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Comment by anotheronelost | Hacker News Reader

Missing from 2014: pushed out Lollipop release to OG Nexus tablets, destroying performance, leaving only those technical enough to downgrade with any way to keep using the devices.

2023: pushed out Android 14 update, removing access to any additional profiles used on the devices. TBF they still have time to deal with this one, but their response so far has been terrible.

And yet I still buy the damn things because there's no suitable alternative for me (ios doesn't have fdroid, netguard, non safari browsers etc.).

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Don’t forget you can’t call emergency services if you had Microsoft Teams installed.

Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?

One year they forgot December existed in the Contacts app.

Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?

Also Google Pay stops working half way through a journey across London meaning you end up in a massive human pile up.

SMS messages stop getting received suddenly at least once a quarter usually when I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere and need to so a 2FA bounce requiring a reboot.

And that time it destroyed the filesystem on an SD card resulting in the loss of two weeks of irreplaceable holiday photos in Australia.

Travel advice for Android users:

1. Take a DSLR/mirrorless and use that. Or upload all your shit to OneDrive or something at every available WiFi hotspot.

2. Use actual debit/credit cards rather than rely on Google Pay.

3. Write down all your bank details and credentials on paper using a simple cipher (shift left/right a few digits / alternate).

Still I'd rather travel with an Android device because I'm less likely to get beaten over the head and getting it stolen because it's 3 months' salary where I am travelling.

4. Don't ever buy Google in-house hardware.

0. This may be an unimaginably reckless contribution to techno-totalitarianism, but just get an old iPhone. They just work.

SE series is great. I’m still rocking the very first SE, and apart from OS software updates (I still have security updates sometimes) it’s fine. Given the broken protective glass screen, it doesn’t look very attractive. The same could be said about modern SEs with the looks of iPhone 6.

I bet something that looks like iPhone 5/5S/6 in 2023 isn’t that attractive to steal, even compared to modern Android phones.

But if we stay on the subject of travelling, I would definitely took _at least_ two phones, an iPhone for stability and an Android for functionality.

I'm using a pixel 7A at the moment. It's fine. In fact it just replaced my iPhone 13 Pro because it has serious issues

As for the iPhone, they mostly just work yes. For a price. Even the old ones are overpriced.

>Don’t forget you can’t call emergency services if you had Microsoft Teams installed.

That was on Microsoft – not Google, though.

>Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?

FUD.

>Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?

If you want someone to tell you (read: decide for you and leave zero room for choice) what permissions are Good and which are Bad, then yes, iOS is much better. If you want to decide which permissions are Good and Bad, then no, Androids are much better.

You will need to back this up a whole lot more for 'app installed blue coed ES call'.

Now as a MS customer it would not surprise me. But data makes arguments.

> If you want to decide which permissions are Good and Bad, then no, Androids are much better.

Okay, I've decided that arbitrary network access is bad; how do I remove it from most applications on my Android phone?

Use NetGuard, or a lot of other firewall apps.

https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

Oh there's a ton more missing than that if we're talking the gritty take on 15 years.

There's Android 4.4's FUSE migration which setup a generation of Android devices to just randomly turn to crap over time, the iOS-ification of the OS by blocking things like log access behind non-standard permissions, there was Doze marking the official start to "important things can live in closed source Google Play Services", there's the death of the AOSP apps so now there's not even a maintained calculator app for Android proper, there's SAF bungled launch with 11 that made I/O for apps 10x slower (not sure they ever even fixed that)

I owe a lot to Android in some ways, my early career was putting together embedded Android deployments, and eventually I even lead a team that launched an Android based consumer product, but my phone is an iPhone, and that's not changing any time soon for a reason.

I'm glad I have a Pixel 3a, which Google doesn't care about anymore, and won't get Android 14.

What’s so special about Android 14, compared to other versions?

I’m still on Android 8, with my Nexus 6P that happened to be lucky and have no bootloops. Curiously, it still covers everything I need, has a quick charge, nice stereo speakers, and is updated with everything (all the apps, including built-ins), but the OS. Even the camera is great for my use case. A have an old Pixel camera mod, back from those early days.

I want to upgrade to a Pixel, but I have nothing else to do with my Nexus, so I try to keep it as much as I can.

Android 14 has been a buggy mess for me on the Pixel 7 Pro. It's confounding that Google is still pushing out buggy Android releases.

I upgraded to 14 on my Pixel 7 Pro a few days ago and didn't notice any problem so far. What are the worst issues I am likely to encounter?

> What are the worst issues I am likely to encounter?

Complete loss of data. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/android-14s-ransomwa...

Back up your data while you can.

Oh fuck me. Given that I'm on automatic updates and the update has already been downloaded, next time I reboot my phone it will switch to Android 14 automatically. :(

(And yup, I'm using work profiles and all that.)

Good thing you can still back up your data. It's possible it doesn't affect everyone, I'm not sure. Lemme know how it goes when you reboot?

Or avoid rebooting somehow (if it's not automatic) in the hope they somehow fix it...

So far I've avoided rebooting but it looks like the GrapheneOS devs had already fixed the bug a while ago:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111309676504712576

I've noticed that tapping notifications has a significant delay (350ms or so) before it opens any app since upgrading to 14.

The lock screen won't show anything sometimes, and you can't unlock it. It's just a wallpaper. I had to enable face unlock and auto unlock in order to use the phone. It start the camera app with the power button, try to access photos frying there, and that gets the fingerprint to work and unlock it.

If you use multiple profiles, you could potentially end up somewhere between locked out of your main account, to even soft- and hard-bricked. See siblings link from Ars.

I really liked Android, but at a certain point I just couldn't deal with the constant buggy releases, security flaws, and short update cycle anymore. Especially things like the Pixel phones crashing when calling 911 seems ridiculous in 2023. Maybe 10 years ago when I had time to play around with ROMs and nobody really needed to reach me 24/7 that would be fine, but now I need a device that "just works" and that's iPhone.

It is great that we have choice, but "just works" is not really the whole truth. It just works as long as you do exactly as Apple wants you to do. Any misstep or need for choice outside what they deem correct usage and Android "just works" much, much better. For you this might be perfect, but to me having zero choice is perfectly bad. A phone without F-droid is to me a brick.

That’s why I simply rock two old smartphones (an Android, Nexus 6P, and an iPhone SE, 1st Gen.). And as I look around, I use them much effectively than everyone I know with much more modern phones, when they have just one device. My iPhone just works (and it does it very well), while my Nexus can do whatever it wants in terms of instability, I don’t care. I use it as a pocket computer, with F-droid and its wonderful apps. On top of that I have an old low-end Samsung smartphone (someone just gave it to me), I re-flashed it with Lineage OS and it has its use-case, slightly different from Nexus. I really cannot see any need in one extra phone, as those 3 cover all my use-cases at the moment.

Pixel phones are the bleeding edge though. You are basically beta testing for the other Android vendors.

It would be nice if that's what they were advertised as, not as top end premium Android devices with polished experience as a major selling point.

But I agree, I had a Pixel 6 briefly when my S23 was in repair for a week and it was an incredibly buggy experience in comparison, although it was quite pretty.

iOS has non safari browsers

But they are not real alternatives as they still have to use WebKit, as far as I know

Child: Dad, can we have non Safari browser?

Tim Cook: No, we have non Safari browser at home.

[Non Safari browser at home: WebKit logo wearing a wig]

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