The link should really be to the original report [0].
This 55% is iPhone's share of phone shipments in Q2, not the number of users of the respective phones at any given time. In other words, fewer people are buying smartphones than were before, but Apple saw less of a hit to their numbers than everyone else did.
Contrary to existing comments here, this stat doesn't appear to indicate that people are switching from Android to iPhone. It looks like Android users are more likely to avoid upgrading their phone in an uncertain economy, while Apple users are more likely to upgrade regardless.
The Android market is way way harder to pin down than the iPhone market. Manufacturers have been walking out software support horizons in the Android world, which should have an impact. To the extent that Android users have shifted toward Samsung and Pixels, that would also tend to walk out the software support window of the Android cohort. And finally, last year there were crazy sales that I don't think have been as good this year, from what I've seen. I upgraded from S21 to S22 ultra last year for $18, no contract term.
OTOH, Qualcomm seems to have closed the gap in SOC performance and efficiency with 8gen2.
I had a pixel 2, 3xl and 4a. none of them lasted more than 2.5 years before breaking.
This year I switched to a iphone because I need something I can rely on working wherever I travel. they will only fix your pixel while you're in the united states. I'd say they are effectively disposable.
I've had the galaxy nexus, the nexus 4, a pixel xl, a pixel 3a, and a pixel 6a.
None of them broke. I only stopped using them because they run out of security updates. The only things I bought for them were the light Spigen phone cases.
Maybe the issue is the operator not the phone here.
To avoid having to use crappy UIs and apps from random OEMs. And to get updates directly from Google.
I never wanted "Google compatible" phone like an IBM compatible PC. Just like the Wintel ecosystem, Android fragmented into chaos. Pixels are the only way to get a Google phone now without all the third party bloat and crapware.
> To avoid having to use crappy UIs and apps from random OEMs. And to get updates directly from Google.
And three years of platform updates with very low resale value. At the time when I got my last pixel it was also three years of security updates. Add to that that the average consumer won't buy at release date. Quite pathetic (compared to Apple).
>That's generally what a "market share" number measures: the share of sales during a period of times.
We don't measure Browser Market Share as number of downloads during a period of times. Nor do we measure OS market share as number of license sold during a quarter.
The reason why Market Share, or share of sales during a period of times were used for commodity, repeatable sales. Because knowing you have 50% of Ketchup sales meaning you own 50% of the Ketchup market.
And when you talk to average people, no one would think Market Share of Browser, OS, Photoshop, as Sales over period of time. The same goes with Apple and Android, when you talk about market share, people will think usage. Not shipment.
Unfortunately even on HN the two is 99% mixed up. As a matter of fact this is the first time someone mention this difference that even gets enough attentions to be the top voted comment.
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. I've worked with these phone manufacturers and they often used the term market share to refer to share of sales / shipments / whatever over a monthly or quarterly time period. I think there is flexibility in the term.
It doesn't seem surprising that companies whose bottom line is from the hardware sale moment would define it that way, and people who aren't (for example, people selling apps, people running websites, people looking around at what phones their friends and family have) would define it by "devices in use" instead of new sales.
Since browsers are not sold (ok, let's agree that ~99% of browsers are not sold), there's not a sales market to talk about.
Ask any mobile phone industry analyst, or a product manager (or product marketing manager) at a mobile phone OEM, or a sales manager at a telco, for the definition of mobile phone market share and they will tell you "the share of sales during a period of time."
>> The same goes with Apple and Android, when you talk about market share
This is 100% not true. Ask anyone in the industry and they will agree that it represents sales, not installed base.
As a point of reference, I used to work at Google, in Android specifically. Previous to that, I spent 10 years in the mobile industry, much of it briefing industry analysts & journalists.
I'm constantly amazed by how people spend so much of their income on Apple products; it's almost like their lives are ruled by the status they feel an iPhone brings (and the consequential sacrificial purchasing).
It likely varies by area and average income, here it's almost an inverse correlation - the less-well off kids at school tend to have parents on iPhones and the comfortable parents are on whatever works for them.
I’m astounded by the pervasiveness of this meme, given its origins are really from a Mac vs PC internet flame war era that I would like to think we’ve moved past.
I’m astounded by the fact that one can imply with a straight face no less that over half the market are status-driven dorks that have no legitimate reason to use an iPhone over an Android phone, the obviously superior for all people in all circumstances choice used by the enlightened few that aren’t concerned with such banal things as social status.
Occam’s razor would imply that this view is perhaps wrong and that you’re just missing something.
I use an iPhone for a lot of reasons. One of these is that I’m legally blind. For my purposes, accessibility features on iOS easily run rings around those on Android. Full stop. Arguing against that is ridiculous. Sectioning me out and saying “I wasn’t talking about you@ because disability is a sacred cow is ridiculous.
Just please don’t make these conversations so charged with this tired old rhetoric that simultaneously chastises such a wide group for imagined status-seeking in a way that simultaneously ties your own (non-iPhone) choice in to an imagined desirable personality trait.
People just like to think they're special "thinking out of the box" rebels because they use android when the equivalent android phone costs the same as an iphone. There's very little price difference between the models for the main brands (you can off course find cheaper alternatives with their own issues) but if you get an iphone and a samsung side by side odds are they're at the same price range.
And as a professional developer that uses a mac (that is by far the best bang for the buck if you're not into gaming) it just makes sense to pick an iphone instead of an android due to the ecosystem value. I doubt many people in developed countries care that much about the fact that you use an apple device or not, that's the kind of shit you'd expect from developing nations like Brazil (where I'm from), where they do remain a status symbol mostly because the population in general is still pretty poor.
> And it's not clear to me how using a MacBook would influence your phone choice.
The same reason you use Chrome and then also Google Maps and Gmail. Just swap a Mac with Chrome and an iPhone with Gmail.
There are lots of little features like being able to copy on my iPhone and then it’s saved into a shared clipboard so that I can paste into my Mac. Those kinds of things (there are many, many others and you can look them up for yourself) are why someone would be influenced to choose an iPhone if they are using a Mac.
As an aside I think most users across all platforms use Google’s ecosystem but I would expect Apple users to use it less than others since Apple provides good enough alternatives such as Safari, Apple Maps, iCloud, etc.
> As an aside I think most users across all platforms use Google’s ecosystem
Yeah this is what I was thinking. Apple users will tend to use two ecosystems instead of one.
Personally, I wouldn't even think about my laptop when choosing a phone. But I would think about the fact that I use several Google services and I'd rather not duplicate them with Mac accounts/apps.
Someone else mentioned the clipboard sync (which is amazingly handy), but it goes so far as to the iPhone camera showing up across the macOS as both a document scanner as well as a webcam (which blows the pants off of any USB webcam on the market), and things like being able to cast your screen from your iPhone to a Mac's display.
Now I'm sure all of these things are possible on other platforms using extra software but in the ecosystem it's all zero setup, instantly integrated and quite reliable.
From my world experience, this is a pure Americanism. And Americans broadly seem to care a more about status than the other 95% of the worlds population.
go to latin america. I bought a phone for a girl awhile back while I was there. she literally chose a used 3 year old iphone over a brand new android that costs more. I even showed her that the secs on the android were objectively better.
There's nothing bang for your buck about apple laptops. I can get a pc laptop for half the price and arguably better quality.
It is true about phones though, especially when you consider how badly all the big brands except apple and Google add unremovable money making spam apps to their phones.
Surface laptops are priced pretty well on par with apple for a worse screen, quality, and battery life.
Literally no other laptop provides a competitive battery life, screen or build even compared to the surface. I literally just bought a new laptop 3 months ago, and almost zero windows laptops were reasonably competitive with the MacBook for a dev.
Could just be because I have a powerful gaming PC, but I definitely found that windows laptops did not meet up to a decent standard.
If you as a consumer buy a nice HP Spectre, it will be more than an equivalent MacBook barring a sale or clearance. I buy 10,000 at a time, and get about 30% off.
A 15" MBA with the max 24GB RAM and a 1TB drive would cost $2100. Note the Zenbook is not on sale, has a 120Hz HiDPI OLED display and aluminum chassis.
Which PC laptop is half the price of, say, a MacBook Air and has better or even similar performance, battery life, input devices…? Keep in mind that you're talking about a $500-$600 price point here.
I don't know if you meant to imply that a Macbook Air starts at $500-600, but if you did then you'd be incorrect based on https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/.
In any case, I think the switch from Intel to ARM makes any such comparisons meaningless until we start seeing more ARM-based laptops in the same niche.
They meant if the person was right, the PC would have to cost $500-600. A PC laptop being in that price range and equal or better than a MacBook Air is a fantasy.
ARM and Intel laptops are directly comparable because you can compare what people can do them.
Not all ARM processors are created equal, Apple's are superior in iPhones and laptops, there's no reason to expect that to change in the near future.
I don't know what niche you're referring to. Apple Silicon are the sole occupants of a "niche," delivering high performance with excellent processing per Watt. When shopping for a laptop, there's nothing unfair about comparing ones with different processor architectures when they all can run the software needed.
Plenty of people don't care about how long you can run off the battery or processing per Watt in general, just performance. For those people, there are x86 laptops that can outperform Apple's ARM-based laptops (not to mention having discrete GPI options).
> I don't know what niche you're referring to. Apple Silicon are the sole occupants of a "niche," delivering high performance with excellent processing per Watt.
You clearly do know what niche I'm referring to, since you just described it. Like you say: Apple's laptops are the sole occupants of their niche, so what would you even compare against? I'm sure there are other ARM chips out there with comparable or better "performance" per Watt, but Apple Silicon's pretty unique right now in maximizing the "performance" half of that equation instead of minimizing the "per Watt" half.
> When shopping for a laptop, there's nothing unfair about comparing ones with different processor architectures when they all can run the software needed.
I never said it was "unfair". I said it was meaningless - because it is. There are myriad metrics by which one could evaluate "performance" (per Watt or otherwise), and Apple Silicon doesn't necessarily win at all of them.
When other manufacturers start putting out ARM laptops targeting the same (or at least remotely similar) performance metrics as a Macbook targets, then there'd be a worthwhile discussion to be had.
What are these x86 laptops that are the same size and price range of an Air or MBP that outperform the M2s in processing power that doesn't involve GPU?
Almost all the benchmarks out there of similarly sized laptops have the M2s (and previously had the M1s) topping the charts in single and multi threaded workloads.
It isn’t, I work as a developer and most developers have no use for a GPU unless you’re doing machine learning or gaming. For this case Macs are really hard to beat, especially given the UNIX like environment.
> It isn’t, I work as a developer and most developers have no use for a GPU unless you’re doing machine learning or gaming.
Okay, well
1. Not every Macbook user is a developer
2. Not every developer has no use for a GPU
If we're going to make comparisons about performance requirements for a specific subset of a specific subset of users, then let's be explicit about that. Otherwise, arbitrarily ignoring a rather substantial contributor to overall performance is indeed arbitrary.
It looks like the Razer Blade 16, with a i9-13950HX can beat the fastest MacBook Pro and is cheaper than that model.
I didn't mention size and don't know how they compare. Size comparisons are largely related to processing per Watt because others need bigger heat pipes and fans than the Macs.
I'm basically an Apple guy and don't pay tons of attention to all the alternatives, I just recognize the Apple products are not the right choice for everyone.
That article's Geekbench single core score for the Mac is substantially worse than what's on the chart while their multi-core score is somewhat better [0]. I don't know what the averages are for the Razer Blade 16, some scores are higher than the M2 Max (especially multi-core), some are lower [1].
That article also compares models with more expensive add-ons, a lot of that higher Razer price is probably from the 4090. The Blade 16 price starts at $2,699 (i9-13950HX, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, GeForce RTX 4060, 16" 240Hz QHD+). For an MBP with an M2 Max, the 14-inch starts at $3,099 and the 16-inch at $3,499. Those Macs have 32GB RAM and Razer charges +$600 for that much but the Blade has RAM slots, you can buy another 16GB for ~$50. Razer also charges a lot for an upgraded SSD (and absurd +$1,600 for 2TB instead of 1TB) but that is also replaceable at a much more affordable price. There's also a second M2 slot available so you can add storage without replacing the original drive.
Edit: the SSD upgrade cost is so high because they make you get other upgrades with it (a 4090 and 32GB RAM).
Only if you don’t care about screen, battery life or user interface.
Caveat. If windows matters, or you’re talking about the generation of defective MacBooks with a bad keyboard, I’d concede that a top of the line HP, Dell or Lenovo is a better choice.
You are out of touch, M1/M2 runs circles around any other silicon and the pro line has great design and usage for convenience built in.
The solid resale price is the proof as no windows device is worth anything used.
It's not a meme in poorer countries. At least not in those that I am familiar with. Quite a few iPhone users I know use it as a status symbol, many have bought it in credit and paid out over the next several years with a significant chunk of their modest incomes (because they couldn't have acquired one any other way). Just in time to get the next model. Eh, whatever, at least it's more useful than expensive clothing.
This comment came over as quite aggressive to me, and, browsing your new account history, I found a similar tone in other comments. As you are new here, I would urge you to read the HN guidelines :
Maybe the dude they responded to should avoid aggressive, sweeping generalizations about people who like a different phone than them?
I buy iPhone for a lot of reasons, 0 of which are “status”. I had no idea there was even any status. The flagship devices are all within a couple hundred bucks of each other.
No, the comment you’re replying to is actually a bit rightfully offended by the casually offensive remarks being dropped by the grandparent.
The problem is fundamentally that Android users drop this microaggression all the time about how apple users are brainless sheep, who don’t have any sense and just let status drive all their purchases, and don’t even see it as offensive.
amd fanboys do the same thing with nvidia users, insisting that “mindshare” is somehow the sole reason that AMD lost ground over the years and that nvidia customers are all dumb brainless sheep too.
It’s actually quite offensive and extremely pervasive, and if you dare call it out you get people like you tut-tutting about how offensive it is to be pointing out your offensiveness.
The problem isn’t the indignant reply, that’s just human nature, the problem is the person who dropped yet another “all apple users are status-chasing sheep” thought-terminating cliche. That’s offensive and pervasive and really should stop especially here of all places. It needs to be said and you are in the wrong for shouting down the people trying to say it.
Again, I know that it’s so absolutely normalized and pervasive that android/AMD people probably don’t see “[other brand] users are brainless sheep” as being offensive, but it is. Like that’s not even a dog whistle, you’re just saying it right out loud. You’re telling a forum full of the general public that a good number of them are brainless, and you’ve been doing it for so many years that you don’t even see why that’s wrong.
MacBooks, iPhones, and nvidia cards are all quite good products and have many many things going for them, there is absolutely no call to be insulting by suggesting that people haven’t done any research because they chose a different product for their needs.
Like how poorly socialized are people that they think calling other people “brainless” to their faces isn’t offensive, or to tut-tut at other people for being upset about such conduct? Especially when here of all places people have most definitely considered the technical merit of the alternatives.
Geeze I rarely bother to go read people's post histories here unless they strike me as uniquely insightful but yours inspired me to go read his comments and dude looks like a troll account who just came on here to cause flamewars and troll. All of his comments are argumentative.
Only half of all people being status-driven in their average purchases of visible accessories seems like a very low Bayesian prior to me in general. I think actually the meme is wrong because most people spending money on an Android phone in the US also basing it on a different form of status, kinda like "I don't own a TV" status. Most of the rest are probably making their choice based on pure cost basis (which can go either way based on resell / used market being better on iPhone).
I would believe that only a small fraction of people are making their phone purchase choice on an axis other than status or price (like you).
> I'm constantly amazed by how people spend so much of their income on Apple products
I don't know about other people, but I went iPhone specifically for the value/$. Got a used iPhone SE 2020 for $150 in late 2021, and expect to use it for 5+ years. I seriously doubt that there are any Androids out there that could get even close to that.
It really helps that Apple's CPU/SoC is substantially superior to what everyone else uses, so older iPhones tend to feel snappier. Between that and Apple's clearly superior OS support, I don't know why value shoppers who don't want to install their own firmware would go with Android.
You must have gone without security or other OS updates then, which I would consider a deal breaker with a phone. Google only recently extended the Pixel OS support timeline to be on par with Android.
> Yes, I don't care about getting updates. If they're important to you, that's fair.
Hardware devices with embedded software couldn't get updates (or was a difficult job so didn't happen) until somewhat recently. It is unfortunate that the ability to do updates is used as a crutch to ship faulty software that then needs updates. A phone shouldn't ever need an update in its lifetime if it was properly built in the first place.
I only recently stopped using my Motorola cellphone from 2005 (only because they decommissioned the towers). It never received any update in 17 years. It also never needed any.
I would like to buy devices with that level of quality today.
Well, yeah, and I'd like a pony. The main issue is security updates. I'm guessing you weren't accessing things like a banking app with highly sensitive financial data on your 2005 Motorola.
> I'm guessing you weren't accessing things like a banking app with highly sensitive financial data
For anyone who has done any serious threat modeling exercises would never ever do that from a 2023 phone (I'm fully aware many people do it regardless).w
Yet somehow millions of people do, and I'm not aware of a single banking app breach caused by a zero-day device flaw.
This advice to not use a 2023 phone is just plain silly. I'm not saying it's 100% locked down, but neither is going to a bank branch and talking to someone in person.
If security is a concern, getting a newer Pixel and installing GrapheneOS is your best bet. It's still not perfect and nothing beats just not having a cell phone, but that's a choice very few are okay with today.
The trick with GrapheneOS, or any privacy setup, is that it requires attention to stay reasonably secure. The OS won't matter if you enable Google services and install apps that track and sell all your data.
Ah yes, android is perfectly secure as long as you install an aftermarket os, and then don’t install google services or any android application which uses google services (all of them).
Or you could just use the brand that gives 6-7 years of OS updates and 10+ years of security updates out of the box…
I would 100% use iOS if I preferred to keep a stock OS and needed those apps.
I just don't need that in a phone and am totally fine with the limitations of a degoogled device.
I don't recommend that for most people. I was simply responding to a question of what device to consider with regards to privacy/security. I even tried to include caveats that it isn't right for everyone and had real tradeoffs.
> If security is a concern, getting a newer Pixel and installing GrapheneOS is your best bet. It's still not perfect and nothing beats just not having a cell phone, but that's a choice very few are okay with today.
> The trick with GrapheneOS, or any privacy setup, is that it requires attention to stay reasonably secure. The OS won't matter if you enable Google services and install apps that track and sell all your data.
Not sure how I could have been more clear here, I literally started by saying "if security is a concern". I stand by that, if security is a concern I would not use an iPhone or stock Android. I also stand by the assumption that for most people security isn't a concern.
So yes, I wouldn't recommend graphene for most people but I would recommend it to anyone both concerned about security and willing to sacrifice some functionality and convenience (both caveats in my original post).
You make it sound as though I changed my recommendation or story half way through. If that's your opinion, please do me a favor and point out specifically where I walked it back or contradicted myself.
