Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but I find Android to just be a miserable UI/UX nightmare, and the Play Store to be filled with somehow 9/10 apps being shit instead of the App Store's even 6/10 being shit.

I recently purchased an Android (Galaxy S20) for testing a cross platform app I've been working on and was shocked at how much worse it's gotten over the years.

If you have a choice, and you do - (just buy a used iPhone a couple generations back, I got an iPhone 8 recently for $100 CDN) - I can't fathom why you'd choose Android, especially with Google's telemetry.

The iOS OS itself is incomparably easier and more pleasant to use (even my 120hz Galaxy S20 device has animations that are choppy as all hell) - and that's not even getting to the borderline unbelievable difference in hardware quality.

I paid $250 CDN used for this S20, and $100 for the iPhone 8 I recently snagged. The 6-year-old iPhone 8 runs incomparably better than the 3-year-old S20.

View on HN

My Pixel (and I wouldn't buy anything other than Google hardware for Android because the integration and UX is top in the industry IMO) syncs up to my Google account, all my photos are freely stored, my phone backup is free, and any other backup data counts toward my Google One account.

If I bought an iPhone I'd have to buy Apple storage to do all of that, and I don't want to. My Google One account has Youtube Music and Youtube premium along with the storage. I never see Youtube ads which alone is worth every penny.

Other than that I really don't miss one thing from my old iPhone. Smartphones are so good these days all iOS competes on is sugar on top.

Apple offers full photo encryption as if this year, whereas Google can - and will - give your local gestapo your photo roll, mysteriously delete your account for taking pictures of your kids, and do god knows what with them for data mining.

> whereas Google can - and will - give your local gestapo your photo roll

Sounds[0] familiar[1]...

[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

Not with ADP enabled, which is new.

End-to-end encryption can only be trusted up to a point when Apple owns both ends.

There are very steep legal penalties for lying about it, and it’s not available in China, so on balance I think it’s a reasonable risk, especially since Android makes no such promises.

Android is not a cloud service like iCloud. Fundamentally it will not make any promises about the encryption of it's services.

That being said, I can use open-source projects like Syncthing or Owncloud to handle my syncing, and skip the whole mutual trust part. Though I'm sure the NSA does a wonderful job auditing Apple's private codebase, for whatever sense of security that offers.

If your really care about that, there's nothing else than GrapheneOS at the moment. Both Google and Apple will side against you here.

That’s the entire point of ADP, you don’t need Apple to side sorb or against you, they don’t have the keys. Google doesn’t offer that and Graphene isn’t a photo hosting service.

Part of it comes down to whether you truest Google. I personally would rather Apple have my personal information than Google, who is actively trying to monetize it through advertising sales. I don't even use them for search.

(I know Apple is inching down that path too, but so far they have simultaneously maintained their privacy focus.)

Yeah, I think buying an used iPhone is the best value for money at this point. Depending on the model you get the same or more years of support than from new Android for similar price. The iOS UX is so smooth I had zero trouble switching from Android to iOS, even though I had never touched an iPhone before.

I'll reconsider Android phone only when manufacturers start providing as many years of software support as Apple does. Planned, premature obscolence is unethical and sucks.

> I can't fathom why you'd choose Android, especially with Google's telemetry.

Because Google lets you remove their telemetry, and Apple doesn't?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com