
Given all the fancy things phones can do nowaydays, talk to satellites, crash detection, gyroscopes, GPS, all in a tiny form factor while managing battery life and a massively powerful camera, I'd argue desktop has maybe less capability than a smartphone OS
And the experience of using windows with 2GB ram is absolutely abysmal. Really 8gb is the minimum for anything acceptable. Microsoft just cares a lot less about user satisfaction so the windows minimum is the absolute minimum possible to boot on while the android minimum is the minimum required to not hate using the phone.
If an app developer tests their app on Android 13 but doesn't test it on older Android versions, they probably aren't testing on low-RAM devices, either. And if a consumer buys a handset after checking only the Android version number, and doesn't check details like the RAM and storage, they'll probably be find out that apps which they expected to work don't work, and be quite unhappy.
My google-foo is awful: I spent time looking for ways to turn it off for Signal but all the search results don't seem to apply to my version of Android and Signal (all the latest, and a Pixel). I had trouble even figuring out what's that called (eventually I discovered it's called Smart Reply).
And typing is awful. It seems easier to type on the iPhone. And the battery life in ALL my pixels is always almost exactly 12 months before massive denigration, without fail. I leave it plugged in overnight every day, so that could be why.
Someone please give me an excuse to move to an iPhony.
There's some decent bints about how to use the platform effectively here. onTrimMemory is something most apps probably just dont do. Knowing when and how to use mmap to access resources is obvious to folks with some systems backgrounds, but we'd be lucky if that's half of mobile developers.
In general it's just really easy to build badly behaved apps anywhere, on any platform. Seeing the magnitude of resources we're using & seeing problems develop is something mentioned in the article, but so often requires fairly expensive paid observability tools & a team that knows & has capacity & backing to care & spend the time. Most orgs care way too much about shipping features that pad their resume; few get promoted for keeping software in good shape.
I had a cheap one from Xiaomi and was happy with 2gigs
Seems reasonable on Google’s part to me.
Teams, WhatsApp and the likes.
I removed everything and it is still very slow in opening the browser.
I wanted to root it and check if it works but got confused as there are numerous choice available for rooting OS.
You know what the iPhone 8 had? 2GB of RAM. Same as Google is calling for now.
And people have been through this over and over. Apple does not insert fake delays to make phones feel slower. If you could prove that you could make a mint.
They add features, which takes extra CPU. Though not all are on every phone for that exact reason.
How many Android phones from 5 years ago got 5 years of updates? How about 2 years?
https://www.itpro.com/mobile/battery-life/356946/how-to-turn...
It wasn’t fake delays just to push hardware sales, which is what people have been accusing them of for 10+ years.
I agree they should have explained to the user better, but imagine how many minor behind the scenes fixes they have to fix and can’t possibly bother the user with them all. I can see how these things slipped through.
“Apple’s latest update tells people they have to buy new phones!”
Apple bashing (really any mega-corp or FAANG) gets so many clicks I’m not sure there was any decent option.
The last one, Nexus 6, I dropped and the gorilla glass cracked really bad, figured it was a loss and got my current LG phone and it has been great except for the suspicious slow downs which cannot be attributed to wear of the storage. I say that as someone who has been a technological person for 5 decades and a paid software engineer for almost 3 decades.
The one before that, Nexus 4, the thing was charging on my desk, I looked over and saw it bulging like it was going to explode.
The one before that, Nexus One, I still have, had to stop using it when the hard wired paltry amount of system space and increasing OS size made it unusable. Glad they stopped that practice of forcing the OS into a tiny space.
I like my LG so it's too bad they got out of or announced they are leaving the phone business.
I've traded several thousand of my dollars to Google for their phones since they started making them. I never owned iPhone, have no plans to either.
But also please double down on explaining yourself. vroom vroom
Maybe the Android Team should consider a "Rewrite to Rust" project, introduce a better designed API for native apps and market an "Android Yoga".
https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf
https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performanc...
Windows 98 required 16MB of RAM, Windows XP required 4x more (64MB) and it was released just 3 years later.
I can see some Android phones with 2GB of RAM that cost under $100.