What about the Exynos RCE bugs? Now that they are patched they are secure again or how is this supposed to work? What about the intentional backdoor unearthed in the pixel phone (the sim swap thingy)? Who was that for?
My problem is, as a user, whose expertise is not 100% security, how can a layman decide which device to trust? Trust the neighbor, trust the expert who thinks is an expert, but doesn't see his own limitations, trust the newspapers parroting whatever they find (or their security advisor), trust the marmots or trust the looks, because you don't know what the silicon does. You might know one domain, but not multiple ones, like you might know the IT domain, but doesn't know the underlying physics domain, so you might think the phone is secure in the IT domain, but since you don't know jackshit about the physics, you have to again rely on someone's advice.
The iPhone is locked down tight, even security experts have complained in the past because analysing the core internals is cumbersome. But that's a double edged sword, when you can't even get basic info about phone's status without resorting to some hacking shenanigans.
Any way to know your firmware has not changed? How come there are zero tools for the layman to verify the status of his device? You don't know whether your usb's firmware is intact, whether your motherboard is a-ok and the list goes on.
According to newspapers, it is/was the panacea of security (iPhone), yet sec bugs after sec bugs are coming out all the time. You don't even have complete control over the phone, since the software switches (like wifi) are not actually disabling the wifi circuitry.
How come banks are sitting on ancient systems and are seemingly fine?
Should you trust zerodium's bounty prices, should you trust exploit brokers? (they ought to see what's an emmentaler right?)
Encrypted secure phones? Look how many criminals got caught, by putting their trust blindly into something, that someone parroted about how secure that is.
GrapheneOS says they are secure, but where are tools that show you that yes we do this and that and that solves these kinds of attacks, thwarted these attacks in the past, demonstrated?
Should you consider Mikko's advice. Use a phone that is made by a country, whose intelligence agency is not a threat to you? But how do you know that a phone, which is made in X country is actually controlled by that country's IA? And how do you know which IA is not a threat to you? :DDDDD Do you even have to fear against a nation state's capabilities or since they have unimited budget you are fucked when somehow get in their crosshairs?
It's like flipping a coin, putting your trust into someone's solution blindly.
Hardware devices with embedded software used to be air-gapped.
As soon as phones got Bluetooth, you got Nokia Bluetooth viruses that would spread via public transit, and you had to go to a service center to fix it since it wasn't designed to be updated.
Even in the days of "software was complete on launch", security was absolutely abysmal and we just relied on most people being honest.
Yeah, saying "embedded software used to be complete and final back in the day" is such a rose-colored glasses take. When I was a kid we could occasionally pick up car phone (that's what we called cell phones back then) conversations by changing to a particular channel on the TV.
The pixel 6a will get 3 years of updates and 5 years of security updates. On a phone that was released 12 months ago.
So it hasn’t been tested yet. Plenty of time for google to renege on that.
The Pixel 6a is at least a cheaper phone. But the Pixel 7 are flagship prices for the same support.
iPhones have been getting this level of updates since almost day one. The last iPhone I ran into the ground was a 6 and that had 5 years of OS updates. iOS 8 through 12.
My current XR has been getting updates for almost 5 years and will get iOS 17. So at least 6 years of updates?
When I got my last Pixel Google were giving 3 years of security updates. I bought it one year after release. For an average consumer doing the same thing they would have had an unsecure doorstop with very low resale value after two years. Should be criminal.
I installed some ROM and kept it alive (not by far as secure as using an iPhone, of course).
This is exactly why I own an iPhone. I don't even personally like apple as a company. I don't like Mac computers. There are things that really irritate me about iPhones, but I use them anyway because of how long they get updates for.
My son's now 4 year old Samsung S10-5G (my old phone) is still getting updated. It is a flagship phone, the first with 5G - will be interesting to see how long they do it.
Google and Samsung appear to be on the same page; I think the front runners in the Android world are a lot better than some would like to give them credit for.
The phones do stop working properly, e.g. unicode doesn't work, and unsupported android OS's aren't no longer developed, not to mention security updates.
It's risky, especially in todays world where financial information is stored endlessly on a cell phone. 5 years+ for iphones make a very nice deprecation curve / alongside a viable resell market. It's nice to sell a 2yr old iphone for 70-80% of it's purchase price and then buy a new one and not have to worry about anything for another 5 years.
If you only buy devices with LineageOS support, you can continue to get updates for a very long time. I would not want to be at the mercy of the manufacturer for the software.
I might be one of those value shoppers; I usually buy the "Pixel .a" version of the oldest available generation when it's time for replacement (I'm currently on a Pixel 4a). I like it. I used to have an iPhone, but I prefer the "feel" of Andriod-on-Pixel, but I don't know how to describe it. Less heavy-handed maybe? More minimalistic?
I don't need the fastest, most powerful SoC. I don't need the best, super fast display. The battery life on my 4a is enough for my needs. People get way too religious about this.
Your "usually" is doing a lot there. You bought the second ever "a", so you've done it once?
I understand your preference though, I've used google's phones (Nexus then Pixel) for about a decade. They have the benefit of having one fewer cooks in the kitchen. Any other brand has to adjust to whatever dumb thing Google has done to copy iPhone in each new OS release, and then also add their own layer on top of that.
My son uses my old S10-5G (the world's first premier 5G phone, released in mid 2019 - ages ahead of Apple), and it's still regularly receiving security updates.
> I seriously doubt that there are any Androids out there that could get even close to that.
I don't see the 2020 SE getting software upgrades for much longer, it's already the bottom of the barrel for iOS17, so I guess you're OK to forgo those for a while ?
If your phone needs are low enough you can get by with the SE in 2026, buying a Gakaxy A series today would totally fit the bill, and you probably could get one new at the same price and way cheaper used.
Fair point. Super critical security updates could go on, while official OS support is dead.
To note, iOS doesn't allow alternative browsers so Safari will also be stuck in time and there will be no option to get any modern engine on the device (I'm not even sure you could get one through jailbreaking, that would be a lot of porting efforts for virtually no one on the market)
I resurrected a third gen iPad a few weeks ago for no reason, and the most interesting part was it couldn't get past Cloudflare's browser check, so couldn't even see some of simpler and primitive sites on the web.
Macs are pretty much in the same boat. I have a couple 2015 models. Can’t get the latest major OS update. But they get updates and I expect I’ll be able to continue using them as primarily browsers for quite some time.
>I seriously doubt that there are any Androids out there that could get even close to that.
It's probably because you didn't really do any research into it. A $100 or less Pixel 4a released in 2020 will easily last 5+ years if you take care of it.
> It's probably because you didn't really do any research into it. A $100 or less Pixel 4a released in 2020 will easily last 5+ years if you take care of it.
I'm not optimizing for years alive in retirement; instead, it's years of active, healthy life.
Similarly, I don't just care about years of software support in a phone - it's important how long the phone feels like it's still a snappy, responsive phone. I just don't have a lot of confidence that I'd feel that way about the Pixel 4a in 2027.
In addition to the Pixel 4a I also have an iPhone X and in 2023 you can really tell how sluggish the phone feels with iOS 16. I can only imagine how much worse it will feel with iOS 20.
2nd data point, I'm using Galaxy s8+ from 2017. I haven't taken great care of it so the back glass has many cracks in it. However the front glass has no cracks, minor scratches but is otherwise in great shape. I don't notice the scratches when I'm using it, but they're easily visible when the phone is off and held at an angle in the light. I'm still very pleased with the performance and the battery life. I did not expect it to last more than 5 years.
No mate, people value themselves and get the best thing they can have. Smartphones are so essential now and used 24/7, don't cheap out on it. You don't cheap out on food either. Nothing to do with status. Not all about Apple either, there are nice premium Android phones as well. What are you doing, saving for a golden tombstone?
Except many people do. Friend of mine is a chef and likes to quip that people will pour the most expensive oil into their car and the cheapest into their pan. The median American takes home like 35k a year, they're not saving anything for their tombstone, they're lucky if the house is paid off by that time. Yet you see a lot of people run around with the newest top line phone. That's just conspicuous consumption.
Almost nobody except for mobile gaming enthusiasts or VR users gets meaningful premium value out of a new phone at this point. People drop serious money on new hardware every two years that they use for Whatsapp and TikTok.
I think the wide variety of payment scheme is the main reason for buying luxury or premium items from lots of consumers. The monthly payment is so low they don't feel it unless they lose their jobs.
The house? 35k isn't enough to RENT a place of your own almost anywhere in the US, never mind a mortgage, and all the additional expenses that come with owning a home, like maintenance.
Even in the middle of nowhere, it's basically impossible to find a 1br for under $1000/month. That's $12k/yr.
At $35k/yr, you have $2500/month post tax, so at $1000 you're spending almost half your post-tax income on rent (and that's not including utilities, taxes, etc).
I'm not sure where you live, but in my area you can rent a well maintained 3 bedroom home with a yard for $850-950 per month. 1 bedroom homes rent for closer to $550.
I'm in the south too actually, about 45 minutes outside Birmingham, AL
I've seen cheaper housing in Birmingham as well, but I don't know some of those areas nearly as well and couldn't vouch for how nice or safe they actually are outside of listing photos online
Cheaping out in food is not uncommon and honestly a great way to save a lot. It's also super easy to decide to do. My wife and I literally don't eat out anymore. Haven't been to sit down place in many months. The value of the experience has degraded so much and the price is so absurd, that every time we used to go out in the past 2 years we questioned why we even bother anymore. And the money we save is used for travelling or the things we choose not to cheap out on (our hobbies).
If the value has degraded so much then you're not giving up anything by sticking to groceries, right? That's a bit different from buying a lower quality phone.
For you, maybe a better analogy would be buying cheaper food at the grocery store.
(I see a lot of restaurants serving outstanding food so it does feel like a sacrifice when we don't eat there, plus we do shop carefully and buy in bulk. I also have an iPhone.)
>people value themselves and get the best thing they can have.
The problem is that what someone considers "best" is highly influential by their social environment, of which status is a part of. If the majority of your friends use Apple, and there is the whole app interactivity that you get with things like iMessage over SMS, if you value the social experience you are going to think that Apple is best.
> No mate, people value themselves and get the best thing they can have.
Not everyone is this embedded in consumerism. Most of us have our proclivities & things we are biased towards (clothing, cars, travel, house, hobbies), but most people don't splurge on everything.
You make a big assumption that it is all about status or that status is a simple equation.
From what I have seen, Android phones appeal to people who want or must spend as little as possible on their phones. It also appeals to people who want to tweak and customize their phones. There is a brand appeal among some of those people to be the anti-Apple.
Apple does appeal to some for brand identity. It also seems to appeal to people who are buying a phone that they can just take out of the box and use without spending much time in setup and configuration.
> just take out of the box and use without spending much time in setup and configuration
That's me. I buy Apple because there's already enough hobbies in my life and I don't need my daily driver devices to also be playful area to tinker with. Give me good enough defaults and the least amount of customizability possible please thanks.
Also, anecdotally, my mom who doesn't do English stopped asking me support questions about her devices almost immediately when we switched her from Android to Apple. On Android it was like nothing ever quite worked right and she couldn't at all figure out how to do things.
I bought an iPhone because Android vendors kept leaving me high and dry after a few years. I'm now on year 6 with the iPhone and it's still working great. As I understand it, I have another year or two before Apple stops supporting it with updates.
That makes the iPhone far cheaper than any comparable Android phone I could have bought back then.
Maybe today Android vendors are offering longer support horizons but I've been burned multiple times and won't trust that ecosystem again.
To me this feels more like the situation where someone with money in the bank can buy $200 shoes which will last 10 years, while someone living paycheck to paycheck has to keep buying $40 shoes that fall apart after a year.
> and the comfortable parents are on whatever works for them
So, not necessarily Androids, but whatever they happen to choose? I'm not sure what we're observing, that people just use whatever phone they prefer? Honestly, iPhones aren't a heck of a lot more expensive than a flagship Pixel phone, especially not for a multi-year tech investment. The "iPhones are expensive" propaganda is underinformed. Apple computers on the other hand are way more expensive than the equivalent hardware in the PC ecosystem, however they also hold their value quite well for resale whereas I've found it quite difficult to offload old gaming PCs in the past. Usually people just want the CPU and GPU, if they're not older than about 4 years. The rest of the carcass just gets piled into an ever-growing closet stash of old PC components. If you have a Macbook on the other hand, you'll have a dozen people asking if it's still available every day until you sell it. Even if it's a relic, just with a working battery and hard drive.
My bias in this conversation is that I've owned an iPhone 12 since late 2020 with no signs of needing an upgrade anytime soon. I don't know anybody living in poverty but shoveling all of their money into Apple tech.
>The "iPhones are expensive" propaganda is underinformed. Apple computers on the other hand are way more expensive than the equivalent hardware in the PC ecosystem, however they also hold their value quite well for resale whereas I've found it quite difficult to offload old gaming PCs in the past.
I think you're perceiving the same thing in both cases, but interpreting the data wrong re: PC hardware.
I just looked, the cheapest unlocked smart phone that Best Buy carries is $60. Yes, its pretty much garbage. But if you need to have a smart phone, and not much else, compare $60 to the cheapest iPhone ($430). So it goes with computers too. The floor on not Apple is quite a ways lower than the floor on Apple, even as the ceilings are pretty comparable. And what Apple is optimizing for is very different from what the average high-end PC manufacturer is optimizing for. When you do an oranges-to-oranges comparison of Macbooks and equivalent laptops, their prices end up pretty comparable.
Saying "iPhones are expensive" is very much akin to saying "the Mercedes G-Class is expensive". Its under-informed (as you say) only because a lot of people get iPhones (and Mercedes G-Classes) as status symbols, not for the innate capabilities.
Firstly, I just want to point out this is kind of a silly argument. A $300 difference in a multi-year investment for a device that drives the way people communicate, pay bills, and even entertain themselves is so negligible that it's not very much worth discussing.
But okay, that's cool and all, but you WILL need to refresh it 1.5x as often or more.. The Pixel 7a goes EoL on security patches in under 5 years. Meanwhile, Apple is still providing patches on iPhone 5 series products released 9 years ago, and latest iOS is available on iPhone models released almost 6 years ago.
Anyway, let's say none of that matters and that tech conservative people only hold their phones for 4 years anyway. An iPhone will hold its value better for that period of time, when you go to sell it on Craigslist. A 4 year old Google Pixel 3a XL can be bought for $72 on Swappa. An almost 5 year old iPhone XR is for sale for $195.
And that's not even to point out the iPhone SE as the other user did, which is cheaper than the Pixel 7a, though I think it would be a fair retort that the iPhone SE is more a competitor to the Pixel 6 generation. 6a being just a tad cheaper than the iPhone SE.
Thinking of tech as a multi-year investment makes the price differences negligible. It's really all about which garden you prefer to be in. Even if your credit sucks and you just need to pay cash for a phone, Swappa makes being in either garden so cheap that you hardly need to worry. And phones are so fast these days that exact tech specs hardly matter anymore unless you're big on mobile gaming.
>Do you also question why people buy quality shoes or mattresses?
I do. I am 99% convinced that the majority of first world people waste way too much money on shoes that aren't any better or worse than cheaper options. Shoes don't really get all that much better than they were previously, but somehow they always change and the cost always goes up.
Agreed - a lot of so-called quality shoes aren't and as for the mattress wars...
It's pretty frustraing, because even stuff that used to be dependable quality seems to get outcompeted by people buying stuff they replace (or would like to, if they could afford the monthly payments) as soon as the next model comes out. And so, the reliable, dependable company slumps (i.e. company making shoes that last for years), is bought-out by a hedge fund, quality goes to hell as they feed off its reputation.
So many people people say they want to buy quality, actually they want to buy is status (Rolex, Apple, Burberry, ...).
I haven't found any shoes that address my foot issues. Even if I did I'm sure they would cost 5x the price of regular shoes and would provide almost no improvement.
Are there some kind of objective metrics on how modern shoes are better than shoes from 10 years ago? Are they objectively more durable? Is the shape somehow better for your feet? Because I haven't felt any of it. For me it's just like other clothing: change for the sake of change.
As someone with severe over pronation (due to completely flat feet) I know most of the developments have been in materials and shapes.
It used to be there was a couple pairs of shoes I could buy, now it seems as if most manufacturers have a few models that help. My last pair cost a LOT of money (Brooks), but I can tell you I've never felt a shoe as good as this one. They get better every time I buy shoes which is every 2-3 years.
Get some diabetic shoes with custom made orthotics. Will probably cost about $200. Will be life changing. Like walking on a pillow. It's about 3x the thickness of a normal insole, amd will be custom modeled to get weight off of whatever you need releived.
Those outside of capitalist countries who move to countries like America usually make the same consumption choices (sometimes it seems worse - Gucci purses and stuff) it’s just that they don’t have the ability in the country they live in. I think it’s less about the economic system and more about access.
That being said I agree with you about advertising getting people to buy things they don’t want or don’t need (strong need) in capitalist economies but that’s a failure of regulation and this a failure by the people.
Another experiment you can do though is look at highly capitalist countries like Norway or Denmark and look at the consumption patterns and then compare that with other capitalist countries like China (effectively capitalist) or the U.S. or Brazil and see whether or not it’s a cultural phenomenon or perhaps an economic one. As I’m sure you could guess I think it’s cultural.
That's the myth.
From personal experience helping iPhone users, they seem to tolerate bad interface and hardware a lot more than other people and blame themselves when they can't get something to work.
I've had numerous iDevices over the years and not a single one failed anyhow. No iPhone, no iPad, no Power Mac, no Macbook, no mac Mini. And I got a trade in worth 40 bucks on my still working 2013 iPad when I bought my 2021 one.
I have a 2011 mac mini that is being used as a file/media/misc apps server right now. I’ve also got a 2020 m1 mba (personal) and a xps 15 (from work) and while the xps is more powerful, it does not feel as nice as the mba (no noise, feels solid). I’m not at all happy with apple’s restrictions, but they build nice tools. When i want something to tinker with, I choose something else.
From a sim card set of instructions that I was working with today:
For iPhone customers: Please install APN after inserting sim card. Open the following website with Safari-Browser: *.*.com.
That isn't just working. It looks like iPhone users have an extra configuration step when using this particular sim card.
Thanks! Very interesting. I suspect this has something to do with the network arrangements of simcard-korea. That’s not standard for iphones with ‘normal’ in-country sims. I change my sim every few months and it ‘just works’ without any extra steps.
The link at the bottom has a profile that sets the APN - it might work without it if you reboot tbh but without being in Korea and having the SIM I can’t verify that. It isn’t the app that he’s talking about.
Didn’t see that. Viewed image on phone and didn’t scroll.
I think it depends on the carrier whether APNs are required. Can be automatically set nowadays with iOS 16 according to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201699
Not anymore. The hardware quality has gone downhill hard.
My powerbook from 2004 still works fine (kind of too slow, so I don't use it, but works fine).
