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Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

I work on Mountain View, and several people on my team have iPhones. The reason is that we have an oncall rotation, and nobody wants to miss a page because their phone kernel panicked or "PagerService has stopped" during their shift. Plus, the iPhone batteries last longer.

I suspect the author's experience might be because he worked in an office where teams are located in closer physical proximity. It can be socially difficult to use an iPhone when the local Android team sits just down the hall.

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> phone kernel panicked or "PagerService has stopped"

Do Googlers typically use experimental Android builds?

Googling for "android kernel panic" gives me pages about overclocked custom roms (and a MacOS X inspired game), and "PagerService has stopped" gives me exactly zero hits.

We do quite a bit of internal dogfooding when coming up to major releases - so yes, it's not uncommon to use an experimental build. You don't have to on a production phone, of course.

The reason is that we have an oncall rotation, and nobody wants to miss a page because their phone kernel panicked or "PagerService has stopped" during their shift.

Are you seriously trying to claim that there is a greater risk with a Nexus 4, for instance, of a pager service stopping or a kernel panic? Your post seems utterly ridiculous.

See my reply to his sibling post; it's common to dogfood experimental builds, which I assume is what he meant rather than seeing that kind of thing in production builds.

Possibly, but if the option is dogfood experimental builds or use an iPhone, maybe they should not force the dogfooding of experimental builds?

Though I don't think that was what they were saying. Their dismissive about Android tone (incl. the battery) means I suspect that they really are animous towards the product. Which might seem odd for a Googler, but actually it could easily be explained as someone who was rejected from that team, dislikes someone on that team, etc.

It's not forced for all phones - it's only compulsory on prerelease devices. Presumably nobody would use such a device exclusively if they're on an urgent on-call rotation. I didn't read that much animosity into the post personally...

> Which might seem odd for a Googler, but actually it could easily be explained as someone who was rejected from that team, dislikes someone on that team, etc.

Seriously? It’s impossible for a Google employee to not like one of their products?

That would be dishonest, no need to ascribe it to malice or retaliation.

This should be true at every company. How can you improve your product if you think everything you do is just perfect and there is nothing to be improved?

It's absolutely possible if not probable that many Google employees prefer iOS or outright dislike Android. However the scenarios given were the worst sort of FUD that even Android detractors don't resort to (seriously, so anyone who actually needs to be contacted should avoid Android if we're to believe the claim).

I have found my Android phone (HTC 1X) to be much more likely to have an app crap out and kill the battery by repeatedly polling location services. After removing app after app looking for the culprit it appears to have been Google Plus. It's recently been updated, so maybe they fixed it.

I never had this issue on my iPhone(s).

Self-respecting googlers aren't using sense or touchwiz junk. They're rocking a Nexus phone or running something like CM.

I have friends with Nexus phones that end up with similar issues.

Meh, I have a nexus and the wife has an iphone. They both have had their fair share of problems. I think its a little crazy to say, in 2013, that the android line is this unstable phone and if you're a sysadmin on call then you must have an iphone because its so super reliable. I'm a sysadmin, I do fine with android, thanks.

Nowhere did I say the iPhone was perfect or the Android was horrible. I was commenting on the battery life. My only phone right now is an Android phone and I enjoy using it. Because of the iPhones locked down nature and limit on background processes it is much less likely to be killed by a rogue process draining the battery. This has been my experience and others I know with other Android phones (including the Nexus).

Regardless of which device you like to use, ignoring its faults doesn't help them get fixed.

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