I have been developing Android apps since Eclair, and I'm from a "developing" country. For me the deterioration of Android started after Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean for me is the best Android OS in history. So fast and fluid, it can run on the most low-end smartphones at that time. Developing for it was also very fun.
Then I remember KitKat OS came and it was all hell broke loose. Every OEM was just releasing different Android versions here and there every year. And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want
In my history of ~11 years of Android development, it's just hard to purchase a Google phone. I bought a Nexus tablet but I have to ask my sister in the US to ship it to me. The shipping fee is ridiculous high I remember. Then they introduced Pixel and Go editions but still I couldn't purchase officially from Google. I have to ask favor from someone in the US/EU to ship it to me.
Personally I miss Kitkat 4.4. That sweet, sweet Mass Storage mode made file management oh so easy. No trying to copy things around only to have it bitch at you that the device is busy, or the crippled replacement MTP making Windows lose its shit at the idea you might want to copy a filetype that wasn't on its approved list. God we've regressed.
MTP sucks hard and is slow and easy to overload with many files.
My 4.2 device was Umi X2 Chinese phone and I even hacked together couple Roms for such Meadiatek based devices back then. I remember my lightest ROM was like 250mb. With working PlayStore and all, but obviously only bare minimum included. Nowadays even the lightest custom Roms are 700mb+ . With Google apps and all easy 1.5GB and more.
The way they went with Java support and how the NDK still feels like a 20% project after all these years killed the motivation for doing side gigs in Android development.
Also Google IO is not fun any longer, knowing that I will only get to play with those features when my phone dies and is time for a replacement.
And even when buying one needs to take care, for example, plenty of Android 10 phones still on sale.
Back when I developed Android apps I never bothered to watch IO and barely kept up with the latest SDKs. There was no point because it takes years for new versions of Android to go live on enough devices to make the effort worthwhile. By the time half of users are on the latest version a whole new version has been released.
I have worked on multiple apps from global top 500, we had a little bit of NDK for videos and WebRTC.
But that code was written in the times when there was no widely used non-NDK APIs for media. Right now landscape is very different: NDK is very niche, and if you’re seeing it everywhere, then either you’re in the gamedev / IoT / etc, or doing something in a very strange way.
I completely agree with android getting worse every major update.
I have an old-ish phone, but recently needed to update from android 9 to android 10. And have been plagued with issues ever since - volume is somehow lowered on bluetooth devices, and the battery doesn't last as long, and occasionally there are crashes that force phone to restart.
The Bluetooth audio issue is annoying.
There seems to be some disagreement between the headset chipset and the phone about what the default volume level should be.
You can turn off a setting called something like 'unified volume control', to go back to the old way of having separate (and redundant) volume control on both headset and source device.
Interesting you had that experience, since KitKat had Project Svelte which was a big effort to cut memory usage. This made an enormous difference for low end phones.
My experience with KitKat is not that good. Yes memory usage improved but the introduction of broken APIs started here. I remember MediaPlayer API was just so broken in this build. It was breaking so much randomly in HTC and Sony that we have to search frantically for those phones. Plus our apps also run on TV by plugging an Android USB. It worked pretty well on JB and then broke suddenly after KitKat. I remember vividly since I have to code for 23 hours straight just to beat that deadline.
> And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want
What would you have expected them to do? Vendors are free by licensing to fork AOSP and do what they will with it. Ain't nothing Google can say to change that; any more than they can say what people can do with forks of Chromium.
- Google most certainly can restrict how its products are used, in fact they do. Licensing comes with rules.
- Huawei is “free” to use AOSP, but can’t use Google’s APIs. See how far they got with that. No App Store and no Google APIs means a lot of apps won’t work. So you really need Google’s version unless you’re in China.
they could've made the android naming and trademark licensing be the gateway - you have to maintain a certain level of quality, or not add crapware, etc. If a manufacturer forks, and don't get the naming rights, they cannot use the logos, name or branding.
Maybe regulate the apps pre-installed and each of the OEM's Android flavor? You have tried Sony Xperia before right? Their UI hardly resembles any Android. Samsung flavor was worse back then too.
I live in EU and pixel phones are not officially available to me. Even in countries where they are there is no sufficient stock for a long time after they are released. At this point mainstream Android devices are either Samsung or Chinese brands.
> Every OEM was just releasing different Android versions here and there every year. And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want
It's open source, what do you propose they do about that? Close source the OS?
> For me the deterioration of Android started after Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean for me is the best Android OS in history.
This is definitely where I lost you. That's a 10 year old OS, basically an OS that represents the the infancy of consumer smartphones. Anyone who actually goes back and uses an OS that old will quickly discover just how little "vital" functionality it has.
One that's particularly funny to me: Android added native printer support in 8.0. That's something we've had on desktop computers for decades!
We didn't even have fully fledged notification controls and do not disturb before Android 5, something that's considered a basic necessity now. Couldn't search the system settings. The list goes on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history
> They just let every smartphone company do what they want
You might be romanticizing the situation. Before Jelly Bean, it was still completely a Wild West. If anything, custom skins from manufacturers were even worse back then.
I have used Jelly Bean both on S3 and Nexus 4. What I found is that Jelly Bean gets really slow after a while and you need to factory reset every couple of months. Newer versions of Android don't have this issue.