In my powerbook from 2021 the entire right side of ports died less than a year into it.
Bought a macbook air in late 2022, one of the usbc ports died just a few months into its life. Which reminds me I need to take it to the store and see if they'll fix it or if I'm SOL again.
I'm not ragging on anyone that uses Apple products, but the "Apple products just work" thing is just as big of a meme as "Apple is for rich people" & "Android is for poor people" memes. Apple products "just work" so long as you want to do something Apple deems worth doing.
I'm amazed at the emotionality of people who dislike Apple. I guess it's a classic projection thing where those with strong emotions opposed assume that those who disagree must do so out of the polar opposite emotion.
Apple products are less expensive the more money you make. Not just as a relative income statement, but because of resale value. You can buy a new $1000 phone every single year and end up spending $300/year net of taxes and depreciation. You just have to have the capital that you can tie up.
I'm on an iPhone 7 Plus since a year. It's an old model that I bought secondhand. It was partly experiment. I was using an Android phone: Motorola G5 (also old). I love that G5, but I have the variant with only 16GB internal memory, which is simply not enough nowadays. For me the G5 is still fast enough, but every time there are app updates, I need to free space so the update can install.
My wife was already using a second hand iPhone and convinced me to try it too. I got that iPhone 7 Plus for cheap, it is in really good condition and it has 256GB internal memory. I was aware it would be stuck on iOS 15, but to my surprise, Apple still sends out security updates for iOS 15. I just checked: my phone is on 15.7.7 and I noticed 15.7.8 came out just a couple of days ago. See [1].
I know that Apple is a closed eco-system and all, but for my phone I don't care that much. My phone just has to work. I still use Google products (maps, mail, calendar, keep, chat), but those run just fine on iOS. The other apps I use, are also working just fine (no performance issues).
To me, it's amazing that a phone from 2016 is still receiving security updates. That is simply non-existent in Android world. As someone who does not have the urge to always have the latest and hottest, that is very nice to see.
I watched a dating show episode, Updating, on YouTube. At one point the fact that the guy was using an Android and not an iPhone was a major "ick" (point of revulsion) to the audience and the (otherwise stunning) female contestant.
Wtaf? Just had to shake my head. Ironically, my S21 Ultra with 16GB of memory/512 of storage was way ahead of anything Apple had made at time of release, probably cost the same as their top model at the time, and is still punching hard with no need whatsoever for me to .. update.
I am baffled why people keep making this asinine remark.
Stock iPhone is not status. Vertu is status (and is an Android platform), moreso the Vertu Signature line. Aftermarket modded iPhones that are encrusted with gold and diamonds are status. The former is the Jane Birkin bag of the smartphones, the latter is pure bling. Both send the same message: I have done financially exceptionally well (or my daddy has paid for it).
iPhone is equally unobtanium to anyone pre-launch nor does Apple make bespoke or customised editions for anyone, both of which also obliterate its purported status symbol. Ironically, it actually makes iPhone more equal and less status compared the status smartphones.
iPhone might be a status symbol in low income countries, and so are Samsung Galaxy's, the top of the range Huawei's, Xiaomi's and whatever else expensive there is out there.
Probably because when they buy something they want it to work.
I was a die hard android fan boy. Owned nearly all android flagships.
I first was driven away from the Google branded phones because it was clear their priorities where something other than providing me the best hardware and software experience.
Then I was driven away from Samsung because too much bloat and advertisements within the core OS.
None is the home integration worked right. Too fractured and error prone.
I got tied of seeing people use their iPhones to get shit done and not needing to tinker heir damn phone all the time.
The iPhone is a tool. A well thought out tool that gets the fuxk out of my way so I can do the things I want. Android. IRS a toy. It’s an advertisement delivery vehicle. On Android you are the customer not the user.
I’ve switched back and forth. Just had worse experience overall on android. Maybe I’ll try them in another few years. For a low budget I went through 3 androids and settled on a used iPhone which was waaay more stable.
It may just be that people who have lower income, and are guided by "status" may make worser choices or are can't/don't understand financial implications or maybe they are just doing their best to "peacock" and fit in with what they think is the right tool to achieve their goals?
It's nothing new, you could've said the same thing in the 90's about Sega, Nintendo and Playstation and with Shoes, Clothes, anything -
Yes 60% of Americans are guided by “status”. My 80 year old mom was just talking to me yesterday about how she feels superior to everyone else because she has Blue bubbles like the Instagram influencers she followx
You’re right. I spent an extra $14 on an iPhone 12 vs the Samsung. Now I have a blue bubble, and people treat me like I’m smart and better looking. Combined with drinking the beer I learned about on the Super Bowl ads, women think I’m cool too.
I use iPhones because I can get 5-7 years of use out of each one. Can you recommend an Android phone that has the same level of software support? Preferably something that also works properly with my MacBook, because that is what I use for work.
I have a ton of Apple products and I could not care less about the status they confer. They just genuinely have a better end to end user experience most of the time. They do, for the most part, live up to the “just works” mantra.
Are you really constantly amazed? iPhone user here. I don’t see my phone as a status symbol. I just like it much better. If you like Android better, that’s cool too.
Nobody pays attention to the phone I have. I am not some teenager sitting at the lunch table with her friends blabbing about phones. To suggest I have iPhone because of status seeking is just ridiculous. Most grown ups don’t care what other grown ups think of their phone. It isn’t 1996.
My phone is in my pocket 99% of the time, why would I care what people think about it? Anyway, a base model iPhone is only in the $600 range, that is like a week of minimum wage work in my state. Where’s the status?
No, it is just a basic functional smartphone for people who don’t like to configure these things (I’ll happily tinker all day with my Linux laptop, but smartphones are just like the worst form-factor, I want it to just work and then go away).
Yeah it's very weird, here in Europe the SE is a lot more expensive. Here in Spain it's €559 which is much more $ to € markup than any of the other models.
I don't think it's that interesting a model either because it ignores the last 5 years of innovations like bezelless phones. For €349 you can get a nice midrange Android which does have a bezelless screen, fingerprint in display, oled display and often even a 3.5mm jack.
Sure it's not as fast but that's one one thing I care less about, if I need fast I'll use my computers. The phone is just for on the road.
Not when you consider that modern phones are also our cameras, satellite navigation systems, calendars, mobile hotspots, mobile browsers, handheld gaming devices, music players, video players, and more.
Personally, I think they’re a heck of a bargain for what they do.
Consider that they're selling a pocket supercomputer. A 386 PC in the early 90's (already second tier to the first 486's) would sell for over $3000, which is $7000 today. Our contemporary expectation that consumer electronics must be rock bottom cheap is a little warped by globalism. This from someone who won't pay more than $300 for something that is easily lost or damaged.
For a person who isn’t technical (able to compile programs), an iPhone has a superset of a laptop’s functionality. Except, much more user-friendly, because all your programs come from the App Store.
> For a person who isn’t technical (able to compile programs), an iPhone has a superset of a laptop’s functionality.
That doesn't even begin to make any sense. Can you run CAD software or serious photo processing on a phone (like DxO)? Nothing I run on a mac can run on a phone.
It’s not “just” a phone. As a previous comment addressed: a high quality camera, video or audio editing workstation, hotspot, nav system, media player.. you can even get FLIR camera attachments, use it as a measuring device, and play high quality games on it.
“Just” a phone would make and receive phone calls and that’s it.
You honestly equate buying an at least arguably better electronic device and ecosystem that you may interact with for hours a day with what’s mostly a logo on an I assume is an admittedly well-made bag?
Probably to at least some degree among kids. No one else cares. Just like no one else cares about green bubbles vs. blue bubbles. But some people feel a need to convince themselves that no one would buy an Apple product for any reason but status.
Time is valuable, and the ecosystem of Android phones is filled with time-wasting BS: bloatware, OEM specific UIs, varying device quality, lack of OEM support, confusing accessory compatibility, a marketplace full of malware, etc.
For the type of people here that like to tinker with tech this might be a non-issue, but some other people just want to use the device to accomplish tasks with as little friction as possible.
The problem here is calling in "ecosystem of Android", it is mainly Andriod vs Samsung. You are either in the Samsung Ecosystem (i.e Samsung UI) or in the Andriod world, Most of the other vendors, the few there are, run close to stock Andriod these days.
Then of-course there is Pixel's Pure Android.
Not really all that confusing, if you can not figure it out then I trust your better served by iPhone.... you likely have also given up on computers completely as windows or linux is far too complicated for you.
>> confusing accessory compatibility
what?
>>a marketplace full of malware
Yes, user freedom bad, must only have applications that Mr Tim approves.
The OEM doesn't have a store in the mall that will help an elderly family member with it. The OEM stops publishing updates after the phone leaves the shelf. etc.
> Most of the other vendors, the few there are, run close to stock Andriod these days.
Which is a gigantic pain in the butt when you're trying to talk your mother through the settings menu over the phone to change one setting, and the OEM decided that was the one feature they wanted to move/rename/omit/customize.
> if you can not figure it out then I trust your better served by iPhone.... you likely have also given up on computers completely as windows or linux is far too complicated for you.
> Yes, user freedom bad, must only have applications that Mr Tim approves.
That's the thing, it shouldn't take someone like me to use a phone. Phones are mass market devices that children, elderly, disabled, and uneducated people use.
>>Phones are mass market devices that children, elderly, disabled, and uneducated people use.
I really really despise this narrative in modern society where by everyone must lower their standards, expectations, or limit themselves so we can cater to the lowest common denominator of society.
This is like saying we need to limit the speed on highways to 20 because some people can not figure out how to drive at 70...
Lower our standards? I look at it in the opposite way. Apple’s accessibility features are the amazing and other manufacturers should raise their standards.
So buy your PinePhone or whatever and let the vast majority of users have something that’s simple and reasonably standardized. I can certainly use a general purpose computer but I don’t want my phone to be complicated.
i worked a little in this space in the past. what we learned was that most people don't switch, but if they do, it's overwhelmingly in the android->ios direction and not the other way around (this is in the US). you may see some anecdotal evidence otherwise but on aggregate that was true
You don't, however, mention which Android phones they switched from.
Android obviously has a huge variety of different phone manufacturers, and many of them really suck, and many more are just mediocre. I think it would be harder to argue that iPhones are now (or in the past 5 years or so) significantly better than a Samsung or Pixel flagship.
I personally own a Pixel and my spouse owns an iPhone, and besides the familiarity there are many features I love more about my phone (particularly the call screening and other call automation features). The biggest downside, which may unfortunately actually cause me to have to switch to an iPhone at some point, is Apple's monopolistic behavior with iMessage: I'm often the "odd man out" in group chats and the presence of my Android breaks the experience for me and all the other iPhone users in the group (video quality is in the toilet, messages can randomly get dropped, emoji reactions suck, etc.)
> You don't, however, mention which Android phones they switched from.
This is very important since any iPhones have a top-of-the-line CPU for that era. On the other hand, the Samsung's mid-end series (A5x) have very weak CPU and they lag.
I know a couple of people who did that, but they switched from a $200 android to a ~$1000 iphone, and were amused at how much better it is. Users who had flaghship androids rarely switched, because their phones were good too.
Yes, I've seen something similar, it's easy to switch from Android and get into Apple's ecosystem, but once in it's difficult to get out.
My brother-in-law would love to switch out, but he feels stuck in Apple's ecosystem because switching now would mean either causing a lot of friction for his family or he'd have to change many devices at once.
Anecdotally, some part of it is also the hype which makes people who use a mediocre Android switch to the iPhone. Once in the ecosystem its significantly harder to switch back. All of my friends who use a high-end Android haven't switched and don't want to.
Also kids favor Ios, they like messenger and they play games with each other when they are in the same room, I'm just paraphrasing my 14 year old. So maybe it just reflects more new entrants? As in kids getting their first phone, whereas the older cohort might be more evenly distributed.
I'm part of this statistic. I've been an Android user my entire adult life, but it really has been a constant downward spiral over these past several years. My previous three phones from LG, Motorola, and Xiaomi all had major software bugs that were never fixed, the biggest being just incredibly poor network connectivity (across multiple carriers, mind you) resulting in at least several calls just not connecting to me. I switched to an iPhone SE several months ago and have had zero issues whatsoever. I resent that my money went to a company like Apple, but there really is no alternative if you want a decent cell phone in 2023.
I kind of went the other way, I have had androids since 2010ish, then tried an iphone at the beginning of corona since my old sony phone couldn't run teams properly. Had it for 2 years and hated it so much I went back to android.
I couldn't even install a separate browser like firefox that was not just a skin and the ad-block on safari drove me crazy. It only prevented items from being displayed but not the network requests etc.
Also, it was nagging me a lot, constantly asking for me to sign up to icloud and other things.
Back on a pixel phone now and couldn't be more happy really.
It's been possible to install ad blockers for the browser on iPhones for years, without resorting to a VPN. I don't bother anymore because I'm usually at home and have a pihole anyway, but I used to use Firefox Focus—not as my browser, but to provide ad-blocking for Safari. Worked fine. Open it once to set it up (at least IIRC that was necessary—I don't remember, but there was some very-simple setup step I'm pretty sure) then never open it again. Ads blocked in Safari. Tons of other options, free and paid.
You do need a VPN (or otherwise something network-level) to block ads in apps, I think. That's a fair point.
VPN apps are annoying. You constantly have to turn in on or off. I find battery leakage. There are speed issues etc.. .And, the purpose of VPN is different than ad blocking.
Sorry, I don't really follow their advertising campaigns. I just mean that they can't make a valid claim for privacy, unless you agree to the idea of being private only when Apple likes...
Sorry, I don't really follow their advertising campaigns. I just mean that they can't make a valid claim for privacy, unless you agree to the idea of being private only when Apple likes...
Sorry, I don't really follow their advertising campaigns. I just mean that they can't make a valid claim for privacy, unless you agree to the idea of being private only when Apple likes...
Having switched from Android to iPhone recently, it’s not even the quality of the phone. It’s the insane fragmentation, incomplete features, and random breaking features.
I finally gave up when a pair of Bluetooth headphones couldn’t pair with my phone. I realized that there are simply too many variations of Android for device manufacturers to test. With an iPhone, you know that most accessories are going to be tested against your specific model.
Now that I’m on an iPhone, the integration between various device is insane. Answer a call in your watch, transfer it to your phone, then move it to your laptop. Seamlessly, cast music to speakers/tv/bluetooth and it just works, every single time.
The Galaxy models compete with iPhones. I've got an old Galaxy S10 that I got like 4 years ago and it still works great, even the battery is holding up so far.
I also remember Samsung being bad in the past but I got a Fold 4 and the software is fantastic. Very little bloatware and many convenience/productivity features added over stock Android.
My limited experience using friends' and family's Samsung phones is that they are the worst out of all of them. Absolutely nothing but bloated, buggy software that you can't disable.
Samsung is disappointing than Xiomi. My Mi phone lasted 4 years and after switching to samsung, it didn't even last more than 2 years. After the battery died, samsung became useless.
I'm part of this statistic too, in a different way. Android worked perfectly for me, but the OS was increasingly dumbed down and Androids consistently threw out features I loved. (Headphone jack, expandable storage, full rectangular screens).
Androids threw away their market differentiation just to become bad iPhone clones. When I found myself needing a new phone, I had little reason not to consider an iPhone.
I bought an SE, then bought a Pixel 4a because of iOS issues, but I am here again considering an iPhone as my 4a nears EOL. I share your resentment of giving money to Apple.
I am also part of this statistic. I feel like android dumbed down the google assistant. Sometimes I am no longer sure what app is called on hey google. In comparison to Bixby, the tech became worse.
I would have switched to SE if my wife did not get me a pro for my birthday (to communicate in iMessage). And now I am on this boring phone no longer passionate about phones anymore.
> And now I am on this boring phone no longer passionate about phones anymore.
Oh man, I could not relate more to this. With how hard it has become to run rooted, for the first time in well over a decade I'm running stock Android with no root. It used to be so exciting! A computer in my pocket! But more and more Apple's (awful IMHO) vision of the phone as an "appliance" rather than a general purpose computer is becoming true, and it's depressing. I don't even really care about specs anymore, cause I can't do much with that horsepower anyway.
I haven't gotten to the point of giving Apple any money yet, and probably won't as the Pixel A is affordable and does everything I need, but I miss the good old days so much. I've been hearing people say I should try GrapheneOS, maybe it's time to finally try it.
Graphene on a pixel is great. It's easy to install, with an online, real time(live) install and load.(Do not adb, a computer, USB drive, etc etc.)
It does add a bit of 'let's install a MacOS on an Alienware' feel to computing without the pain. Then f droid and infinite other sources for apps.
Yup, for something so critical in my life, I just want the damn thing to work. While I would love to tinker with an Android, I just don't have the energy for that (I did a decade ago) nor the time to troubleshoot problems that come up.
Android gets shittier with time in my experience, phones get buggy and unsupported in like 2 years. iPhone software works consistently, and the phones are supported for like 5/6 years by Apple with software updates.
Same. I had to make around 300 phone calls for a recent health ordeal by my rough estimates^. I went through 3 androids and settled on used iPhone after learning my lesson. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to drop calls/not be heard/screen freeze/no ring. A cheap 3 year old iPhone worked so, so much better.
^if you’re on “Obamacare”, which is a godsend, finding a specialist on your own equates to being given an excel sheet with extremely uncurated or simply incorrect listings. Then finding a specialized occupational therapist after surgery, etc, etc.
Funny, my last android was samsung which I had many of the issues you describe above, and in particular it felt very bloated.
I've been getting older generation Pixel S and they are very good for the price. usually 1/4 the price of a comparable flagship iOS and I never have any issues.
Nothing. The iPhone SoC blows every android out of the water. Apple has been dominating mobile performance ever since they went to 64-bit in 2013. That's a decade of leadership in silicon. No android comes close. Not sure what OP is thinking.
So what? The OS is totally locked down. There's nothing to actually do with all that extra compute. Are iPhone games better than Android games? Probably, but I imagine most of the HN crowd isn't into mobile games. Other than that I can't even think of what the better iPhone SOCs would be used for.
I'm saying it's good enough for my use, which is watching YouTube videos, using apps, taking pictures, having a reasonable battery life, making phone calls, sending texts.
It might not be the best possible soc etc. But for $349 it serves me as a daily driver for 3 years without shelling out over $1000
Because each one of those has 3 (Samsung) or 4 (iPhone) major models with wildly different specs, and each of those specs has often times major differences in quality between the two lines.
I’ve read a biography on him. He was definitely an asshole. But tbh he’s nothing comparable to someone like an Elon. Jobs fired people unceremoniously, but he didn’t buy a huge tech company and fire 2/3rds of staff and make them work weekends and holidays to get things working again. Jobs was shitty to his daughter, but if you learn about how he was disowned as a child it all starts to make sense. Not that what he did was excusable, but it’s not quite “americas greatest asshole”
Why do you resent that your money went to a company who put a good device in your hand? I'd resent giving money to a company who can't be bothered to make a device that makes me happy.
