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Comment by snogglethorpe | Hacker News Reader

You're nuts.

Google certainly has some mediocre "products," but they have many great products as well besides search.

Gmail, of course, essentially sets the bar for online mail, and is still leaps and bounds better than any of its competitors.

Google maps is very, very, good, vastly better than most of the competition (a point made starkly clear by Apple's recent maps C-F).

Google+ is, technically, absolutely excellent, much better than FB. If all your old high-school buddies are only on FB, it's a shame, but there's not much Google can do about that.

Android is vastly better than iOS (I use both, and using iOS always makes it feel like my hands are tied behind my back).

...etc.

Google has its downsides (e.g. their online support sucks), and you may not like them for other reasons, but they're very, very, good at writing software...

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> Android is vastly better than iOS (I use both, and using iOS always makes it feel like my hands are tied behind my back).

For me, I feel like I have 2 hands when using iOS but 17 hands when using Android. It asked me to pick one of 3 power-savings modes for Wi-Fi when in sleep mode. I don't want to have to care about that (nor do I want to pick one of the three options without thinking, because then I'll not have an optimal configuration). I have enough things to tweak on my computer.

Yeah I get that, you might like Google maps more if say you cared about the actual maps.

That'd be Bing maps then - which I use pretty much exclusively these days.

Bing is great… unless you travel. It fails for many countries. Even for major cities in China it will only show the main roads.

Regarding the power-savings mode selection issue, that is most definitely not a part of stock Android. Google releases Android without any OEM or carrier modifications. If the OEMs/carriers decide to do something, Google is (generally) not involved.

This fragmentation issue is always presented when a flaw like this is incorrectly attributed to Google, but somehow that has nothing to do with Android? That seems like a silly thing to say. Yes, iOS suffers some problems but so does Android, as a fragmented beast that is still stuck on jelly bean as the majority version (which IMO is pretty lacking). I do look forward to Android's future though.

It's really pretty easy to avoid this by buying a Nexus branded device, though.

Agreed, but explain that to a regular consumer in the Verizon store.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that we explain anything to regular consumers in Verizon stores. The point is that an HN member should be able to understand and appreciate the fact that stock Android is very different from what most Android phones have, and that those who want stock Android should get a Nexus.

It's been part of stock Android at least since 2.0. But it's also hidden 4 layers deep within Settings (Wifi / Menu / Advanced / Keep Wifi On During Sleep / ...). Complaining about being "asked to pick" a setting when it's hidden that well is pretty disingenuous.

I'm not making this up. It was a Sony tablet with 3.x (much later there was an update for ICS). It asked me to choose a value for this during initial setup. It didn't even have a recommended setting iirc.

In any case, it's just one of many examples where I feel Android requires more maintenance than iOS. Which is perfectly great for those who want something to tweak and play with.

> In any case, it's just one of many examples where I feel Android requires more maintenance than iOS.

Once again, this is not part of stock Android, it's part of "stock Android + some modifications Sony made." There's a big difference.

That is true. Unfortunately, that's the only first-hand experience with Android I've had so far. It wasn't by choice. If I had to get an Android device, I would without a doubt try a stock Google one. I don't expect a huge difference, but it should be more pleasant.

It actually is a pretty big difference. I had a really bad first impression of Android from using early HTC stuff, but my current job is Android development so I figured I should check out the alternatives--and I still had my iPhone, so I could swap the SIM. The AT&T store sold me a Motorola Atrix HD, running either 4.0 or 4.1, and it was awful. It was ugly, Motoblur stuck a bunch of crap I didn't want everywhere...just bad. I took it back the day I got it and bought a Galaxy Nexus online, with 4.1 on it, and it was remarkably impressive; I've been using Android ever since.

I've seriously considered a Galaxy Note 2, but TouchWiz's existence offends me. :) If there was a decent stock-ish build that supported the pen I'd be all over that.

The setting may be part of stock Android, but being asked to pick one of the options is most definitely not part of stock Android.