But it isn't what regular people mean when you talk about Android. In the say way you could say that MacOS would be Open source if they had almost the same name with Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
Android seems to be growing inferior to iOS in almost every way, which I find sad. I prefer to root for the underdog.
* Privacy
* Security
* Efficiency
I have a personal Android S22+ and an iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone gets better with every update, whereas there's always something funky going on with my droid. Every update does something weird, fixing one thing and breaking something new, and managing to offer no significant privacy improvements.
In fact, today it is Samsung, the world's second largest phone vendor (outside of China), who is the one getting hit by data breaches, leaks, and hacks on an ongoing basis.
Apple has literally proposed using the phone you bought and paid for to spy on you and report you to the authorities if you do bad things. While they backed down from that plan, they went out of their way to make it clear that they were only backing down temporarily. To suggest that iOS is ahead in privacy is ludicrous.
I'll keep buying phones that only use cloud services that spy on me, instead of spying on me directly. At least that's somewhat defensible as it's not my hardware acting against me.
This comment is pretty incoherent but I assume you're talking about CSAM.
In which case, (a) you are not required to use iCloud Photos and (b) it is not out of the ordinary for US-based photo hosting services to scan for CSAM.
There is no evidence otherwise that Apple is "spying on you" whatever that specifically means.
> spy on you and report you to the authorities if you do bad things
Pedantic correction: while the phone would spy on you to pre-calculate + embed "you are a bad guy doing a bad thing" metadata into photos, the phone wouldn't then report you to the authorities. You had to choose to sync your photos into iCloud Photos (i.e. expose them in cleartext to Apple), for Apple to then discover the embedded "you are a bad guy" metadata out of them, and use it to report you to the authorities.
This comment has predictably spawned a back-and-forth about which shitty privacy violating phone is 10% less shitty, but if you care about privacy the discussion you should be having is how to eliminate smartphone usage as much as possible.
As I'm sure you are aware, the proposed change was for files synced to iCloud. This puts it in the same boat as the recent Google Photos incident which you appear to be ok with.
But, as you noted, Apple backed down on the proposal, so assuming that you still hold that cloud scanning is ok, Apple's approach, at least in this regard is at worst equal.
While I don’t agree with their plan, the only reason it was proposed is a tradeoff between allowing e2e encrypted cloud backups and upholding the law regarding no child porn on their servers. If you have a better idea then I’m sure they are happy to hear it!
>However I only like stock android, Samsung, or the million other IOS clones from Chinese companies almost all suck.
I used to like stock android but since 12 it's been going down the drain in terms of looks and feel. Now I prefer the Samsung UI since they're at least consistent with previous versions and don't make huge changes for the sake of changes like Google does.
So this is one of the main advantages of android: vendors can rejected Google's ästhetisc choices and just keep the under the hood improvements.
I've been an Android guy for a long time and I briefly switched to an iPhone from 2020-2022 but went back to Android. The reason? Being forced to use Safari or a re-badged Safari because Apple refuses to let other browser engines on the platform.
On Android I can run proper Firefox and get uBlock Origin.
Does uBlock Origin do a better job than the Ad Blocker extension on iPhone’s Safari? I use uBlock Origin on my desktop and Ad Blocker on my iPhone. Honestly, I can’t tell any difference. They both seem to block everything.
I will not buy an iPhone until I can put uBlock Origin on it. My iPad is nearly unusable as a web browsing device, although it's outstanding in every other respect.
I completely agree, having Firefox with uBlock on Android is really great! I wish more Android users knew and cared about personal security so they'd take advantage of this awesome capability.
Apple's entire platform is so locked down, it definitely comes off as somewhat user-hostile to me. That said, my mom doesn't care about this aspect in the slightest.
you can actually use ublock origin through the Orion browser! it’s still relatively new, but it’s a nice browser. it’s also available on macos and supports syncing. you can use chrome and firefox extensions with it
It's getting more locked down too. It used to be great for hackers, we could root the phone and do all sorts of things. Now there's stuff like hardware remote attestation getting in the way.
I'm thinking there's no point in owning an Android phone anymore. They aren't trustworthy devices, they offer increasingly less user freedom at the cost of a less refined experience. It seems like they're just gonna become worse iPhones, all the problems and none of the benefits.
OTOH these is a wodespread sense that people who can afford iStuff will get that, and only the poor will get Android. In that sense I don't think it's crazy to call Android the underdog.
I have a cheap-ish Pixel 4a bought at launch. Never had a complaint with it, went through all the updates, I use it for mapping and listening to music daily as well as reading RSS.
Never a slow down or any glitch, except for connecting some Bluetooth devices.
As with all software, YMMV. At least Google is not throttling its CPU behind my back.
Also, Snowden has outed Apple as one of the corps complying with any government for customer data so don't get too high on your horse.
> Zerodium this week announced that it will not be purchasing any iOS exploits for the next two to three months due to a high number of submissions. In other words, the company has so many security vulnerabilities at its disposal that it does not need any more.
Android FCP zero-click has been keeping higher price than iOS for a few years now.
iOS iMessage RCE+LPE has been lower price than SMS RCE+LPE on android for a few years.
In almost every comparison, iOS has the same bounty as android or cheaper.
This, despite the fact that iOS bugs have more demand because of more premium targets.
