I went iPhone -> Android -> Windows -> Android. I'd really like to get back to an iPhone for privacy reasons, but the storage situation really doesn't work for my family. Traditionally, it's been a low capacity entry model and then ~$100 to upgrade to each new tier, paying Apple's wildly inflated markup. The pricing is also way out of line with our budget. I was really hoping for a new SE model for my wife.
I'm fairly happy with my Galaxy S9+ now, but I really miss a lot about Windows 10 Mobile. I'll never forgive Google for doing everything in its power to make sure another mobile platform didn't become viable.
This is why I bought the 256GB versions (although your photo archives might be even bigger).
Not sure what I can recommend but in any case I'd probably get a professional camera with 400GB SD card. :D I mean, if you guys like to make long videos during a time outside, why not?
I agree Apple's proposition has cracks by the way. Not arguing that.
As for W10 Mobile, yep -- I sold my Lumia 1520 the summer of 2017 and my heart is still broken. :( This system had so much potential! And I have never found a phone whose form factor and feel to the touch that I like so much as the Lumia 1520 and the Lumia 950 XL.
As for photos, I wouldn't say I take hundreds of gigabytes. The point is I don't want to have an anxiety attack over running out of space where I have low coverage. I can get a 512 GB microSD card for $100 and smaller capacities for much less. That let's me have my apps, offline music, offline maps, photos, 1080p videos, and so on. But, thanks for the suggestions nonetheless.
Use what serves you best. I recognise that your scenario isn't well-served by Apple. Of course you'll switch.
I'm preaching to the choir, but it sucks that the only two viable options these days require such huge trade-offs. And that the premium for privacy is so much greater than what typical Android hardware costs.
I'm glad you've been able to find a trade-off that works for you. I'm hoping something changes in this duopoly system we have.
I completely agree we shouldn't have to make the big trade-offs between the duopoly. But truth be told, if Microsoft failed to gain ground as a third smartphone vendor, what hope does anybody else have? They were sabotaged by Google at every turn and let's face it, if your mobile OS cannot have YouTube that means at least 80% of the smartphone populace will write you off as useless. If not 95% even.
I also haven't found the perfect setup yet. Pondering investing heavily in a 10Gbps router + 10Gbps switch + NAS with 25TB as a start. I have loads of videos and can't pay iCloud for them. So things are still shaping up.
Overall though, I am really happy with my choice. Serves me well in 98% of the time.
Thank you for the kind words. Right back at you. :)
Well then 40% of American households are concerned: https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-house...
I'm a former ios user (9 years, from my 3GS in 2009 to my 6S which I used until 2018) that switched to Android last year mostly out of cost. Apple crossed a threshold I'm unwilling to follow.
Now I have a moto x4 that was just $300 so I'm not terrified to take it running/hiking with me in case I trip or fall or otherwise break/drop/lose the phone. It takes an SD card so I don't have to pay inflated rates for memory during purchase, the one chance you get. And on top of it I'm on a cheaper carrier (not strictly Apple's fault).
That being said, don't most US households get carrier-financed phones?
I'll grant you that Apple providing better software support for their phones was a huge advantage. And their stance on privacy is leagues apart from Google's. So, I could work out the math on that iPhone 8+ and call it roughly breakeven. I typically keep a phone for 3 years, so the per annum cost was roughly the same. But, for that money I likely wasn't going to be happy and that factors in. I just wasn't going to have what I want out of a phone and I'd have to console myself with having an intangible benefit of better privacy. I care about privacy, but trying to be honest with myself, that likely wasn't going to make me feel better about paying $200 extra because Apple doesn't think I need a microSD slot.
My wife has a completely different hang-up. She gets very nervous about carrying around a fragile $800+ device. And she'd lose her mind if she misplaced such an expensive device. Prior to inheriting my Lumia 950 XL, she had a Lumia 640 she loved and only paid $30 for. So, she was never going to be happy with an iPhone 8 either. If Apple had refreshed the SE device, we may very well have made the switch to iOS. But, they want to sit at the high-end of the market -- as is their right -- and so we decided to self-select out.
All of this is a really long-winded way of saying that affordability isn't the only concern when it comes to making a purchase. For all its other faults, the Android ecosystem provides many options to suit people's budgets and comfort zones. And yet again, I have to lament the demise of Windows 10 Mobile because it really offered the best of both worlds there.
I most certainly do, but as mentioned in a sibling comment, don't most US households use carrier-financed phones? That's like, $20 - $50 extra a month?
The 3 years usage period is kind of surprising to me because it clashes with my anecdotal evidence somewhat -- I've known 20+ people holding on to iPhones for 5-6 years. But I am pretty sure the median you gave is more accurate so in that case the cost per annum might indeed be equal to Android flagships (or larger).
