Comment by avcloudy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avcloudy | Hacker News Reader

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This is a really ideology driven push. I don't think you really think the iOS browsers are worse, there's just less choice, because they all fundamentally use WebKit. Having to use Chromium is a worse experience, and not being able to use Gecko under Firefox is not a clear upgrade - particularly as WebKit is so tightly integrated with the hardware, leading to less battery use. If you really don't like WebKit for whatever reason, I get it. But that's not worse.

Whenever there is an app with full feature parity (WhatsApp) you assume at best it can be equal, based on nothing. You have specific apps that work for you, and that's great, but my practical experience is much different: whenever I haven't had a choice in an app (think banking apps, carrier apps, local library apps, the Covid apps) the experience has been much better on Apple. Whenever there is a choice in apps, they're often cross-written in something that allows easy porting, and very similar, or the native Apple solution is much smoother. It's rare that an app just feels better on Android, and usually limited to cases where a specific app is only available on Android or, you know, Google.

no ublock

How can whatsapp be better? Android at least has features like scoped storage.

Where is the ios equivalent of newpipe? Where is the iOS equivalent of pojavlauncher? where is the iOS equivalent of libretorrent or syncthing?

Open source is essentially banned on iOS.

What is the advantage of iOS? "Feels smoother"? Totally subjective.

Safari just got uBlock back!

iOS isn't particularly open source friendly, but mostly people don't do it because of personal incentives, not because it can't be done.

It's subjective, and I get that, but what you miss is that features are subjective too. Missing parity apps are only relevant when you care about that feature; at no point in my life have I ever thought my life would be better or more convenient if I could only torrent on my phone.

But having an app that is responsive and works well has made my life better. Standing outside a bar in the rain trying to get a stupid Covid app to work, not work well, just work, on Android has made my life worse.

(Ironically, I've kind of noticed this is part of the Unix ethos writ small: do one thing and do it well. It's not exact, and iOS for sure has tons of crud everything apps. And they sure don't work together! I just think it's amusing.)

You say that they are ideologically driven when they say browsers are better on Android, and then go on to defend that having LESS features is not necessarily bad. Honestly, you are the one sounding ideologically driven. Having more options is good, specially if there are better options out there (which is the case). Firefox on Android is a better browser than Chrome or whatever, and having the option to use it IS better than not having. You have the right to say that Safari is great, but you cannot say that Gecko on iOS would be worse because, well, you don't have that option.

I'm just gonna put it out there, more choice always being good is the ideology, but when you measure user experience, they consistently rate smooth, fast experiences over feature count unless it's a feature that's important to them.

I don't think iOS is less feature rich except in some specific areas, like web browsers, but you can see in the extreme example that if you could use any web browser for 20 minutes before running out of battery vs safari for hours, one is clearly better. Then you're just haggling over scale. Having the choice to use bad options is not really a choice, unless you have to eg for certain functionality.

And like, in other contexts this isn't even a debate. You talk about the useless feature bloat of Microsoft Word and the associated UI crud, and people are like 'yeah'. But in this context people will straight up make an argument that n+1 features better than n features.

Synctrain is an open source (MPL2.0) iOS Syncthing client (which I made) with full native mobile-first UI and tight iOS integration (shortcuts, background processing, etc).

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