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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Too little, too late for me... I hate to be the guy having those "hot takes" or whatever, but hear me out for a sec:

I didn't get a cell phone until 2013. (Yes I used land lines until then.) It was a Nexus 4 (still love the grippy sides and sleek glass back). Every 2-3 years I traded up, all the way until Pixel 6.

Tomorrow my first iPhone will be delivered. Why? A lot of reasons, but some are:

- I can't just plug my Google phone into an external display to mirror it. Uh, hello?? DisplayPort out is explicitly disabled in the source code with no reason given: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1189998588023234560 -- yet this works great in other phones.

- I can't access my text messages from my Android phone (without a separate app like SMS Backup & Restore) -- go ahead, try it. Yeah, do an adb backup. Maybe rooting your phone would give you access, but it's impossible otherwise AFAIK. And I think rooting your phone deletes everything in the process.

- I can't access my phone backup. It's ONLY stored on Google's servers. The only way to even get close is to restore it to a phone. This is a physical device I bought and literally am holding in my hand but can't access all the stuff on it! Did you know you can just plug in an iPhone into Windows or Macs and dump a backup to your computers? It's all right there, text messages, system settings, contacts, photos, databases, EVERYTHING (except maybe hardware-protected keys). It's amazing.

- Do I even need to mention all the Google shenanigans? We all know what I'm talking about, right? The mess of messengers... the killing of various services, the lack of support, the stronger integration with ads and tracking.

Apple's not perfect either, but I feel like it's worth a shot inside the walled garden for a bit. I like that some of these common sense things are not a problem with iOS:

- Display out.

- Accessing your own device.

- Messaging that actually makes sense.

- At least it feels like Apple cares about privacy; counterintuitively, I feel way more in control using Apple products than I do Google ones.

View on HN

I switch between both every few years, on iPhone 14 ATM.

Honestly Android does a lot of things better - there's so many stupid "because Apple" things on iOS. For example it's impossible to tell the charging speed/estimated charge time, I have a lot of charging bricks between places and I can't tell if I picked an iPhone compatible fast charger/cable or not ? Or when I have Chrome/Firefox installed, highlight text and tap search the web - it takes me to Safari ? A lot of small annoyances like these where you can't do anything about it because the OS is so closed down.

Android is way more customisable, easier to side load stuff (like running GBA emulator on iPhone). Also a lot more exciting phones in the Android ecosystem (eg. Samsung flip phones)

I like the ecosystem integration with my Mac but I wouldn't say one is clearly better than the other.

Both ecosystems have their own pros and cons but I wouldn't trade my Pixel for an iPhone ever.

In fact, I recently got a refurbished iPhone 13 just to check the ecosystem out (as a mobile dev) and get a feel for things but honestly I prefer my Pixel more. There are so many things that Android does well like notifications and typing (these two stood out to me on Apple - horrible implementations really, especially the latter) that it will always remain my primary driver.

But yeah, if someone thinks that Android is not for them and Apple's walled garden is worth entering then or vice versa then whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Did you know you can install GBoard (Google's Android keyboard) on iPhone? I would never be able to use an iPhone without it.

Typing on iPhone is just such a bad joke.

Typing on all touch screens is a bad joke. It's like you're comparing a dog turd with a cat turd.

It’s not the touch screen that’s the issue. It’s the autocorrect. And it’s not an imaginary comparison I used to have “t9” on my phone 20 years ago that was better than what maybe any phone now has. I’m pretty certain iphone was better once too. I remember being able to touch type on my iphone (yes on a touch screen it was that good)

If there’s one thing that infuriates me about the current crop of phones, it’s this. I’ve actually mostly switched to voice dictation because my iPhone touch screen sucks so much. Bring back physical keyboards!

I was a devout Android user in the early days, I've launched Android based consumer products and I still use an iPhone.

I always joke that when Android can handle a screen rotation without blanking the screen, I'll switch back: It's not about the actual blanking of course, it'll just mean they finally ripped out a design tradeoff they made for a device with 256MB of RAM and just... never fixed.

Android is full of decisions like that, like the horrible storage framework churn that randomly made a generation of devices dog slow as various terrible FUSE implementations.

Decisions that are technical, but just end up affecting user experience every day you use the device.

> I always joke that when Android can handle a screen rotation without blanking the screen, I'll switch back

None of the Android phones I've used blank the screen, there's a smooth animation.

Every single phone in existence running Android blanks the screen.

It can be hidden by frankly disgusting animations where they do things like squish a screenshot of your current screen to hide it, but the literal UI is being tore down on every rotation.

As you can imagine that's a pain in the ass to deal with on the app side, and until relatively recently the framework did a poor job providing support for handling it all. It's a very common cause of app crashes too.

(To really get technical, apps can opt out of this... but doing so means you'd need to reimplement the entire view stack and rotation yourself, which doesn't happen for anything but video games)

I know what you're referring to but Apple made this experience worse by disabling rotation in iOS on the home screen altogether.

Of course most people don't notice because they unlock the phone with Face ID and usually don't stay on the home screen for too long, but still - if you push the home button when in horizontal mode you're presented to a rotated screen.

As for RAM: I was surprised to note that my phone has in fact 4GB of it (always thought it was 2GB), because apps get suspended all the time. It appears that at least on Android that was a sound design decision.

