Android features I envy as an iPhone user
notes.ghed.in
notes.ghed.in
For audio:
* Have different volumes for different app
* Have one app play its sound on your phone and another app to another device.
* Have two apps play at the same time.
For UI:
* Hide status icons that are just always on and thus meaningless.
* Customize the navigation gestures
* Put apps into windows, split screen, etc.
* DeX for desktop environment when connected to a display -- I can even remote display to my LG TV and the magic remote can be used as a mouse pointer.
For Apps:
* Linux shell and apps (Termux) -- even X windows.
* Firefox, Chome, even Samsung Internet as browsers. Samsung's browser has some unique features for phones and tablets and I end up using it the most.
* VLC for playing downloading media easily on my devices
* Smooth integration with Windows via Phone Link -- notifications, messages, photos, remote access.
* Lots of notification customizations
I could go on. There are so many features that I have never used but that's ok -- we all need and want a different set of features. I use many of these all the time. I used to have an iPhone (and my whole family has i-devices) but I think I'd have trouble going back to such a restrictive environment. But I still fully recommend iPhones and iPads for most people.
I wish I could talk to the PM who decided this was an upgrade.
(There are other trade-offs between Google and Samsung, of course.)
This really should be an Android standard. I would prefer Linux instead of Android, but this is the next best thing.
What?!! I didn't know this! I used the phone as a stupid touchpad.
Could you share some examples?
Same with the battery icon. When you plug in your phone every night, but the battery lasts 2-3 days, knowing you're at 80% vs 72% has no purpose.
Why have them there if all they do is contribute to anxiety (why did I lose 3% faster?) and take up space in the top bar (where alarm and DND indicators live)?
Some of the changes I've made include different icons for the back/home/app switcher buttons at the bottom of the screen and a different layout for the app switcher.
Just because it might come in handy for some: There is iSH for iphones, that emulate a whole x86 CPU to run a lean linux environment. I use it to ssh into servers and edit some txt/special files ios is too dumb to handle otherwise (you can move stuff to its file system).
I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you familiarize yourself with Samsung's privacy policy.
Now in terms of a little thing that's a major annoyance is the alarm. Android has this feature where upcoming alarms are shown as notifications which you can turn off (just the next one). I set multiple alarms for the morning so that if I shut off one I get another. Now if I wake up on the 1st alarm I will have the next 2 on notification that I can turn off. On iPhone I will keep having those alarm bells and turn them off (which can wake up my kids/wife) or disable them once I wakeup and I might end up forgetting to turn them on for the next day.
Now the freedom in terms of application or browser and extension!!! are obviously general problems.
The volume of media playback und ringtones can be changed separately. Ringtone volume can be set in "Sounds & Haptics". Disable the toggle for changing the ringtone volume with the physical volume keys if that interferes.
It is separate on iOS.
* Iceraven (Firefox) - I use a number of extensions that make the internet much more pleasant, including ublock origin, ublacklist, dark reader, violent monkey, keepa, augmented steam, and more
* ReVanced - makes YouTube much more enjoyable: automatically skip ads, intros, like and subscribe reminders, and other "fluff", set custom playback speeds and remember them, return the dislike count and background playback, and so much more.
* Smart AudioBook Player - I look for books on CD and rip them because SABP is so much better than any other app I've tried.
* Headphones jack and especially microSD support (moto g100). I could probably live with Bluetooth headphones, but expandable/removable storage is incredibly useful and Apple seems to be dead set against it.
Asking to know what I’m missing as my music lives on Spotify, movies online, photos on iCloud, and documents wherever they are shared with users or on iCloud Drive. So, what could I use the local storage for? And how fast is it expandable storage compared to onboard flash?
In the past I've carried a music library and some movies or TV series, but I mostly stream those these days. (I used to fly more often, so a local copy was more important then.)
Also, I like to try out different Android flavors on my phone occasionally, and it's nice to be able to pop out the microSD and know that no matter what I happens during the installation, that data is still safe.
I'm sure it's not as fast as the internal storage, but for the way I use it, it's fast enough that I don't really notice the speed.
Best AudioBook app ever.
>Headphone jack
Agree
Also, sideloading and file system access. With Syncthing, I can sync local folders between my Mac, Windows PC and phone in one go.
Uhm, I got a bad news for you: https://9to5google.com/2024/04/04/android-bluetooth-automati...
As for the revamped notification tiles which mashed Wifi and mobile data together into one tile – this being Android, at least you can bring back the old behaviour via e.g. https://f-droid.org/packages/be.casperverswijvelt.unifiedint...
Spotlight search on macOS is mostly broken (with no fix in sight), and autocorrect on macOS feels like it was made by kid with limited vocab and no familiarity beyond the most commonly used words (e.g. sometimes 7/8 letters correct isn't enough for macOS to make any guess as to what you might have meant).
