Hacker News Reader

Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Yes: “App Store” on iOS protects you against exactly this.

Having non-tech-savvy relatives throw out their phones, buy thousand dollar hardware and swap to an operating system they are unfamiliar with is an absolutely terrible solution to the problem.

Hyperbole of this comment aside, what else do you suggest then?

It's a fundamental tradeoff between allowing multiple ways for apps to be installed or forcing everything through a single installation workflow (a la iOS and its App Store).

Nothing in my comment was hyperbolic. The median price of a current gen iphone is $999. The people OP is asking about are not typical HN users; asking them to change phone operating systems is an unreasonably onerous ask.

OP had a good suggestion for a solution, something that allows gating surprise app installs.

I’m not saying that you should cajole them into doing something they don’t want to do, but in case it’s useful to anyone else reading this, I had a good experience having family make that switch for that reason. Having used Google, Samsung, and Apple phones extensively, I knew that switching to iOS is way less frustrating than going in the other direction, or even from vanilla Android to Samsung, IMO. The iPhone 16e is more than sufficient for a non-demanding users and is $599 totally unsubsidized, without trade-in, and they really do keep ticking for years for basic needs. (I got them iPhone SEs years ago and they just upgraded recently.) Quite usefully, my family lives near a few Apple Stores, so they can go in and get user support (including backup/phone reset type stuff) for free nearly on-demand, which saved me a lot of time mitigating someone just downloading some bullshit that had a name like “Weather Zone Plus Free Pro Traffic Weather News Games Center Deluxe Free (no ads)” that totally horked their setup.

$599 for a phone is frankly exorbitant for what is required here.

The phone they have have that was being asked about is probably either free or close to it with carrier incentives.

Here on HN we are in a bit of a bubble. Most users of this site can just make a $500 purchase if they want to and not think about it. The median American's liquid savings are well under $10k, and buying the least expensive iPhone is a burden. "Buy an iPhone" is not a suggestion that should be made to a person who would have to put it on a credit card and would be unable to 0at.it off that month.

And you can get iPhone 14s for $99 on occasion as long as you commit to prepaid service from Total Wireless/Trac Fone for 3 months (so about $180 - so your total price for the phone and 3 months of service is about $300) or you can use carrier trade-in deals to get hundreds of dollars off an iPhone 17, as long as you stay on a postpaid plan and take the credit over 3 years.

Yes, there are way more options to get sub $500 Android phones, but pretending like an iPhone is too expensive for most Americans when carrier deals are often as good or better for iPhone options (to say nothing of the older phones being sold by Total Wireless and the like) and when more people in the United States use iPhone vs Android is a little bit silly.

We just got $1130 from Verizon for my husband's old iPhone 14 Plus towards his new iPhone 17 Pro (I get a new phone every year so I’m just on the Apple Upgrade plan or I buy it outright each year, whereas he gets a new phone every 3 years or so), making it essentially free (we had to change the plan he was on but it cost the same as the old plan) and if he’d wanted a regular iPhone 17, he could’ve dropped down to a cheaper phone plan too. A 16e would’ve been even less than that.

I guarantee that a) they can get a hell of a lot more phone than that with carrier incentives, and b) if you compare Android phones released when that phone was released, you’re not going to see anything more than a hundred or two cheaper. And as much as I miss my salary, which was comparatively meager by standards here, I haven’t worked in the software business in years. I’m in my early career in a blue collar manufacturing trade, and not even in a major metropolitan area. I’ve been accepted into means-tested low-income programs within the past 6 months. I’ve got a pretty grounded understanding of what people outside of the Silicon Valley cultural sphere consider reasonable to spend on a phone, and what features they’d expect for it.

Anyone who is trying to save money shouldn't buy the "median" device. Just get an older iphone or the SE if you want it. Doesn't make sense. “I’m in top 10 percent of price conscious users so I want 50th percent device”? Just illogical behavior.

An older iPhone or an SE is still hundreds of dollars more device than these people need.