My several years old Samsung doesn't blank the screen.

Android indeed does tear down the activity and creates a new one with different rotation and size; but activity is not the framebuffer currently displaying. Recreating the activity does not imply blanking screen.

Some people like to play games with semantics, but I say you lose the right if you can't get the basic details right...

You're saying "activity is not the framebuffer currently displaying", which is a completely nonsensical statement. The framebuffer does not change: the Surface Flinger is bound the the framebuffer and that's not changing during a rotation.

Tearing down the activity and creating a new one is literally blanking the screen as far as the activity is concerned: removing all views on the activity surface and adding brand new ones.

If you were to look at the activity in a view debugger frame by frame you'd get... a blank screen.

You could poll the WindowManager and there's... no views.

There's all sorts of ugly hacks to hide that fact, but at the end of the day supporting seamless transitions across rotations is something that dates back to iOS 3.

It's an artifact of the literal first Android phone that ended up causing pain for developers and instability for end users in perpetuity. Google simply is not product driven in a way that will ever allow them to match Apple. No UX obsessed company would have allowed that mess to go on as long as it has.

While I agree, I must say that GBA emulation is a bad example here.

It’s one of the few things you can "easily" sideload on an iPhone without jailbreaking using AltStore (the emulator is named Delta, btw and it is excellent).

I will not say that AltStore is really practical to use but GBA and GameCube emulators are basically the only things you can sideload without a lot of pain (along with UTM, a virtual machine runner.

I didn't know about this - thanks !

I haven't tried this for a while, but just for comparison I actually got a GBA emulator on my Samsung via play store. It's very much an Apple thing again.

Yes of course the situation is way better on Android on this topic. I’m really waiting for side loading to happen in Europe.

> highlight text and tap search the web - it takes me to Safari

God damn this one is so annoying.

> - I can't just plug my Google phone into an external display to mirror it. Uh, hello?? DisplayPort out is explicitly disabled in the source code with no reason given

This apparently changes with the Pixel 8

> - I can't access my text messages from my Android phone (without a separate app like SMS Backup & Restore) -- go ahead, try it. Yeah, do an adb backup. Maybe rooting your phone would give you access, but it's impossible otherwise AFAIK. And I think rooting your phone deletes everything in the process.

> - I can't access my phone backup. It's ONLY stored on Google's servers. The only way to even get close is to restore it to a phone. This is a physical device I bought and literally am holding in my hand but can't access all the stuff on it! Did you know you can just plug in an iPhone into Windows or Macs and dump a backup to your computers? It's all right there, text messages, system settings, contacts, photos, databases, EVERYTHING (except maybe hardware-protected keys). It's amazing.

This is not applicable for all Android phones

> - Do I even need to mention all the Google shenanigans? We all know what I'm talking about, right? The mess of messengers... the killing of various services, the lack of support, the stronger integration with ads and tracking.

No I don't, none of the dead services have impacted me, what mess of messengers? Lack of support for what?

I don't have an opinion but..

> what mess of messengers?

Meet, Hangouts, GChat, Talk, Allo, Duo, Meet, Voice, Messenger. Fi and RCS barely.

With various levels of integration, merging, and unmerging of the services over the years.

Everybody use WhatsApp here (east of the Atlantic Ocean,) even on iPhones, because you never know which kind of phone all your friends are using. Apple and Android could stop developing their messaging apps and nobody would notice. SMSes are only for banks and spam.

everyone uses whatsapp, except those using telegram or facebook messenger.

None of these are significant in my country of almost 30m people. You are in a bubble.

Given that iMessage has 1.3 billion active monthly users, WhatsApp has 2 billion and Facebook Messenger with 3, I don’t believe they are the one living in a bubble.

Not everyone and as soon as you go to another country they are using another messenger so unless you want to never communicate with them again you will have both installed

Lucky you, I still have contacts using Viber

Right, forgot to list that one

Signal?

It's the same here in Japan: everyone uses LINE messenger. SMS is pretty much never used because it's considered a privacy violation; only delivery companies and banks and the like use it (and spammers, like you said). Nobody cares about iMessage's colored bubbles.

But it's never "everyone", there's always someone using something else in some part of the word so end result everyone has 5 different apps.

No, in Japan, it really is everyone. All kinds of commercial entities also use LINE to communicate with customers even.

Yes, if you want to talk to people in other parts of the world, you'll need a different app for that, because different parts of the world tend to use different apps (e.g., Chinese all use WeChat, Europeans seem to use WhatsApp, etc.). If you just want to talk to people in Japan, LINE is all you need. (Taiwan too, I think)

> If you just want to talk to people in Japan, LINE is all you need.

I talk to them on Facebook Messenger and Instagram personally. Which means "people in Japan" have them installed also. So you get my drift :)

One messenger is never "all you need" unless you pick your friends based on what app they use.

>I talk to them on Facebook Messenger and Instagram personally. Which means "people in Japan" have them installed also. So you get my drift :)

No, I don't.

Those people only have them to talk to you, because you're not in Japan and don't use LINE.

People in Japan who don't have foreign friends don't have this issue.

(Also, Instagram is not a messaging app. Messenger is.)

> People in Japan who don't have foreign friends, don't do business with anyone abroad, never travel abroad, ...