> paying $200 extra because Apple doesn't think I need a microSD slot.
I now dearly regret not keeping the link but there was a research showing that the SD controller introduces lag in the entire system (in the case of SoCs anyway). However, nowadays that probably can be solved. Likely nobody in Apple tried though. So there's not only Apple not thinking you might need a microSD. There seem to be other factors in the equation. iPhones are known to be fast and Apple doesn't want to risk losing that no matter what -- would be my guess.
> She gets very nervous about carrying around a fragile $800+ device.
As I mentioned in the other sibling comment here, I really miss the days I didn't have to care if I dropped my phone. Sadly I don't think these days are ever coming back. :(
I personally am unwilling to sacrifice privacy and smooth operation (most budget Androids lag like hell) -- because I consume a lot of reading and video and audio material on my phone and replacing light amounts of anxiety (that most of the time I can put under control) with severe annoyances on a daily basis is a bad trade for me.
Of course, we aren't trying to convince each other, I am aware. We're sharing use cases and I am grateful that you oblige.
The problem isn't that I'm using the device wrong. The problem is the device isn't fit for purpose.
especially in the case of a phone failure to boot.
So consider that this niche feature you find useful is of almost no consequence to anybody.
Additionally, iPhones and Samsung devices have really durable internal storage. Almost always the battery craps out first.
The ability to do offline salvaging does not seem like such a big selling point to me.
As for offline salvaging, do you realize how many phones have had bugs that resulted in boot problems in the last 10 years?
As for privacy, I would disable cloud sync and backups as well. But eventually came to the sad conclusion that I have a lot more going on in my life and I cannot sacrifice even more of my preciously little free time to self-manage all my data -- not to mention this would require a moderate investment in my own NAS / 10Gbps switch / 10Gbps router and end-to-end encrypted backups to 1-2 VPS-es.
I get where you are coming from, I do. But I had to make a choice between an actual life and paranoia. I settled for a "mostly ok" solution and a bit more of a personal life and free time.
If privacy and offline-first own personal data get commoditised, I'll be the first to switch away from cloud (and thus Apple).
Now my phone has 64 GB based storage and I'm still in the same situation because everything has bloated to fill the available space. microSD is a really cheap and incredibly effective solution to the problem. Certainly much cheaper than buying a new phone so you can get more storage.
That's awful in my eyes. What's more is my inability to browse that file system without a third party application when i want to simply move files to my computer.
The only reason I'm even contemplating the move to iOS, is b/c I have a android based, digital audio player that has 2 SDcard slots that I keep disconnected from Wifi (and it does n't have a 4G connection at all).
If my music was still on my phone, I simply would not move to iOS over this singular issue. You're talking 250-400GB of files, not including my downloads, my pictures, my Keepass databases, my SSH keys, my certs file for my VPN, and files that I don't want the OS to index and put in some general library.
It stills seem ridiculously daunting to let go of. Because I use it extensively. Daily - even without my music on there.
>ou guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users)
Except only the apps I trust are allowed storage access.
As mentioned in a sibling comment, Apple's proposition has cracks and that's unequivocally true. Your usage sounds like an outlier case.
In my case, I have tons and TONS of videos (800GB at this point) so I am pondering the home NAS + 10Gbps router + 10Gbps switch setup. And yeah, I can't use Apple's iCloud for my videos.
That's not the case almost anywhere though. And you won't be able to access your own stuff without internet either. That's would be very annoying for music, imo.
In my case I am on 1Gbps ingress/egress for ~43 EUR a month and could negotiate a deal for a datacenter level of a link (10Gbps) but I don't want to.
The reason I'll go for 10Gbps router and a 10Gbps switch is because if you put a NAS in your home network then the gigabit speeds will never be achieved again (various reasons, including LAN chatter). And also because I'll buy a 10Gbps-enabled machine and would like to be able to work with the data on my NAS with 1.25GB/s.
I agree that my planned setup is an overkill but I am setting myself up for such a tech overkill setup in all my work endeavours because I want to have a peace of mind for about 10 years -- if at all possible.
I don't think any of us will soon need more than 1.25GB/s ingress/egress anytime soon (unless of course our games are rendered on the cloud and streamed directly to our PCs). And since I am sick and tired of eternal tinkering, I want to go for an ultimate endgame, or at least one that can last me some years in the future.
Quite an investment I admit. But it's long-term. I don't anticipate changing that setup for like 10 years.
My main complaint about iOS is text entry. Both the keyboard and voice input are incredibly bad compared to Android, even compared to Android of 3 years ago. I still struggle to type accurately or voicetype without having to make a ton of corrections. And there are better 3rd party keyboards (including GBoard) but they tend to be slow and awkward due to iOS limitations, plus then you lose voice typing completely which is not acceptable to me. If I could have an iPhone with the native Android keyboard and voice typing I'd be super happy.
