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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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