Try Galaxy: A web app to demo Samsung’s OS on an iPhone
trygalaxy.com
trygalaxy.com
Additionally, one can always swipe the bottom bar to switch between apps.
Eg Photos seems to change Back on almost every view. Swiping back navigates around albums and locations and such. Until you open a photo, then it flicks between individual photos. If you are looking at a photo and want to return to album view you need to click the Back arrow at the top left. If you swiped up to view photo details and want to go back to the photo, you need to swipe down. If you are Adjusting photo details, you need to click Cancel at the top left. If you are editing a photo and want to go back to the photo, you need to click Cancel, which is at the bottom left this time.
The only place I don't notice a back button in Photos is the top right. But that's exactly where Books puts it.
On Android, every single one of navigations would be performed by the dedicated back button/swipe. Which might explain why the iOS Google Photos app seems to just stick with a top-left back button on almost all views.
eg View details in Photos, and swiping back doesn't work. But there are also no back buttons or visual cues. But there are 3 ways to get out of that screen AFAIK, which some might label intuitive. But if you go one step deeper and Adjust the photo details, the only exit is a Cancel button.
You'll be fine, if I break my current phone, my next one will be a Galaxy S4 as well, some people do run Android 12 on it nowadays, the battery is replaceable and the phone is so cheap used that it's not even worth worrying about.
I didn't know about the dialer/Google Meet integration, that's a pretty smart move. The messages app being labeled "Android Messages" was also a surprise, I don't know any other brand that uses this exact messenger. Maybe the point they're trying to bring across there is that texts are just as good as iMessage?
It all feels pretty close to native though the web UI is still a lot choppier than the real UI. For any real UI demo you'd probably need an app rather than a web app, but I don't think Apple would allow such an app on the app store.
I'm not sure why Samsung is trying so hard with the ads, though. I get it, you really like the New And Exciting Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Plus, you don't have to repeat it every other screen. I'm also not sure why they've gone all in on these influencer videos, the acting in them is so obvious it made me cringe. Is this what American ads look like?
Probably the config for HAProxy is set a little bit low or something.
But try again now. And then try again a little bit later if it continues to not load.
So when I proxy with HAProxy I was not forwarding client IP. And so Nginx and Peertube ended up thinking all connections came from same source. And this was probably leading to overly aggressive rate limiting at times.
I have now fixed parts of the configs so that now Nginx and Peertube are aware of the real client IP address.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=try+galaxy
From this search I also learned this used to be called "iTest" 2 years ago.
People going out of their way to declare (or at least make clear with varying degrees of intensity) just exactly which feudal overlord they're ready to "bleed for" (i.e., give money, personal data, and free promotion to). People who often act as if they have an appropriately suspicious view of corporations in just about any other interaction, come out boldly declaring that this company or that company is GREAT when it comes to privacy, or consumer choice, or <fill in the blank>.
One of the strongest and most consistent weaknesses of human psychology is the effect "flags" have on otherwise reasonable minds.
That's Marcus Aurelius in the ”Meditations" talking about supporting teams at the chariot races and gladiator fights. It seems very human to get all tribal about something subjective and inconsequential. Ancient Rome had the same fanboyism, just in a different arena.
(I have a phone that just runs Alpine Linux, but I know better than to try and tell anyone about it.)
(Love the aside at the end ... seriously, though, Aurelius had an incisive eye, his writings have great value and much to teach just about anyone ...)
> I have a phone that just runs Alpine Linux, but I know better than to try and tell anyone about it.
What phone is this?
What about people who hate their overlord?
> (I have a phone that just runs Alpine Linux, but I know better than to try and tell anyone about it.)
I wish you would! That sounds interesting!
So yeah, people tend to fall in line under a flag through a lifetime of indoctrination and threat of financial or physical violence...
In any case, at this point in human history especially, I'd argue it's time to consider "the group" to be ALL humans - "by default". There are nuances, and I'm out of time for commenting further right now, but, that's my take on it.
Hopefully, this comment is of some use to you / someone / etc. - hope y'all have a great day!
Isn’t this a bit dramatic? It’s a demo to which people are replying with their preferences. Some fly flags, but most debate features and priorities.
I haven’t actually sat down and compared specs but I’m guessing this happens because Android devices tend to skimp hard on their GPUs at midrange and below.
I always was an Android user until that iPhone, I had it for about a year, and switched back to Android again because I thought I was missing some stuff, but I was wrong, I don't miss a thing of current Android, I think current iOS is simply smoother and more fun to use, and stutter free 95% of the time.
It also makes me wonder if an Android “container” could run as an app on an iPhone. Maybe sideloading leads to that?
From a technical standpoint, I suppose it's possible, but you'd be stuck with a very barebones Android system without all the system daemons for notifications and such. You'll also need to write some kind of EGL-to-Metal driver to get decent graphical performance out of it.
Seeing how far Anbox and Windows' Android implementation have come, I do wonder if it's possible to take an Android app, stick it into an emulator, and bundle that as an .ipa for use on iOS and macOS. It would certainly make porting easier.
I believe it's a stretch to say that Apple has the best privacy experience in the market, unless you believe Apple's marketing pitch on "privacy" verbatim. I think the best privacy on a smart phone today is likely GrapheneOS. Apple has sold it's users on privacy, but in actuality Apple is a for profit platform that has, and will, target it's users data as it needs to delight it's shareholders. For example ATT has issues [0], there's a class action against them [1], and it's hard to take them seriously when there's concern from a number of other angles [2]. A walled garden doesn't imply security and that's how Apple sells "privacy".
