I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelized android to for almost as long. I did ground work for google by pushing people into google's services. I have a day 1 pixel 6 pro. I pay for cloud storage and yt premium.

But to me google is just falling apart. I feel like they have lost their technology drive in order to pursue ideological ones. Their tech has become all half-assed with poor/no support. I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. RCS is still a disaster, my one friend on Fi with a pixel 5a still cannot get it working and Google/Fi has pretty said "We don't know".

I do not like Apple, but after almost 20 years a Google fanboy, I'm starting to like Google even less. So much so that I'll have to eat lots of shame from the many iphone people who questioned my android love for years.

*If anyone can convince me otherwise, please do*. I feel like the best thing that could happen is disposing of Sundar and getting someone who can refocus google on being a tech company devoted to making the best tech products.

Apple's ecosystem, while it doesn't offer as much, is a much superior and polished experience. iMessage works great, integration with Apple Watch is top notch, and the whole ecosystem is very fine-tuned. There are still a bunch of things to complain about, for sure, but overall comparing the two is a night and day difference.

I've slowly started phasing out all my Google products.. and not by choice either. Had Google Nest and Nest Secure for over 3 years until Google decided to just cancel Nest Secure all-together. Google Home devices are increasingly being less and less effective. Google just can't seem to commit to anything longer than 2-3 years and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather deal with getting features much later but thoroughly thought out, then half-assed and cancelled in 2 years. I will say the one thing I do miss is native Google Assistant, Siri is complete ass in comparison.

That said I switched for mostly privacy reasons, so won't be going back.

I'm gonna write a quick comparison as I've switched between platforms several times (still miss my Windows Phone tbh though):

I've found that no matter which Android "iphone camera killer" phone I got, the camera was unreliable and always ended up having crappy results. Meanwhile, my iPhone pics are constantly a decent quality.

Somehow, iPhone screens _consistently_ shatter for me. Even when I'm careful. I've yet to break the screen on an Android phone -- even if I've used it significantly longer or it was significantly cheaper. Something about iPhone's design or manufacturing lends it to shattering. My current iPhone has a shattered back from when I dropped it on my soft carpet from a foot up-high about a year in...

iPhone and Android software both sucks but Android's app experience is _significantly_ better. Why? BACK BUTTON. Every iPhone app has different expectations around going "back" from swiping up, left, right, or just having no way to go "back" at all. Which is common. Good Android apps are _great_; however, most iPhone apps are ok and most Android apps are not even ok.

iMessage isn't great but it's hard to give up on it. SMS/MMS experience _sucks_ -- so knowing when someone will get your 5 minute audio message in good quality is actually really nice. Sending pictures between platforms _sucks_. With that said, Android's web interface for messages is a million times better than the iMessage app and obv cross-platform.

I also absolutely hate getting data off an iPhone. it's unreliable especially if you don't have a mac. The Android experience is so much nicer.

So it's kind of a give and take. :/

Also -- less notification/customization options on the iPhone but having a hardware "silent" button is rad.

The camera thing drives me nuts. My pixel 6 can't take a reasonable photo of a flat piece of paper due to spherical distortion causing blurring of text. Sure you can go 2x and hold the phone further as suggested in online discussions but it's nuts that this made it past any attempt at QA and testing.

I find the concept of a smartphone affecting a transportation decision or the reverse to be highly unusual.

Can you please explain your rational? For example, do you spend excessive amount of time in your car? Do you do specific tasks from your car that require a specific connection between car and smartphone?

Apparently next year the Macan is getting Android Auto support, so people in the future won't need to make the choice. But I was in need of a car this year, so I had to make the choice.

I imagine this is what the GP is talking about.

There are limits, but it’s not display only like it used to be.

It was up until they took away the ability to fake app permissions.

i expected IOS to be this perfect experience, but in fact many of apple's own apps are buggy ,and some quality of life features dont exist

and then theres TrueCaller :(

I finally have a phone (3axl) that didn't die in a couple years from accidents / abuse / going to the gym in my pocket, and Google is eol-ing it because they've cut off security upgrades.

My next phone will be an iphone.

It sounds like what you're saying is Google has only continued to shuffle ever more vital functionality into the Play store since I left Android, which negates the often claimed benefits of an "open source" operating system. If all the important stuff is in a proprietary blob attached to a proprietary platform, I might as well stick with the one I already know that's never given me any trouble. I'm not going to root my iPhone or install a custom OS, so that's irrelevant to me.