I will be curious to see how the usually controlling and exacting Apple will grapple with an inherently unpredictable LLM.
I don't even think asking the time is processed locally
I guess I'll read this https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/alfred-raycast
I think the article it has its merit. I'm following a few podcast and news outlets and they seem to be very blind to what's actually missing from iOS or Apple's influence, in that sense it is a better take than most I've seen.
In particular, on browser engine most people seem to brush it off as a "every will just choose Chrome and it will all be the same" when there's a lot more to it. In particular it makes it a lot more interesting to keep Firefox on the desktop as we get history sync.
The other parts (e.g. DEX) are also usually brushed off as things people don't use, but I'd wager the fact that the dominant mobile OS doesn't support it has a lot to do with that state.
> Although iOS is better served with good apps, some Android exclusives are missing.
The broader point here is that this appears to be a very low quality/effort article, and so question was genuine: what am I missing? It clearly resonated with some folks.
Your comments were so rude that at first I thought to ignore, but then I decided I’d like to let you know. I’d rather write “incomprehensible English”* than being this mean on someone I don’t even know.
* allegedly; everyone else seem to understand what I wrote.
Agree — this is a deeply under-informed article, and most comments hours in don't seem to realize it.
While the policy limits mentioned are real, most supposed technical limitations mentioned and alleged to be solved by openness are not real. Others have made such apps or features when they put in the work to leverage libs/APIs already provided.
For instance:
“Every time I open Firefox on my testing Android phone, with its cool extensions and the Gecko engine, I remember the iOS version, much inferior because it lacks the features that make Firefox on Android an alternative capable of, over there, competing with Chrome.”
Kagi Orion browser, which implements Firefox extensions on iOS, shows that Mozilla could have implemented Firefox extensions on iOS.
A majority of readers believe, and repeat, that such things can't be done, yet they have been implemented by others and available for some time.
And so Firefox on iOS is indeed much inferior, but that appears to be because the original goal seemed to be a minimum viable app that would nevertheless sync Firefox bookmarks, not because one can't implement Firefox extensions.
Counter-examples exist for most every technical claim the article makes, where it says you can't, others already do.
It's specious.
- - -
As for gecko versus webkit, that's a battle both sides should consider a detente, there are larger stakes, and both sides should be keeping their eye on that ball.
If someone made a vertically integrated Mozilla phone -- something like palm phone hardware + Mozilla client suite + Proton services for instance -- that blocked any other engine and controlled the OS integration points for security and privacy reasons, I would support that Maker's right to market that thoughtfully engineered pro-human experience.
( I do want a Palm + Mozilla + Proton phone so tightly integrated it's impervious to Pegasus type attacks. Like the original PalmOS phone, and original iPhone design intent, I want the only "apps" it runs beyond the core communicator capabilities it ships with to be sandboxed fully open HTML5 PWAs: https://www.flyingcowdesign.com/web-design-services/html5-is... )
Here are just two reasons of many reasons I support maker choice to continue to market a product that becomes very successful, where choices within the product offering are made by the maker:
(a) If the last barrier to corporate web products abandoning all but one rendering engine being everywhere falls away, neither WebKit nor Gecko will be targeted by banks, utilities, travel, government sites, etc., and Google fully controls web standards. You have no farther to look than their various adtech "privacy" standards proposals to see where that ends up: blink (by whatever name) and consumer profile everywhere. It's bad for the web, and it's bad for humans.
(b) I don't believe in forced decomposition of a product experience's hardware, firmware, operating system, and software. There are experiences that uncoupling prevents, and consumers should have a right to purchase tools that make no compromises from firms with a right to market them.
Removing either the Steam + Linux + DIY gaming parts or the PS5 console experience from the market would be a disservice to free choice.
Ironically, draft legislation exists pushing both agendas and any incremental laws towards no DIY (think of the children and our security!) or only DIY (ban vertical integration!) collude at eroding the more fundamental right to make, market, and own, your choice.
Second would be a better keyboard, but you can install Gboard and almost get there.
(Almost?) Every app in iOS has the “swipe from left” to go back.
It integrates with the system browser and, I think, all embedded browsers. I only use the 'privacy-safe' subset of Wipr, that is, the passive filter list that Safari supports most efficiently. It works great. I'm sure there are other options that other iPhone users can recommend to you if you ever want to try it.
Idk since when, but Safari on iOS had extensions available for quite a while. I have been using an adblocker one + a few webdev ones (not that I need it often at all, but once every few months I might need to take a look at the DOM or check network requests with no access to my laptop, it comes in quite handy).
Didn't they lift the restriction on which extension you can install on mobile Firefox as well?
If you are learning a language, Android is a must have just for that alone.