Doesn't stop Google's keyboard to periodically pester you to give it full access "to get the full experience" (or something along the lines) but if you don't, it will never get or send a single byte to Google's servers.
Trust me, I researched. I too didn't want the huge irony you mentioned to hit me. And it doesn't.
I use GBoard on iOS, and on the iPhone XS with iOS12, you can still use the native voice typing while using GBoard
The best part is the equivalent Android APIs have terrible performance and stability.
Android has been steadily moving away from both being open and supporting power users, with stuff like Doze relying on GCM, nerfing WiFi control, disabling getting BT mac addresses (and not even letting apps ask for permission)
It turns out being able to replace a users lock screen with a full page ad is not a good thing.
iCloud is accessible as a "filesystem" on iOS. It's a decent compromise that doubles as a dropbox replacement
I've never really wanted to tinker much with my smartphone. I want it to do a handful of simple tasks (calls, texts, maps, music, light web browsing), and otherwise get out of the way.
Similarly, I switched to Mac OS X awhile back after years on Linux and BSD, because I realized that I would never want to tinker with (the source code of) my web browser or word processor, and there was a whole tinker-friendly Unix system sitting right next door. Pace, Stallman, but I don't need the freedom to tinker everywhere.
I used Debian as a main driver for several years and lost patience around 2010. Using a MacBook Pro with an external monitor and working to get an iMac Pro with maxed out settings (~14_000 EUR) to have as a main driver for the next 9-10 years.
Customisation and freedom to tinker with the details is great but only when you need it. Not all the time.
I ask you what can we realistically do though?
It's very apparent that budget Androids that lag like hell and break down often aren't to the general populace's taste if they have a choice -- in my "poor" country (Bulgaria) people get loans so they can buy the Galaxy S10 or Huawei P30, en masse. Most people I've known in my life buying budget Androids only did so because of money constraints. I only knew 2 people who bought cheap Androids to tinker -- and it was because they loved tinkering with tech more than having sex with their wives, or spending time with their kids, or go jogging.
I already said I am not OK with Apple lobbying against the right to repair.
But I have no recourse as a customer. My iPhone is legitimately saving me time and frustration for a no small amount of leisure and work activities. If it didn't, I'd be using a budget Xiaomi for life. But here we are.
What would you do? Would you sacrifice your free time so you can punish the big evil corporations? And how?
If the only Android phones where the cheap, shitty ones, I'd probably be on an iPhone now.
I loved Samsung while I was using Androids but they were starting to lag at the 6-9 months mark, without an exception (I owned 5 of their devices over a course of 4 years). Eventually it pissed me off.
Only Android device I legitimately loved was the Xiaomi Mi 6 (the high-end version with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage). Truthfully a masterpiece!
In the end though, my need for full and easy integration between my mobile devices and laptop (soon a desktop as well) prevailed. I arrived at the conclusion that "tinker at all costs" is not for me. There are plenty of people who do only that, I am passing the torch to them.
The current toss-it-over-the-wall-ware model is good enough. Android and Chromium technically "work" without Google, and their code is online. There are multiple Firefox forks. I don't know about OSS programs for Excel spreadsheets and Word docs, but I'm happy to sacrifice some freedom in order to never have to go down that rabbit-hole.
Instead of being hung up "but if the people just do this...", how about we formulate a new strategy based on the facts observed so far?
Trust me, I'd like some of my ideas to be funded as well. But it doesn't seem to be the world we are living in. :(
A free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space apps and libraries.
It's cool if you have a weekend's worth of time to burn on such a project and fine-tune everything to your liking. But I don't.
Is it not? Your entire post only argues "It is, but here's why it works for me...". Removing the "freedom to tinker" is taking two steps back from what a computer should be. And smartphones are growing to be the primary computing device for many, so in my mind it's ridiculous to argue them being locked-down a merit. Relying on apps from a walled-garden app store is not a solution even if it works for you or others. Many legitimate apps are banned from the Apple app store entirely, and users cannot install them even if they choose to because iOS prevents installs outside of the app store (unlike Android). I want to run my own code on my own device, freedom to do so is not "hugely overrated".
And as for privacy: what is privacy if its decided for the user and not the other way round? You cannot have true privacy without freedom, you only have Apple's definition of it. Tell Chinese Apple users about privacy, why Apple stores data in China.
And freedom extends to hardware, too. You purchase an iPhone and Apple tells you it's too dangerous for users to fix it themselves, and lobbies against right-to-repair [1]. Do you also consider freedom to repair your own devices overrated?
