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Comment by lawdawg | Hacker News Reader

I hear stories like this all the time, but every single person I know that has an Android has very few, if any, problems (most own Samsungs or Nexus phones though). I mean to be honest, I hear a lot more complaining from the iPhone crowd, but that might be more because they expect more and things like the battery dying after 10 hours of moderate use really piss them off.

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Anecdotally, I have the opposite experience. I can think of three Android users in my friend group so disillusioned with their SGS1 and 2 that they want to abandon Android as fast as possible.

Doing an OTA update on day one in fifteen minutes is a big factor. Nerds/tech crowd can get through Android updates but for the average user it's an utter clusterf* of a nightmare.

More work goes into figuring out IF your Android device will be updated than goes into the entire iOS update process...

The OTA update from 4.0 to 4.1 was "press button, wait a minute." And far as "figuring IF" my Android device will upgrade: I use a Galaxy Nexus. It'll get upgraded to the newest version for the foreseeable future. You might be shocked at how very, very little "work" that was.

(Yes, I'm saying "don't buy non-Nexus devices." Not like that's a hard one to grasp, though.)

yes, it was a press button wait a minute, when the OTA update was finally released to you. I waited 4 days to get the OTA on my Galaxy Nexus. My iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS all were able to update when the new iOS was released, that day. No waiting.

The OTA update was released before I purchased my phone. I don't exactly wait with bated breath for oh my god the newest and bestest. It is more than "just" a phone, but the marginal value of an upgrade has not, to date, been worth being an early adopter for any one phone.

"But I had to wait four days" is really just...really? And that gets you frothy?

4 days shouldn't. A minority of Android devices, notably the most recent flagships, are getting decent upgrades.

But even a glance at what version of Android is being used: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html shows that over 2/3 of all Android Users are still on 2.x or before, and it's very likely that many of them will never have an opportunity to upgrade.

That gets me frothy. iPhones get 3 to 3.5 years of updates, and Android devices averaged on whole are getting what, 1.5 to 2 years? Maybe less, considering how many aren't being updated?

The answer of "only buy a flagship" is bunk. If Google supported that answer, they should cut out the cruft. But Android is more than flagships.

And that's a better point. I'd like to see Google do a better job of it. However, Google's backport APIs are, in truth, pretty good, and I haven't yet found a problem with targeting a decent spread of devices.

I've had a lot of grief with my iPhone 4. Let's see, 1. Shitty antenna - compensated with free case 2. Lack of free upgrades (Siri, maps) 3. Corrupted iPhone database meant I couldn't copy songs to my iPhone. Had to rebuild the phone to "recover" 4. All upgrades usually take me 1/2 a day to rebuild my phone, as everything is copied off and then back on. 5. Shitty iTunes that makes everything a bitch to get on/off my phone (see 3. Above). My wife has had almost no issues with her nexus s, nor has my best friend with his (inc. free unconditional upgrades) I'm not saying apple is bad, just saying the experience hasn't been as rosy as I would have "expected" given all of the pro IOS hype I read about, and the big price difference I paid vs the nexus s.

My point was that anecdotal experience is worse than useless, as everyone and their aunt has "a story".

This is off topic, but I have a SGS2 and was getting pretty tired of how the UI looked half-ICS and half-old after an ICS upgrade from Samsung (btw. OTA upgrade didn't work for me so I needed to resort to Samsung's Kies software which is amongst the worst software I have used and even with that I had troubles upgrading).

So I installed cyanogenmod 9.1 and I fell in love with my phone again. It's not perfect though but I don't think I'll ever want to buy a non-stock Android phone again...

So being a rather passionate Android guy I do recognize that there are very annoying problems with some Android devices. And installing cyanogenmod is way above the skill level of the average phone user (even though it's rather easy).

Sometimes I wonder if iPhone people experience the same kind of disappointments ... and when they do it makes me feel a little warm inside. I know it's not nice but I guess we all need to justify our own purchasing decisions to ourselves every now and then :)

schadenfreude

> Sometimes I wonder if iPhone people experience the same kind of disappointments ... and when they do it makes me feel a little warm inside.

Sometimes.

