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Comment by lisp2240 | Hacker News Reader

A smartphone is an appliance like a washing machine or a blender. It should just work. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that perform well. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that require no maintenance and can’t be broken. If I want something unreliable I can program or hack, I will go to a real PC.

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A smartphone is first of all a data collection and ad distribution device.

That may be a vendors perspective. What is the users perspective?

Data collection sure, but the ads are optional. I haven't seen an ad in years. Stock firmware BTW.

So just like a modern washing machine or blender then.

With this mindset, computers would still be typewriters or calculators.

Couldn’t agree more. The locked down nature of my iPhone is something I actively desire - the curation on the App Store isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the Wild West that is the play store. I _want_ an ecosystem where developers are forced to upgrade their apps to use the latest APIs to take advantage of the new device features.

> I _want_ an ecosystem where developers are forced to upgrade their apps to use the latest APIs to take advantage of the new device features.

You want thousands of people to do useless and potentially unpaid work?

I want the opposite: that I can write the code once and it will work forever, requiring maybe only security fixes (which is not even required for many apps). I am not interested in spending my time for maintaining the code or "updating to the new API".

> You want thousands of people to do useless and potentially unpaid work?

I think this is an extreme interpretation of what I said. I want software that is maintained. Android has a problem with apps refusing to update to hold onto legacy permissions that are restricted in newer versions (or at least it did when I moved back from android to iOS in ~2022). Apps that don't work with biometrics, or handle the notch properly are other examples.

> I want the opposite: that I can write the code once and it will work forever,

That only happens if the environemnt the code is run in is frozen, and if the underlying API was prescient enough in the first place. Device resolutions and aspect ratios have changed dramatically in the last few years. Access to buttons/input methods have changed on iOS and Android. Hardware has chagned dramatically.

Fully agree with the first part, but not the second. I absolutely don’t care if an app that worked when I installed it doesn’t do new 500MP AI continuity things today. What I personally care about is a selection of apps that don’t suck the privacy soul out of you by design and tradition at the first start. The fact that google not only allows but promotes, let’s say, a gallery that instantly requires address book, sms, gps, bluetooth, etc accesses, and no one bats an eye about it and continues to cheer android phones - is “amazing”.

I rather have more choice and possibilities and control with the added risk of breaking things and the necessity to take responsibility. And it's not necessarily easy to break things on Android, but yeah you have to be a bit more conscious of what you're doing. I guess for people that are not very tech savvy iOS is maybe easier and safer.

> I guess for people that are not very tech savvy iOS is maybe easier and safer.

This is dismissive. I'm tech savvy - I'm a programmer who has written kernel level code shipped to hundreds of thousands of people. It's not about it being "easier and safer", it's about not caring wanting to have to make every microdecision just so I can read an email.

I didn't mean to be dismissive, but that I can see why you would choose iOS as your main OS. Because yeah maybe other people in your family are not as tech savvy and you want to use the same ecosystem.

Also apps on Android usually have sane defaults so you don't necessarily have to make microdecisions in order to read an email.

I think a great example of the android decisions is (or was) “which wallet do I use?” I had a Samsung phone, and used google chrome as it synced with my pc. Except google pay didn’t work with the Samsung phone, so I had to use Samsung wallet (and let’s not mention the fact I had a Fitbit watch which required Fitbit pay, even though they were owned by google at the time). So I ended up with three separate apps which had their own intricacies. Since I swapped to iOS, I have a wallet and that’s that.

Yeah, that's Samsung for you, they put all kinds of bloat in their Android version.

That is why you need to do a little bit more research and be a little bit tech savvy for using Android in the proper way.

I would recommend brands like Google Pixel, OnePlus, Sony, Motorola. They don't put much bloat in their Android versions.

But yeah that is the thing with Android, developers have more freedom with it, so also some will use it to make things worse. With Apple you can't do anything; you're just stuck with what the manufacturer provides you and if you don't like it then you are either the CEO of Apple or it's just too bad for you.

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