And just because they are applied by the play store doesn't mean they are closed source. The play store itself is closed source, but the security updates to the OS get published via the normal processes.

Android is open enough to allow competition, eg. Amazon's Android, Microsoft's Android runtime, etc. are all done without Google's permission.

To me, that's key, but I'm not trying to tell you whether open source should matter to you. I just wanted to clear up the stuff about the security updates because I think the Android way of doing it is now better than Apple's method.

I think it is a much better way to do security updates than the Apple model - security issues shouldn't have to wait for the next firmware update and for the user to apply them.

At least they fixed this with the pixel 6 with a 5 year upgrade plan.

Google “upgraded” to less than any other mainstream computing platform. Windows gets about 10 years of security updates for each major version, up to 15 if you pay extra.

Hardware wise, you can easily pull out 20 years or longer simply by constantly bumping up the OS version.

They release a generic template, other vendors then apply platform kits for the SoCs they use and they release the operating system for their devices. Google has no idea what it runs on, or what is needed to make it run on specific devices. It is the vendor's task.

Mobile devices have no UEFI, no bus enumeration, so the OS image has to be taylored for each device. It is similar to Raspberry or Odroid or similar SBCs: althrough both are arm, you cannot use Ubuntu (or other disto) image intended for one on another.

> Mobile devices have no UEFI

Since the Snapdragon 835, Android devices with Qualcomm processors use UEFI all the way to the kernel.

However, custom UEFI binaries aren't part of the boot flow, with an Android UEFI boot application running instead.

> no bus enumeration

It's device tree instead of ACPI, but apart from that the situation isn't _that_ different from PCs today. We aren't in the ATAGS era anymore. The reflashing interface nowadays is standardised through fastboot too.

> so the OS image has to be taylored for each device

Thankfully a lot of progress has been done on that.

Since Treble, the BSP proper has been untied from Android releases.

Since devices shipping with Android 12, a Google-built kernel with a stable kernel module ABI has been shipping (for a given major kernel + Android version release combo). This allows kernel security updates to be identical across the whole ecosystem.

> althrough both are arm, you cannot use Ubuntu (or other disto) image intended for one on another

That used to be true, but across the whole Android device fleet (even between SoC vendors) it's not true anymore.

However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those.

More info on generic system images: https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image.

This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributions on phones too if there's motivation to do so.

> However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those.

> This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributions on phones too if there's motivation to do so.

So assuming my bootloader is unlocked, have a GSI compliant phone, what is the remaining work I would need to have done in order to get it working under linux (and by working I mean all devices - including cameras and etc)?

A good chunk of the Linux community on phones didn't want to have to rely on binary drivers for non-technical reasons, and that's one of the reasons why it isn't exactly well taken care of today.

For Ubuntu Touch specifically:

https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction/Intr... for Ubuntu Touch.

https://github.com/ubports/porting-notes/wiki/Generic-System...

An upgraded Halium (https://github.com/Halium) image on a can work unmodified across the whole ecosystem of Android devices.

However, the latest currently developed experimental Halium works on an Android 11 base at most, so that devices launched with Android 12 might be using drivers too new for it at this point in time.

(https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/jenkins-ci/generi...)

This can be fixed with an engineering effort to do so to make it work on devices launched with Android 12. The Linux on phones community is very small and that causes problems in this case.

Together with the unified kernel image (GKIs) on Android 12 which allows to have kernel image binaries built with GNU/Linux-specific features that work across the whole fleet, a full straightforward experience can be made possible. This would fill the last chunk of custom per-device bits.

I wonder how big the audience would be for such a project though. :)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/talkin-treble-how-an...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomm-promises-th...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/android-10-has-the-f...

Same reason I switched to Apple last year -- after being android only since original Motorola Droid (2009).

I assume your friend has tried all the debugging on this page? https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en My wife's phone keeps failing to connect and we have to do the carrier services reset to make it work. A terrible solution to me requiring factory resetting your phone.

But even then, I have a friend that was never able to get RCS to work on his phone, and he spent multiple hours with Google support trying to figure it out. There is something wrong with his account on Google and the carriers side (he tried multiple phones, and it never worked). The RCS team definitely has some corner cases to work out getting everyone activated, because it leads to really bad stories like this.

