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Comment by bhawks | Hacker News Reader

The web works better on Android.

At Google some PMs used to lament that Android users spend more time in the browser than in apps versus iPhone. In my experience using browsers on Android are much better than on iPhone and not everything really wants to be an app.

Id point the finger at Google actually allowing different web browser apps (Safari drives every browser on iPhone and lags in many areas) and just natural competition. (If ads really bothers you an ad blocker is an install away).

My only complaint really being cookie banners but they suck the fun out of desktop web too.

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I would actually suggest there may be a flip side of this. Android apps tend to feel more clunky than their iPhone counterparts, and the web is universally familiar. But it is possible both can be true at once.

I think iOS apps are more heavily monetized because of the high fees. So maybe those are higher quality as that's where the money and paying users are. I wrote a few free iOS apps and I had to pull them because I just don't want to pay $100 a year for something I don't make any money off. Discoverability is terrible for both platforms, but I had better luck finding good free apps on android

Free, or free but ad-supported?

There are better FOSS apps on Android thanks to F-Droid and other efforts. Plus it's not that hard to roll something in a pipeline of an open source project that builds an Android app and have maintainers for it.

iPhone Apps require specific hardware and tools to make and maintain, and can't easily be built on an automatic pipeline. So all the work has to be by dedicated people using manual process.

Which apps specifically? As an Android dev that prefers an iPad for their tablet. There's been no discernable difference to me in native apps.

It only gets laggy and slow when the app is obviously some poorly put together react native, Xamarin app, or some other non native app. You can tell usually because they just kept the exact same design from their iPhone app. You have to put a lot more work into those kind of apps to make them not run like garbage.

You can block cookie banners with ad blockers too.

It’s not a perfect rule, but the areas in which WebKit lags behind Blink tend to be in newer standards, not longstanding central pillars of web apps. As far as speed goes, my personal findings have been that WebKit and Blink are neck and neck assuming one has adblockers installed (which Safari on iOS supports).

When there are speed differences, it’s often because the app in question was only ever tested against Chrome and/or makes use of Blink specific quirks (as YouTube did/does). I’ve also seen some talk about over aggressive polyfills gunking things up under non-Blink browsers.

I want to believe this / hate on Apple as another iPhone X user with very slow web performance.

I would wager it’s not Safari mobile though just your standard website got way more resource hungry due to SPA proliferation etc.

TL;DR hard to verify your claim as Safari is the only allowed browser engine on iOS.

If somebody had a jailbroken/dev phone that would eg allow compile and install of Firefox then we could actually know.. I’m very skeptical it’s down to the browser though. Not sure if typical benchmarks are telling as hardware always different. Again “badly optimized” websites and 6+ years old hardware; albeit should be fast enough…

> The web works better on Android.

Does "the web" work better, or the Google ecosystem?

One reason I don't want to move from iOS is their embedding of their stuff into the OS, which in turn beams my queries etc through GOOG.

But it's been a long time (multiple years) since I messed around with an Android tablet.

(Don't have the money to take risks rn, though ironically the next laptop will probably be anything but a macbook -- touchbar is terrible, heart my f keys)

Late is better than never, right? I'm someone who only uses only these google service: maps, the play store and sometimes, rarely, google books I don't use google search, mail, drive or any other services, I have every single kind of history off and I use Firefox exclusively, on desktop as on Android. I must say, I do encounter badly designed mobile sites with this setup, but it is trivial to toggle desktop mode and then the problem is gone. It helps that I have a folding device, so I can always use a larger screen when needed.

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