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I guess I'm at the point where I just don't care to futz with the device much anymore and try to limit my use of the phone. In the early days you'd load custom ROMs and tweak things and that was a lot of fun. Nowadays I just want something that is secure and works. Nexus and Pixel devices have always been very good at that for me. But now that I don't care so much about that it means the focus is on device lifetime, security and long-term cost. Apple wins those.

But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol



As a more mundane example...

My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.


Similar pet peeve: how you can have a tab open on iOS Safari, even for a static page, leave it for 20 seconds, and come back, and then it has to re-download the entire page. It somehow won’t even cache what you had to local storage.


I mean.. that's not a feature. That's a bug (likely due to RAM being full). I rarely if ever have this issue, but I do remember it happening at some point, but that's definitely not a feature that iOS thinks is better.


Really? I mean, I've seen it over ten years of usage, and it's never been any other way, so that sounds like a deliberate decision. At the very least, not using internal storage -- when RAM is needed for something else -- is a decision.


Mobile device OS's do not swap to storage because the typical mobile storage is bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC and the wear-and-tear of swapping on the flash would be a killer.


It would only need to do it in the few occasions when the tabs have filled up the available RAM and they're large enough to be worth dumping. iPhones use bottom of the barrel storage?


I see that sporadically but it's uncommon enough to be noteworthy on an iPhone 11. Do you have an extension installed or are switching to a very RAM-hungry application? I typically only see that if I switched over to do something like edit a video.


No, nothing RAM hungry. Only extensions are adblockers. And it's an iPhone 8, which, yes, I know, is from the Dark Ages where no one could ever expect any amount of data to be stored ever, but this has happened with every iPhone I've had back to 2012, including ones that were bought close to release.




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