[0] https://publicknowledge.org/apples-privacy-promises-are-unde... [1] https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/09/apple-privacy-tracking-lawsui... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/23/apple-use...
Whether or not I can install a different OS on a phone does guarantee an erosion of privacy. What you're arguing is that I should be fine with Apple because you can't install another OS. No thanks. And, yes, people do buy Pixel phones just because they can install a privacy respecting OS. Now, baseband is another problem, but - that's one that Apple has no claims to solve for either.
Yes, the vast majority of people don't install a custom OS onto their computers, either. So for the average person, this doesn't matter.
> What you're arguing is that I should be fine with Apple because you can't install another OS.
That wasn't my interpretation of the OP. The fact that it's possible, with a lot of effort, to get a privacy-centric device after the fact means nothing for the general public because they are never going to take those steps. So I think it's still reasonable to define "the market" as whatever the devices ship with.
It's great that we have the ability to install privacy-focused operating systems on some Android devices (I have one), but if I were to suggest this to any of my friends, they would laugh me out of the room. There is far less resistance recommending Apple products.
It's a victory if you want it, but utterly pyrric when both of the options on the "market" are useless for privacy.
Any legitimate competitors will follow the law in the jurisdictions it sells to, which is why this requires political solutions first.
I don't think this site will be very convincing, there are a lot of glitchy animations and unresponsive areas that look as if they should be working.
You'll find older folks leave it basically default. If you hide some of the ugly samsung app icons, it instantly improves tenfold.
That being said, I only have a samsung because the s22 is the smallest flagship you can buy.
It's interesting that they're using Safari's “add to Home Screen” feature so they can use fullscreen. I think that might be why that's the only browser which is supported.
They're just detecting "add to Home Screen" by looking for window.navigator.standalone which you can manually set using a breakpoint.
The page will freeze, go to the Console, type window.navigator.standalone = true; and unfreeze the page clicking on the blue arrow.
Kind of annoying, I was wondering what Samsungs's phone UI looks like these days but I guess they don't want my money. Samsung's marketing department can be weird like that for no well explained reason.
Edit: found out that Kiwi browser allows access to the Chrome extension store and to the Chrome dev tools so I got it to work despite all of Samsung's best efforts.
i have found some win32 emulators mostly for j2me development, but not those ui emulators.
would be fun to have them again!
Actually generalize that: Depending on your exact threat models, this is a great way to have data that can't be lost or stolen just because your device is.
For a large enough app it's probably less data intensive, not to mention much faster, to run the app in a cloud data center where it has effectively unlimited bandwidth, and just stream a video of it over a smaller network connection to the phone.
Creating virtual phones in cloud is probably an easy way to create a lot of them, which allows you to do things like run untrusted apps in complete isolation without access to any of your data or other applications.
For making me glad that I use an iPhone once again.
After scanning the code this happens:
1) Hey! Please copy this page URL and open it in Safari!
I open it in safari
2) Hey! Please add this to your home screen!
sigh...I add it to home screen and open it
3) Now I'm greeted with mandatory 5-10 seconds long UI tutorial
4) Finally I can start using it
This is exactly why I use iOS despite Apple being asshole company. After I scan the code I want end result IMMEDIATELY. No bullshit. I don't wanna press 20 buttons and change browsers, add stuff to homescreen etc.
Next time open it right away in whatever browser I choose to use and then add additional option: "Hey! Wanna get a full screen experience? Add this to your iOS homescreen in Safari and try out. Click here to start!"
Then it'll say you're already on Samsung..
(I'd like to see that it looks like too.)
(I prefer android to iOS but Samsung has never been a good choice. Only pixel was. Too much preloaded shit on Samsung phones that you cannot get rid of, like Bixby and 4-6 social media apps du jour)
After changing to Desktop mode it asks to add it to the home screen. I’ve add it and then launch it and, of course, the web app uses Desktop mode Safari and doesn’t work at all, showing the qr code.
Well done, Samsung!
Even if I emulate the user-agent of an iPhone, it needs me to run it from the homescreen.
- open developer tools, Toggle device toolbar, pick an iPhone dimension
- Network > More network conditions ("wifi" icon) > User-agent > Custom > "iPhone Safari"
- in Sources, set a breakpoint on the 1st line, refresh the page, when the debugger breaks, type "window.navigator.standalone = true" in the Console, and continue
Since this is -I guess- a project made for fun, it would nice to open source it, so we can learn from it. Maybe then, we can make the opposite project, TryiOS.com
I know that it’s possible to do (better) but fact is most web developers don’t (or can’t?). Even VS Code, the prime example of how good Web Apps can be always reloads the page of an extension when you switch the tab and go back. Don’t get me started on MS Teams which is just horrible to use
I’ve seen better OS “emulations” on HN made by devs in their free time.
So yeah, they couldn’t even make it proper, which reinforces my belief.
If the biggest vendor can’t make it right, who can?
I love Android, it’s a great scaffold to base your product on, but all implementations just suck.
I'm not sure what the point of trying it is if you already know beforehand that you're going to hate it.