This is just a tiny sliver of my dissatisfaction too. I feel like the long time lover that sits down one night and after a lot of thinking gives pause with "Wait, why am I still in this relationship?"

Apple went to full proprietary stack that no one else can use, while Google went the more open protocol. Open protocols like this always tend to have a bit more headache, and we're seeing that with RCS. Especially when some of the players are cell service providers.

If the EU open protocol legislation ever pans out, I wonder how that would impact iMessage and RCS.

From there I went to iPhone 4 and had so many issues. So I went to the Note 4 and initially I loved it. But android got slower and slower so after 6 months I reset the phone and didn’t install anything. It got slower and slower and all I used was phone text and browser.

But I refused to go back to Apple.

I did a few hours of work for a friend fixing something and was complaining about my phone being slow so he bought me an iPhone 6 max as payment.

I was annoyed at first but it was so fast… and I’ve stuck with iPhone since and don’t regret it. Best thing ever moving over to iPhone.

PS: I was the same as you (used Android, despised Apple) but eventually made the switch and never intend to go back.

That's actually the largest reason I can't invest in Google's ecosystem, but that's mostly from a tech stack end.

Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage that I only turn on if I need to use a banking app or something.

Especially if this platform was bootstrapped in a smart way, for example with an emulation layer to be able to run applications from Android.

Or perhaps WebAssembly will make it viable to do more things from a (mobile) browser.

I really miss the N700-N9 series with Maemo and Meego. It was so elegant and simple.

https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview

But frankly, many users only want messaging, maps, banking and a few other things.

WebAssembly could solve that.

Even Microsoft couldn't make it work with barrels of cash. Granted they did make some huge mis-steps.

Or emulate Android apps, like you said. That solves the initial issue of having no apps. It seems like Google Fuchsia will likely take this approach. Although it isn't clear if another platform could do this, without a lot of goodwill from Google - and good luck with that.

I distinctly remember Google making it a right pain to use Google's products on the phone, namely Youtube and Google Maps. In addition I remember a bunch of articles talking about how Google prevented Microsoft from developing a native youtube app and doing shady nonsense regarding User Agent filtering.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-windows-...

https://geekinsider.com/google-blocks-youtube-on-windows-pho...

How Google got away with that is beyond me.

Certainly makes me somewhat glad that Microsoft just chose to yoink chromium for edge. At least now Google can't do any more shady nonsense with the browser to filter them out.

It was on my short list for my next phone at one point, but the platform imploded before that happened.

If Google makes a misstep, it wouldn't take too much effort for Microsoft to run a hostile fork and capture a massive user base. They already are the 2nd most popular browser.

As it is, they have nullified Google's anti-competitive nonsense of using the browser as a way to manipulate markets.

Granted as a Firefox user, I conceded your point to how to affects open standards. Frankly though, that has already been long tarnished by Google anyway.

And it already exists: GNU/Linux phones running desktop OSes, Librem 5 [0] and Pinephone [1].

[0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

[1] https://pine64.org/pinephone

Instead, they spent billions and billions of dollars trying to attract developers to their platform before eventually shuttering it.

There was a phone with awesome hardware, an awesome mobile-first operating system, and practically no apps. Bill admitted his biggest mistake was being too preoccupied with the antitrust activity in Europe, and missing the shift to mobile computing cost him ~400 billion.

Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads?

Fixed that for you. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31094407.

Their application Model was web technologies based, which is quite popular now, between React-Native and PWAs.

I’m doubtful though that someone could pull out off now. Mostly because you need access to the services that people already use and Google/Amazon/Apple already wall their gardens to their own liking.

AFAIK KaiOS (the operating system for some T9-keyboard-only phones like the rebooted Nokia 8110) is Firefox OS with a new coat of paint, but it also seems kinda dead. And no touchscreen in those devices, so not really comparable to "normal" smartphones anymore... :/

[0] https://checkra.in

Since the drivers for the wifi were non free he used some USB device instead.

Last I read that lasted a few months because he got sick of it.

I can't imagine adding all those steps to use a smartphone is any less annoying.

The only real problem right now is just lack of apps. Devs build against Android/iOS-only SDKs and use native features that aren't cross platform, so running those apps is mostly out of the question (although I have seen some people running Android apps on their Pinephones!! Need to look into that more).

So GP is saying for apps like that they'd keep an android around but do everything else in a browser.

People don't care about this stuff if it's going to waste a ton of their time.

Theres a reason people buy closed source oems and don't care. It's because it works and doesn't waste their time.