I'm pretty sure you could fill a library with how much this topic has been discussed over the years, but iOS doesn't make everyone happy. It's entirely possible to enjoy the stability while also being frustrated by Apple's software design choices.
Interesting you didn't name the two brands that are true, non-Chinese flagship Android: Pixel and Samsung.
If you want true software freedom on a phone, there is GrapheneOS on Pixel. I think Samsung is the better UI of the two, but if my Samsung breaks I think I'll go pixel and go graphene.
I've been using Google Fi as a wireless provider for years and have been using their phones as a result. I've only once ever had an issue with one of the phones from a software standpoint and it took me a while to figure out how to port over my contacts (I had to export them to an Apple format and then import them). I've stayed away from Apple products because (1) the Google products don't have a ton of corporate fluff like Samsung products, (2) Apple phones tend to do "magic" things that just annoy the hell out of me, and (3) Android Auto just works.
I've been thinking about switching to an iPhone because I'm tired of never upgrading my phone to avoid it breaking, but the fact that I can't install ReVanced or an adblocker stops me. I don't know if I'll ever change my mind on this, lack of good ad blocking really is a dealbreaker for me.
General purpose computing is a concept that computer scientists appreciate. The vast majority of consumers buy products based on their cost/benefit of their features and overall experience, not ideology of their technical construction.
You won't see too many people who decide to hand wash their dishes because they can't find a dishwasher with an unlocked bootloader. It either satisfactorily washes the dishes or it doesn't. Most people buy phones the same way.
Your comment has nothing to do with what you’re replying to. He’s explaining (at someone else’s request) his own consumer choices. He can make his choices and the people you’re talking about can make their choices.
And I can point out that I think that opinion is just as silly as resenting my dishwasher for lacking a JTAG port on the front panel. iPhone's aren't Stallman's college mainframe. They are consumer products.
You have to go back a long time, but just the Apple II[1] technically, and maybe the Newton, but both would be less general than a pre-App Store 2007 iPhone because Safari is such a difference maker.
[1]: I, III, Lisa, too, but I mean you get the gist,
Enlighten me, what could you do an Apple II that you can't do on a modern Mac?
It has a real UNIX terminal. I can write code in nearly any programming language. There are thousands of packages that I can install easily with Homebrew. It feels general purpose to me.
If you’re asking me that question I think you misread my comment.
This is a list of general purpose computer platforms Apple has made in the past in addition to the Mac. The Mac may be the last one they’ll ever make as open and general purpose as it is, which is a damn shame considering what they showed off with their Vision Pro announcement and press demos.
The disconnect is that you're thinking about computers for their ability to do computing. Most people don't care about whether their computers are good at computing, but are instead trying to accomplish some other task. In fact, the more that the 'computer' disappears, the better in their mind.
how are they stifling imagination? You can still get a compiler and text editor like always. Those two things were all we had back in "the good old days" of so-called general computing.
A few examples from my own childhood. Some freedoms were good and some are bad, but my mom said they were all worth it for what I learned:
· My dad made a custom boot script that gave me instant access to my favorite games.
· I sent a computer to the repair shop for weeks after figuring out how to change the computer to use an unsupported screen resolution.
· My Palm Pilot had several video game emulators.
· Our Windows 95 computer got the Ripper virus from my friend's 3.1 machine. It replicates if you boot the machine with an infected floppy disk connected, but it doesn't affect 3.1, so he had no idea his was infected.
They don't care until they need to do something that they can't do because their platform doesn't allow them to do it. There's no reason why compilers couldn't run on phones. Modern phones are more powerful than computers were even 15 years ago. And yet you can't do the things on a modern phone that you could on that computer from 15 years ago. At least you can't do it nearly as easily because of artificial limitations.
> And yet you can't do the things on a modern phone that you could on that computer from 15 years ago. At least you can't do it nearly as easily because of artificial limitations.
This may be a con for enthusiasts, but these artificial 'limitations' are exactly why Apple has been successful with the mass market. 15 years ago, computers were plagued by drive-by downloads, malvertising, and other crap. People in the early 00s spent millions of dollars paying repair technicians to uninstall toolbars, adware, and other junk software they were duped into installing.
But Apple, Google and co do the same thing themselves. Here's an example from Android:
Mom gets a new Android phone.
The phone asks if she wants to back up pictures she takes (it even used a weird word in my native language that I had never heard before).
She selects yes.
A few months later Google tells her to upgrade her subscription plan for Google Drive, because her Drive space is full. If she doesn't upgrade then scary things will happen!! (They said she wouldn't receive emails anymore.)
So she comes to me with it. It's an annoying process to delete the photos, especially when you're trying to make sure it only deletes it on Drive and not locally.
A week later she comes to me and says her drive space is full again, because the phone will keep pestering her to turn on cloud backups.
I have no faith that Apple doesn't pull some similar types of tricks. People who don't handle computing devices well will fall for all of these prompts about this and that. The alternative is that they never update their phone and don't understand why things don't work anymore.
They make an awful lot of their money selling what I'd assume to be general purpose computing devices.
I run mostly mostly open source software on mine. Almost everything made for the linux ecosystem is also available packaged for MacOS or can be trivially built on MacOS.
Not really. They are bringing features out on all of their platforms at the same time, now, so where is more feature constancy. Some iOS UI treatments have been brought to MacOS and some MacOS UI elements have been brought to iPadOS. But MacOS is not getting locked down the way that a phone is.
For me it's things like iCloud Photos having no API to access them and no reasonable way to pull them out or back them up. So very much a trap. Among other things.
I will fully admit this is a big problem with Apple. God forbid you have two iCloud accounts and want to merge (not just the photos) My sister has two from living in another country for a decade and me, our dad, her husband, and her gave up after hours and hours and multiple trips to the Apple Store. I see there are some software out there but it shouldn’t require it to merge what are essentially files, and who knows if they will merge everything. I think we’d have to download individual documents, maybe in batches of 10, from what I remember.
Thanks! I looked into it when that article got posted actually, and near as I can tell that isn't a solution to this problem - and that is fully intentional on Apple's part - because:
1) That article is for things in iCloud Drive, which is everything EXCEPT iCloud Photos. Though you can put photos in iCloud Drive (as files), they just won't be seen as photos, visible in iCloud Photos (or the Photos app), etc. without importing them on an Apple device manually into the Photos app. Where they'll then be synced into iCloud Photos.
The photos that are imported/stored in the Photos App on Apple devices also are not visible in iCloud Drive after being imported into iCloud Photos.
2) It only works on Mac/Apple devices. And only locally. So you'd need to sync to a Mac device, then backup the mac device, then hope it all works. No direct backup is available. So even if it did allow syncing iCloud Photos, it is a really awkward and brittle way to back them up.
3) There ARE APIs for iCloud Drive. But not iCloud Photos.
The web iCloud Photos interfaces also only does manual per-album level downloads (no Takeout or global download equivalent) of photos using the web interface), which stops working at scale VERY quickly.
Notably, Google Photos stopped providing the Google Drive interface to Google Photos shortly after Apple made this their standard operating procedure. So it's a common theme.
Though Google Photos does have APIs and Takeout, so it's lockin is less 'firm', and they're definitely less obnoxious about it. The Takeout data requires some significant massaging to get equivalent from what is visible in Google Photos though.
This is the kind of sneaky trap I've learned to be wary of, as Apple does this a lot for lock-in purposes with their hardware too.
The photo library on a Mac can be in any local drive. You could put it on iCloud Drive but that would be redundant.
You iPhone or iPad take photos and store them in a local cache that syncs to iCloud. It is separate from iCloud Drive but the storage comes from the same iCloud capacity that you have subscribed to.
On your Mac the files are stored in a library folder that can be on any local drive. Those files can be backed up like any other file. Any changes you make to those files, like in the Photos app, are synced to iCloud Photos.
The photos in the local library are accessible but they are not really meant to be accessed. The meta data about the photos is stored in a database, not the files. There are original files, modified files, and thumbnail files.
If you want to you can export some or all photos to separate files and do what you want with them.
I do the backups from my Mac. Photos on that Mac is configured to download all of the photos in iCloud Photos. It is the source of truth for my photos. The photos are stored in a library directory as discrete files and the backup software has no problem backing them up.
It would be trivial to restore the whole set of photos. It is more complex to restore specific individual photos as you would need to know the file name of that photo.
If you want to generate an alternate photo store you can export some or all of the photos but that is not necessary for backups.
Seems like as long as they all fit, that should work. But does require a non-iPad/non-mobile device with enough storage, as iPad/iPhones don’t have backup mechanisms besides iCloud.
I don’t have a Mac laptop anymore, and my library was starting to get too big to fit on any one device. That’s when I realized they had no other way of accessing/moving/transferring/backing up, so I moved it out using some special photo backup software before I got stuck.
Yep I get way better service on iPhones. Even with wifi calling. I get 0-2 bars where I live. With my iPhone I don’t even have a tenth of the same reception problems.
> My previous three phones from LG, Motorola, and Xiaomi all had major software bugs
I see this pattern with a lot of IPhone users. They tried the cheapest worst quality android phones and came away with a bad taste in the mouth. So iPhone is the only "decent cellphone in 2023". My dude you never tried the good android phones. Get a Samsung galaxy flagship. These are at par, if not better than the similarly priced iPhone model in all respects.
Me too. Love android UI more actually, the screens more, and the fast charging more, but a few things such as the photos/videos are what drew me to finally get a 13 pro max. I still use android on a wifi only phone and tablet and enjoy it but iphone is nice for daily driver and because the photos i can take and battery life post charge when full seems to be longer.
I've had both Pixels and iPhones (work phone). They're mostly the same to me, except that iphones are much more expensive for no good reason (besides branding). I like that they still make small phones though. Was super happy with my pixel 4a, but they don't make such small phones anymore unfortunately.
KISS launcher is one of the main reasons I gave my iPhone XS to my dad. On iOS I'm not even allowed to place app icons where I want to. The freedom to install any app I want is another main advantage.
Most people just want their defaults to be good enough but there's no reason to limit those that want something that works better for them.
Obviously iOS does some things incredibly well. E.g. gesture navigation on Android is objectively worse than on iOS.
How are we still, 15 years later, stuck in the feigned incredulity stage of android vs ios?
"I don't see how anyone still buys an ____. How can you not see the overwhelming evidence that ____ is unequivocally the better phone?"
If either device can fit in either blank, as it has all over this thread, perhaps that's because there hasn't been any undeniably impactful feature improvements on either platform in the last decade.
Tribalism. Just like politics and brand preferences in other economic sectors (cars, computers, and so on).
I for one think both Android and iOS are pretty awful operating systems. I still look forward to a viable third option, and would especially enjoy a phone that functions more like an accessory or terminal to my computer, rather than a first-class computer in its own right.
> Despite inflation numbers falling through the quarter and ongoing strength in the job market, consumers hesitated to upgrade their devices amid market uncertainty.”
> Apple’s resilience was driven by strong promotions across postpaid and prepaid. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile continued to offer $800+ promo credits for the iPhone 14 while old-generation iPhones were also steeply discounted across prepaid. We are seeing no weakness in the overall promotional activity.
Perfect storm, especially for a broke-ass like me. When it stops being about features and starts being about "cheap"...
Then again, I'm going dumb phone next month, which is _even cheaper_. Take that, smartphone market!
I have a love/hate relationship with Verizon. Okay, more often hate/hate, but still. They have the best network in this area when we're out in the sticks. But their pricing is pretty high. They'll offer $800 on a new iPhone, and then the credit comes one month at a time over 36 months. Meanwhile, you're paying $70-80 per phone. You might as well take the upgrade when available, if you're going to stick with them, because otherwise you're just paying for other people's upgrades.
I'd switch to Visible (the Verizon prepaid) and pay half the price, except they don't yet support standalone Apple watches. So we continue to pay almost $200/mo for a family of four (with only two real smartphones), because of those watches. Some day the kids will be old enough that my wife will let them have smartphones, and we'll switch to some plan that costs half as much.
Who else has cheap data sims? Is this still a killer feature of GoogleFi alone (one time $5 fee for a data sim)?
I really wish companies would be happy to sell data. Making a bunch of addon charges to get me to he point where I can consume data is such a defiance of what these companies best utility should be: carrying data.
The one other thing that almost wholly shapes who I'd go with for an MVNO is what speed I get after soft cap. Everyone has unlimited & everyone will eventually slow you down to much slower speeds: what life is like after that threshold is why I cling to my absurdly expensive very grandfathered Verizon Unlimited, which they won't even let me bump my SMS allowance on.
This is exactly my biggest question about every network out there. What happens after soft-cap?
> The one other thing that almost wholly shapes who I'd go with for an MVNO is what speed I get after soft cap.
This should have to be advertised alongside any deal in big bold print. It should be in the main paragraph outlining the plan in every review. But instead it's often buried somewhere in terms & service, or uses vague words like "lowered priority" (even though it just means you'll be soft capped). If it's available at all. And most reviews / descriptions of plans don't mention this. The awareness around this issue needs to be the focus of most of these plans, in my view.
Agreed. I recently travelled over the US border to Canada (to a major city) and was shocked by the International data pittance, and what Verizon considers "3G speed". Crossing that imaginary line took me back almost 15 years and as much as I want to blame Verizon and their CA partner, apparently they're one of the "better ones"!
I use visible. It has been trash basically everywhere I go. I live in austin and it's almost completely useless there. I haven't traveled to a single area yet where I've been happy with the service.
Yup, there are plenty of MVNOs out there that operate on your choice of network. I use US Mobile, which I'm generally happy with. I haven't even had to think about it really for the past 2 years. Better yet, there was a recent price reduction, instead of a price increase as I was almost always dealing with on Verizon or AT&T. I think I went from $25/mo to $21/mo.
What a wreck. Then, I'm never surprised. It's always been a rip-off built on having the "next best thing" at all times. Well, a price is paid for that, as you demonstrate. Blech!
I also don't want to spend a lot of money on phones and when my last android phone broke (dropped it one too many times and the glass shattered) I got an iPhone SE. But I kind of hate it. When the better goes (which will only be a few years, I'm amazed at how poor the capacity is, you really don't get a lot of value with low end apple phones) I'm going to switch back to cheap android with a big battery. I'm a low-usage phone user so android was fine for me.
For me the sweet spot is an SE with a battery case. A ‘full size’ phone still wouldn’t cut it with my usage, so this way it’s heavy, but still fairly compact and gets the job done.
Ha, what a world! I've known that Apple's actually been fairly competitive from a cost benefit analysis wise for a long time at the hardware level but it's very funny to see a comment associating Apple with being the cheaper option.
Edit: I see you answered below ;-)
Which dumbphone are you getting? (Nokia) That's awesome. I've been doing a PHONEVORCE lately... it's been several years in the making as I've shed all social media, and deleted and blocked nearly everything that I can waste time on with my phone.
Now my phone use is for looking at maps, checking which aircraft are nearby, email, and direct messaging.
It's pretty calm! I'm reading more, mental health seems very good, I learn neighborhoods really well cause I don't use GPS.
It's really nice not staring at that fucking box all the time.
Not had a smartphone or even a cell phone plan in years. I live in silicon valley and run a b2b company.
I manage bank accounts, travel a lot, keep up with friends, clients, and peers, etc etc, and get by fine with looking up directions before I leave with a paper map as a backup.
Turns out you actually do not NEED a phone. I have a very digitally connected lifestyle which makes it that much more important I be -disconnected- whenever a workstation screen is not in front of me so I can be -present- in whatever I am doing or with whomever I am doing it with.
Where do you live that gyms don't work without a smartphone? Must be some hipster SV place with Juiceros and Keurigs I imagine.
All the gyms I've been to in Europe give you either a physical RFID card or armband for access when you sign up, no smartphone required. Then again I've only been to the most budget gyms, not the uber-fancy ones of tech-bros, lawyers and corporate elites, so maybe those gyms have "smarter" access systems too but I couldn't care less.
I know at least Puregym in the UK eschews physical passes, and while 80% of people check in by scanning the QR code on the app, they also just give you a number which you can put in the keypad on the door instead
Fwiw, I have smartphone (iPhone 12 work mandated / provided, and a samsung note for myself), but I don't use it for banking, gym, shopping, payments, etc. Guess I'm old school but Financial stuff I like to do on computer, for access I like physical tokens. Yes I print my air tickets! :-) I like to reduce my failure modes and I view my phone as disposable, even though tech companies want to equate it with my life / identity.
You can have a non-ios non-android device for maps, visit a non-requiring a smartphone gym, use a plastic card instead of NFC and a website instead of bank app. Also use phone/email for voice/text conversations instead of 14 apps every one of which are full of ads.
Yes to all of that except for banking. I have to confirm login and every operation with either an OTP generated by the app of the bank or with a fingerprint in the app of the bank. In the best case they could run on am emulator on my laptop but I never checked if it works.
I really don't. I exercise at home. I can just go to the bank, or if I have a balance inquiry, call them. They also have a desktop web application that I can use. The only one I really need on that list is maps, which my dumpy trash-heap will have.
I'm going to be getting a Nokia 6300 4G. Smart enough to have google maps, dumb enough to stay out of my head.
I've been recommended to "just get a GPS" -- they're like $300, and I'm cheap :) so my dumpy little phone will have to do the job. That's like, the #1 thing I _really need_ out of a phone; the rest is distracting trash.
The best part is that you can pay _ridiculously low_ prices month to month through various carriers. Like $15 / month in the US, on top of the phone being $70. Good stuff in my opinion. I thought I was getting off good with ~$45 a month for Google Fi.
> I've been recommended to "just get a GPS" -- they're like $300, and I'm cheap :)
Get a second-hand Android device for those tasks, install LineageOS and F-Droid/Aurora Droid, don't put in a SIM card and you're set for much less than $300. You'll be running free software - e.g. OsmAnd for mapping using off-line maps, no connectivity necessary - and you won't be feeding Google (et al) your data as you will using that Nokia. The battery will last a long time with connectivity disabled as well, longer than that on those $300 GPS receivers.
This is a _fascinating_ idea. I have a Pixel 4a right now, can I install this stuff on there and just switch to a dumb phone entirely for... phone purposes?
To be clear, there is no need to replace the stock firmware unless you are taking a hard ideological stance. You can install F-Droid on most any Android phone, then install OSMAnd+ from F-Droid over WiFi, download some maps, and then turn off the networks to use it offline as a GPS-only device.
Replacing the firmware with something de-googled would make it more certain that don't login with a Google account during initial phone setup nor send any telemetry during that period before you go offline, or if you go back online eventually for map updates etc.
Also, if you're going to use it offline as just a "GPS tool", you might not care about other issues like getting firmware updates. It won't be subject to attack if you're offline and not browsing the internet...