There could be loads of reasons for this price difference other than supply. Android's higher market share, the ease of further exploiting any priv esc, the fact any zero day will patched much slower for a majority of devices...
I don't buy the privacy advantage. Security wise also it seems it's the other way round as long as you can have your device up to date. That is, even though iOS gets regular updates there seem to be more zero day vulnerabilities in it.
Efficiency, esp when it comes to UI animation not stuttering is where iOS has done a tremendous job.
> Android seems to be growing inferior to iOS in almost every way
Crazy statement. I have iPhone for work and it is horrible to use. I haven't met a single thing from UX point of view in iOS that is better than whatever is in Android. It's a complete downgrade IME.
It’s possible to view any OS as horrible to use really. Usually it comes from a mindset of “anything that isn’t how I’m used to is bad”. Which is especially likely if it’s only used a bit for work.
I could argue the same. The UX experience on android is horrible and about the only valid point that people have with android is that is more customisable.
I tried to go to iOS just for curiosity since 2 years but I think the next device will be an Android again for these reason:
- you cannot simply install applications outside the AppStore
- developing applications even for personal use requires macOS, an Apple developer account, etc
- it lacks of decent applications, such as an email client that works, thanks to limitations imposed by Apple on what the applications can do in background
- it comes with stupid limitations. Such as you can't to a software update on a mobile network (why? To this day with cheap plans that gives you 50G or even unlimited data for 10 euros at month a lot of people no longer even have a landline internet connection and thus Wi-Fi at home, and have to use another phone in hotspot mode to download an update, this is pure insanity of Apple!)
- it works well if you are all-in in the Apple ecosystem, for example you have also a Mac, but it doesn't integrate with Windows (the Windows phone companion that lets you to receive notifications on the PC and other stuff is only available for Android, since iOS doesn't have APIs to do that stuff such as read notifications).
- the only browser allowed is basically Safari and this to me is very wrong for the open web (it's true that in Android you have Chrome, but you can install whatever browser you want, such as Firefox). Safari doesn't support progressive web apps for example for no reason, so you are forced to install an app while you could have used its PWA enabled website.
- you are forced to use Apple services, while in Android using Google services is an option (you can have an Android OS without Google Apps, even if it can be impractical I like having this possibility at least in theory). For example the only way that I found to backup my photos was to pay iCloud, since Google Photos (that did give you unlimited space back then) didn't work in background and thus you have to open it to sync (something that is pretty useless for a backup tool that you want to be always running...)
- it's less user friendly, there are things that are complicated for no reason. This was confirmed by a lot of people that transitioned to iOS and find it more difficult to use
- to this day it's practically impossible to mod (jailbreak) an iPhone to overcome its limitations. In the past there was jailbreak that really did solve many of the issues, but this day it's nearly impossible
- lack of support for open standards, such as the usage of the proprietary lightning connector instead of USB-C (something that is now a requirement in the European union by the way)
From the hardware perspective, it's well built for sure, but I find it too expensive for what it offers. The iPhone that I actually have (an iPhone XS bought new for 600 euros) it seemed expensive when I bought, now to get an iPhone of a similar range (that is an iPhone Pro) you have to spend at least than double that price! A decent Android that is enough to me for my daily tasks can be bought for 200 euros, a top spec one for 600. To me the added cost of an iPhone is not justified.
Over the years, my family has had a mix of iOS and Android devices and even though the Android device was generally less expensive up front, the iOS device ended up being less expensive overall because after a few years the resale value was still pretty good. Generally, they all were decent devices.
All of your points about installing software outside of the app store are valid and if that's what you need, iOS is not for you and I think that's okay. Choosing the platform that best supports the software you need to run has always been how you decide what to buy. The other way around doesn't make any sense. It would be like buying an PS5 and then saying it sucks because you can't run Excel on it.
the exact opposite is true, Apple iPhones have never been worse than now.
1. almost every generation has some kind of hardware defect that you only find out later that lots of people report in enthusiast forums. Be it the loading cable, display bending, weird issues around refresh rate straining your eyes.. it never ends. And no, the hardware doesn't even feel better than the competition anymore. I had the iphone 13 in my hands and it felt like any cheap plastic phone.
2. The UI is horrible, the false perception of iOS being "simple" is perhaps the biggest marketing success in human history. I had an iPhone 13 for a few hours and there were already countless things I found incomprehensible. E.g Undiscoverable gestures or extremely hard to achieve gesture to swipe up to remove an opened app.
For one ui menu on the right middle side I had to press part of the hardware button on the right (what on earth, a hardware button to activate a touch ui!). Since when is the point of using a touch device to: ignore the touch interface and instead use a hardware button. Not even considering yet the weird annoying popup ui in the first place, why would you ever put something like that on the middle of your screen.
3. scrolling is slower, they have some kind of terrible human-like algorithm where you have to gear up the scroll speed as if you're manually accelerating a dial every time you want to scroll down. This is why they had to invent all these little tricks to scroll back up to the top of a page with a shortcut. Scrolling is just too slow, on huge pages it's fingerhurting work to get to the bottom.
4. The notch is objectively terrible, it was never good, it was never acceptable to put camera holes or notches into the display but the notch is the worst, most biggest affront to visual consistency. It almost has comical qualities, "oh yes, please put a huge black block directly into my visual field and make it so I am forced to look at it, I can't even install an app to hide it".