FTFY

> Those people only have them to talk to you

Nah, any single one of them has many more friends outside of Japan than I have friends in Japan. People living on an island with the most powerful passport in the world love to travel, breaking news.

> because you're not in Japan and don't use LINE.

It's true for all of the world except Japan :)

> (Also, Instagram is not a messaging app. Messenger is.)

That's just false. After it's stopped being about photos, it's just a messaging app for me and countless other people who don't care about its tiktok-mimicking reels and other drivel. It's actually very decent at being just a messenger.

I've been on Android for more than a decade, and I still don't know what I'm "supposed" to be using. I have switched out that stuff for third party apps a few years back. Was a disaster zone, I'm sure it still is.

I hate to beat a dead horse but its been an issue even before Android. I had gmail in the inital invite-only launch back in 2004. They added their first real chat feature into gmail (back when gmail was the only google service you needed an account for) in 2006, 2 years before Android.

I don't even know what they call that chat-inside-gmail these days. Talk? Chat? I remember it getting merged with Hangouts eventually and then un-merged. Or was that Voice?

I was on Voice too as GrandCentral back before Google bought them. The mp3 ringback functionality which was the first feature lost in the purchase.

Ended up reminiscing a bit there but its been a crazy ride in the Google sphere.

That was google "Buzz" - a very simple XMPP based chat app, that it really wouldn't have hurt to hold on to. Last I heard it was merged into hangouts yeah, but hopefully it should still work with standalone XMPP clients ...

They've more or less got it down to Messages (SMS and RCS) and Gmail chat.

I don't understand the deep misguidedness of your question.

You've been on Android for decade, keep using what you've been using and you like. When did people become too dumb to choose a thing they like and started demanding socialism?

Some of the ones that I've liked have literally disappeared, or at least become practically unmaintained (eg, Google Voice).

Not to mention fairly nice features like SMS and Hangouts integration that were ripped out into separate apps again.

It has been a confusing mess.

>started demanding socialism

Tf is this supposed to mean in this context?

Socialism has started being adopted as a synonym for "something I don't like and/or don't understand". It would be funny if the word didn't have an existing meaning.

> "something I don't like and/or don't understand"

In particular "something I have no need for but lots of other people do but I don't care about them"

The sad thing is that they were in a good position with this with Google Talk. But they used extremely creative tactics to reposition themselves into a complete mess.

It has all distilled down to RCS Messages and other messenger apps so stop worrying about what Google is doing and start using whichever app your family and friends are on.

I've been using android phones since 2009 and am highly considering a switch to Apple for the next one.

Along with the reasons you state, the ecosystem is really messy. I've bought Nexus/Pixel phones for the last 10 years and continue to be bummed by their performance.

Pixel 1 XL was fantastic, but after about 2 years the camera kept failing. 3+ seconds to load, and it would commonly crash. Ultimately the battery life degraded, and the replacement battery degraded within a couple months, so I moved on.

The 3a fell out of my pocket and broke 2 months prior to the end of security updates. That was a decent phone overall, but not supported by Google as long as I would have liked.

Pixel 6 Pro has been fine so far, but my wife has been having issues with her Pixel 5. Slow performance, unreliable cellular connectivity, etc.

"Don't buy Pixel phones" could be the lesson here, but alternatives are arguably more of a security nightmare. My experience with Galaxy phones has been that they're preloaded with an incredible amount of junk that needs to be un-installed. With Pixel it's exclusively Google apps, most of which can be removed. That gives a smaller privacy and security concern than having 30 different companies with their apps pre-loaded (and possibly not removable).

> Apple's no angel either IMO, but I feel like it's worth a shot inside the walled garden for a bit.

I've hated on Apple a lot over the years and am disappointed that switching platforms seems like the best move after all these years.

I made the switch two years ago and never looked back :) let me know if you have any lingering questions

I really love android notification system (As a user, not as an android developer), are those still "okay-ish" in iOS?

I was a huge android fan until I got my first iPhone. Consequence of getting a job that trained me up for iOS development, and eventually I wanted to be able to use the apps I was building. I've never looked back.

Android will always, always have my heart for hacking, I still buy them occasionally for projects and weird esoteric shit I wanna do/try, and for game emulation and that kinda thing. But for my daily driver life manager, it's iPhone all the way. The integrations with HomeKit devices + Apple TV's make my home incredibly smart, absolutely everything is mirrored onto my Macbook and iPads (a current gen mini, and a 2017 Pro that's somehow still hanging in there despite being beat to shit every day for 6 years) without me lifting a damn finger, and when I do get around to upgrading, I plug them both in and all my shit is transferred over, and I blank the old one and send it to Apple for recycling.

Like it's cliche as hell, but it does all Just Work. Androids have caught up quite a bit in terms of power and the "slickness" that iOS got famous for, but at this point, I'm so deep into Apple's ecosystem I'd have to replace damn near every piece of electronic kit in my house to really transfer back over. And the grass just don't look that much greener over there.

Soon as I can sideload another browser with real AdBlock I am switching. Looks like the EU might force apple to allow it :)

I’m sending this on an up-to-date, not-jailbroken iPhone running the Firefox version of uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger

It’s via the Orion Browser by Kagi, which somehow supports Chrome and Firefox extensions on top of the Safari rendering engine.

