Comment by chetanahuja | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chetanahuja | Hacker News Reader

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Lots of "Android apps are no good" chiming in going on here. I've been an iOS user since the week after the first iPhone came out and still am (due to an iPad mini). But gave up on iOS for my phone because I can't find the following apps on iOS.

1) Alternate Launcher with pretty much infinite flexibility on look and feel.

2) Swype like keyboard options. Typing anything on iOS now feels like I travelled back in time to horse-and-buggy era.

3) Tasker app. Enough said.

4) Google Now. Enough said.

5) This is not an app per se, but the "share with" option for pictures etc that simply let me chose any suitable app on the phone that lets me share that particular object using pretty much any means of sharing out there.

And this is not even counting all the hacker'y goodness of having a full root shell with an almost complete debian environment on my Nexus devices. No "jailbreak" required. Nexus devices are rootable by design.

If you call yourself a hacker (this is hacker news... right?) and have turned your nose up at Android so far, you're simply missing out on the future of portable devices. iOS is catered to non-technical consumers and its feature-set (both for users as well as for developers) is accordingly restricted. The future killer apps are being written for Android today and you're not aware of what a mobile device is (and should be) capable of today and by extension, tomorrow.

[Edit: 1, 2 and 3 in that list above are paid apps btw. Checkout out the install numbers for those three on the play-store. Android developers writing stuff for Android (and not just copying stale iOS material) are making plenty of money]

Android is awesome for the way it lets apps interoperate. The "share with" functionality is just one example and it's not just for photos either. For example if you have Readability installed, you can "share" the article to Readability from within both Chrome and Firefox (speaking of which, Firefox isn't available on iOS because Apple doesn't allow it).

I would like to add to your list the ability to completely block phone calls and SMS messages from annoying numbers, with no traces left in the phone's logs. Or the ability to automate your phone settings, depending on time or location, like turning the data off at 11 p.m. for battery preservation or turning silent while you're at work.

I don't know if such apps are still banned on iTunes, but it's what made me switch from an iPhone 3GS to a Galaxy S.

I didn't go into details of the Tasker app (#3 on my list), but that's exactly the context dependent automation I use it for. And yeah, there' no equivalent for such a broad ranging "device-wide programming" app for iOS. Nor is there likely to be one given the fundamentally "isolated apps" model of the world wherein iOS operates.

So... Paid for alternate launchers and task switchers are the future of mobile operating systems?

I know I'm feeding a troll here (I've checked your comment history) but what the heck. What is a "task switcher"? And corollary question, do you have any idea what you're talking about?

Why would I bother to answer a deliberately offensive comment from someone who's own posting is deeply partisan?

I use both platforms on a daily basis. I used an iPhone exclusively for 3+ years before my first Android device. I'm working on products that help devs on both platforms to make their apps better.

Being a developer, I have solid reasons to prefer one over the other for my personal use but I know a large number of people prefer the other. If that makes me somehow "partisan", so be it.

Now, would you explain what you meant by a "task switcher"?

Or perhaps you could simply admit that you made that comment based on the name "Tasker" without having any idea what the heck it was. That would work too.

Ok - so you've justified your opinion. How do you justify your offensiveness?

4) Google Now. Enough said.

You are aware that "Google Now" is available for iOS

In some form yes. But really the killer feature that makes it "Now" is the fact that (on Android), you don't have to do anything to activate it. It just quietly works in the background and notifies (btw, Notifications, another key feature for a phone that iOS doesn't do too well) you of things you need to know at the time you need to know them (e.g., delays on flights you might have searched for or may have received boarding pass for etc... it has been amazingly useful in exactly such scenarios for me).

That doesn't work on iOS. Probably due to limitations on background processes.. or perhaps because google doesn't feel like providing the full feature-set it on the rival platform... I don't know. But without the automated notifications for things I'm not even aware I should be searching for yet, the magic just doesn't work the same way.

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