The iOS4 update on iPhone 3G was absolutely terrible, the phone became pretty much unusable. The 4.1 update made it less unusable, but the phone was never restored to its former snappiness (unless down-dated to iOS 3.1)

There's also the issue of updates being (at least somewhat) intentionally nerfed for older devices. Sometimes it's explainable by hardware or performance issues, even if a stretch, but other times it feels like complete arbitrary bullshit:

* for iOS3, 3G owners couldn't "view or create 'Invitees' on a Calendar event" while 3GS users could

* for iOS4 3G owners not only didn't get multitasking (acceptable considering the performance issues) but they didn't get the fast-switching UI and attached tools (orientation lock) or larger fonts in messaging applications (...) either

* for iOS4.2 3GS users didn't get the expanded set of text tones

* for iOS5, 3GS users didn't get location-based reminders (geofencing)

* for iOS6, neither 3GS nor 4 owners get turn-by-turn navigation or panorama mode; 3GS owners don't get offline reading lists

I have an Android device and I really don't like it. It's a Nexus.

Oh, and to be honest as well, I don't hear many complaints from the iPhone crowd.

Is it a Galaxy Nexus? Because if not, you're talking about a pretty old device, and I hear people complain about their two+ year old iPhones all the time.

The only real complaints people tend to have about their old iPhones is slow performance, and that's pretty normal. IPhones do not have the "apps randomly breaking or giving odd error messages" issue.

There are also complaints about battery life. Lithium batteries have a half-life of about 3 years, so it's not surprising that older iPhones need recharging sooner. A lot of people blame it on an OS upgrade rather than deteriorating batteries, though.

Wasn't there a study done recently where they determined that applications on iPhones actually crash more often than on an average Android, except that no error messages are thrown up at all.. you're just sent back to the home screen so the user thinks "Oh I must've pressed the Home button by accident"

My own anecdotal Nexus experience (I own the Google updated GSM version): no crashes (although there was a brief syncing outage last night), updates are smooth and fast, and the whole "it just works" thing applies.

See my post above. In many ways, I regret buying an iphone4. My wife's experience with nexus s has been much more hassle free than mine. There are definitely things I prefer on iPhone. One case in point is that although I often see crashes on apps, they just shut down quietly and I restart. Android let's my wife know that an app has crashed. I also upgraded my wife's phone to android 4.1. It took 5-10 mins total. I'm dreading my IOS6 update which I am estimating will take me 8h (inc. reinstall of my purchases via cydia - which I am forced to do if I want the functionality that I WANT vs what apple lets me have).

>>I'm dreading my IOS6 update which I am estimating will take me 8h

8 hours? What?

He has to re-jailbreak and re-install all of his jailbroken apps, many of which probably don't work anymore.

It probably goes without saying that iOS isn't for him.

There are certainly lots of iOS apps with stability issues. With iOS 6 even Apple's own apps have started crashing on me (App Store & Game Center).

But you're right about the error messages, when thing go wrong there are very few apps that will tell you about it.

True, but if you look at most crash logs the apps are dying due to memory allocation issues, which a restart of the app clears up instantly. (I mostly see SIGBUS errors from the apps I use)

I don't see a problem with just jumping back to the homescreen, most people will reopen the app right away anyway.

That's because Apple decided that the correct way to handle a crash is to give no error message at all to the user, and just close the app. ;)

No, it's a Nexus 7.

Tablets are another thing. Google hasn't been thinking about it too much (N7 is their first attempt) and the iPad is still king.

There's a lot of work to do in that field, and that's catching-up work more than improvements. It's much like discussing the Nexus One. Let's talk about it again in a year or two.

Samsung seems to have done it right (I am on my way to pick up one up) but the earlier Androids were hit and miss. I assumed I had choosen right when I went with an HTC phone, but I got shaftet and my Desire (the original one) never even got Ginger Bread (2.3) despite promisses from HTC. Now, not yet two years old, it has started to crash whenever I use the browser for more than a few minutes; hence the replacement.

I would love something as dead simpel as an Iphone, but IOS is far too limited for my likes (especially lack of sideloading, intents and services).

Got a Galaxy Nexus here that was given to me by Google (for free), and I still feel like I got ripped off. System UI crashes all the time, rendering it utterly useless until it times out and relaunches. (My Nexus 7 has the same problem.)

On top of that, the UI design quirks are infuriating, and this is from a guy who's spent the better part of a decade mostly using a BlackBerry. (Trying iOS here, shortly. We'll see which sucks the least of the three...)

Android still hasn't lived up to its promise, and the software fit and finish is pretty lousy. Had I paid for this phone, it would certainly have gone back during the return window.

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