5. The amount of popups when I open any kind of app or the appstore is incredible. I think I had at least 4 consecutive popups before it lets me do anything.
6. The prices are a riot, it's a designer luxury item. I guess in the US the prices seem somewhat acceptable but anywhere else in the world the value for this phone does not match the money you pay for it.
7. [insert here every other criticism, e.g about iTunes being required or any other of the dozens and dozens of legitimate problems]
This list is nowhere near complete. Meanwhile when I use my Android, my only complaint is that Samsung installed some default apps I don't want. That's literally it. Everything else works fine for me. I had an iphone 5s for years, while I was using it I liked it but nowadays when I have a comparison with a fluid, new android phone it cannot compete. To me it is clear that the success of Apple is a psychological success of two things mixed together: speed and beauty. The ui is always fast, therefore there is a false impression that it's simple and good. Beauty likewise gives a false impression that the ui is good in a general sense when in reality it's not better.
What the fuck are you talking about? Almost all of your points are either blatantly false, or so subjective they clearly show how biased you are regarding iPhones. Like for example « scrolling is slower » what the hell is that? I spent 10 years on Android and have switched to an iPhone 2 years ago and this is just not true.
> The prices are a riot, it's a designer luxury item
Yeah they’re expensive. You’re not entitled to buy everything that exists. An iPhone is not a need. Plus, price is not an issue since you hate them anyway.
> The amount of popups when I open any kind of app or the appstore is incredible.
I have no idea what you’re even talking about. There are things that suck in the App Store (the sponsored apps that appear before the searched results for example) but popups? The only time there are popups is on install when you try to install an app and your iCloud account is not linked. FYI it’s the same on the Play Store.
> The notch is objectively terrible
Subjectively. It doesn’t even lose screen real estate since the space around the not h is used for icons and clock.
I agree with many of these points. To me, the iTunes requirement is probably the worst. The idea that I'd be forced to use what is effectively a shopping application just to load files on my phone is pretty abhorrent.
Regarding the Samsung default apps, I agree that there are too many of them and they can be annoying. But they're easy to deal with. My favorite approach is to use "pm uninstall" in adb. I have most of the package names saved in my notes anyway, so it's just a copy and paste job.
Alternatively, for less technical people, they could either uninstall the apps manually or just disable them if I uninstalling an app is disabled.
The Android does get more use, but there's no denying the camera lag has been there since day one with the S22+.
Previously I used (and still adore) the S10e. It's camera lag actually seemed slightly better than with the S22+, but still inferior to any recent iPhone (10x or newer).
What's the android security flaw? As far as I've read pegasus has 0 click exploits on iOS that has successfully infiltrated hundreds of people. I couldn't find documented android examples.
I've read android has some malware that you need to click "allow from web" and manually install.
I have some sensitive stuff on my phone so security is my number 1 reason for getting an Android.
I mean, Private, Security, and Efficiency may not be so orthogonal if you consider what sort of data collection is desired for ad targeting, its basically everything. What apps are installed, which are used most, when? where? Which bluetooth and wifi devices are nearby?
Truly the data scraping could be enormous, needing resources and lots of them.
It's kind of insane to me that my phone (Android or iOS) requires 2GB of ram and 16GB of storage given that in 1995 my WindowsNT 4.0 PC with 128Meg of ram and maybe 2gb HD ran 3DStudio Max to render 3D effects and movies and and ran Photoshop and MS Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) and now it takes 2GB to just write messages, and share photos :P
Yes, but your 1995 Windows NT 4.0 PC ran a 640x480 display at 60Hz and graphics compositing had, at best, one-bit transparency. It took 3 minutes to boot. Websites could bluescreen it with `<img src="con">`. A malicious attachment could trick your email client into deleting your whole hard drive.
I think the interesting question is what how much we're "paying" computationally for each of those things.
The "img src=con", and to a lesser extent, the "malicious attachment" thing could be solved on the same PC by running something not-Windows. 1995 might have been a bit in the teething era for Linux and BSDs but maybe some commercial Unix would have been viable?
The "3 minutes to boot" would be largely ameliorated by using a SSD and by the fact the phone is largely a fixed hardware tree that doesn't require significant probing and dynamically selecting drivers at boot time.
Getting to a higher resolution and colour depth-- okay, maybe you need to advance to say the specs of a decent 2005 PC (1Gb memory, early x86-64 CPU, DirectX 9 class GPU) to get there.
But beyond that, I think we're paying mostly for poor software design. How many apps are loading big full-featured browser engines when all they need is libcurl and some minimal optimized rich-text system? How many apps are relying on dynamically loading content that could have been permanently baked into the bundle (i. e. a shopping app's category tree?)
My NT machine ran 1280x1024 which is about 2/3 of what my phone does. More Hz is the job of the GPU and doesn't take more memory. And I'm pretty sure it took under a minute, and the boot speed would compete very well with my phone if the drive was migrated to a $25 SSD.
The security was different, but I don't think that's one of the major factors here.
The sad thing is that even with 2GB an Android device can't reliably multitask without forcing background apps to sleep and purge data. Devs only testing on flagship phones means that a lesser pocket supercomputer results in unnecessarily poor performance.