Imagine buying an open source car where you can to periodically rebuilt parts of the engine because it was "free". That's absurd, people aren't buying a philosophical journey. they're buying a car.

I'm sure if pinephone or OLPC used entirely free drivers and didn't waste your time to do the same asks people would find it much more agreeable.

I had a conversation with two people recently who got defensive at the idea that controlling the software in your phone should be the norm. As if criticizing Apple's approach to free/libre software is an attack on them as an identity.

For the vast majority, it probably isn't. Also, I'm not full RMS since I would consider using an iPhone which definitely has closed-source components :)

I don't think it would be that much of a hassle to me, since I already don't use a lot of the "nice" apps etc. The way most people use their phone is quite alien to me. E.g. I much prefer old.reddit.com over a reddit app and/or constantly getting harassed with banners to use the app.

I'm pretty sure it would remove extra steps for me, instead of add them, by letting me compute how I like to (GNU/Linux) instead of trying to compute like GNU/Linux on Android.

no. i don't want an app. thanks. i want your desktop website, yes on mobile with a touch screen. yes i'm weird, i know.

- DriveDroid to boot a PC, I haven't used a USB stick to boot off in... years?

- /etc/hosts

- Viper4Android for system wide EQ

- Messing with user hostile apps such a firefox when they disable your addons although they still work, proven by the fact that I was able to make them work again as root

Edit: more things

- Wireguard kernel module

- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself

you can add as many of these as you want, i'm not giving up root. The crippled API model that's in fashion these days kills innovation.

The Mini has a better screen for switching between ISOs and virtual disks.

This is possible on iPhones isn't it? I definitely remember Fiddlering my self a few years back on my iPhone.

Root is an insurance (to a degree) against apple changing their mind, like google did.

Here's how niche indie software handles this: https://i.imgur.com/6m809SB.png (excuse the sarcasm)

I don't care anymore though. I've switched browsers since, Mozilla is beyond help. Still, in that moment i was very glad to have root to override their bullshit.

- GravityBox for various UI tweaks and making volume control a little more fine-grained

- UMS Enabler to expose your external SD card as an USB drive (accessing it via MTP isn't really fun and doesn't work everywhere [1])

- proper local backups and therefore the ability to e.g. relatively painlessly revert borked app updates

- sometimes due to bugs cruft accumulates in data directories that as a regular user can only be cleaned by – depending on the nature of the bug – clearing the whole application data [2] (which is already annoying enough as it of course also means wiping all your settings and other stuff you might actually want to keep), completely uninstalling and reinstalling the app [3], or even wiping the whole phone [4].

[1] E.g. the local state library has a nice book scanner available for public use. You can either e-mail yourself the results (but that only works reliably up to a certain file size), or else save them on an USB drive. I didn't have an USB drive with me, but thanks to UMS Enable I could just plug in my phone, switch my external SD card to USB mode and voila.

[2] It seems that e.g. possibly as a result of /etc/hosts blocking via AdAway some apps accumulate telemetry data that they cannot send (Fabric / Crashlytics seems to be the particular culprit here) and after a few weeks that amount of data can reach a notable size.

Another example was that due to some sort of bug Google's TTS app (Speech Services) kept accumulating TTS voice packs after updates and wouldn't delete the old versions, and by the time I noticed they were occupying a few hundred MB.

[3] Don't know of a current example, but during the days of Android 4.1.2, Android had a bug whereby if a native library was removed from a future APK version (respectively renamed), then Android wouldn't remove the old copy of the library when installing an update. Skype was a particular culprit there, because their native library was around 25 MB and included a version number in its filename, so each time that library was upgraded an additional 25 MB file was plonked onto the file system, with the old file remaining behind. Without root, the only way to remove those superfluous files was by completely uninstalling the app.

[4] I occasionally find system RAM dumps appearing under /data/ss-ram-dumps. I've got no idea whether they eventually get cleaned up automatically, or if they would just accumulate and take up more and more space until you're forced to wipe the whole phone.

What do you use for your backups?

I've used Titanium Backup in the past, but it has some issues in Android 11 and seems to no longer be maintained.

Trying OAndBackupX (recently rebranded as NeoBackup) but the results are not great. Hoping the next major version cleans it up.

So while it's a bit clunky, for now I'm relying on a combination of Titanium Backup (at least on my phone it's still working fine except for split APKs) + SAI to do an extra backup of split APKs.

