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Comment by timmillwood | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see they pick Samsungs version of android, the worst one going.

Yes and its the one most people know?

Let's compare user experience. One phone is straight out of the box. The other we will just take a minute to gain root and reinstall the entire OS. Just to keep things fair.

But it means they're not comparing iOS (and WP and BB10) to Android, they're comparing them to TouchWiz (or whatever Samsung are calling their skin these days). In that case, they should also include HTC Sense and Motorola Blur etc. The fact that TouchWiz is most popular is irrelvant; pretty much any Android skin is probably more popular than BB10, and many are more popular than WP as well.

Relatively no one who walks into a store to buy a phone understands any of those words you just said.

They just know they bought the most popular android phone and I guess this is what android is?

Edit: By your definition you can't compare anything to android because android doesn't exist.

Is it possible to compare windows to linux?

> Relatively no one who walks into a store to buy a phone understands any of those words you just said.

> They just know they bought the most popular android phone and I guess this is what android is?

SifJar was talking to you, not the average person who walks into any store.

> Edit: By your definition you can't compare anything to android because android doesn't exist.

He didn't try to (re)define anything. To give you a clue, when someone talks about Android to me, I think about the Android Open Source Project, the OS managed by Google. It's essentially what the Nexus devices come with.

The problem with the study is that they claim to compare different operating systems, while more precisely, they are comparing different user experiences on different OSs. Big difference, I'm explaining it below, and they should know better.

In the case of Android, most OEMs do everything they can to differentiate their devices from other Android devices, and thus they offer a fundamentally different experience. They even give names to these experiences, e.g. TouchWiz or Sense. So the authors were actually comparing TouchWiz to other operating systems. This is evident by the fact that some of the features they felt were lacking are actually in Android trunk, and some of the features they found problematic are not.

Thus, I feel like the people who did this UX study didn't actually know what exactly they were studying, based on their choice of words (TouchWiz is not mentioned at all).

Exactly, I thought -- before reading the report -- that they're going to compare AOSP. The different skins OEMs put on their phones massively cripple the UX of AOSP, I think pretty much everyone agrees with this. So while it makes sense to include some of the more popular UIs, it's very short-sighted to equate those to Android. It would have been much more interesting if we could see what the OEMs start with, and how they make Android overly complicated and awful.

There is no need to root or reinstall the entire system. You can just install a new launcher app. I think it would be better to have tested against vanilla Android (The one that comes with the nexus). Probably more people has that system than a Windows Phone.

This sure is a thing normal consumers do. Installing a new launcher app.

Go Launcher: 100-500mil installs Nova Launcher: 5-10mil installs Smart Launcher: 5-10mil installs ADW.Launcher: 5-10mill installs

That's just the top 4 and makes it over 115 millions installs. Facebook Messenger has 100-500mil installs. So I think it's safe to say that there is plenty of people that install launchers.

But anyway, I was pointing out that you don't require to reinstall the system to customize the system. In fact, you can make an android look like any of the other ones any time and without too much tech savvy-ness

So which launcher should be used in the comparison? I just checked out Go Launcher and it doesn't look any better than Touch Wiz. Personally I prefer stock Android and got a Nexus 4 because of that. The fact is a large, maybe majority, of Android users are using TouchWiz so it seems fair to use that in the comparison. They probably should have included a few versions of Android (Sense, Stock, most popular launcher app) to improve the results.

That is a lot of effort from you to defend your purchase. They are just telephones, y'know?

If they where just telephones, Nokia would still be the biggest player in the mobile market. The whole point is that they are not just telephones, they're mini computers that you can occasionally use to make phone calls.

The overwhelming majority of buyers use it as it comes out of the box so an out of the box comparison is the only fair one.

It's also one of the most popular versions. Everyone I know that owns an Android device owns a Samsung or a cheap device that can barely be classified as a smartphone. TouchWiz IS Android to these people.

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