> going dumb phone next month, which is _even cheaper_
You sure it's cheaper? I've been unable to find a dump phone for a good price - a used smartphone on eBay is far far cheaper. Also a Chinese android phone, and just don't use the "smart" parts.
That’s just such a US. American problem that it is honestly, kind of funny in a dumb way from any other part of the world. Like SMS itself is a legacy, insecure tech, it really should not be used at all anymore, unless you really only know their phone number. Knowing that you are not sending SMS when you see a blue bubble, but apple just conveniently put their internet-based message system into the same app is not a hard concept. Similarly, you can install Telegram, Whatsapp, Messenger, Signal, Element X (which I all have installed besides Whatsapp) and communicate with people available through those application at the utterly tiny inconvenience of having to open that app first.
You can’t send images/videos through a Short Messaging Service, period. That’s not apple being anticompetitive, this is literally the technology’s limitation. It is also terrible from an encoding point of view, and probably why the rest of the world had no problem ditching it for most things, as sending an Unicode message takes up plenty characters, making you have to send 2 messages even with moderately long text. (I remember removing ‘ö’s and spaces when I was a child and had stricter limits on the number of SMSs in my plan.
People are just eating what Google says raw. Apple will just need to implement RCS and everything will be better.
Don't worry that the only universally available RCS relay is operated by Google and encryption is a part of a non-standard Google extension. So Google wants Apple to hand all messages over to Google.
For fun, Apple should propose to implement RCS but only if Google agrees to use the Apple relay. No chance it would ever be accepted.
And the included encryption is beyond useless if it is instantly dropped when sent to a device that doesn’t understand the new protocol. That’s such a huge security vulnerability that it is just security theater to encrypt in the first place. Though I’m sure it has to do something with all those messages going through google’s servers.
Actually it’s not true for iMessage. Messages switches to SMS/MMS if the phone doesn’t support iMessage or has it disabled, but if it’s an iMessage it’s an iMessage—encryption and all—and you can see in advance if that is the case.
That said I don’t know what Google’s messenger actually does when it drops the encryption on RCS messages. Is there a visual distinction between encrypted RCS and unencrypted RCS on the sender end if it is just dropping the encryption on the receiving end as a fallback?
> Similarly, you can install Telegram, Whatsapp, Messenger, Signal, Element X (which I all have installed besides Whatsapp) and communicate with people available through those application at the utterly tiny inconvenience of having to open that app first.
...and the not insignificant inconvenience of knowing which of these apps each of your contacts uses or prefers. There really is a network effect of most people in a particular circle just using one thing. For US iPhone users at least, that thing is iMessage.
I have my family on Telegram as well as some close friends, a single friend on Element, most other people who are less tech-aware are using FB’s Messenger so I can’t ditch that unfortunately. That’s not hard to keep in mind, it is not that many people I actively keep in contact with. Though I am no social butterfly, you may have it different.
Kids. I have never kept so many strangers in my phone until kids. Friends from school. Friends from random parks. Friends from random activities. Parents to coordinate this activity or that. Trying to remember which platform friend of the quarter is on is too much for me. The reduction of children is the worse. Few children in the neighborhood and everyone is an only child, so now we all have to schedule social interaction until they can read at least.
Yes, it is a US centric view, but it also explains why iOS market share is nearly unstoppable in the US. It will likely tilt much farther in that direction if there aren't fundamental changes in how people use messaging.
> Like SMS itself is a legacy, insecure tech, it really should not be used at all anymore, unless you really only know their phone number.
I use SMS mostly because the only people I know who don't are using Facebook stuff and I'm not going to do that. But I am nervous about the say when people stop using SMS so much because I don't look forward to having to have multiple messaging apps and trying to remember who is using what.
> You can’t send images/videos through a Short Messaging Service, period.
90% of people I message with use WhatsApp or Signal (and most of them use iPhones). I keep hearing about iOS messaging lock in, but I've never experienced it.
Those plain SMS threads are green instead of blue. That lets iPhone owners judge Android owners from afar. /s
Only half kidding. The real issue is just SMS vs data. And a little bit of feature parity - it's changed a few times, but until recently, if I "liked" a message in an SMS thread, we'd all see something like "Alistair like 'something said by somebody'" instead of just applying the thumb-up icon. This only gets worse for media sharing, link shares/snapshots, etc.
From what I understand (I am European, so never met anyone using iMessage) the real issue is that Apple refuses to distribute its application on Android, forcing instead communication from and to Android to travel via SMS. It's not a problem of SMS (which nobody really uses anymore), it's a deliberate choice. The genius is to allow enough communication between iPhone and Android as to not force iPhone users to switch app, while making it as uncomfortable as possible for both sides.
If it were possible at all, the best solution would be for Android to just block SMS from iMessage, citing some bogus security reason. Then iPhone users would be forced to switch app to communicate and the spell would be broken.
This has been a huge problem in my social circles.
I really like my current android device, but my wife and our friends have iphones and we are all constantly inconvenienced by the messaging and other poor sharing options between platforms.
They share things without having to think about it, and I have to come up with solutions that are acceptable to them.
Between this issue and the differences in performance in the last few years, it has me thinking of moving back to team blue after 10+ years on green.
Due to the distribution of cone cells of different colors in your retina, white on green is the hardest to read. Apple has probably caused car wreck deaths with the green bubble, even though you shouldn't read texts while driving, but they probably think a few deaths is worth it for the lock-in and stock incentives.
A simple example is the media sharing quality is horrendous when you transcend the iPhone/Android boundary. Can you communicate, yes. Is it as good as an all iMessage interaction, no.
Yup...my parents share videos from their iphone to my android and it is of a quality where you can literally count the pixels. Maybe there is a way to share higher quality, but they're not tech savvy and just do what is the default.
Maybe you could use any app asking WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Signal or even Messenger (is it still a thing?) They work well with video. WhatsApp wouldn't be running Europe if its videos were bad.
Telegram is by far the best one for video/photo quality because it doesn't do any (visible) compression, meanwhile WhatsApp and Messenger (yep, still exists) noticeably degrades the quality.
There is definitely a way to share higher quality, my feature phone could send better images and videos in 2010. EMS standards haven't gone away, apple just chooses not to use them because...
SMS can only handle a certain number of phone numbers. If a non-iPhone user receives a group message where their number is past the limit, they cannot reply. It has happened with my mother a number of times.
Android users that interact with iphone users via the default messaging apps end up going over SMS. This has a lot of annoying limitations (can't modify groups, for example).
iOS users will tell you how terrible that is and effectively put pressure on people to switch to iOS "like everyone else".
Yep, same boat here. All my Android friends are on Discord so that's where we talk. I talk to a small handful of friends on iMessage, my family, and then some work stuff for my side business but I do most my chatting in Discord at this point (and Slack for work).
Its annoying as hell, because iMessage isn't really useful when most of the people I write to don't have an iPhone.
100% I blame Google though, they need to get their ass together and make their own. It needs to work with everbody who already have a google account and they need to commit to it for 10 year minimum.
Then it is reasonable for Apple to create a system so they can talk together.
> It needs to work with everbody who already have a google account and they need to commit to it for 10 year minimum
This already exists. 10 years ago, Google Hangouts was separated from Google+. It is currently accessible through the Gmail web interface, Gmail app, and "Chat" app.
But they still have the chat app in gmail, then there was that allo thing as well, and whatnot.. Google honestly should be diagnosed with ADHD with that attention span.
Crazily, they also have something that looks just like it inside the either the Docs or Drive app, but it doesn't have the same chat history as the one under GMail!
I dismissed a notification with photos from my wife and then had a hard time figuring out where that conversation was, because it seemed like it would be chat but wasn't.
Incentive is to make it better for their users who have Android friends. They already did that with the last update that meant you could do Facetime group calls with them.
SMS vs data. iPhone to iPhone uses a data connection with richer media sharing features. Plus SMS is in a different color, so you can easily/remotely judge your peer for using Android.
Also, it is just fake open-source, at the end of the day all your data goes through google’s servers, with optional encryption that will be decrypted when you talk to an old device — that’s security theater.
Doesn't the encryption support depend on the messaging app? Meaning old devices could easily just update (even auto-update) to a newer version of Messages that does support encryption?
The original linked report is far less biased [1]. It seems the only reason there is demand for iphones right now is the heavy subsidies offered by carriers. I think few people are paying retail for those phones.
I'm thinking of making the switch to iPhone this year once the USB-C model comes out
Whether I regret it, not sure, I mean Android isn't _that_ bad really and the Samsung phones are good, but I think Apple have nailed the ecosystem thing a lot better than what google have.
From a support after the sale perspective? Yes it is.
The $399 2016 iPhone SE is still getting security updates today.
The original Google Pixel is also from 2016 but stopped getting any sort of updates at the end of 2019.
If you want a basic phone that will be supported as long as possible after the sale, the support length per dollar spent proposition of the SE models is pretty unbeatable.
I think this is a major factor that is driving market share towards iPhone.
This is 100% the reason I have an iPhone. I can usually eek out 5 yrs on an iphone before it’s taken one too many falls. Which has also been why any iPhone of mine has died, no other reason than I fumbled it around with no case on it…. Also much to my pleasure, the 13 mini was still available for my most recent upgrade, so now I don’t have a gigantic phone anymore either.
I have looked to get out of apples grasp, but nothing else comes close in terms of long term support, which is absolutely necessary for a device that touches all of my digital life.
You’re right, few people care about how long the phone will be supported.
What they do want is an inexpensive phone that still runs the latest software. Because Apple models are supported so long, people can buy used, old iPhones that still run the latest software.
Others trade in their phones often because they always want the new shiny. Because Apple models are supported so long, the used phone they trade in has more value, allowing them to fork over less cash for the latest Pro phone.
These are the sort of factors that drive Apple’s market share up.
> Because Apple models are supported so long, people can buy used, old iPhones that still run the latest software.
You (usually) can run the latest software on an old Android nowadays - the reason is that many of the functions which were previously baked into the system are now part of Google Play Services, which are upgraded like any other software package.
The only app to tell me that it will stop updating on my 5-year-old Android phone was... Slack.
I disagree. I know a bunch of people who buy cheap iPhones and use them forever because of this. And I know even more that buy old iPhones off Craigslist for $100-200 and use them for years.
Yes. I'd argue most people hate or are annoyed by updates. "Ugh, another update??" I hear this all the time. Or "X company updated my phone and everything is different, I hate updates!"
I'd argue that Google wouldn't keep gaslighting users about how it's fixed the update issue "for sure this year" if they didn't know that users care about updates.
I had an iPhone SE 2016 model for about 5 years, really the only thing that caused me to get rid of it was apps no longer supporting the screen size. I wasn't able to use my banking app properly because things would be cut off, amongst various other apps.
I have an iPhone SE. It might still be getting security updates but the actual user experience is quite bad now; new features and apps are just not designed for it. Meanwhile the original Google Pixel doesn't have the newest security updates but Play store apps and features still work properly on it.
If you read the OP linked report, contrary to the popular sentiment here and on Apple sites, that more people hold on to their Android phones longer than iPhones despite the lack of security updates
Maybe I’m just old, but the idea of have a device on the internet that no longer gets security updates just seems wrong. Learned too many lessons back in the 90s and the oughts.
I'm a graybeard too (with a security background), and I got over this. The problem started when companies combined forced updating with no longer issuing security updates separately from other updates.
If it were just security updates, I wouldn't mind automatic installations. But feature updates are too disruptive. So I avoid automatic updates where I possibly can.
I accept that there's a security risk associated with doing this, but for me, it's a risk that's worth taking.
Didn't some recent Google Pixels have a baseband issue that allowed a remote takeover of an unpatched device by hackers knowing nothing more than the device phone number?
I am still using an iPad Air 2 from 2014. In that same time span, I've had at least 4 different Android phones.
I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, although I'm a Google Voice user which makes me a little nervous about that prospect, plus I've been less than impressed with Safari's extension ecosystem.
This misses the point completely. Regular security issues happen often, in 2023 alone we've already had 809 CVEs in Android [0]. Saying we should overlook addressing those because sometimes a CPU level security issue comes along is absurd. Spectre and other similar families of attacks are comparatively rare enough that they have names not numbers, that should say enough.
I made the switch at the end of 2021 after only having an android phone since the very first one. I wouldn't say I regret the change but I would say I'm not impressed. The way so many of my friends mocked me for having an android phone and talked up their iphones made me think I _must_ be missing something. Alas, I don't feel that I was. Every once in a while I boot up my old android phone (oneplus 6) and use it and it's snappier than I remember and feels way better in my hand than my iphone does.
This was clear as day over 10 years ago, and is just as clear today.
Back in the early days of iPhone vs Android, there was a huge meme of iPhone users praising Apple for "inventing" features that Android had years ago [0]. I remember (but can't find right now) a screenshot of a conversation of an iPhone user all happy about iPhone getting SwiftKey and then saying "When is Android getting this? XD" and the other person responding with "About 4 years ago".
While the meme of "iPhone is better than Android because iPhone can do X" while Android has been able to do X for over 2 years no longer applies, there's still the meme that iPhone is somehow still a superior device. Apple has somehow convinced people that the iPhone is a luxury device, and there are some iPhone users that look down on Android users and think that Android is for people that can't afford iPhone, even though flagship Androids cost just as much.
It's just personal preference these days. I can't stand Apple's walled garden approach, but people that have multiple devices (laptop, tablet, phone, watch, etc) love it since it guarantees compatibility and functionality.
Similarly to that, I saw people in awe that when you receive a token via SMS on iPhone it allows you to copy it without opening the message. Something that Android also already had since before. In Android's case it even writes it on the app automatically without the need to do anything at all
AirDrop?
Handoff?
Fully encrypted iCloud storage, a first-of-its-kind offering that no other mass market OEM has been able to match?
Apple pay leading the market and getting mobile vendors to literally adopt contactless payments for the first time?
Mobile video chat that took Google years to replicate?
The list goes on. I don't know how one could say their software isn't powerful. It is.
To me it's the fact that it just works and I use it as a smart phone and not as a General Purpose Computer. There is a lot of ecosystem stuff on iOS that are just missing from Android. Plus the skinning of each manufacturer is/was terrible. Samsung's early TouchWiz was incredibly terrible...
I also use Android when I need more access to different things e.g. portable pocket pc that runs Linux.
I've launched Android based hardware products, I should be as Android deep as anyone can be and I use an iPhone.
"iPhone is better than Android because iPhone can do X" was never why anyone used iPhones. iPhones generally did things years later than Android but did them significantly better.
And Apple didn't need to convince people, they straight up were luxury devices compared to decay prone Android devices. Android lagged in locking down background services so battery would worsen over time as random apps did random garbage in the background. Lots of devices had weird eMMC and virtual FS bugs that'd also slow them down over time. And for a truly embarrassing length of history, top apps for things like flashlights would install lock screen ads on your device.
I agree it's more personal preference these days, but that's mostly because Google went and copied Apple's walled garden approach. Things power users loved got gutted, more and more core functionality became part of Google Play Services that vendors aren't allowed to modify. Because of Project Mainline even the Android runtime is about to start getting updated via Google Play.
FWIW When I switched from Android->iPhone, I didn't think much of it. Some stuff was better, some stuff was worse. I didn't 'feel' that much better.
Then when I switched back from iPhone->Android (Pixel 4) the change was a lot more jarring. I noticed a lot of polish and batteries issues and I missed my iPhone until I finally switched back.
My theory is it's similar to lifestyle creep. You wont appreciate improvements as much as you'll notice regressions.
> Every once in a while I boot up my old android phone (oneplus 6) and use it and it's snappier than I remember and feels way better in my hand than my iphone does.
I wonder if you'd use it as a daily driver for a longer time if you'd have the same experience as me.
I made the switch to iphone as well in 2021 after androids for 10 years and I echo this sentiment. It's not transformational, it's more or less the same, especially compared to a pixel flagship phone.
I still use google photos because I find it better and it works fine. My next phone will be a pixel again though.
I had a pixel 7 pro, that after a half a year developed a battery problem. I got my money back and could get another pixel but was afraid of battery problems again, and picked a one plus 10 pro. I regret it. Pixel has the best Android expirence on the market. I'm not buying iPhones probably ever. I tried iphone 14 pro max a little bit and it's not worth 400 EUR over the Pixel for me. I also had Samsungs, they are ok, but pixel is better.
Text entry on my android phone was much more reliably good than on the iPhone, and the ux was better. I've had to disable a bunch of stuff to make it work reasonably on iOS, and it still gets stuff wrong far more often than I'd like.
One of the things i unticked removed the words list you get for editing its errors, so i have to edit the mistakes by hand. Very annoying. (And the suggestions were crap anyway.)
iPhone is not what it is cracked up to be. A lot of lock in. Some things are absolutely annoying. When I went to Poland, I had to change my region to download apps from appstore, it messed up all my purchase history and subscriptions.
One thing I like is that I have an iPhone 12 and have no need to upgrade, the phones have a much longer life imo.
The statement "apple stuff is just so easy and it works" is EXTREMELY misleading. When it works it works but when it doesn't you generally won't find much good advice.
> The statement "apple stuff is just so easy and it works" is EXTREMELY misleading. When it works it works but when it doesn't you generally won't find much good advice.
I've been a Mac fan since OS X came out in 2000/2001, and had iPhones and android phones for years. Just a general "I like all the OSes... and I hate all the OSes" kinda person....
The worst thing about being caught in a situation where something doesn't work right, or is just outright broken? If you go to an iphone/mac themed discussion place to discuss it, you'll probably just get called an idiot and insulted. A lot.
I also hate how iOS kinda has dark patterns to keep you locked into Apple's iCloud services. Lately, MacOS has been getting worse about that too. I think the only Apple service I can log into without causing an Apple device to freak out and have iCloud take everything over is Apple Music.
My biggest beefs are trying to export a tens-of-thousands picture library out of icloud - there's no good reliable way to do it except to tell the Photos app on a Mac to download everything locally and then wait an eternity (like literally weeks) to do so. Then you can use a python script to read the sqlite db and dump everything with correct EXIF data... (if you don't, it's a complicated mess)
My favorite is how bad the ECG app on the Apple Watch is. Especially if your older parent who has the watch on the largest text size uses it. Basically, it becomes almost impossible to dismiss the legal warning screen that pops up if you touch the grey "sine wave, 65bpm" summary thing. If you do, you have to hit a teeny tiny target at the top left of the screen to go back to that summary screen, scroll down without touching the grey box, and then hit 'done' at the bottom.
THEN you reach for your iphone and open the health app you had open before. But it doesn't show the ECG you just recorded - unless you tap the notification from the home screen. When you do, it'll exit the health app and reopen it, so that the latest ECG loads.
It is the most hilarious and fucked interaction I've seen. Like, the Apple Health App is LITERALLY BROKEN and their workaround is to make the notification force-restart the app.
Originally, it was "install the emulator on your device," and you said that would cost $8.33/mo, which was wrong. Where exactly are you moving the goalposts now?