Of course we should have the right to repair. And of course many Apple users aren't okay with everything Apple does -- or you thought we were all mindless worshipping drones? No. We buy Apple because it makes the most sense for our needs. That's all there is to it.
But tell me, what choice is there out there if we want alternatives? No, really. Don't give me theoreticals and "if we could only do X...". We have Android and iOS. Nothing else. Sailfish OS is very niche and not everybody likes Sony's 2-3 devices that the OS supports. W10 Mobile is dead. Google and all Android OEMS actively sabotaged any and all open-source efforts -- mostly the ROM community -- mainly by voiding warranties if you touch a single byte in the bootloader. Even the rootless unlocking techniques are attacked on a regular basis. It's a furious battle and the OEMs won.
So don't tell me Android is much better than iOS because it's very obviously not. Historical factual records show that Google is very keen on the walled garden idea as well -- and I hope you are aware of the Google Play Services situation and that "the vanilla Android" (AOSP) gets less and less useful with each release and that more and more functionality is sucked into the proprietary, closed-source, binary blob that's Google Play Services.
---
Again, what other choice of mobile ecosystems do we have?
Android's supposed increased freedom is periodically strangled away (normal file system is soon going to be a thing of the past, for example). Looks like a pretty classical bait and switch, don't you think?
Oh, and the ability to side-load apps is only useful for the 0.2% of the populace that are tech-savvy users. For everybody else it's a huge security risk.
I understand you're not OK with what Apple does -- trust me, I hate their guts for some of their policies as well. We really don't have a choice nowadays though. Apple just seems like the lesser evil compared to Google.
Now if you aimed your comment to be narrow then why broadly disregard the fact of Apple's ecosystem and related concerns as simply "supposedly" and freedom as "overrated"? There is nothing "supposed" about iOS being locked down, and "just find it on the App store" isn't viable alternative to the freedom Android offers. Neither is the contrast in the two platforms an "illusion" to merely adapt to.
> what choice is there out there if we want alternatives?
What Google does with Android remains a worry for the future, but the current-day choice simply from a matter of freedom and privacy is a LineageOS-supported device, preferably one requiring the least amount of blobs, alongside F-Droid. No Playstore and related frameworks installed. No accounts, no perpetual sign in and tracking, unlike Apple requiring you to be signed in with Apple ID even if you don't use their cloud services or just to install an app. If you must use apps that depend on Play Services, install MicroG and use Yalp. You have near full control of your device, which extends privacy since you can root, install low-level firewalls, and edit system-level files like hosts. Notice that this ecosystem is more Unix-like as opposed to just one big Apple ecosystem. You can decide yourself instead of Apple making choices for you.
With Apple, you only have one vendor, but with Android you have many choices you can make. Headphone jack? Too bad. Since iOS comes with Apple hardware, you have to discuss the two alongside each other. And for me, even ignoring the lock-down of iOS, I refuse to support Apple and vendor lock-in.
> For everybody else it's a huge security risk
Think-of-the-children fallacy. This always ignores the fact you can have the best of both - those none-the-wiser can continue using official means of installation. It also ignores the other side of the coin, developers wishing to offer programs but not interested in dealing with the Apple ecosystem - both them and users are out of luck in that case, and this can happen even if you're already on the app store if Apple decides to take down your app or developer account for whatever reason.
There is a counter argument which says that the only reason you can do those things is because the existence of open source Android forced Apple to do it or be uncompetitive with Android's features.
My primary objection to Apple is one of principle: giving up your right to code software that is hostile to the interests of a platform owner is massive loss of freedom. As Stallman put it, "Apple made it cool to go to jail".
I realised in the next months that the perceived "freedom to tinker" on Android is something hugely overrated. I could achieve almost everything I wanted on my iPhone -- it just took a bit of time to find the proper apps. Later Apple added the Shortcuts which is a very solid automation app.
Many Android users also lament the lack of a visible filesystem but that's a huge plus in my eyes. What are Android apps doing with that? You guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users). iOS' sandboxing is not a bug. It's a feature which I appreciate a lot.
I'll not shy away from the fact: there are areas that I miss from Android. For example, I could have inspected WiFi strength signal with an Android phone and I cannot with a non-jailbroken iPhone.
Again though, as a guy who used Android phones for 4.5 years before switching to an iPhone, I found that the uncomfortable feeling of switching to an entirely new (and supposedly more "locked down") ecosystem is mostly an illusion created by our brain's unwillingness to endure big changes. You get over it very quickly. Don't trust your brain on these matters, it floods you with non-truisms to avoid cognitive shock.
P.S. I too loathe the notch. So after 15 months with the iPhone X I switched to iPhone 8 Plus. Easily the best phone on the planet to this day (plus a bigger screen and a slightly bigger battery). Now I dread the day the device will no longer be sold.