I wonder if Apple will notice that they accidentally let us have nice things, and take it away.

I really wish Android wasn’t a user-hostile privacy and stability shitshow of a closed ecosystem, but it is.

Lesser of two evils, and all.

Orion is nice but it works by using Safari’s extensions API under the hood. Safari does have a fairly thorough extensions API even on mobile but it’s missing things like webRequest. This is particularly a problem for the Bypass Paywalls extension because you can’t change things like referer. It’s the biggest thing I miss from android.

> Orion is nice but it works by using Safari’s extensions API under the hood.

To clarify that is not how it works, the Web Extensions API support in Orion was ported from scratch on top of WebKit.

Yes, they’ve mapped webextensions to WebKit api calls.

Yeah I have been using android for every single phone I've ever had, but I don't see the point once iOS allows sideloading. They have locked down android so much(I kind of understand why, but still) at this point that sideloading is pretty much the only difference now. So why go for android?

You can side load apps, but need a Mac or a MacOS VM and XCode. But without paying the $99/year developer program fee, apps have to be reloaded every week. I paid the $99, as I grew tired of reinstalling the tethering app or GBA/PSP emulator.

If sideloading becomes easier, that’ll be a big win in my book.

I would have said you are being overly pessimistic about Android, but my Pixel Pro 6 is collecting dust for the reasons you stated.

Using it as a webcam would be a win though. It has a nice camera that sort of works in open-source land.

brave supports ublock origin filter lists

(and has most of them pre-setup)

> 3+ seconds to load, and it would commonly crash.

Admittedly I haven't used Android full time (I have some Pixels for testing) since the Nexus days, but they pushed me back to iPhone when they released an update that completely destroyed the performance on my Nexus 7. Since then the growing Apple ecosystem makes it unlikely I'll change back. And that's fine. Phones are a solved problem at this point, it's really everything else where interesting work is happening.

A mess of messengers is a pain, but I'll take that over a messenger that only rich people can use, which is what you're signing up for with Apple.

A few of the things you mention sound pretty annoying, but none of them are annoying enough to make up for not being able to write code on any computer I like, and run it on mine or my friend's phone, without paying a regular subscription and submitting to a reviewer who can just say no for any reason.

The pay to write software thing is bullshit, but iPhone’s really aren’t more expensive than androids, per year.

The 5g SE (2022) is $429 (or at least $100 less if you shop carrier deals), and the CPU is current android flagship-grade.

You can get the 2020 model refurbished and unlocked at walmart.com for $70-$140. It probably has at least 2-3 more years of security updates, so the longevity is better than many new androids.

> but iPhone’s really aren’t more expensive than androids, per year.

> The 5g SE (2022) is $429

iPhone absolutely are more expensive than any other phone if you care about things other than the CPU/GPU performance.

The 5g SE has a tiny screen with archaic bezel design and still uses LCDs in an era where not giving you an OLED would be seen as a ripoff on the android market. It starts at 64gb of storage for this $429 (in France, it's actually 529 euros), my S20FE from a couple years ago which I bought at 400 euros on deals had 128gb. It has a very big, 120hz OLED screen and the finger print sensor works from underneath the screen.

For me, and many others, the phone is primarily a content consumption device. If the CPU is good enough that I don't see stutters all the time then it's good enough. I don't need my smartphone to be a laptop in the pocket. I do need a screen that I enjoy looking at and big enough that I can use it to read ebooks.

This in turns is heavily reflected in how many Apple users will splurge the big bucks to get the iPhone models that are comfortable to use despite their insane prices. Right now, the cheapest phone Apple produces with a large screen is the iPhone 14 Plus at 969 euros.

There's a reason why the iPhone SE is the least popular of all Apple phones despite having far-more-than-good-enough hardware performance and longevity while being accessibly priced: it lacks what people actually wants out of their phone, Apple knows that and they keep the SE the way it is because they wouldn't want to cannibalize the sales of the expensive phones. If you look at any statistics, the SE is like a rounding error compared to the sales of the other iPhones.

See, a lot of people are excited about Android 14, but the S20FE is already on security update-only status... meanwhile the iPhone 13 of the same vintage just got a major OS upgrade.

And next year, when the S20FE won't even have security updates, the 13 will get another major upgrade. And probably another after that.

In fact, if you had bought a refurb $500 iPhone when the S20FE was announced (iPhone 11!), you'd still be getting into the new update the S20FE just missed out on.

That is how absurdly abysmal Android support it: you could have gotten a 2 year older phone and actually gained an upgrade cycle.

Also fun fact: the 2 year older iPhone 11 would also be faster than the S20 FE

I don't disagree with the update story being still a problem with Android, but iOS users tend to blow it up to a level higher than it actually is because they don't understand how Android is segmented.

You see, if Apple dropped support for your iPhone, you would never be able to ever get a browser upgrade again, since Safari's engine updates are tied to iOS itself.

Android doesn't do that. Very old phones past their prime and past the security updates support will still receive the latest Chrome with latest web standards support and security fixes for itself (though it won't stop other apps from being able to, say, exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability and other things of that vein). You will continue to receive upgraded Messages etc.