Hey, relax. Everything is not a debate. Take off the hostility glasses and re-read my post with some charity:
“Meepmorp you’re totally right, it doesn’t cost anything at all! However, I do highly recommend paying this meager sum because the benefits are quite substantial.”
And when I was on an Android phone, Apple users weren't too happy about me trying to use talk/hangouts/meet/duo or whatever Google's messaging app of the week was.
For interoperability, nothing beats SMS/MMS/POTS/SMTP.
Yes because with iOS you can also RESTORE your entire operating system from that same backup. And if you really want to, you can change the file location so that iTunes backup file sits in a cloud folder.
If you live in urban areas such as NYC, upgrades are important because of signal interference from skyscrapers, subways, below-ground parking garages, basements,and tower congestion etc. The improvement in modems (eg, now X65 going to X70 Qualcomm) and transceiver electronics are improved as well as battery life.
I yearly upgrade primarily but not only for that reason. The newer modems are particularly good at weak signals, eg, < 120 dBm.
I use Verizon and use iPad Pro and Apple Watch also on cellular. Works really well together.
Really depends on your use case if you are constantly piping various files from one app into another - android still has that down fairly well. Browser > NewPipe > VLC for instance.
If you are more focused on the curated ecosystem Apple does it much better.
I mostly use Android because of my work flow but I do not think many people in the grand scheme work like this.
Give iOS a try you could be plesantly surprised with it.
Every couple of years, I'd pick up an Android to see what I might be missing. My history includes the HTC1, Samsung 7, and Pixel 3.
But last time, I realized that while both types of phones were fine, the ecosystem between Apple and Android was like night and day. Even if the iPhone was a way worse phone, there'd be so much in the Apple ecosystem I'd also have to ditch. That's just a no-go.
Here's what I found from my last Android adventure:
1. The iPhone gets the basics right. It might not have the flashy AI stuff of Pixels or the folding thing from Samsungs, but it doesn't drop the ball on the basics like some others I mentioned.
2. Apple usually doesn't rush out half-done features to get people talking. New stuff is generally thought out and polished.
Adding a bit more to this, here are some things about iPhones not talked about much:
3. Attention to detail. There are loads of tiny things that on their own don't seem like a big deal, but when you put them together they make a huge difference in the experience. A lot of other phone makers overlook this in their race to jam more features in.
4. Consistency across phone generations. You usually don't see features on iPhones popping up one year only to vanish the next. Even 3D Touch hung around for 3-4 years.
5. Easy data migration between generations. I've got texts going back to 2012 when I first got an iPhone. That might not matter to some, but I don't want to lose my stuff just because I swapped phones. This is becoming more common on Android, but it's not consistent across all phone makers - unless you plug in a wire to transfer your data when you upgrade. Really, needing a wire in 2021? It's nice to have the option, but it shouldn't be the only way.
6. Generally better quality apps. There are a few Android apps that are better than their iOS counterparts, but in my experience, the scales are usually tipped in iOS's favor.
7. Apps that are only on iOS or get there first. Lots of high-quality (Apollo RIP) are still only on iOS and the developers don't seem to be in any rush to move them to other platforms. Can't say the same for many top Android apps. Also, lots of apps launch first on iOS, while the Android version drags its feet for months.
8. The iOS API. It's not perfect - it has its problems, but compared to the hot mess that the Android API can be, it's not half bad. How does this impact me as a user? Well, good APIs mean more developers can make better apps.
9. The camera. No, not the camera hardware or the fancy photography stuff. I mean how the camera works with the rest of the system and the camera APIs. Did you know that a lot of Android apps that use the camera just open it up and take a screenshot?
10. A consistent story. Apple is trying to tell a consistent story, slowly replacing many single-purpose items in your life like your wallet, keys, and ID, and even eventually your passport, with your iPhone. This is done consistently, not just stuffing whatever's new and hot into this year's phones only to toss it next year.
I could keep going, but this post is already pretty long. Maybe I'll add more another time.
There are a few other things people mention, but they aren't unique to Apple, like the hardware mute switch and Apple Pay.
Don't get me wrong - there are things about iPhones that really bug me, but this isn't the post for that. :-)
Pixel 3 was awhile ago. I quite like the hot mess of features that Android used to have. I want to try that new idea even if it doesn't work out. However, I think that's in the past now except for maybe foldable design which I'm not that interested in. It does feel like there's still some cool camera stuff coming from the Android side.
I just upgraded my Android phone, different manufacturer, the migration was done via my Google account I didn't have to plug in a cable.
> Did you know that a lot of Android apps that use the camera just open it up and take a screenshot?
I don't think I've ever seen that. I switched from iOS to Android quite some time back, I found iOS annoying because it felt like apps couldn't easily share with each other and a lot of tasks took too many steps. That was from an iPhone 5 so I imagine it's very different now, but I tried out a 14 and thought it still wasn't for me.
Interesting, this is what I'm considering too after exclusively using Android+Windows since forever. The enshittification of Windows is mainly what has changed my mind - worse privacy, UX, forcing users to use online accounts - but also life seems more simple when you only have Apple to consider instead of whatever shenanigans that Microsoft and Google throws at you. Furthermore, the UX of the Apple eco system seems better than anything I've encountered on Android+Windows.
One thing to note is that Apple also tries very hard to get you to log in to their online services when you use your phone or laptop. They're not as overt as MS about requiring it yet, but I would not be surprised if it was coming.
As for UX, I feel like it's hit and miss for me. With the huge caveat that I haven't used Windows 11, Windows beats MacOS in a lot of areas. For example, I prefer older versions of Windows to MacOS for window management, and Explorer is a lot better than Finder in my opinion. Those are two major pieces of the user experience!
I recently sold a bicycle to a guy, over Craigslist. He sent me the funds with Venmo from his Pixel 7. Not only did it take tens of seconds for Venmo to initially draw itself, after that the platform offered, in a pop-up dialog, to kill the process every few seconds. The entire experience was pure jank. I don't know what that person had done to their phone but it should have been up to Android to have prevented it. That's Google's flagship phone!
Android’s problem is Pixel is the only good one, and it has not been flagship quality since the Pixel 2.
The 3 had odd issues, the 4 had a laughable battery life, and 5-7 are a weird mix of midrange and flagship capability (trending towards flagship, but not in the club yet).
All other Android vendors are on a continuum of crap, between these points:
1. loaded with bloat and customizations that aren’t better than what Google provides, whose main point is to say “but I’m not Google” (Samsung)
2. vanilla-ish Android but missing capabilities that are normal in Pixel
If Google would take Pixel seriously, it would be a credible competitor.
This "Pixel is the only good Android" sentiment is so bizarre to see. Similarly the point about Samsung devices being loaded with bloat and customizations that aren't better.
That second argument was valid like 5 years ago, but definitely not today. Samsung devices do still have a lot of customization, but most of it is actually pretty useful in my experience. Lots of little features that I hadn't realized would be nice to have and similarly to Apple, lots of cross-device integration conveniences, except that unlike Apple, they don't lock you in anywhere near as strongly. The S23U and Tab S8U are amazing devices both in hardware and software.
And then there are other pretty great devices from Sony, Motorola, OnePlus etc.
Indeed, Samsung is still dealing with the bloat reputation from the TouchWiz days, which is a shame because some of their features like multitasking are way better than stock/pixel android.
> That second argument was valid like 5 years ago, but definitely not today.
I disagree. It's still valid.
> Samsung devices do still have a lot of customization, but most of it is actually pretty useful in my experience.
Ahh, that may be why we have different experiences. You consider their stuff to be useful -- which is a totally fair opinion -- but I consider it all to be worthless bloat -- which is another totally fair opinion.
I don't mind that it's there. I do mind that I can't delete it.
> I don't mind that it's there. I do mind that I can't delete it.
This is the key point. Not giving the user the choice. Yes, they can install a different program that does the same thing, but the manufacturer-dictated programs are still there, taking up space in storage, the app list, and possibly memory if they're doing potentially user-hostile shit in the background.
Hot take: I find recent Samsung flagships far superior to what Google offers, especially the latest S23: small and speedy with longer SW support than a pixel, better CPU/GPU and better cameras, at a decent price. Bloatware and Android implementation is also not too bad.
Also Samsung DEX can save your bacon in case your laptop dies and you don't have a spare but need a quick desktop experience for some multitasking productivity task thill your laptop is being fixed.
This. Dex is Samsung's killer feature - but noone seems to know about it!? It's especially relevant to developers.
It's now common to see monitors that have an integrated usb hub - so no docking station needed. Just plug your phone in via one cable, it will charge, send video, and use keyboard+mouse.
You can have a 4k60 desktop, and then run termux and almost achieve a desktop-equivalent development environment. Unfortunately the newer android kernels are missing certain linux features so you can't run containers without rooting. If you do want to root then you can definitely have it all! Personally I don't want to spend the time tinkering to hide root from the banking apps.
It also works great for running things like Geforce Now and streaming games in 4k resolution, with a paired bluetooth controller.
To get the higher resolutions you need a newer Samsung flagship, S22/S23. And maybe also need to enable extra stuff via "i love dex" option in multistar.
Or I can get a proper workstation (which I already have because I need it for proper work) which will run circle around the dex. Have you tried to run Android Studio with a big project? You need some good computing power for indexing the code and building it.
That may be the case for your particular bloated use case but it works fine for many others.
You can also remote desktop to your main workstation when mobile. Moonlight offers a low-latency self-hosted gamestream similar to geforce now, but also works great for desktop usage.
You misunderstood. DEX is not there to replace your workstation, but can be a short-term productivity workstation, in case your laptop is stolen or in for repairs.
How about Google bloatware? Samsung Internet browser is far more superior than Google Chrome, but you can't uninstall Chrome. Of Gmail. Or Play Store. Much of the bloat is coming from Google. After all, it's a Samsung device, not a Google device.
I used to be some kind of Androis purist, owner of multiple Nexus and Pixel devices. But for several years now, I'm sticking with Samsung.
Which bloatware and what problems does it make you?
For me, I don't really consider Microsoft Office as bloatware as I can use it, plus, what's bloatware for you might be useful apps for others, and I found it stays out of my way once I push it to the side if I don't need it, so it's existence is a non-issue for usability.
Samsung bloatware used to be bad in the past but now it's decent IMHO, and I think people are being overly pedantic and mostly overblow the problem of some bloatware just to win some religious argument of "my choice of phone is better than yours" while ignoring the other useful reasons people buy it.
If you wanna see real bloatware, check out Chinese phones.
It is utterly insane how much crap they have in baked in. Everything tries to connect to you ludicrous samsung account and the best selling point their apps have is that they try to masquerade them as standard android apps and not a cheap samsung knockoff.
I have to support friends with samsung a bit and I get a headache even touching them. Great cameras, wouldn't touch one even if I was paid to actually use it.
And this is using top-of-line devices. They also have the absolute lowest range too, which is quite impressive hardware/dollar wise but the software situation is of course even worse on such an underpowered device.
The telemetry and the dark patterns they utilize gets me in the stomach. The big problem is that for I guess the majority that don't actively fight it they get extremely tied to samsung. Which I guess is a key reason to their success. A big detriment to android though.
>So, exactly as with google trying to sign into google's account?
Massive difference though. Samsung tries to trick people to use it by not being up front with what account it is and what it is for.
Now, don't get me wrong. Google would probably do the same, but in this case they don't have to - because it is their OS. It is trivial to skip the google account if you want but it actually has its place in android. A samsung account on the other hand just makes things objectively worse, and at every turn they dare they try to get you deeper into their dependence, always trying to trick you into depending on samsung for the same stuff google already does for you (if you went that route).
How you can compare the two boggles me.
And even if the shady practices doesn't bother you and you feel like they are equally bad, then both of them are twice as bad. Why on earth would I want to use one I didn't have to?
And above all, why would I tie my android experience to one vendor?
> Again, same for google's apps which people think "come as a part of android", but in reallity they arent?
Really not the same, but yes, google bundles crap too if that is your point. Samsung is way better at making crap though. Regardless, who should be bundling crap anyway? The OS vendor or the hardware vendor? The hardware vendor is more than fine to write apps directly related to hardware features but other than that they should just fuck off.
> As if google doesn't use telemetry?
You think it is ok if Dell installs telemetry on a Windows PC? As much as I hate google what samsung is doing doesn't compare.
>Google would probably do the same, but in this case they don't have to - because it is their OS. It is trivial to skip the google account if you want but it actually has its place in android.
No, it's not.
AOSP is free and open source OS that is completely functional without google's account or services.
>Samsung tricks you into depending on them for the same stuff as google.
Well yes, but either we give a pass to both of them or none. Giving a pass to google just because "they are the more popular one" is simply dellusional and puts unfair expectations on any1 who tries to challange the status quo of current market.
>Why on earth would I want to use one I didn't have to?
If you treat those companies as necessary evil, then you are correct, it's more logical to choose the path with the least ammount of "deals with the devils".
But at the same time, this aproach is anti-competative. You will always buy into the biggest vendor, because it gives you the most features.
>And above all, why would I tie my android experience to one vendor?.
But you are alrady doing that with google's experience. Samsung just gives you an alternative. Some people like it, others don't. But it's just a preference.
> Regardless, who should be bundling crap anyway? The OS vendor or the hardware vendor?
AOSP foundation is vendor of base android.
Google is vendor of google's android.
Samsung is vendoer of samsungs OneUI.
We are going to give google a pass literally just because they play a word game where they don't explicitly name pixels OS as "G-UI", like samsung does with their launcher? What?
>The hardware vendor is more than fine to write apps directly related to hardware features but other than that they should just fuck off.
But samsung doesn't markets itself as ONLY hardware vendor. They are software vendor as well, and their software is OneUI.
Just as google's software isn't AOSP, it's google android.
This whole distinction between hardware/software/OS is irrationall.
> No, it's not. AOSP is free and open source OS that is completely functional without google's account or services.
That's just what I said. But most tie the android experience to the app ecosystem, which (not necessarily, but in practice (for most people)) is tied to the play store. Which requires a google account.
> Well yes, but either we give a pass to both of them or none.
WHY?! Google is honest about it. Why are they honest about it? Because they happen to be in a position where they can be honest about it. Samsung choose not to, because they rather trick people.
Google is required for the typical android experience. Samsung is only required if you like to be abused. They are not the same.
> But at the same time, this aproach is anti-competative. You will always buy into the biggest vendor, because it gives you the most features.
No, you buy into the vendor that is required. Not the one that tries to bully you and sneak under the radar.
> Just as google's software isn't AOSP, it's google android.
Google makes both. Google is much close to AOSP. Doesn't matter at all huh?
Google follows the typical android UX (close than anyone else at least), samsung tries to be different just for the sake of being different.
The competition to android is not samsung, it is non-android OSes
This is like defending tracking popups. They are abusive, illegal, user hostile and doesn't offer anything. But somehow avoiding sites that has them is anti-competitive?
> Which bloatware and what problems does it make you?
Just about every single pre-installed app? Their store, their browser, Bixby, Bixby vision, messaging, their car mode, their friends, Galaxy smartwatch BS, SmartThings, their weather app. It's all - to an app - worse than the alternatives, and worse than Google's defaults if that's your preference.
You can disable any app aside from the Galaxy Store, I believe. Takes like 5 minutes to do them all if you are a die hard Samsung hater.
> Their store, their browser, Bixby, Bixby vision, messaging, their car mode, their friends, Galaxy smartwatch BS, SmartThings, their weather app. It's all - to an app - worse than the alternatives, and worse than Google's defaults if that's your preference.
They don't have their own car mode or messaging, they use Android Auto and Google Messages.
As someone who uses some of them, Samsung apps are actually quite good generally.
Even if they were all hot garbage, there is nothing wrong with having more options IMO. All you lose is a bit of diskspace if you disable them.
> They don't have their own car mode or messaging, they use Android Auto and Google Messages.
As of late 2021 when I got my last Samsung this was not the case for the default messaging app. I thought driving mode (not Android Auto alternative) was different too but I do feel less confident about that.
I don't want the OS to have any material differences at all between devices. Android should be like Windows, which is the same no matter where it's running. Even the "good" changes that manufacturers make are unwelcome, because they dull much of the appeal of an OS like Android where hardware vendors are interchangeable and can be switched on a whim without software downsides. I don't want to become dependent on some manufacturer-specific change.
If it were practical to do so, every Android device I buy would immediately have its OS replaced with something like LineageOS or Pixel Experience to eliminate these variances, much as technically inclined people will wipe the Windows install that comes stock on a prebuilt PC in favor of vanilla Windows.
> Even the "good" changes that manufacturers make are unwelcome, because they dull much of the appeal of an OS like Android where hardware vendors are interchangeable and can be switched on a whim without software downsides. I don't want to become dependent on some manufacturer-specific change.
So you want a worse software experience all the time in case you have to use said worse software experience in the future because of a hardware change? And you don't want Android hardware vendors to be able to differentiate themselves with software, giving all of the power to Google?
Doesnt make sense to me. Seems a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It's something I see as necessary because products manufacturers you trust can and will sour on a dime (see OnePlus) or even get out of the business entirely (see LG and countless other former Android handset companies). If manufacturers want my loyalty, they can get it by consistently producing superior hardware (both technically and in fit and finish) and treating me well as a customer. Those things on their own are stronger differentiating factors (excellence is unusual) than software gimmicks that rarely live up to promise.
That "OS should be coherent" argument would work if android itself was providing all those options.
But it's not.
Go to AOSP source and the "phone app" you'll find there is deprecated, ugly crap that no one ever uses.
The 'nice' one is just a google app that's not only closed source, but equally bloated as the samsung's one.
People give google's apps this weird pass, as it's not the same kind of bloat as the manufacturers one, but there is no reason to treat them differently.
This is increasingly true as Google is moving further and further away from AOSP, and I think it's eroding the appeal of Android as a whole.
That said, at least Google apps talk to just Google. Samsung apps for example have been shown to connect to numerous different analytics services and ad networks even if you spring for the most expensive devices they sell which isn't great.
It is, if you wipe it and reinstall plain Windows and whatever drivers are necessary, which is trivial on x86 PCs and basically the default for technically capable individuals.
But even then, PC manufacturer bloatware doesn't typically modify the OS itself and is just extra crap bolted to it. The versions of Android that gets shipped on phones and tablets by contrast are different at the source level, sometimes bearing significant divergences from AOSP.
Razer and Nvidia drivers almost force a login on you and do things like constantly spin up and wear out your idle HDDs searching for games to "optimize." You often have to do a research project filled with SEO spam to get around stuff like that.
At least in the case of Nvidia, the drivers bundled with Windows are good enough for most peoples' needs. It sucks for those of us who want up to date drivers for more demanding use cases though.
I am just personally opposed to Google having all that much access to my data, which is quite funnily only possible to prevent on an android by having.. a pixel and installing GrapheneOS on top.