A lot of the issues related to multitask actually comes from OEM customizations. Many Android OEMs, especially Samsung, would make killing background apps more aggressive.
iOS does much better here because it started with apps only running while in the foreground and limited background processing has been added over time in specific cases. On the other hand, Android originally let apps do whatever, whenever, and has tried to rein that in over time, through 3rd party tools, manufacturer tools and changes to the OS; but it's so fragile, because apps don't always cleanly separate... And a lot of apps will try their hardest to wakeup and do something that's not really important whenever they can.
I run AOSP and can confirm the claims of the parent comment. It's not just OEM customizations, Android itself got way more memory hungry in the past years.
Regularly I can't even have two apps running at once without one of them being force unloaded and that's with all the "battery optimizations" disabled, because without it's even worse.
I have an Android One phone and it behaves just as badly. This is a fundamental systemic problem with core Android development. I dread system updates because I know some of the key apps (maps in particular) are going to have a worse experience than before.
I have been developing software for over a decade. I wanted to give Android apps a try too. But when I tried to install the tooling, it was all so heavy and bloated and clunky that I gave up and never tried again.
Compare that to writing web apps. You open an empty text file in a text editor and are ready to go.
> I have been developing software for over a decade. I wanted to give Android apps a try too. But when I tried to install the tooling, it was all so heavy and bloated and clunky that I gave up and never tried again
At least it's cross-platform and it doesn't require you to buy special hardware like the main mobile competitor does.
I had a complete opposite experience a few weeks ago. It took me about an hour max to install Android Studio in Manjaro, install SDKs, spin up Android VM, pull open source Android keyboard app and add my own customised layout, then test it in VM and install to my phone. There were no errors at all. Just clicking buttons and waiting.
Had you been through the trouble of installing it, and tried the NDK, you would have found a primitive development experience requiring devs to manually copy code from GitHub to use NDK frameworks.
How after 10 years Google thinks that is a good development experience baffles me.
That's one of the most commonly heard complaints about native Android development from newcomers: "why does Android Studio is such a resource/memory hog bla bla bla..."
About a decade ago, when Eclipse was the default IDE for Android development, the situation was less worse. 2 GB RAM was fine.
One of the quick solutions is to use VSCode and install the required Android SDKs manually.
Android Studio and the NDK experience is so bad that in order to get game developers on board, Google had to come up with the AGK and Visual Studio plug-ins.
Even then, it is like a construction yard experience versus iDevices, Windows or game consoles.
Android has been a mess for awhile and it isn’t getting better. A lot of bullshit is being done for “security” which will just end up recreating some of the sandboxed nightmares from iOS. The enforcement of Scoped Storage with Android 13 it going to essentially recreate the nightmare of file management that is iOS.
It’s really frustrating how Google has to slowly screw up damn near everything they create.
2GB is also the minimum RAM for Windows 10 (64-bit x86) and that's a full fledged desktop OS with much more capability than a smartphone OS. I think what people are wondering is how the much more constrained application environment on a phone has become that demanding of system resources?
> Windows 10 (64-bit x86) and that's a full fledged desktop OS with much more capability than a smartphone OS
Given all the fancy things phones can do nowaydays, talk to satellites, crash detection, gyroscopes, GPS, all in a tiny form factor while managing battery life and a massively powerful camera, I'd argue desktop has maybe less capability than a smartphone OS
I really don’t believe the statement that Windows is much more advanced than Android and iOS.
And the experience of using windows with 2GB ram is absolutely abysmal. Really 8gb is the minimum for anything acceptable. Microsoft just cares a lot less about user satisfaction so the windows minimum is the absolute minimum possible to boot on while the android minimum is the minimum required to not hate using the phone.
It wouldn't make sense for the operating system alone to consume 2GB RAM/16GB storage, but an Android version number also represents a compatibility level for apps and handsets.
If an app developer tests their app on Android 13 but doesn't test it on older Android versions, they probably aren't testing on low-RAM devices, either. And if a consumer buys a handset after checking only the Android version number, and doesn't check details like the RAM and storage, they'll probably be find out that apps which they expected to work don't work, and be quite unhappy.
Android version number for a app developer is only for API compatibility. It doesn't ensure memory or storage. The above minimum memory and storage is for OEM's so they can ensure new version of Android can run properly on their devices.
Readit News
Then I remember KitKat OS came and it was all hell broke loose. Every OEM was just releasing different Android versions here and there every year. And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want
In my history of ~11 years of Android development, it's just hard to purchase a Google phone. I bought a Nexus tablet but I have to ask my sister in the US to ship it to me. The shipping fee is ridiculous high I remember. Then they introduced Pixel and Go editions but still I couldn't purchase officially from Google. I have to ask favor from someone in the US/EU to ship it to me.
MTP sucks hard and is slow and easy to overload with many files.
My 4.2 device was Umi X2 Chinese phone and I even hacked together couple Roms for such Meadiatek based devices back then. I remember my lightest ROM was like 250mb. With working PlayStore and all, but obviously only bare minimum included. Nowadays even the lightest custom Roms are 700mb+ . With Google apps and all easy 1.5GB and more.
Also Google IO is not fun any longer, knowing that I will only get to play with those features when my phone dies and is time for a replacement.
And even when buying one needs to take care, for example, plenty of Android 10 phones still on sale.