Many of the APIs are updated independently too from the OS, through the Play Store, and because the developer community is aware of the OS update fragmentation, they also tend to target older SDKs for compatibility. So android phones are not becoming obsolete as fast as some Apple-exclusive users seem to believe from only being informed about "android doesn't get updates".

By the time my phone is truly done I will probably buy a new one because the battery will have worn out beyond my tolerance, as it always happens with these devices just as it happens on iPhones (I used to be on the iPhone camp when prices had not turned obscene, started with a 3g and ended with the 5s. No, I'm not paying $1k on a goddamn smartphone just because I prefer a bigger screen.).

To remark on not being able to get 14: it's sad, but I don't really miss it. I've never used webcams in my entire life, and the other OS level features aren't particularly important. IMHO, both iOS and Android have become mature as OSes and most of what people care about is in the app ecosystem, not what comes out of the factory.

I've launched AOSP devices professionally, so I understand how Android is segmented better than most...

You spent way too many words trying to downplay some pretty simple facts: Android OS updates are what contain most headline features lay people recognize.

GPS/Mainline cover things that are implementation details as far as they know, and don't cover the binary blobs which are the biggest reason why losing security updates in a year is going to mean the S20FE is forever an insecure device, regardless of what Mainline can deliver or what going with a custom rom does.

Also Android is extremely far from mature, things like Project Mainline show we haven't even settled on how far Google gets to sink the closed sourced claws of their GPS into the core of it.

I mean you've got Android 14 finally adding the APIs to properly support scrolling on high FPS displays. Android had 120hz displays years before Apple and somehow manages to screw up these basic cases because they have no unified product vision to speak of.

Maybe Android will be "mature" once Google is done with their iOS-ization of AOSP driven by crappy vendors, but for now the updates are extremely meaningful.

1) iPhone 13 is 09/2021; Galaxy S20 FE is 09/2020. One year older device.

2) System updates do not mean the same on Android and iOS. On Android, all the apps are going to be updated still. Browser, mail, chat, maps are not hostages to system update. Conversely, security-only updates on Android are perfectly fine. Most users would not see difference between major releases anyway.

1) So let's go with the iPhone 12. Or the 11. Or iPhone XR from 2018, which just got iOS 17.

2) I don't get why people keep lecturing a guy who built AOSP products with wildly wrong understandings of Android's update structure

Browser, Mail, and Messages are all baked into AOSP just like iOS... they're just so awful they mostly stopped getting updated: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/

You're instead referring to Google Play Services alternatives, which get updated but also don't represent the headline features that get announced with new Android releases.

> Most users would not see difference between major releases anyway

Absurd take when Google spends literal millions marketing the new features native to Android releases (not app releases, Android releases)

And in less than a year the binary blobs running half the phone in your pocket will no longer get updated, so it elevates from being a feature issue to being a security issue.

> Browser, Mail, and Messages are all baked into AOSP just like iOS...

The Galaxy S20 FE doesn't run AOSP though. It has Chrome, GMail and Messages from Google and all of them get updated via the Play Store.

> You're instead referring to Google Play Services alternatives, which get updated but also don't represent the headline features that get announced with new Android releases.

... sound about right chief?

You're assuming 1) that people need a phone that fancy in the first place, and 2) that a phone's life is up once it stops receiving updates.

The Moto G6, and that stopped receiving updates long ago, and was released in 2018 for about $100. I don't need much power, so I could easily get by with such an old, underpowered phone. I did for a while, but I did switch away because I was more phone-reliant at the time, and so an upgrade was needed. And I find the freedom of being able to install anything just from APKs, set another browser as my default, etc. as a huge value-add for Android.

And yeah, the iPhone has more security updates, but that doesn't really matter to me. I only install reputable, and mostly open source, apps on my phone so I'm not really concerned about security.

So in terms of value: there's the 2020 iPhone SE, with, say, 3 years left, for $120–$40 per year counting just the remaining years and using the current price at Walmart, or $300–$50 per year, assuming MSRP, a carrier discount of $100, and 6 years total. And the Moto G6, with just over of 5 years of life so far, and more value to me due to both the relative freedom of Android, and the fact that I'm used to and prefer Android, for $100–$20 per year. The choice seems obvious to me, for my purposes, but I can absolutely see why an iPhone is better for some people.

By the way, fun fact: the Moto G6 has FM radio built-in!

P.S. also, there's no way I'd risk becoming one of those arseholes that tries to make their whole family get iPhones so they can FaceTime, just because they can't figure out how to download another damn video calling app, despite being able to download all other apps just fine. Yes I'm looking at you, mother's half of my extended family.

> And yeah, the iPhone has more security updates, but that doesn't really matter to me. I only install reputable, and mostly open source, apps on my phone so I'm not really concerned about security.

As much as I’d love this to be a valid stance if you use the internet then you need to be keeping up with security updates. Recently there was a bug in the open source decoder for webp images, it impacted basically every device, and was being exploited in the wild via nothing but displaying an image.

... and libwebp gets statically linked into Chrome which gets updated via the Play Store even on Android devices that "don't receive security updates anymore".

I have two phones that do the exact same things for me - iPhone 14 and Pixel 7a. Screens are almost the same size. Battery life is very similar. Both are fast for the things I use them for.

iPhones typically get OS upgrades for 5 years. Pixel gets 3 years.