Sure, lineage and such exist for other phones as well, but people seem to forget that it is not some thinkpad where you can just swap the OS to your liking — plenty of phones have proprietary firmware that auto-wipes on reinstall. I wouldn’t want my fancy, expensive S-twenty-X’s camera to become essentially garbage.
Sure, each to his own, but personally I and others don't really care about the preexisting apps as they're few and they stay out of my way and don't pester me.
I just want a great phone for a decent price, that fits all my needs and I'm not gonna die on this "zero-bloatware" hill for the sake of a philosophical stance, because I'm not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
What use to me is a zero bloatware device that doesn't have the HW, features or updates, that I personally need and value?
It's reasonably small for today's bloated standards. Unfortunately it's heavy even if it's not a 200 g monster. The real problem is that it costs 3 times as much as a phone is worth. Not that I couldn't spend those money, but why?
>The real problem is that it costs 3 times as much as a phone is worth.
Everyone values things differently. You're just not the target audience. There's other cheaper phones out there of lower specs, but all are much bigger in size though as cheap phones tend to overcompensate with bigger screens. Plus, they're full of spyware and adware, yes, way more than in premium Android phones.
Sony's phones seem best to me. Vanilla android with headphone jacks and microsd slots. They're just expensive. Nobody ever talks about Sony's phones for some reason but I think that's great because I wouldn't want them to get an ego and start ruining a good thing.
Overall though, what's killing Android is Android (through Google)
Every release gets more limited & restrictive, as does the Play store & framework.
If they want to downgrade android to be iOS, while iOS is improving, at some point I might as well just buy iOS.
I think Android reached its peak around 4.4 Kitkat. I'm still sitting on 9 knowing that things get even worse on 10 & 11. Who knows what Android 12 has? Who cares?
Lol ok. I have a pixel 5a and honestly, I regret getting it over a $200 moto g power. Those phones are fantastic and you can slap a third party rom like lineage on there and use it basically forever.
Well the pixel is generally about the newest android that's the flagship software experience, with a decent camera, running on 1-2 year older hardware. But in my experience the lack of crapware and gaming benchmarks means it feels pretty snappy compared to Samsung.
I tried Samsung a few times, even with more ram it was vicious about killing tasks in the background so switching apps always did a splash screen and relaunch. Some apps do that well, others not so much. I tracked it down and apparently that behavior helps it win benchmarks. Even on a generation older hardware the pixel felt much snappier, I could multitask with 3-4 apps going, and the home button was MUCH snappier. I verified it wasn't hardware by installing Cyanogen on the samsung, and suddenly everything felt fast again.
I switched to GrapheneOS, it's only for Pixels. The seem to have moved the needle on making it your phone, not just Google's phone that they let you use. You can remove every app, even the play store. Play has to ask permission to install things.
I think of GrapheneOS as a leaner Pixel that's more secure.
I have an old Samsung flagship with a 120Hz display, snappy and clean UI that never lags. It has survived several drops without a scratch. I was on the edge of moving to Apple but decided back then to give Android one more chance, and it was a good decision. What bothers me is the very mediocre ecosystem that stopped developing some time ago. That’s the place of the actual battle between Apple and Google. Apple moves forward, and Google doesn’t know what to do.
I think Motorola phones are OK. I personally will never buy a Motorola after an early experience with them prior to Google buying and re-rolling them. But my wife used them and liked them and they seem less shitty than they once were.
I've had a series of Nexus and Pixel phones. I had a Pixel 3 for a long long time and really, really loved it. It was such a perfect phone. I'm on Pixel 7 now and it's... alright. Compared to Pixel 3 it's big and heavy and the fingerprint scanner is on Pixel 3 was so much better. Pixel 3 was just about perfect.
I just cannot stand iPhone. Everything about them is so annoying. My kids have them. Apple's parental controls are a complete joke. I just cannot understand why anyone thinks iPhone doesn't suck. The parental controls are constantly breaking whenever one phone upgrades and etc. Screen Time settings are the most infuriating and dumb as hell stupidity ever. On the other side Google's Digital Wellbeing is also useless trash (Seriously... only per-app time limits? Does anyone at all dog food that bullshit?). But on Android you just swap it out for something that doesn't suck.
Just got an S23U 2 weeks ago. Its an impressive device both hardware and software. I was expecting a lot of bloat but looks like only MS Office apps where Non-Samsung apps pre-installed and I was going to install them myself either way.
Bloat isn't just things that you don't like. It is not uncommon for a "pointless" Samsung OS customization to make its way into stock/pixel android a few years later, at which time it will receive much praise and be considered revolutionary.
Meanwhile, Google steps on the rake of not putting enough battery in the phone every single time. I swear I've not seen a single flagship pixel review that hasn't mentioned bad battery. If it's bad out of the box, how bad will it be in 2 years?
My pixel 5 is still going strong and has plenty of battery. I have noticed degradation, but it's still enough to get through a day or more depending on use.
The one thing that eats the battery alive is Instagram, which is great as it gives me one more reason to avoid it.
Honestly I don't know how iPhone users live without the back button (or more accurately now, the back gesture). I used an iPhone for a year (work phone) and just could not get over how much harder it was to work a large iphone. I felt like I had to reach every corner of the screen much more often than on Android.
In the rare case it doesn’t, you can swipe down. But the animations help a lot, it is pretty idiomatic after a while. Something came in from the left? It goes out there as well. I converted like 2 years ago and it didn’t take a lot to get used to it.
I don't understand how anyone is satisfied with ANY "gesture" based navigation, I still have the classic android 3 button setup from the good old days. I have a dedicated back button that is ONLY a back button, so no issue with it changing the "activity" you are working in like the modern android back gesture, a dedicated home button that always goes home, and a dedicated "bring up all alive activities" button that functions exactly like alt-tab does.
Why did any of this ever need to change? Why did dedicated buttons with defined roles and useful, predictable functionality that are always available, always work, are never misinterpreted as a drag instead of a "gesture", that you don't have to know ahead of time how to interact with the OS to discover how to interact with the OS.
Why the fuck are phone OS's navigated completely by a scheme that is impossible to discover without someone teaching you?
Last time I installed LineageOS I tried the gesture navigation and it did provide a hands-on tutorial as part of enabling it.
- Swipe up (from anywhere) to access the app tray
- Swipe up and hold to see the app history / currently in-memory apps
- Swipe from the side of the screen to go back (can be configured to just be the bottom half of the screen and a "thinner" sensitivity area - which I needed because the defaults were stupid and made 'back' such a frequent accidental action).
They're the only gestures I've bothered to learn, and I get by. Still not sure it's better or worse than have the 10 pixel space at the bottom for the navigation buttons.
90% of apps (that don’t override the default UINavigationController behavior or use some custom cross-platform framework) support the back swipe gesture.
Honestly I don't know how I live without the back button, either.
The back button on Android 5+ stopped being "back", it's now some weird system I don't quite understand where it tracks, I think, "activities" and goes back from those, but the end result is the modern android back button is sometimes back, and sometimes close your app, which is really frustrating.
That's because what the back button on Android does is partially determined by the developers of the apps you use. If an app is written using Android Framework there's some things that will automatically add an entry to the back-stack, but many actions won't unless the developer explicitly adds them. So naturally, the back button ends up as something of a "I'm feeling lucky" button.
... there is a back swipe gesture. And it works much more consistently than Android's "Where the heck is this gonna take me" back button. Every app you can swipe back, and it's a much nicer animation than Android.
The back button is a cudgel: a sign of a poorly designed UX. Apps aren't websites, the concept of "back" is not universal, so a universal button doesn't make sense. It only exists on Android because it started off as a non-touch OS.
> the concept of "back" is not universal, so a universal button doesn't make sense.
> It only exists on Android because it started off as a non-touch OS.
... so android has the exact same gesture and it's a bad thing only there because it started as a non touch OS, iOS has it but it's totally not the same concept at all and perfect.
Android had the back button since the beginnings. They added an option a few years back to hide the usual three buttons at the bottom of the screen and to enable an ios-like navigation with a swipe up for home, etc.
That made a swipe from the left or right edge recognized by the OS trigger a back button. That is quite different from the app itself recognizing an in-process swipe left, showing the underlying screen you would be brought to. Though some android apps do support this as well.
You misread. Parent said the back "button" is a cudgel, not the gesture. Though unfortunately someone at Google decided to give the gesture the same behaviour as the button, so yeah, it is a bit silly on Android.
> It only exists on Android because it started off as a non-touch OS.
That doesn’t really make sense, it has very little to do with the actual interaction. It seems Android apps were originally envisaged as a collection of islands rather than one solid block. In that context the back button does make sense, you’d be jumping from “activity” to “activity” rather than app to app, and the back button would provide a logical thread through all of that.
But it didn’t work out that way at all, apps became just as centralised as iOS ones and the back button’s original functionality became kind of vestigial.
It works better because iOS had this for many years and apps implement it natively. Android's implementation is basically a workaround. The back gesture is recognized by the system and forwarded as back button event to the app. On iOS the gesture is handled by the app, which can provide proper animation, giving users the ability to “preview” what’s behind (and pull back to the left to stop going back). Android is trying to copy that right now (as they should because it works really well), but it will take many years for apps to adopt it.
This is the flaw with the Apple back gesture, sadly, as although it's generally really easy to support this in native app — essentially it comes for free and you just don't break it — plenty of developers just don't care about invisible quality of life things.
How is it different to android developers breaking shit? It’s not hard to break the “atomic” back gesture either, hell, websites are getting really good at breaking my back button!
Shitty apps/developers are everywhere, we should not limit ourselves over them.
I'm not sure I understand you. If an Android developer breaks the back gesture, surely they also break the back button, so they've completely broken the back function?
An iOS app can have fully functional back buttons, but break the back gesture only.
It's not a perfect rule but most fully native (as in written with Obj-C or Swift) tend to leave this functionality intact. For React Native and other alternative UI stacks all bets are off.
I am planning to make the switch this year. As a long time Pixel user, Google's support of its own hardware has been subpar. My phone was only officially supported for 3 years.
They will increase support for new phones, probably because Apple does the same. It is too little, too late for me.
I've had every htc g1/nexus/pixel. 3 years hasn't been too big a deal, we have 3 phones in the household and the phones trickle down based on preferences for camera, phone size, and us. Did run up against the 3 year limit a few times. Fortunately the pixel 6 and 7 switched to 5 years of support.
I was considering switching to iPhone, but then I tried GrapheneOS. It's only for pixels, is easy to install, and focuses on privacy and security. Suddenly it feels like it's my phone. Zero crapware, something pixels have been pretty good at. I can remove any app I want, even the play store. It ships with a de-googled chrome. I'm impressed.
Is there any hope of getting these operating systems (grapheneos/leaniageos) to run on anything other than the pixel phone?
I've been using Samsung all my life (tablets, phones, watches, TVs) since they've been providing consistent quality, but after samsungs silently leaking my keyboard input to grammarly and not providing me the features I paid for on their galexy watch, I decided to move out of the samsung echosystem for good.
The thing is that I still really like their hardware. I just want to change the software running on it to something more sane and less shady.
Long time Android user here (since 1.5 on G1), had all the Nexuses and Pixels as well. Give the OnePlus phones a try. My family's switched to using them and I've been impressed with the battery life and hardware. The software is closer in spirit to the Nexus line.
Don't. Older OnePlus devices (1-3) were great, but the newer ones are pure trash, basically e-waste phones due to how poor the SW support is: good up to date HW, but buggy SW and poor SW update cycles with late updates which often add more bugs and remove features and don't address older bugs leading to never ending frustrations (just read their forums).
They even did bait-and-switch where they promised X update was coming in the future for your phone, and later axing that update completely while quietly removing all mentions of their promile from their webpage and forums. Stay away from them, there are more pleasurable ways to burn your money away.
My mother asked me for a phone recommendation and I told her to try OnePlus. It is a beautiful phone (for an Android) but very buggy. It often fails, at random, at it most basic job of making phone calls without needing a restart. I regret making that recommendation.
I had an early pixel and the Pixel 4 coming out and being ass was what drove me to iPhone. I wanted a phone with clean software, instant updates, and face unlock. The Pixel 4 being bad made me realize that the iPhone had all of those things for a long time.
Was just on to apple support for an issue with my daughters phone, and I have to say it was a really nice experience. Good online chat first (may be a bot, but if so was a good one), and immediate call from a senior advisor when it needs to be escalated. Issue solved in 10 mins flat. Not sure how well it goes with others, but customer service counts for a lot and glad apple appreciate that.
Support is also great at an Apple Store. I walked in with a broken Apple Watch. A couple minutes later my Apple Care claim was taken care of, and 2 days later I had a replacement arrive on my doorstep.
I was due for an upgrade and switched to Android this cycle. Acquired a unlocked Pixel 7 that was on sale in June and immediately reflashed it with GrapheneOS.
Ultimately a very smooth experience. The difference in tracking is very evident as is the amount of data streaming out of the phone.
I have an unlocked 6, wife got the upgrade this cycle. Nice phone, but much nicer with GrapheneOS. Definitely feels like my phone, instead of the default Pixel which is more of a Google owned phone that they let you use.
But Google is again deliberately stupid with them, like, just goddamn.. sell it.. in Europe. I honestly can’t even understand that there are like 3 Eu countries I could buy it, if I wanted to..
> The full list of countries includes the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and India.
I get that plenty of countries don't have official Google Store support, but it's a bit like saying there isn't a Samsung store? I assume you're free to buy the phone elsewhere in the EU, or even in countries that aren't directly supported by Google, and activate with your own carrier.
Do you have a more specific example? Xiaomi's site, Mi.com, for instance doesn't seem to cover every EU or European country (e.g., Bulgaria, Croatia, Norway, Switzerland, etc.). Are you referring to OPPO or OnePlus as a "cheap no name Chinese phone"? They account for about 10% of the global sales (as does Xiaomi).
It doesn't exactly seem fair to say Google is up 48% when they went from 2% to 3% of the market. It seems to me that their growth is almost entirely coming from Samsung. The numbers are jumpy enough that I also wonder how much when different phone makers announce their new wares affects the numbers.
I am not surprised because they've been advertising pixel really hard, and they are good phones. Still, it seems a lot more likely to eat into Samsung than Apple market share.
I agree Google is more likely to eat Samsung shares till they offer an equivalent high end as Apple, but that may take a decade or more with phone life at Google and Samsung support moving closer to Apple's model of six years or more.
And yeah it is way easier to grab marketshare at the 2% range then to take Apple head on with say 40% market share in USA.
I finally convinced some in-laws to get an se2 after telling them it wasn’t really cheaper to keep buying terrible no name Samsung phones every other year. They have also both become photographers now and can FaceTime easily to see grandkids. So mark me down for contributing 2. Your welcome Apple.
Long support (5+ years), physical first-party stores for support every 100ish miles in the USA, compatibility with Apple's proprietary iMessage and FaceTime protocols. An OS that's generally considered easier to use, with more walls in place to protect users from malware. A simple $400ish price point.
Not a huge difference from Samsung's cheaper offerings on paper, but a lot of little things that add up to a better experience for many older users.
My limited experience with the Apple store seem a reason to stay AWAY from Apple.
They wouldn't look at the phone. They made me stand in line to make an appointment to come back, all the while their team of "experts" stood around chatting. It came across to me as horribly elitist, and one of the worst retail experiences I can recall.
Also, entry level iPhones and iPads don't have anemic SoCs. They're just a generation or so behind what gets put in the flagship Pro models, which are still more powerful than what you'll find in many less-than-flagship Android phones.
I have an upper-entry-level Android tablet I bought for development/testing which has a price that's within spitting distance of that of a refurbished iPad, and it's stunning that something as weak as the SoC it's built with is on store shelves in 2023. It lags and stutters all over the place, and even an entry level iPad from 4 years ago carrying around the extra weight of the latest version of iPadOS would destroy it in terms of performance.
It’s honestly not even funny how much ahead iphone CPUs are to the at the time flagship android offerings. There is like 2, sometimes 3 years of difference.
WhatsApp takes about two clicks to setup. My 60 year old and generally technophobic mum and all her friends have managed to set it up and use it themselves (including group chats and profile pictures)
This is perhaps a giveaway that you're not in the US, where WhatsApp is generally not something people use to communicate. (Anecdotally, I have seen it primarily used among people who have families outside the US.) FaceTime, on the other hand, is widely used here.
The SE 2020 being extra cheap (and even the 2022 model if you look well enough) is only a product of the used market and the fact that that line of iPhones is often overlooked, so people selling them really lowball the price more often than not. Apple doesn't actually have a lot to do with it.
iPhones end up being cheaper in the long run. They get software updates much longer than almost any Android phone, and at least here even small cities have local shops that repair them. It's also just a superior user experience.
I wish they kept on making the mini models though. I'm using a 13 mini, which has been really nice. Most modern smartphones are uncomfortable to carry in the front pocket of slim pants.
A lot of mobile sites break on the mini phones it’s a huge hassle. Would not recommend. I have one and that’s my biggest gripe with it. There are restaurants I can’t checkout at for example because the button is stuck just below the fold and I can’t scroll to click it due to shitty ui
I've found just setting the browser to always load sites at 75% zoom solves a lot of these issues. There is also the option 'Hide Toolbar' behind the 'aA' button on Safari which also helps as well
I'm still using an iPhone XS (2018) and have zero complaints aside from a lack of RAM. I plan to upgrade this year, so it will come out to $200/year. Seems like a good deal.
I'm a long time Android user but boy, Google is trying hard to make me switch. Android Auto is a mess, not a lot of good phone options with compact footprint, poor update policies and basically the feeling of always being 2-3 years behind Apple.
I don't get "Android Auto" and "Android Automotive"
They aren't open source, and when they don't work, your car is left with a weird system that can't be substituted. They make it less likely that I'll want to buy a car with them. What's so good about it versus just using bluetooth and a phone mount? Could be crazy, but figure buggy software should be something I can swap out, not integrated into a car many times more expensive than it.
Android Auto is able to show your current route/map to the car's screen. Android can do that reasonably successfully, so it's worth the price of admission for this reason alone. This said, there are a few usability annoyances and other failures elsewhere in the overall experience. But this particular feature works pretty well.
I don't understand the value of this. Is it just "big screen=better"?
Because, my phone's screen is already bigger than the standalone GPSs of the past, and has voice, so I've never thought that I needed a bigger screen for navigation.
In fact I want less: A few new cars have very slick HUDs on the windshield which are very elegant in their simplicity. A recent BMW rental had this, all without any smartphone integration, and I thought that was really cool!
Now, though, that feature has probably been replaced with an android equivalent - A lot of companies are going "Android Automotive", and it sounds like a downgrade.
Yes, it's a LOT better. Charging the phone connected to it is automatic and the screen is positioned in a safe location and much more visible to not only the driver, but other people who can help with navigation. It's a game changer, I'll never have a car without a screen again.