I mean just look at this: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android . No recent version ever even hit 50%.
Maybe it would have been different if I was part of a large team with more time to spend on somewhat frivolous efforts.
But that code was written in the times when there was no widely used non-NDK APIs for media. Right now landscape is very different: NDK is very niche, and if you’re seeing it everywhere, then either you’re in the gamedev / IoT / etc, or doing something in a very strange way.
What exactly do you use NDK extensively for?
I have an old-ish phone, but recently needed to update from android 9 to android 10. And have been plagued with issues ever since - volume is somehow lowered on bluetooth devices, and the battery doesn't last as long, and occasionally there are crashes that force phone to restart.
You can turn off a setting called something like 'unified volume control', to go back to the old way of having separate (and redundant) volume control on both headset and source device.
What would you have expected them to do? Vendors are free by licensing to fork AOSP and do what they will with it. Ain't nothing Google can say to change that; any more than they can say what people can do with forks of Chromium.
- Google most certainly can restrict how its products are used, in fact they do. Licensing comes with rules.
- Huawei is “free” to use AOSP, but can’t use Google’s APIs. See how far they got with that. No App Store and no Google APIs means a lot of apps won’t work. So you really need Google’s version unless you’re in China.
It's open source, what do you propose they do about that? Close source the OS?
> For me the deterioration of Android started after Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean for me is the best Android OS in history.
This is definitely where I lost you. That's a 10 year old OS, basically an OS that represents the the infancy of consumer smartphones. Anyone who actually goes back and uses an OS that old will quickly discover just how little "vital" functionality it has.
One that's particularly funny to me: Android added native printer support in 8.0. That's something we've had on desktop computers for decades!
We didn't even have fully fledged notification controls and do not disturb before Android 5, something that's considered a basic necessity now. Couldn't search the system settings. The list goes on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history
You might be romanticizing the situation. Before Jelly Bean, it was still completely a Wild West. If anything, custom skins from manufacturers were even worse back then.
Android is an open source project.
But it isn't what regular people mean when you talk about Android. In the say way you could say that MacOS would be Open source if they had almost the same name with Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
* Privacy
* Security
* Efficiency
I have a personal Android S22+ and an iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone gets better with every update, whereas there's always something funky going on with my droid. Every update does something weird, fixing one thing and breaking something new, and managing to offer no significant privacy improvements.
In fact, today it is Samsung, the world's second largest phone vendor (outside of China), who is the one getting hit by data breaches, leaks, and hacks on an ongoing basis.
I'll keep buying phones that only use cloud services that spy on me, instead of spying on me directly. At least that's somewhat defensible as it's not my hardware acting against me.
On Android, you have a dad reported to the police and his Google account locked (including his Google Fi cellular plan) for taking photos of his toddler to send to the doctor https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
Apple has not done this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
In which case, (a) you are not required to use iCloud Photos and (b) it is not out of the ordinary for US-based photo hosting services to scan for CSAM.
There is no evidence otherwise that Apple is "spying on you" whatever that specifically means.
Pedantic correction: while the phone would spy on you to pre-calculate + embed "you are a bad guy doing a bad thing" metadata into photos, the phone wouldn't then report you to the authorities. You had to choose to sync your photos into iCloud Photos (i.e. expose them in cleartext to Apple), for Apple to then discover the embedded "you are a bad guy" metadata out of them, and use it to report you to the authorities.
But, as you noted, Apple backed down on the proposal, so assuming that you still hold that cloud scanning is ok, Apple's approach, at least in this regard is at worst equal.
The company that wants to force CSAM, doesn't encrypt iCloud backups so it can remain as a backdoor to WhatsApp, cares about your privacy?.
I can't even install and app without an apple account.
Apple doesn't care about your privacy, its just marketing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Epj6ldKU
On android I can use it without a google account, with newpipe for zero ads on YouTube, infinity for zero ads on reddit, glider as a client for HN.
I use CalyxOS for better privacy with usability, and you can switch to GrapheneOS which is one of the most secure mobile OSes. (Only on Pixel).
While on iOS, there is nothing even close to it, and the FOSS scene is totally dead.
However I only like stock android, Samsung, or the million other IOS clones from Chinese companies almost all suck.
> Security
IOS has more vulnerabilities than Android
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_flaws/
I used to like stock android but since 12 it's been going down the drain in terms of looks and feel. Now I prefer the Samsung UI since they're at least consistent with previous versions and don't make huge changes for the sake of changes like Google does.
So this is one of the main advantages of android: vendors can rejected Google's ästhetisc choices and just keep the under the hood improvements.
Every big company forces it, Apple tried to make it better but it was PR failure. Nobody bothered to understand their papers properly.
> doesn't encrypt iCloud backups
CSAM scanning on device feature would have allowed that, now they need to keep scanning in cloud.
> I can't even install and app without an apple account.
How easily average users can install app safely without Google account on Android? Underlining the word safely.
You are talking from the perspective of 0.01% users.
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On Android I can run proper Firefox and get uBlock Origin.
Apple's entire platform is so locked down, it definitely comes off as somewhat user-hostile to me. That said, my mom doesn't care about this aspect in the slightest.
I'm thinking there's no point in owning an Android phone anymore. They aren't trustworthy devices, they offer increasingly less user freedom at the cost of a less refined experience. It seems like they're just gonna become worse iPhones, all the problems and none of the benefits.