(Relatedly, if you're an app developer for some shop or other, and you ask for notification permissions "so we can keep you up to date on your orders!", and then the app spams me with marketing push notifications, it should mean that you and anyone else responsible gets a thousand years in the lake of fire when you're gone. Fair's fair.)
Everything else I don't miss really. My years of giving a toss about tweaking everything to be just-so are pretty much gone, just give me a sensible default that I can work with and I'm happy.
The main bit would be the arrow keys, which are a lot better than swiping around. Otherwise firefox has better text selection IMHO, but it has other downsides that Chrome doesn't.
Try it here: someonesemail@notyahoo.com
Edit: This appears to be a Chrome thing.
> Android Oreo came with a new "smart text selection" feature that uses AI code to make smart decisions about selecting text such as addresses and phone numbers.
- no way to record phone calls: missing the ability to relisten to the calls after the fact has costed me a lot of problems.
- keyboard woes: some of it can be down to muscle memory but the default keyboard felt very unresponsive at first and is still a struggle at times. it is broken in Discord app for some reason (might be down to that app itself)
- ALARMS!: how can someone build an alarm app that randomly goes SILENT ON SNOOZE?! maybe it is the world nudging me towards fixing my sleep cycle, but this is ridiculous.
- backups: i had to make a huge compromise by forgoing with syncthing because there is no free and open-source way around it. even syncing to cloud services with encryption has little to no options. (please send help if you know something that works)
- personalization sucks even today: imagine using a music creation app to create ringtones or notification tones. even then they don't work consistently across apps!
besides this, i see some progress thanks to EU and other international regulations. but i doubt that it will impact these silly design choices which don't have any anti-competitive stuff around it.
Considering the grips mentioned by the author, it’s easy to get all the features I want by using iCloud. Personally I am always going to pay for cloud storage and I pay for a primary and a backup. iCloud is my primary, and I keep backup copies of my photos and files from iCloud on google drive and Dropbox as well.
I used to prefer the browsing experience on Android until I realized safari on iPhone just isn’t always the smartest about figuring out the page zoom level. Brave sometimes gets it right more often, but you can always manually change the zoom. With most pages where I think WebKit is terrible and unusable I lately have figured out that changing the page zoom makes things work better.
If I could make iOS do more I’d definitely want some real browser choice and maybe virtualization on the nicer iPads too. That’d go a long way to making iOS devices better at keeping me away from the laptop.
My phone can do at least 500mbit when speed testing over WiFi.
- AdAway in host file mode, i.e. without having to mess around with a fake VPN connection
- toggling Wifi, mobile data and airplane mode programmatically all require root on current Android versions (turn on airplane mode automatically at night, turn off mobile data in my home Wifi and back on when I leave it, and turn on Wifi automatically when I'm near my home [1], plus restoring the original separate Wifi and mobile data toggles via e.g. https://f-droid.org/packages/be.casperverswijvelt.unifiedint... needs root, too)
- being able to poke around on the whole file system is sometimes useful
- Xposed for fixing miscellaneous annoyances that would otherwise require hacking APKs (doable but somewhat annoying) or outright compiling a custom ROM (which would be way too much effort)
-- Google blocking installation of old apps without ADB
-- Google introducing a bug in Android 13/14 that breaks options/overflow menus in some apps – there's a workaround, but that's of no use for old apps that won't see any new updates any time soon
-- Google blocking selecting the top-level directory of my SD card in the file access folder picker, which again breaks one app that unfortunately won't see any new updates but otherwise still works fine and has no suitable direct replacement
-- turning off the aspect ratio restrictions for old apps, especially seeing how I ended up with one of those ultra-tall aspect ratio Xperias as my current new phone (it seems that this might be an official feature in Android 15, but I don't want to wait that long, plus who knows how that'll actually turn out plus what other things Google might break in turn in that version)
-- working around the developer of the music player I paid for introducing a #@§+$%[# timebomb in his app (disabling it two years after the build date of the respective update), and then eventually selling the app to some shady company that's mostly interested in extracting as much money as possible from the app before the whole thing probably burns (if user reviews are anything to go by, they've stopped honouring the old paid unlocker APK and are instead demanding a subscription at a totally unreasonable two-digit monthly price – for a music player for local files (!)).
- still haven't found a good replacement for QuickPic gallery for my use case (folder-based browsing respecting the actual file system hierarchy, i.e. nested folders) – while somebody has been keeping up a modded version of the app based on the last version before it, too, was sold to some dubious company, I've found that file access restrictions introduced in recent Android versions require some additional root-based workaround for keeping the app working as I want it, too.
[1] It seems current Android versions (or is that just a Sony-specific feature?) offer an option to automatically turn on Wifi when you're near a saved network location, but you can't configure that one.
Android at least, can only run one app at a time.