For example, I see no reason why a calculator app needs access to my contacts, phone, or microphone, and X-Privacy will let me disable permissions to those specific resources for the calculator app while still letting me use it. As a bonus, it'll also put in fake data in to these apps when needed, so the apps continue working, thinking they have access to my data but they don't.

Something like this should be standard in every smartphone, but obviously phone OS makers don't value privacy enough, and even require root in order to allow you to do this.

I'm not paranoid, but it's not the direction I want to see computing evolve in.

The main point of it is that if you don't have the control over your computing, someone else has and they can use this power for their own advantage against you. Examples are numerous: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor....

Oh, and some scripts to fake input events so I can automate apps.

- macros and scripts- it's nice not having to enable, disable etc stuff and just scan qr codes, nfc tags or use ble tags as markers to enable something

- chroot

- faking permisions and data for apps is a must

- sim links to app data folders for easy backup/restore

I tap an NFC tag to open/close my garage door (the tag is outside, next to the door)

You forgot reasonable support time: Proprietary drivers prevent you from upgrading the Linux kernel, and the device becomes very insecure and outdated within few years.

Meanwhile I have a phone that is based on free software (for all the aspects where it matters) and that works. Today. And which has future potential to be just as free as the librem/pinephone - after all, if the code being developed by Purism is free, it can be adopted by other vendors.

A laptop from 12 years ago more likely than not has less memory than a mid-range phone from today, and unless such laptop is your only device for all this time, it has no point in this conversation.

I do use it as a daily driver.

> unless such laptop is your only device for all this time, it has no point in this conversation

It's the only device used by my non-technical relative. But even if it wasn't, the device would serve a purpose and not be another piece of e-waste.

> And which has future potential to be just as free

You can't upgrade Linux on your phone due to the proprietary drivers. You're stuck with the ancient version. When it's not supported, your device effectively becomes a brick, unless you are going to recompile everything yourself or fine with being hacked.

> You can't upgrade Linux on your phone due to the proprietary drivers.

Hardware-specific binary blobs don't stop the UBPorts devs to make constant updates to my old BenQ phone. The software part is still up-to-date, but the application catalog is almost non-existent, the hardware is limited (1GB RAM) and the camera is shit. Eventually I want to turn that device into a networked music player, but as a smartphone it didn't last two years.

If I manage to get 7 years out of this Fairphone, its ROI will have been unbelievably great, I will gladly buy whatever comes from Fairphone in 2027, and I will try to find another use for this device.

Hopefully by then Linux on mobile will have matured, but I don't need to compromise on my actual needs just to please the FOSS-purists.

This is an outdated information. The development pace of Pinephone is unprecedented. Even here on HN I saw many recent posts saying that calls and MMS work fine already.

Update: reading through https://www.reddit.com/r/pinephone/comments/u6zzyc/how_pinep... (from 6 days ago) it seems like you are not just overselling hard, you are trying to convince people to switch to something that is absolutely not ready for general consumption.

You do realize that if your goal is to get more people to adopt FOSS, your approach is more harmful than beneficial? Don't make promises that you can not keep, it will burn whatever goodwill people might have and it ends up convincing them Linux is never going to be for them.

Note that we are not on Reddit but on HN. Is its audience ordinary people? My goal is to bring more technical people to GNU/Linux phones.

Also, is your goal to get people to use GNU/Linux phones or is it to maximize the overall adoption of Free Software? The former requires a radical shift in consumer behavior and will be unlikely to happen, the latter can be done in gradual steps with a much higher chance of success.

Think of it this way: if you manage to upset me, who is pretty much in favor of F/LOSS, imagine how many bridges you burned with those "on the other side"?

Where did I make this claim? I said that I use it as a daily driver. It's possible, though not for everyone yet.

> Also, is your goal to get people to use GNU/Linux phones or is it to maximize the overall adoption of Free Software?

It's the same goal. Adoption of Free Software without using it on the phones will not help much. There are more people using smartphones than computers. I also don't see how one is a "radical shift" while the other is "gradual steps". It's the same to me. People are going to switch to new type of smartphones slowly: first developers, then early adopters, then theirs friends and then the rest. Same for Free Software.

> HN audience is large and diverse enough to the point that it makes no sense to think as some homogeneous group of people who are interested in tinkering with their phones.