My iPhone cost £849 including tax, which is £170 p.a. The Pixel was £449, working out to £150 p.a. So the Pixel is £20 cheaper per year.

iPhone SE has a much smaller screen, too small to read comfortably. I don't trust refurbished phones. So these options don't matter to me. Far cheaper Android options don't matter to me either because they typically have huge quality and security issues.

For people who just keep using their phone for 5 years no matter what, Pixel would be £80 cheaper, but I think performance would no longer be on par in the later years given that the iPhone starts out with higher specs.

I'm not saying this comparison is any more correct than yours. My point is that whether or not iPhone or Android phones are cheaper depends on how people use their phones. There is no one true answer to which one is cheaper.

When you're poor you don't have the luxury of worrying about security updates, and your credit probably isn't good enough for those carrier deals. You use a phone until the battery explodes, and on that measure even the cheapest of new phones is going to outlast a refurbished anything.

Well, it sounds like you mostly have issues with Google (and Google devices).

I'm pretty happy with my Fairphone 4 on LineageOS, personally. Murena also sells some degoogled out-of-the-box with /e/. I also like having root adb access on these systems (which btw, gives you access to the sqlite sms database). Screen mirroring via DP alt mode over USB-C works out-of-the-box and you can enable Android's "desktop mode", though it's rather barebones and clearly experimental. Plus, Fairphone supports their phone for a long time, they are easy to repair, they can run mainline kernels (postmarketOS...), etc. Of course, any Android phone still depends on Google for the OS.

I'm with you on a lot of complaints regarding Google, though switching to Apple would feel like trading one evil for another: I would absolutely not describe an Apple cellphone as "mine", nor "accessing your own device" sounds like something Apple provides.

A lot of your issues come from using a Google phone (Nexus/Pixel) rather than a different brand such as Samsung. Samsung can do external display mirror over USB, or let you use your external USB monitor as a second display (wirelessly too). It has no messaging bullshit.

That said I have a Fold 4. iPhone aren't doing folding phones atm and they lock down the ecosystem so much I have zero interest.

Exactly my thoughts. The OP just seemed like they want an iPhone because they like it, not because of the excuses they posted. They are all solvable by simply picking a phone from another brand (except maybe for the messaging thing, I didn't quite understand that one).

As someone who has been running de-googled android for years, I don't identify with any of your complaints.

Good luck leaving that walled garden by going to apple.

There is nothing better than degoogled Android, or at least limiting google to some extent.

Why choose one evil over another? Sure Apple device is more convenient but "Privacy", that's Joke.

I get that people want convenience and feature but I would choose Google over Apple anyday, why? because it's not trying to lock me in.

Unlocking your phone wipes it. Rooting does not.

I've used LineageOS + MicroG on a pixel phone and it's been great being free of Google spyware.

I've done this but have lost access to wireless payments (Google Pay). Any workarounds?

The SafetyNet Fix module. I believe kdrag0n is the original author, but there's a popular fork on GitHub with some fixes - if you Google it you should be able to find it.

It tricks apps into thinking your phone doesn't support hardware key attestation, forcing it to fall back to basic software attestation which can easily be spoofed.

Been using it on my OnePlus 7 Pro and aside from when I had to switch to the fork, I haven't had any times where SafetyNet has stopped passing.

I just don't use Google pay. Well, my wife hasn't completely gotten off of Google, so she pays for my Duolingo subscription as a family plan.

Only fragile ones, and those will only work until google finally flips the switch and their servers stop validating anything less than true hardware-backed attestation.

Then we'll switch to patching the check out of those apps like is already possible for some with Revanced Manager

You can't patch that out when it comes to hardware attestation. The entire bootchain is authenticated and you can't spoof it because the authentication mechanism and private key are is in the on-silicon enclave. Anything that's not authorized will fail attestation. You can't patch it out because it's an allowlist. Anything less than official signed boot + OS + apps + configuration + known good hardware private key will fail.

It's about as easy as it would be for an ISP to inject code into an HTTPS page.

The only reason anything works is because Google attestation servers still return a green light for evaluationType=BASIC. Once old devices become rare enough they'll only return a positive attestation for evaluationType=HARDWARE_BACKED.

Go find try and find a single instance of anyone achieving HARDWARE_BACKED with less than a fully stock device.

They are none. No amount of Magisk magic will make it work because it's all taken out of software's hands. Bypasses at that point look like electron microscopes and micro-electronics cleanrooms.

I've been on Google phones since the first nexus, with the exception of a single Samsung before swearing them off due to bloatware and awful performance degradation, despite being twice the price of the nexus, and am finally tempted to switch to an iPhone as well.

The main things drawing me to the iPhone are:

Live voicemail - don't have to deal with my carriers awful voicemail anymore, and it's way more practical than Android's Call Screen, because the Call Screen prompt is way too tedious to sit through, unprofessional if you're being called for an interview, and they know you're there. Live voicemail I can see it, optionally answer in the middle, it gets saved after, and the other party has no idea if I'm available or not.

Apple Photo Memories - My girlfriend shows me them on her iPhone, they're cohesive and actually really enjoyable to watch, they look like they were professionally done, like what you'd pay someone to make or see an social media influencer post. Google Photo Memories look like random assortments of photos in a powerpoint presentation you made back when you were only 8.