It's not even a hundred dollars for the 2020 SE model which still has 2 years of updates in it. For the newer 2022 model it's under 200 from refurb sellers. You can get 13s for under 250. You can even get apple care with the new subscription model and sneak a new battery for 12 bucks. Arguing with bogus facts is bad manner.

You're awfully cavalier with other people's money. Some would call that "bad manners" too since you brought it up.

Buying a $100 phone every other year when offered an android phone for free from the carrier is a meaningfully bad financial decision for people less well off than yourself. You are fortunate to be in a position to not have to worry about money like that, but try to have compassion for people less rich than yourself.

Oh stop the wiggling. You said hundreds of dollars and they aren't. Now you are switching your argument to "free phones" there are no free phones you still pay for them. In lower income countries your carrier even installs malware as part of their bloat itself. The backmarket prizes in these countries are even more attainable for older iPhone models. Instead of paying your shady carrier you can finance the refurbs. Just stop making shit up and the petty emotional misdirection when you are called out. Judging from your other comments in themis thread it's your go to discussion instrument...

You're making an impressively bad faith argument here.

Yes if you buy an ancient device it is less. If we compare apples to apples, or apples to androids, you could buy an equally old android device for next to nothing. Any "wiggling" was because the discussion was about new devices before you decided to pretend to miss the context clues.

You are delusional if you think that there exists an iPhone that is not much more expensive than a lower end Android of a similar age. All the namecalling and pretending in the world won't make it otherwise.

> 2020 SE model which still has 2 years of updates in it

> You can even get apple care with the new subscription model and sneak a new battery for 12 bucks

> you could buy an equally old android device for next to nothing

Is that Android device going to have any support or security updates or battery life?

On the other hand, iOS is popular because of quality issues like this. Android is only as good as it is because of the competition from Apple.

Before the iPhone you couldn't even get the "cool" phones in America, Japan had so much better things available and everybody envied what wasn't available here.

The reason we have any control from the carriers was the power Apple had and the stubbornness of Jobs.

A lot of the battles being lost by Apple are being won by groups who will make the ecosystem worse.

I mean sure, the iPhone did a ton to create the modern smartphone as we think of it. If you as a user care about that history and want to support what Apple does, you should buy their devices.

That doesn't make it a reasonable device for a sizable segment of the non-tech-savvy population though.

It definitely can and should be a factor when choosing what hardware to set your relatives up with in the first place, though.

It's much too late for that in both my case and the same case for probably tens of thousands of others.

Many people are buying new phones every couple years. That's a new opportunity to switch.

If you leave your front door open, you’re gonna get a lot of strangers and stray animals in your house. If you don’t have the desire to close the door, I guess you’ll just give in and get familiar with your new roommates.

I’ve never understood why people use android, which was built by the largest advertising company in the world. A company with a history of violating privacy, scanning personal data for advertisement purposes. Also, what amazes me, is that many technical, well-informed people continue to use standard android os, knowing full well that they’re giving up major privacy protections and using a much less secure platform than alternatives like iOS. I’m sure there’s good reasons for it that people have and can rationalize.

The main rationalization that I have seen from technical people is that they just hate Apple. They’ll never use Apple, even if they have to give up significant privacy. Other people like the fact they can customize the device (which I like as well), but unfortunately, makes it easier for bad actors to customize your phone in ways you don’t want.

Take the hourly billing for those of us who work that way. Multiply by family tech consulting time. It's probably cheaper to buy an iPhone for everyone!

At least this used to be true in the halcyon days when iOS was simple.

The same "walled garden" app store that is much maligned on HN?

The only walls that need to be in place to prevent this are against malicious carrier app stores. There's no need to restrict users here, which is what people complain about.

Stopping carriers from ruining phones is quite popular on HN from what I've seen.

Yup.

Geeks don’t like it.

But Apple is a three-trillion-dollar corporation, because most folks aren’t geeks.

I’d bet a large sum of money the safari user agent holds the top spot for total number of mobile users for Tuesday US office hours. Maybe dang can validate or reject the hypothesis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com