> Android is vastly better than iOS (I use both, and using iOS always makes it feel like my hands are tied behind my back).

It's really in no sense "vastly better" the market pretty much bears this out.

From a developer/technical standpoint it can be a pain that you have less access to device features on iOS and the AppStore review process can be a nightmare. But developing on XCode isn't bad, as is the UIKit architecture. It's unfortunate that iOS isn't open source like Android, but I can see no way from a user or technical perspective that it's "vastly better".

> It's really in no sense "vastly better" the market pretty much bears this out.

Some markets. iOS is big in the US, Android's big in the EU. It's clearly network-effect.

Because of that, "the market" doesn't bear out anything regarding quality.

I'd like to see citations for that. But one of the reasons could be that low end smartphones and off contract phones are far more popular in Europe. That drives the market towards cheaper devices which tend to run Android.

In any case it was the word "vastly" I was objecting to. It's possible to subjectively think Android or iOS is better but I don't see how to can make a reasoned argument that Android is objectively vastly superior (aside from the fact that it's open source which could be considered critical).

Here's some data for Japan; Apple has about 1/3 of the smartphone market, almost all of the rest is Android. There's generally little difference in device capability or pricing between iphones and non-iphones in Japan, so it's not a low-end vs. high-end thing, and two out of the three major carriers heavily push the iphone, so it's certainly not marketing....

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2012/4/1_in_...

> I don't see how to can make a reasoned argument that Android is objectively vastly superior

It's an opinion... :]

> There's generally little difference in device capability or pricing between iphones and non-iphones in Japan

Actually Japan is probably one of the few places you could say Android phones are more capable as a lot of them have 1Seg tuners. :)

The iPhone plans in Japan also tend to me more expensive (partly due to LTE on the iPhone 5).

The situation is also slightly odd in Japan as the historically largest provider (docomo) doesn't distribute the iPhone. They are however rapidly losing customers possibly because of this:

http://japandailypress.com/docomo-bleeds-subscribers-as-ipho...

> Gmail, of course, essentially sets the bar for online mail, and is still leaps and bounds better than any of its competitors.

If Gmail keeps lowering the bar instead of raising it, that's not going to be true for much longer.

There about two features that matter in consumer mail: storage quota, multi-location/mobile availability (not a fixed single client machine), and spam.

Storage is storage, no worry catching up there. Multi-location availability is just IMAP. That leaves spam as the only hard problem, though admittedly it's a problem squarely in Google's wheelhouse.

The days of Google Maps being vastly better than Apple Maps are fast disappearing. It is about 95% parity for Australia and UK at least and any differences are being eliminated rapidly. And the touted advantages of Street View aren't there since the data is at least 4 years out of date in some countries.

The fact is that Maps aren't something you can dramatically keep improving. You reach the "everything is mapped" point and then it becomes a keeping everything up to date scenario.

Good luck with that. BTW aren't you going to point out once again that for example in Australia all the data comes from Tele Atlas and Whereis?

I don't know about the rest of the world, but it's still a lot worse than Google Maps in Japan. I'm sure it will come in time, but it's a difficult problem and one that google has a better handle on with it's background in "big data".

I'm not quite sure that this is true. I've been noticing many more house addresses in captchas recently, indicating that Google is working to make sure that home addresses in Maps accurately correspond to those in the real world. While improvements of this nature are far less noticeable, they demonstrate that many of the remaining improvements to the product are being made 'under the hood'.

> The days of Google Maps being vastly better than Apple Maps are fast disappearing. It is about 95% parity [...]

Not where I live (Tokyo), it isn't.

I have an iPad mini (got it for free!! :] ), which has a nice large display, and I'd really like to be able to use a mapping app on it when I'm at home, but using Apple Maps is painful compared to Google Maps (which I have on my phone). The presentation in Apple Maps is very pretty (well, as long as you don't turn on satellite view and notice the super low-resolution images...), but the data/integration just isn't there.

If you live in Cupertino, of course, Apple Maps probably has fewer issues...

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