It's the most used mobile OS worldwide, by far. Owned, developed and release by the world's largest ad and web company.
Never a slow down or any glitch, except for connecting some Bluetooth devices.
As with all software, YMMV. At least Google is not throttling its CPU behind my back.
Also, Snowden has outed Apple as one of the corps complying with any government for customer data so don't get too high on your horse.
Compare Zerodium's payout for iOS vs Android:
https://www.zerodium.com/program.html
iOS security was bad enough in 2020 that it even lead to:
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/14/zerodium-pauses-acquiri...
> Zerodium this week announced that it will not be purchasing any iOS exploits for the next two to three months due to a high number of submissions. In other words, the company has so many security vulnerabilities at its disposal that it does not need any more.
Android FCP zero-click has been keeping higher price than iOS for a few years now. iOS iMessage RCE+LPE has been lower price than SMS RCE+LPE on android for a few years. In almost every comparison, iOS has the same bounty as android or cheaper.
This, despite the fact that iOS bugs have more demand because of more premium targets.
Efficiency, esp when it comes to UI animation not stuttering is where iOS has done a tremendous job.
Crazy statement. I have iPhone for work and it is horrible to use. I haven't met a single thing from UX point of view in iOS that is better than whatever is in Android. It's a complete downgrade IME.
- you cannot simply install applications outside the AppStore
- developing applications even for personal use requires macOS, an Apple developer account, etc
- it lacks of decent applications, such as an email client that works, thanks to limitations imposed by Apple on what the applications can do in background
- it comes with stupid limitations. Such as you can't to a software update on a mobile network (why? To this day with cheap plans that gives you 50G or even unlimited data for 10 euros at month a lot of people no longer even have a landline internet connection and thus Wi-Fi at home, and have to use another phone in hotspot mode to download an update, this is pure insanity of Apple!)
- it works well if you are all-in in the Apple ecosystem, for example you have also a Mac, but it doesn't integrate with Windows (the Windows phone companion that lets you to receive notifications on the PC and other stuff is only available for Android, since iOS doesn't have APIs to do that stuff such as read notifications).
- the only browser allowed is basically Safari and this to me is very wrong for the open web (it's true that in Android you have Chrome, but you can install whatever browser you want, such as Firefox). Safari doesn't support progressive web apps for example for no reason, so you are forced to install an app while you could have used its PWA enabled website.
- you are forced to use Apple services, while in Android using Google services is an option (you can have an Android OS without Google Apps, even if it can be impractical I like having this possibility at least in theory). For example the only way that I found to backup my photos was to pay iCloud, since Google Photos (that did give you unlimited space back then) didn't work in background and thus you have to open it to sync (something that is pretty useless for a backup tool that you want to be always running...)
- it's less user friendly, there are things that are complicated for no reason. This was confirmed by a lot of people that transitioned to iOS and find it more difficult to use
- to this day it's practically impossible to mod (jailbreak) an iPhone to overcome its limitations. In the past there was jailbreak that really did solve many of the issues, but this day it's nearly impossible
- lack of support for open standards, such as the usage of the proprietary lightning connector instead of USB-C (something that is now a requirement in the European union by the way)
From the hardware perspective, it's well built for sure, but I find it too expensive for what it offers. The iPhone that I actually have (an iPhone XS bought new for 600 euros) it seemed expensive when I bought, now to get an iPhone of a similar range (that is an iPhone Pro) you have to spend at least than double that price! A decent Android that is enough to me for my daily tasks can be bought for 200 euros, a top spec one for 600. To me the added cost of an iPhone is not justified.
All of your points about installing software outside of the app store are valid and if that's what you need, iOS is not for you and I think that's okay. Choosing the platform that best supports the software you need to run has always been how you decide what to buy. The other way around doesn't make any sense. It would be like buying an PS5 and then saying it sucks because you can't run Excel on it.
1. almost every generation has some kind of hardware defect that you only find out later that lots of people report in enthusiast forums. Be it the loading cable, display bending, weird issues around refresh rate straining your eyes.. it never ends. And no, the hardware doesn't even feel better than the competition anymore. I had the iphone 13 in my hands and it felt like any cheap plastic phone.
2. The UI is horrible, the false perception of iOS being "simple" is perhaps the biggest marketing success in human history. I had an iPhone 13 for a few hours and there were already countless things I found incomprehensible. E.g Undiscoverable gestures or extremely hard to achieve gesture to swipe up to remove an opened app. For one ui menu on the right middle side I had to press part of the hardware button on the right (what on earth, a hardware button to activate a touch ui!). Since when is the point of using a touch device to: ignore the touch interface and instead use a hardware button. Not even considering yet the weird annoying popup ui in the first place, why would you ever put something like that on the middle of your screen.
3. scrolling is slower, they have some kind of terrible human-like algorithm where you have to gear up the scroll speed as if you're manually accelerating a dial every time you want to scroll down. This is why they had to invent all these little tricks to scroll back up to the top of a page with a shortcut. Scrolling is just too slow, on huge pages it's fingerhurting work to get to the bottom.
4. The notch is objectively terrible, it was never good, it was never acceptable to put camera holes or notches into the display but the notch is the worst, most biggest affront to visual consistency. It almost has comical qualities, "oh yes, please put a huge black block directly into my visual field and make it so I am forced to look at it, I can't even install an app to hide it".