The apple watch is also better than the google watch.

I still have to see what features I care about that I'll be losing before making the switch though. I still remember having to fight my iPod where the internal music db would always get corrupted and need to reset because I used MediaMonkey instead of iTunes since it was faster and had better transcoding and library management features.

I've been using my Samsung Galaxy S21 for two years now and don't notice any performance degradation. I feel that the bloatware you're speaking of is also minimal. It has far more features than an iPhone, e. g. Samsung DeX, which is actually quite interesting. The photo gallery app is good, I think you'd like its story feature. It has object recognition and creates small stories from pics of people, pets and certain days on which you took a few more pictures. I also like their new AI photo editor (Galaxy Enhance X). It gave me good results on overexposed pictures without me having to manually fumble around. The regular photo editor with its object eraser also comes in handy. If possible I suggest you try one of the new Samsung Galaxy S devices.

More than decade ago, in 2011, my father had Galaxy S2 and I had Galaxy Nexus. Hardware-wise, they were comparable (Galaxy Nexus was something like Galaxy S2.1), but the former run TouchWiz and the latter vanilla Android. The latter was much more snappy, the former's performance did degrade.

Now fast-forward almost a decode. I'm using Galaxy S10 since its introduction in 2019. TouchWiz is nowhere to be found. Samsung uses OneUI nowadays, which is actually pretty cool, and I prefer it to vanilla Android. Basically, I have as good experience with it, as you described.

Caveat that you have to have a device running macOS to do this:

If you set up your Apple account to use iCloud to sync your messages, you will end up with your iMessage and text messages in the Messages app on your macOS computer. At that point the message content is easily retrieved from files on disk, should you choose to do so.

Nexus user here as well.

Of course you can accesss your stuff on it, just back it up with android debbugger (adb).

If you're annoyed with the search box you can disable it or flash GrapheneOS or LineageOS.

My partner is always having a hard time transferring her iPhone photos to her desktop. Finally gave up and bought iCloud storage. Apple has better integration with their peripherals though. No stupid app to use the heaphones, create other accounts etc. Their Apple Air Pods setup is just integrated in the OS. I have Sonys and absolutely hate their 4.7 star rated app, nags you to create an account and give it access to the camera in order to optimize your sound.

> I can't access my phone backup. It's ONLY stored on Google's servers.

What options do iPhones have for saving/restoring backups?

iPhone lets you manage backups from your computer. Learn more: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204136

Thanks!

On Linux you can use libimobiledevice’s (1) idevicebackup2 to backup an iOS device.

1: https://libimobiledevice.org/

> What options do iPhones have for saving/restoring backups?

iCloud and local.

You can also do more granular backups with software like iMazing

https://imazing.com/

Ironically that website gives me ASP.NET vibes.

I remember that I was able to mirror my phone to a TV with a USB cable. It's been years since I did it so I don't know if something changed. I don't know if I ever connected my current phone. I had phones from Samsung and Sony, never Google. Maybe they have different USB ports.

That was gone in android 7, I think.

In the past, some phones and tablets did support MHL.

Today, some phones and tablets support DisplayPort alt-mode over USB-C.

>DisplayPort out is explicitly disabled in the source code with no reason given

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/111044305

That link gives a permission error.

Same. @charcircuit want to give us a summary?

You have to be a Google employee to see it. I was pointing out that resolving that issue was the reason that was given for the change.

And that issue was?

These are all solvable on Android with a little bit of work.

It's not packaged up and made shiny by the manufacturer, but that's why I like it. It's a decoupled experience where I've got control over it.

I have to sympathize with their post a bit. There's no reason for it to be "a little bit of work". Google is not some indie company.

As much as I enjoy tinkering and having control over my device, sometimes I want things to just work. The Steam Deck and SteamOS are the what I consider the gold standard for this: SteamOS is very beginner friendly, but allows power users to access the Desktop mode and unlock its full potential.

I've talked about this before on HN [1]. I cannot backup my Minecraft worlds on Android 13 without paying Mojang $4 for their server to act as an intermediary to transfer files, whereas people in the "walled garden" of iOS can access it via a file manager app or plug their phone into a computer and backup the worlds.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36350135

It's a company deciding what they will and what they will not do.

If you want an all encompassing authoritarian provider, you have an option. But demanding that of everyone narrows the periphery and extinguishes the creative sparks of discovery

Vendors should embrace diversity and not line up in compliance with whoever the perceived market leader is.

This is called Error reinforcement: when a tech company makes a poor decision and their competitors copy them out of fear because they don't know it's a mistake.

The original firm sees the copycat work as evidence they were right.

See Google/Apple maps, iPhone/Android, Google/Bing etc

This leads to service degradation, feature reduction, persumptive interfaces, poor defaults, hostile interfaces, and disliked products with no alternatives because everybody is racing to clone each other feature for feature assuming that everybody else knows what they're doing

Any presumed market diversity from competition is then traded in for compliance, uniformity and conformity.

So go buy your Apple device. Expecting everyone to be like Apple (or anyone else) is offensive to the craft of innovation

???

Are you sure you've responded to the correct comment? Or did you misunderstand my comment?