This is true, but these people are "hackers", i.e. interested in though-provoking things and intellectually curious. I don't expect that they would just buy a new phone with a new OS without doing any research and believing a random comment on HN.

Your interjection came off as one that could provide the same level of usability and no compromises on the freedom aspect. It's only now that you are backing off on the claim by adding the caveat that you can use it as a daily driver.

> Adoption of Free Software without using it on the phones will not help anyone.

AOSP is free-software. F-Droid only distributes free-software. So why did you feel the need to interject about

> I also don't see how one is a "radical shift" while the other is "gradual steps".

The amount of people that could be interested in using /e/OS with F-Droid is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of people interested in tinkering with "Pure FOSS, GNU/Linux".

"Google Android -> AOSP + closed apps + f-droid" is a much easier adoption curve than "Google Android -> GNU/Linux"

There is no phone in the world which can run AOSP without proprietary software, at least drivers. (Well, technically, Pinehone and Librem 5 could do it, but it's not ported yet.) F-Droid is great, but it's running on top of a proprietary OS. It's probably a step in the right direction, but you can't just say "AOSP is FLOSS".

> The amount of people that could be interested in using /e/OS with F-Droid is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of people interested in tinkering with "Pure FOSS, GNU/Linux".

Every single change in the society starts like this. I don't see anything wrong or unexpected here. It doesn't mean that one should not promote the change. To me it even proves my point, because more technical people will get interested first anyway.

> The original comment I responded to was complaining about how the Google/Apple duopoly leads to a "pick your poison" situation and the user hostility. My recommendation was to into Google-free Android distros that can be used and do not require big compromises in terms of usability.

In this way you are still supporting Google with your money, it's not the best solution to the problem. Yes, the compromises are smaller and I did not disagree with it. I just noted in my original comment that anything Google-related will inevitably become e-waste, even if you use "AOSP" on it.

> Your interjection came off as one that could provide the same level of usability

You are probably right, and I could add a disclaimer that GNU/Linux phones can't do everything yet and are less reliable. But I don't see how those things were implied.

That's why I had my quip about "FOSS purists". In practical terms, people using AOSP (and boo-hoo closed drivers) have a lot more options of free software in applications and all other aspects that matters to them.

> It doesn't mean that one should not promote the change.

We have a quarter of a century of "This is the year of Linux on the desktop", and any adoption that Linux ever got could never be attributed to an increase "technical people" interested in a "pure" alternative. Valve's working on Proton and making gaming on Linux a reality is doing more for FOSS than any "activist" ever will.

The problem of FOSS is not a lack of education or promotion. The problem is that its activists miss the forest for the trees. To illustrate, instead of taking my comment about an alternative that would be miles better than iOS/Google Android and adding to it, to make the message stronger, you decided to "educate" them, and now all it's left is the two of us on a debate that does not help the others in any way.

> In this way you are still supporting Google with your money.

No, I am not. A Google-free Android, is as useful to Google as a GNU/Linux system. Google will only make money if people continue to use its search and see their ads.

But even without root I can side load an app via APK on Android. This way my Telegram messenger almost always a version ahead Google Play.

What about getting rid of the preinstalled "system" bloatware that may be present and outside of your control to remove without root?

Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.

- Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc.

iMessage? Everyone here (Scandinavia) uses FB Mewssenger, Whatsapp, Telegram or Discord anyway. The data thing, sure

- Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.

Thats fair.

The big thing for me with Android is price (my Asus 5z from 208 still going strong)

Customization, and I don't mean homescreen I mean that webbrowsers are not just Safari re-skins, Firefox has actual addons for excample, there is the Google playstore but I can also use F-Droid

And there aren't really downsides to Android imo

Four whole years?

It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone. That it is not really surprising at all is a sad reflection on how normalised shipping insecure connected devices with inadequate support has become.

Obviously we don't yet know how to build 100% secure devices of this complexity but we are talking about some of the biggest businesses in the world here. There is little excuse not to require (by law if necessary) essential security updates for a much longer period given the reasonable useful life of the hardware and the rest of the software on it.

I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months. And the market would correct for that, but everyone was doing the same thing - abandoning a device mere months after its release.

And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.

Given that many new phones were bundled with two-year contracts it seems likely that consumer protection laws in many places would have meant a phone that was not properly supported for at least that long after the time of purchase would have fallen foul of fitness-for-purpose rules and potentially entitled customers to partial refunds or updated replacements.

And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.