5. The amount of popups when I open any kind of app or the appstore is incredible. I think I had at least 4 consecutive popups before it lets me do anything.
6. The prices are a riot, it's a designer luxury item. I guess in the US the prices seem somewhat acceptable but anywhere else in the world the value for this phone does not match the money you pay for it.
7. [insert here every other criticism, e.g about iTunes being required or any other of the dozens and dozens of legitimate problems]
This list is nowhere near complete. Meanwhile when I use my Android, my only complaint is that Samsung installed some default apps I don't want. That's literally it. Everything else works fine for me. I had an iphone 5s for years, while I was using it I liked it but nowadays when I have a comparison with a fluid, new android phone it cannot compete. To me it is clear that the success of Apple is a psychological success of two things mixed together: speed and beauty. The ui is always fast, therefore there is a false impression that it's simple and good. Beauty likewise gives a false impression that the ui is good in a general sense when in reality it's not better.
> The prices are a riot, it's a designer luxury item
Yeah they’re expensive. You’re not entitled to buy everything that exists. An iPhone is not a need. Plus, price is not an issue since you hate them anyway.
> The amount of popups when I open any kind of app or the appstore is incredible.
I have no idea what you’re even talking about. There are things that suck in the App Store (the sponsored apps that appear before the searched results for example) but popups? The only time there are popups is on install when you try to install an app and your iCloud account is not linked. FYI it’s the same on the Play Store.
> The notch is objectively terrible
Subjectively. It doesn’t even lose screen real estate since the space around the not h is used for icons and clock.
If you install 100 + apps in iPhone it is also terrible.
Both 256GB versions.
The Android does get more use, but there's no denying the camera lag has been there since day one with the S22+.
Previously I used (and still adore) the S10e. It's camera lag actually seemed slightly better than with the S22+, but still inferior to any recent iPhone (10x or newer).
I've read android has some malware that you need to click "allow from web" and manually install.
I have some sensitive stuff on my phone so security is my number 1 reason for getting an Android.
Dead Comment
Truly the data scraping could be enormous, needing resources and lots of them.
The "img src=con", and to a lesser extent, the "malicious attachment" thing could be solved on the same PC by running something not-Windows. 1995 might have been a bit in the teething era for Linux and BSDs but maybe some commercial Unix would have been viable?
The "3 minutes to boot" would be largely ameliorated by using a SSD and by the fact the phone is largely a fixed hardware tree that doesn't require significant probing and dynamically selecting drivers at boot time.
Getting to a higher resolution and colour depth-- okay, maybe you need to advance to say the specs of a decent 2005 PC (1Gb memory, early x86-64 CPU, DirectX 9 class GPU) to get there.
But beyond that, I think we're paying mostly for poor software design. How many apps are loading big full-featured browser engines when all they need is libcurl and some minimal optimized rich-text system? How many apps are relying on dynamically loading content that could have been permanently baked into the bundle (i. e. a shopping app's category tree?)
The security was different, but I don't think that's one of the major factors here.
I can assure you that in 1995, having 1024x768 was quite common.
Why are you pretending 1995 is like today?
I don't want those things, so who cares?
Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com/
Regularly I can't even have two apps running at once without one of them being force unloaded and that's with all the "battery optimizations" disabled, because without it's even worse.
I had to upgrade a couple of years ago.
I think it's not just the OS, but the apps themselves, and even the web pages just got more resource-hungry.
Love it
It tickles me to think that there are others who think about (and name) smartphones this way :)
Compare that to writing web apps. You open an empty text file in a text editor and are ready to go.
At least it's cross-platform and it doesn't require you to buy special hardware like the main mobile competitor does.
-edit: typo
How after 10 years Google thinks that is a good development experience baffles me.
That's one of the most commonly heard complaints about native Android development from newcomers: "why does Android Studio is such a resource/memory hog bla bla bla..."
About a decade ago, when Eclipse was the default IDE for Android development, the situation was less worse. 2 GB RAM was fine.
One of the quick solutions is to use VSCode and install the required Android SDKs manually.
Even then, it is like a construction yard experience versus iDevices, Windows or game consoles.
It’s really frustrating how Google has to slowly screw up damn near everything they create.
Is it just that it makes it hard/impossible to make super cheap Android phones by raising the minimum BoM?
2GB is the minimum RAM for iOS 16 as well, so this doesn’t seem crazy. If they said 4GB or 6GB I would understand better.
Given all the fancy things phones can do nowaydays, talk to satellites, crash detection, gyroscopes, GPS, all in a tiny form factor while managing battery life and a massively powerful camera, I'd argue desktop has maybe less capability than a smartphone OS
And the experience of using windows with 2GB ram is absolutely abysmal. Really 8gb is the minimum for anything acceptable. Microsoft just cares a lot less about user satisfaction so the windows minimum is the absolute minimum possible to boot on while the android minimum is the minimum required to not hate using the phone.
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If an app developer tests their app on Android 13 but doesn't test it on older Android versions, they probably aren't testing on low-RAM devices, either. And if a consumer buys a handset after checking only the Android version number, and doesn't check details like the RAM and storage, they'll probably be find out that apps which they expected to work don't work, and be quite unhappy.