No where did I say I want an "all encompassing authoritarian provider" or to "narrow the periphery and extinguish the creative sparks of discovery". All I asked for is my device to "just work" when I want it to. You can have have your cake and eat it as well - it is possible to be friendly towards both novice and pro users, as I demonstrated with the Steam Deck example (whether they will continue this, is a separate discussion). Things can "just work" without a company deciding what's best for me.

I used to be able to plug my phone into my laptop and copy my Minecraft files. I can't do that any more.

I own the device. I decide what I want to do with it.

I myself have faced the brunt of "error reinforcement": my phone doesn't have expandable storage, lacks a headphone jack and didn't come with a charger in the box, - all to inconvenience me and raise Google's bottom line.

If you're up for constructive criticism, please don't come off so aggressive.

Sorry I'm passionate about the industry.

Apple took the first step on almost all those feature killing things you listed and then to "keep up with the industry", the android vendors followed suit.

Products that "just work" often in practice get that attribute by only working in a proscribed way and then flat out failing in others.

Your fail case is inevitably because the just work philosophy was followed for some other imagined use case so being a tool was replaced with being an appliance.

When you try to meet the user too far you inherently compromise functionality and adaptability in exchange for narrowed convenience.

You need to take things away and remove decision points from the user in order to get to a just work state.

Then there's an actual group of users that reinforces this and classifies such things are progress.

I care a lot about a productive meaningful future and I want to push things in the right directions

All good.

Thing is, power users are a vocal minority in his industry. People like our families are the majority, and I don't want them to have to deal with quirks or troubles, but I also don't want an oligopoly controlling the space and compromising innovation, privacy, etc. in the name of "convenience" (profit).

Power user is the wrong view.

The problem here is whether someone wants a good knife or a bunch of specialized knife like devices like cheese slicers for specialized knife functions.

The problem in technology is we presume it's Either the mandolin Or the knife and not both.

The fleeting elegance in the craft of engineering tech products is in empowering all these modalities and not the endemic narrowcasting we see plaguing the industry.

It's possible, it's just sadly not common

> Display out

As you said, this is only a Pixel problem. Speaking of, have you tried Samsung Dex?

> Accessing your own device

Seriously? Apple basically invented the idea of not giving you full access to your "own" device. At least there's a file explorer now...

> Messaging that actually makes sense

Messaging under Apple is literally just messaging on Android plus iMessage. You still have SMS, like 50 common third-party messengers, all the Google ones, but then also this Apple-only thing. How is this better? If you want a better chat experience, look at Blackberry (yes, really!).

You do have a point regarding privacy though, as most Android devices ship with at least Google's spyware, if not also their own...

I'm thinking also about switching for some of the reasons you mentioned, but I learned thanks to you there are more good reasons.

1 - HDMI cable does the trick 2 - This until recently was not a problem if you had signal. 3 - Syncthing. it costs $0. 4 - iMessage ?

You have to pick your poison, but a phone that actively forces you to update AND also blocks 3rd party apps from running AND forces proprietary cables that no other consumer device uses... seems like a nonstarter for me.

The iPhone they bought uses USB-C

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BR3M8XHK/

But the option with display out cost more than 1000 usd

Why do you need to mirror your phone? Why do you want to access your messages? For what purpose? What do you need to backup besides (maybe) photos? Which is easy (drag and drop) anyway. Sounds more like you have some kind of device dependency beyond normality.

I think when you say "why do you need to ____?" you think you're saying "what are you trying to do, and maybe there's another way to accomplish that", but what everyone hears is "you're right".

And for the record, "because it's their device, not Google's" should be as good a reason as any.

Actually I'm just wondering specifically why the need to do any of those things. Isn't the phone just fine as a standalone thing? I mean other than maybe exporting photos, videos, or sound to a more powerful and easier to use platform (such as a desktop)...

This is like asking, "why do you need a touch screen or internet on a phone in the first place? Neither are needed to make phone calls. Isn't a phone just fine as a standalone thing?"

It's not 2005 anymore, a phone has all the computing power that most people need. In fact, most laptops are just phone boards these days. It's completely reasonable to ask that your hardware not be artificially limited by the software it's running so they can sell you a separate device that does the rest of what you need.

In a perfect world, my phone is a supercomputer capable of doing everything I'll ever want in a fraction of a second. And the thing standing between my current phone and a perfect phone shouldn't be my insistence on having a separate giant desktop taking up more space than is necessary.

I do the NYT crossword on my iPhone. Not uncommonly, someone will start kibitzing over my shoulder. If there's a TV nearby, I throw the app up there, either with AirPlay or an HDMI cable. Because it's an iPhone, the app can detect that it's mirrored to a big screen and give an alternate layout for that screen; the NYT crossword app does an average job of this, giving a layout optimized for large 16:9 landscape displays. Makes two people (or ten) working on a crossword together much more pleasant.

I'm not sure if this is a weird use case or not, but given the number of iPhone apps that I have both used and written that have special handling for TV mirroring to improve user experience... it can't be /that/ rare.

Have you ever used miracast with iPhone?

I have not.

Displaying something on a TV is beyond normality?

I think so - aren't there established avenues already? I just don't see why you'd need to do that from a phone... seems backwards

I sometimes have to give presentations at a community center or church or some random venue and I just need to plug in to their TV/projector. Got my slides all ready to go. Is that asking so much?

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