Android Isn't the Anti-iPhone Anymore

This is why I'm looking at an iPhone as my next device when my current phone gives up the ghost. If you're going to force me into a walled garden then I might get one that offers the most "social interoperability" where I live, and has a nicer (imo) ecosystem built around it.

The section on copy pasted designs really hit home for me. Android phones used to be the wild west of experimentation and phones that were cool tech in your pocket, not just mini computers. I think part of it is because phones are required for day to day living so they've converged onto a single design style. LG had some of the coolest experimentation but never really stuck with one or ever fleshed out any of their ideas. The G5 was awesome and I wish they had pushed it more for it's modularity. I had one until it got run over and upgraded to a G8, which is fine I guess? It's a very boring phone, no IR blaster, and no subtle curves leading up to the camera and fingerprint sensor.

Some of the coolest phones I've ever see were the ones that were sold with Caterpillar Inc. Rugged phones that could survive a lot, and some of them had thermal cameras, which seems like a gimmick but were incredible when you needed it.

100%. I miss the days when my phone was my phone, not Google’s.

And of course nowadays a Windows computer really belongs to Microsoft, and an Apple computer belongs to Apple. At least my Linux box is mine. Well, mine and Lennart’s.

I've always been rather happy with Android in the form of certain versions/ROMs like Cyanogen in the past or GrapheneOS nowadays. The latter is lean, not bloated, secure and - IMO - very usable. Installing it is easy and there are also easy and well documented methods included for enabling all sorts of Google functionality which (some) users might be missing from the default state (like the Play store, "enhanced" location services and all those sorts of things).

I also have an iPhone as a work device and I've had different personal iPhones in the past. iOS is fine but Android can be much more flexible (and easy access to an open source "App Store" like F-Droid is awesome).

I don't think I agree with this article at all. Yes, it's true that the modding scene has largely gone away, and that's a shame. But Android is still the platform that things are tried out on. There are cheap phones like the Nothing phone doing stuff with customization and LED lighting. There are flip phones and foldables. Android gets the more interesting camera stuff before Apple does. Some things have gone away or gone the same path as the iPhone, especially if you look at Samsung who are Apple's main competitor. My most recent Android phone is from Oppo and has the best camera I've had on a phone, a really fantastic battery life, and it was cheaper than the last 3. And I can still install the browser I like with full ad-blocking, I can still replace the launcher, and I can still use alternate app stores.

Companies make what they think people will buy. Not enough people cared about certain features so things moved on.

IR blaster was so damn useful. Not sure a single production phone still has one.

I'm in the process of switching to Graphene OS. So far its a very capable system with minimal tinkering to get basic functionality. I'm seeing how far i can get without the sandboxed Play Store, there's a lot of great FOSS and alt "playstores" for rapid trial and error. Reminds me a bit of the early days of smart phones when you could sample whatever apps were trending without fear of ads and micro transactions, and play around with the device to get it just right.

I can point to my phone as being one of those devices that's _lost_ functionality over the past ten years.

Losing functionality is not bad in and of itself, if I stand to gain something in excess of what I lost, but that hasn't happened. Consider when I made the switch from a Treo 650 to an HTC Sensation (yes, I had that Treo a _long_ time): I sacrificed the hard keyboard and exceptionally easy-to-use operating system for Wi-Fi, a decent quality camera, fast-at-the-time 3.5G network connectivity, and the entire Android ecosystem.

Then I broke the screen, and got an HTC M9. I gained a bigger screen that I didn't want, an IR blaster that I never used, faster CPU, more memory, more flash... for a device that I didn't do much with. Worse, I lost the replaceable battery - I actually had multiple batteries before that.

Then I broke the screen on _that_, and got an HTC 10. I again gained a bigger screen that I didn't want, I lost the IR blaster that I never used, and again got a faster CPU, more memory, and more flash for a device that I didn't do much with.

Then the battery went flat, and I got an Asus Zenfone 8, which gained me basically nothing over the HTC 10 except 128GB of storage that I don't use. In this trade, I lost having a good camera in my pocket - the Zenfone 8's camera is atrocious, and even my HTC Sensation took better photos than it does. It has a headphone jack, but it's died and I haven't fixed it... which is a shame, because I have an 80s car with the cassette deck adapter, so effectively that feature's as good as gone as well.

My next phone will probably be a headphone jack-less, swappable battery-less, SD-card-less, possibly even SIM-card-less monster of a 6-inch-plus phone. At least I'll hopefully end up with a better camera in that trade.

Android lost its edge when Huawei was denied access to the Play Store.

Huawei was the driving force behind true innovation in the Android ecosystem and one of its biggest contributors.

Even today, my 2019 P30 Pro holds its own against the latest flagships—a testament to the kind of progress we lost.

When I first heard that Android was based on Linux, I thought, "Great! I'll be able to use my phone the way I use my desktop, with shell scripts, cron tasks, etc."

The reality was quite a disappointment. I suppose I could do at least some of the things I'd like to do with it if I rooted it, but I don't want to become a full-on hobbyist; I just want to do basic things that I routinely do in seconds on a normal PC.

A Gnu/Linux phone with Android in a container using WayDroid or AnBox gives you the best of both worlds.