My Mazda has both Android Auto and its own decent mapping solution, but Android/iPhone is just better than what ships with the car. The phone also has more information on speed traps, detours etc.
> I don't understand the value of this. Is it just "big screen=better"?
Yep. 8 inch touchscreen in my car is much easier to read and interact with, plus it is already there in a nice location so I don't have to put a phone mount somewhere, run the cables to it, etc.
I liked using Android Auto on the phone w/ a Bluetooth connection to my car until they killed it. It was perfect and I was furious when they removed that feature.
Manufacturers deserve this because they became greedy bastards.
My anecdote, i loved my samsung S10 which i had to replace. Their new flagship is heavier, has no headphone jack, no FM radio, no SpO2 meter, and doesnt feel considerably faster. It also seems to heat up a bit more. What the hell is going on. I feel cheated
Apple's phone seem to make slight improvements, but really it's hard to tell anymore.
I think the sector is beyond its peak and about to see a huge slump
iPhone has always been a superior experience to me. While it may not have that tinkering ability like an Android, on the whole Apps are much higher quality, more paying customers as a dev, lots of things that just work between devices.
I have both types of phones, an Android one privately and an iPhone for work, and in direct comparison I honestly prefer the Android user experience. It's not that I love Android, but the iPhone feels so often clunky to me.
- There's a greater reliance on gesture-based tricks, which I find unintuitive and undiscoverable
- I often feel stressed when using the iPhone because I can't figure out how to do basic things while under time duress. This is as simple as hanging up on a call I had on speaker and left to navigate to other apps: There's the green bar at the top indicating I'm still in the call, but I cannot figure out how to get back to it. If I swiped it out it's gone from the multi-tasking overview (without ending it), and unlike in Android you can't drag down the notification tray and access the call via a notification bubble
- There's reproducable little bugs that annoy me. For example when I initially boot up the phone, I can't tap the password field to open the on-screen keyboard. It doesn't work. I have to turn the screen off and turn it back on, and then I can open the keyboard
- There's flows that admittedly are used rarely but that are enormously clunky. If you open a certificate file to import, you get a frigging dialog box telling you to manually go to the Settings app and approve it in some well hidden sub-section. Why doesn't the dialog offer you a jump straight into there? These kinds of flows of composing screen pages from different apps into sequences is something Android does extremely well with the Activities concept
If I were in the situation the guy described I definitely would have tried swiping down and then got confused when that didn't work. I guess I'd eventually try tapping it.
I haven't used iOS in years though, maybe if I was used to it then tapping would have been my first impulse. Do you often have to tap on the top/bottom of the screen to do things?
You aren't really tapping on the top/bottom of the screen in an arbitrary way. There's a green oval indicator that you're on a call (or a blue oval if you have map navigation as I mentioned in my sibling post to yours). You tap on that indicator. It's been that way for years now. Perhaps it's not the most intuitive, but it's not totally unintuitive and it makes a lot more sense to tap an indicator object than to try swiping randomly.
On some older phones it's just a horizontal bar at the top of the screen. But it also says "touch to return to call" on it, so that should be fairly self-explanatory. :)
Or any other “thing” that uses your camera/mic. You will get a clear indicator that it is being used, and touching it brings you to the app in question.
I just swapped to a Pixel Fold from an iPhone 14 myself. Some of the issues you talk about are present on both, but are issues in different ways imo.
> - There's reproducable little bugs that annoy me. For example when I initially boot up the phone, I can't tap the password field to open the on-screen keyboard. It doesn't work. I have to turn the screen off and turn it back on, and then I can open the keyboard
I've also noticed bugs with the PIN input, where it just won't register touches at first when the screen turns on, leading to a missed digit at the start.
> If you open a certificate file to import, you get a frigging dialog box telling you to manually go to the Settings app and approve it in some well hidden sub-section. Why doesn't the dialog offer you a jump straight into there?
This is 100% an issue on Android now too. Not sure when they made the change, but certs result in a dialog essentially saying "go to settings."
No doubt iOS has great exclusive apps, however, Android has some gems as well.
Newpipe, Buzzkill, the ability to have any browser engine you want, 3rd party app stores, 3rd party launchers, I'm sure I'm forgetting some other perks.
Both platforms have their strengths.
Remember back in the old days when people got their phones and phone plans together as part of a 2 or 3 year contract? Back then, people lived with cracked screens and other damage as much as possible because of being locked into those contracts. And then that sort of went away when the market decoupled and you got your phone and service separately.
Well, lately I've been noticing more and more people carrying around phones with cracked screens, and apparently just dealing with it. This is totally anecdotal and unscientific, but it feels like there is a shift in mindset going on. For one reason or another, people are keeping those "broken" phones in service rather than replacing them.
In Canada perhaps It's due to zero choices from service providers? Samsung and Google Pixel are the only Android options in the high-end (TCL/Motorola/ZTE low end). I would consider a Asus Zenfone or Sony Xperia if they were widely available here.
Does this mean the US government can finally start treating Apple the way it treats Microsoft, etc when it does clearly anti-competitive things? They get away with murder sometimes and no one bats an eye. Even here on HN, it's full of people that turn a blind eye because they have a love for Apple. Everything as spun as "looking out for the user" as if not using USB-C, locking out RCS, the "Apple Tax" etc are anything but anti-competitive behavior or straight gouging. Apple to this day is treated like it's late 90s 5% market share self. This isn't the 90s anymore.
People forget, but Apple faced a massive backlash in 2012 when it replaced the 30 pin connector with Lightning.
People called it a ploy to make money on cables. Tons of e-waste.
USB C devices started shipping in 2015, so one can see why they didn't want to put themselves through that again.
Adopting USB C in fall 2023 iPhones is smart, because by now everyone has USB C cables already to charge their iPads, Macs, and Apple TV remotes (yes, even that recently switched from Lightning to USB C).
They are only adopting USB-C because the EU is forcing them to, and they still are intentionally limiting features on cables that don't meet their standards (ie paying a license to Apple.)
iPads transitioned to USB C in 2018 so I think this has been in the cards for a while. We'll have to see about the cables, I don't hate the idea of of an "actually works right" certification in the chaotic USB C universe.
The "lightning port" is to block vendors from making universal products for its competitors while it lets Apple collect a licensing fee to use it, and it creates tons of needless e-Waste. No one cares though, at least not in the US.
None of your examples are “murders”. They have been using USB-C in pretty much every non-iphone device for years, switching on a whim to USB-C would have just left a bad taste in the users’ mouthes (and millions of unused cables). RCS is just google’s fake open-source proprietary protocol with terrible security, I really don’t want any of that thank you very much.
Apple Tax is as bad as any other similar app store — they would be stupid to bust it deliberately, thankfully we have governments that will do their job here. With the EU rules it will become great.
You just proved my point so many times over, it's hilarious. Typical turning a blind eye to Apple's wrongdoing. Apple was genius to create a cult around their product that is so blind to everything they do that screws anyone not in the cult. If Microsoft, Google, etc did some of this stuff you'd undoubtedly not support it, and you'd be right to.
Market share alone is not why MS was sued for anti-trust violations. It was how they got into that position, what they did to maintain that position, and what they did with that position.
This isn't in contradiction of what I just said. If anything, it supports it, because 55% isn't a "monopoly" but their behavior is anti-competitive, and they have been propelled into this position in part because of that behavior.
App store and browser, I'll agree with you on. The arguments around RCS vs iMessage and USB-C vs Lightning are very weak, though, and largely based on an ahistorical/atemporal understanding of the world. USB-C wasn't even available when Lightning came about so it wasn't an alternative until after the fact. You can be annoyed with the length of the transition, but it was inevitable and pretty much every Apple device but the iPhone has already transitioned as of last year (wireless mouse and keyboard still use it to charge, IIRC).
RCS was a poor solution to a carrier problem (non-carrier locked messaging platforms let people move more easily between carriers) that Google only endorsed to make themselves look better after fucking up their dozen messaging platforms in a dozen years (not sure if a dozen is too many or too few, I lost track a while ago). I still don't get why a technical crowd wants RCS given it's carrier locked like MMS/SMS and has poor E2EE without any guarantees of E2EE (if your carrier doesn't support it, you don't get it).
>foldable shipments could reach their highest level ever in the US in Q3 2023.
Yes, people with a bit more disposable income &/or early adopters (there's some overlap there) are going to be less price sensitive and therefore less put off by rising costs elsewhere in their lives. Of course it helps that there are increasingly more foldable options, and more mature designs in them, as time goes by.
In the US, having an Android is one of the biggest social status negative signals I can think of.
I used to have an android and when I'd meet people the primary thing they'd remember about me was that I had an android. Their blinders were up after they had that information.
I think phones like the Galaxy line might be better than iPhones, but the experience of owning an iPhone far exceeds owning a Galaxy.
My own extended family is literally a cult about this.
But, I’m back to iPhone because I actually need my phone portion to work. Went through 3 androids with constant call issues.
Who cares if there’s a cult. The products are objectively worse if you need to make important phone calls. Couldn’t care about anything else even a tenth as much.
In other words, Android devices last longer than iDevices which causes the latter to be replaced more often. As to why Android devices last longer can be disputed, this can range anywhere from they are used for a longer period of time because the user does not want to spend more money on mobile gadgets to they last longer because they can be kept up to date using AOSP-derived distributions which enables 10+ year old devices to run current Android and anything in between.
Add to that the fact that iDevices are much more recognisable due to there being only a handful of current versions compared to the thousands of current Android devices and as such more easily recognised as 'out of date' or 'old' and their - often brand- and status-conscious - users have an extra incentive to buy a new device even though the old one still worked fine just so they are not perceived to be 'poor'.
Years and years of terrible decisions from Google (15 messaging apps, Android SDK glitches that still exist from 2010, copying Apple's features instead of leading) will only continue to let Apple dominate. There's simply no reason to choose Android - iPhone does everything better, for the same price.
My wife is totally in the iOS ecosystem and I'm fully in the Samsung ecosystem and they both have their pros and cons. Pros on Android: My work profile is isolated from my personal profile, I can just copy movies onto the device and play them with VLC, automatic routines are better, audio controls are much better, the back button, ad blockers, real alternative browsers, etc.
The problem with long term iPhone users is that they don't know what they don't know. Superficially, it's very easy to see an Android phone and an inferior iPhone if you only look at what iPhones can do.
That being said, I always recommend iPhones over Android for family/friends/etc. For someone like myself, who is a little bit technical I actually prefer the control, customization, and advanced features of Android. I actually find iPhones to be frustratingly simplistic.
As a technical user (I was rooting my phone to get upgrades and remove bloatware and I was jailbreaking out of iphone), I got bored out of doing customization. I just want something to work and do the stuff I need to do. If I need to tinker, I will buy something to tinker with, but I don’t want that in other areas of my life. I don’t want to modify my fridge or my washing machine (I know what I should learn to do it). If my iPhone can no longer do what I need, i’ll switch.
And these days, I’m against the kitchen sink. I watch movies on a TV (there’s always one anywhere I’ve been) I read books on an e-reader, and I have a DAP for listening to music (except today, streaming is becoming more convenient for general listening). And most of my computing is done on my laptop. My phone is very much an appliance because I don’t need it to do much, just that it does it reliably.
My Android customizations are all in the direction of minimalism. I turn off ever-present icons that provide no useful information. I turn off anything I don't need and keep it small and simple.
One thing I did literally 2 days ago: I've been using my phone for navigation a lot more this month than ever before but having the maps audio go through the Bluetooth to the car is awful in my car. For media and calls it's fine but for navigation it's just not a good experience. So I've been manually flipping the app audio to my phone every time I use it. I finally got fed up and created a routine to automatically set the audio for maps to the phone whenever it's connected to the car and, if also plugged in, launch maps automatically. Took only seconds to setup (should have done it sooner) and now I'm less annoyed whenever I have to use my phone for navigation.
Low-end iPhones outperform and outlast high-end Android phones. Nobody keeps an Android longer than 3 years because it slows down and doesn't get updates. Not the case for iPhone.
In what?
What are you doing that hasn't become so fast it's imperceptibly different on all modern phones? They all seem to text, browse, email, and play media at the required FPS and load time to me.
Yes I have seen synthetic benchmarks. But, they haven't had any relevance to what I do on my phone since like 2012, so I'm wondering what other people are doing?
> There's simply no reason to choose Android - iPhone does everything better, for the same price.
The person you replied to, then replied
> I'm sorry, but - "for the same price"? You must live in a very different place than I do.
They are saying that android phones don't have to cost the same as iPhones for the same functionality. A point you made for them by having to compare a pro of one to a bigger screen normal version to get the same price.
You're struggling a little here aren't you. 1) it wasn't me that compared them, 2) "There's simply no reason to choose Android - iPhone does everything better, for the same price." - which it does, even for the same price, and 3) "They are saying that android phones don't have to cost the same as iPhones for the same functionality." - it's not the same functionality if we've already established that the iPhone does it better, even if you spend the same amount of money.
Yeah pixel line phones are the only decent android devices but they aren’t as good as iPhones and they cost the same. 6 or so years ago they were competing at the 400-500$ range and were actually a good trade off
My Pixel is rapidly coming out on it's drop dead date for security updates and I'm considering just switching to an iPhone SE. I want a small phone that will be supported for a long enough time that I don't have to constantly remind myself when the EOL date is.
Now that the 2G network shutdowns are done, there's no driving force to get a new phone, especially in this economy. The phones have gotten far more durable in the last decade as well, so breakage isn't as big of a driving factor either.
Apple is the only manufacturer that still sells a phone today with an actual physical button. It is hard for me to give that up. Also it is very small and slim. Barely feel it in my pocket, not to mention the nice feeling aluminium on the back.
I always found it interesting how the dynamic for 'nerds' shifted from Android to iOS because of data security reasons. I was one of those who originally got an Android because of "tinkering" (and honestly still miss that), but with the data privacy realization of iOS vs Android, I could NEVER go back.
IMO, outside of the tech world, nobody really cares about USB-C - or at least - not enough to drive upgrades. It's just what one end of the power cord looks like.
For people who already have USB-C phones and are considering switching it means "All of the cords you have right now will still be useful", which is a definite improvement over "All of the cords you have right now are junk you will throw away and have to replace with new cords".
I'm not trying to say that will drive massive upgrades in and of itself, but I can definitely see it being a nice-to-have at the margins and help a nontrivial set of people pull the trigger.
I'd think most potential upgrades to the next iPhone would be current iPhone users. If anything, I think the switch to USB-C would be a deterrent to people who are sensitive to cord changes.
I don't understand the need to have a single connector vs a block with interchangeable cords, but I also don't care that much about it so I might be missing something.
Don't you have USB-C cables for literally everything else? This is Apple's equivalent to finally dropping micro-USB, everyone is using USB-C now, thankfully.
I mean my MBP has a MagSafe charging port, but I use USB-C for powering that too. One type of cable for everything.
You know what we had to do about a decade ago? Toss out our 30-pin connector cables. Times change, the switch of the iPhone to USB-C was inevitable given that Apple has already moved pretty much everything else away from the Lightning connector already. At best the EU pushed up the timeline.
We're about a decade out from them changing from 30 pin to lightning and I still occasionally hear someone complaining about apple "always changing the charging cable" so I imagine it's actually going to piss off the general public.
For some people its a deterrent. I talked my coworker into an AppleTV earlier this week and the new remote was USB-C charging (doesn't come with a cable) and he was upset that he couldn't just charge it with any of his existing lightning cables. I tried to explain to him that in no time at all his house would be inundated with usb-c cables everywhere, but he was not happy.
I swapped from Android after a decade to iOS at the end of last year, and don't regret it one single bit.
Android you just get plagued with software bugs (random battery drain, UI freezes, weird crashes etc) constantly, additionally I wasn't a fan of how system apps because they come from Google auto-update, going in and having an app completely change at random when I'm not expecting it, is not a nice experience when you need the app in a hurry (looking at you Google Maps).
Ironically for a phone, phone calls were the buggiest thing on nearly all Android phones I had over a decade (OnePlus, Samsung, Pixel etc).
iOS, as much as I disagree with Apple's closed ecosystem and propriety behaviour, is just a far better software quality than Android. Google is obviously not a software company.
Well it's far easier to have better overall software quality when you have a closed ecosystem with even the hardware and drivers designed by yourself. You need to implement and support only your own use cases with all loose ends cut.
For me the choice is simple. Android allows piracy out of the box and lets you do some pretty advanced power user stuff (e.g. system-wide VPN ad blocking) without rooting, iOS requires a jailbreak to do literally anything. Android will run any browser, iOS is Safari only. Android is open source, iOS is a closed proprietary black box. iOS also does other absolutely ludicrous things, like ATS blocking fetch and xhr requests over HTTP with no way to disable it. It's like it comes with always-on parental controls out of the factory. I'm the admin of my device, not fucking Tim Apple.
Android may be a buggy duct taped amalgamation of random hardware and software, but that's a direct result of it being open and no worse than the average linux machine.
Getting Slack messages on my Apple Watch is nice when I am away from my phone but still in BT (wifi?) range. I know this not specific to iPhone, but the integration is nice.
BT if in range, WiFi if not but on a known network. Done that way for power savings.
I love my iPhone, but the ecosystem integration is also a huge point for me. The little ways different Apple products work together adds so much niceness and extra value above the utility of the individual products.
Even the cheap folks in my extended family are starting to switch to iPhones. The TCO is better, as is longevity and use experience. The only way to be cheaper is to stick with awful budget android phones and then you give up on the experience and extended software support. Get burned a couple times by that, and pretty soon a basic iPhone SE starts to look really appealing. Especially for people who don't want to upgrade every couple years.
Personally I don't understand the friends I have that use Android. They wear it as a badge of pride that they didn't give Apple money [0], ok... cool? None of them use a third-party app store, none of them use a custom rom, none of them really customize the phone at all past stock. I understand if you want to go the Android route to root/customise it but if you aren't going to do that then I really don't get the point. Google and Apple are, at worst, equal in how "evil" they are and in my opinion Apple comes out on top for more things that I care about.
I also never say shit about their phone/computer choices but for some reason some of them find reasons to bring up my use of Apple products regularly. Makes me think of the scene in Mad Men "I don't think about you at all" [1].
I totally understand that, that's why I said "I understand if you want to go the Android route to root/customise it" but none of my friends are doing that, that's what puzzles me.
Maybe they just want a descent browser on their phone. Another reason could be theat they don't have an abundance of financial resources and are fine with a $200 phone.
This 55% is iPhone's share of phone shipments in Q2, not the number of users of the respective phones at any given time. In other words, fewer people are buying smartphones than were before, but Apple saw less of a hit to their numbers than everyone else did.
Contrary to existing comments here, this stat doesn't appear to indicate that people are switching from Android to iPhone. It looks like Android users are more likely to avoid upgrading their phone in an uncertain economy, while Apple users are more likely to upgrade regardless.
[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-smartphone-shipments...