Sure but again that's why we need consumer protection rules. Any security patch implies that the original product was defective. Buyers are entitled to reasonable corrective action if a defective product was sold to them. It may be unrealistic to release a product with no defects, and the corrective actions are typically intended to compensate for actual loss of value rather than being punitive, but the basic rules still apply.

That's really, really poor. I mean it's good for the Android ecosystem but their biggest competitor is at six+.

edit: replaced "almost twice that number of years" with "six+".

That's terrible.

Debian's EOL comes to mind, even Ubuntu LTS isn't supported for much longer, CentOS was supposed to be the more stable option but that didn't work out either.

Though for some reason mobile devices are somewhat crippled in regards to upgrading to new OS releases versus their desktop counterparts: not being update from Android X to Android Y is the real terrible bit here.

Not sure why on earth that should be acceptable or why the drivers should be such an insurmountable problem, wherein using anything but flagship phones with third party ROMs is a total mess (i've personally had everything from the touch screen to radio, to even Wi-Fi stop working).

So when Google issues a kernel patch for an actively exploited zero day you aren't vulnerable?

Don't be ridiculous.

Software zero days can be patched and on Android even the vendors with the best support policies only cover half as many years.

Cheap Android phones don't even get that.

The OG iPhone SE is on it's sixth year of OS updates.

The iPhone 5s just got it's eighth year of security updates.

Even if it's a software flaw that can easily be patched, but the vendor prefers to force you to buy another device and toss the first into a landfill.

$250 is about the max I would consider spending on a smartphone.

It’s not as flexible but my end cost for the phones is usually $5 more a month in plan cost and being stuck to a big 3 carrier, I haven’t paid much for a phone since I started doing this after Att paid T-Mobile equivalent of $4B in break up fees a decade ago and that pushed for more competition. Though back then I was rocking webOS then Windows Phone before sadly going from iPhone to iPhone. I believe it was iPhone 6 to 8 to 13 Pro. So 3 year and 4 year gaps waiting for deals where I wouldn’t pay anything except a trade in and being tied to the carrier.

I also use a ton of data. Except during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. During that time period I for sure was wasting money.

I would rather have a 10/month phone bill than a 40-50 one.

What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode

AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins.

To me browsing the web is unusable without those plugins in Firefox. How is browsing the web on an iPhone? Do you get overlays, autoplaying videos and ads on websites or can you block them? Do you get a reader mode?

You can also have Reddit links opened automatically in eg Apollo.

Also I'm a bit confused that browser plugins are apps. Are they actually running as individual apps, or part of the browser?

Can they get taken down?

All extensions are distributed as native apps, usually bundled into the primary app and are (when applicable) installed into Safari when they’re installed onto the device.

There are Content Blockers, App Extensions (into/out of Safari), Web Extensions (“of” Safari), share extensions etc with different limitations and abilities that run individually within their apps and message Safari and other apps, or have rules read ahead of time by Safari with no runtime access, or run within Safari using the WebExtension API etc etc

The archetypal web browser plug-in via the WebExtension API totally exists and are convertible for the most part to Safari’s very proprietary but very user conscious ecosystem.

https://developer.apple.com/safari/extensions/

Alternatively, I've just signed up for the Orion browser beta[2] for Mac and there is a testflight available for iOS. This can apparently use (some) WebExtensions, notably uBlock origin. I cannot run testflight apps on my old jb iPhone so I can't speak to how well it works

[0] https://myxxdev.github.io/depictions/MYbloXXforiOS/MYbloXXfo...

[1] https://myxxfm.com/script

[2] https://browser.kagi.com/

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...

Yes, there’s a reader mode.

One common example is setting up Tailscale on Pihole and your phone and then you can set the dns on whatever Wifi you’re on to the Piholes private IP

I use Brave Browser on an iPhone and don’t see any of this, including ads.

The thing is nobody* does that.

There are a few. That’s why I added the asterisk. But realistically very few people actually do it. Especially compared to the number of iPhones they sell every year.

If you were using MP3 files, you wouldn’t have an issue. Or AAC. There might even be others. Apple really likes to make things easy, but they tend to only do it for the common case. That’s what gets the most use, that’s what makes the most people happy, that’s what they focus on.

If you’re the kind of person who wants to do things that are far out of the mainstream you’re never going to be happy with an iPhone. You can use other apps as other people pointed out. But I wouldn’t expect this to ever work in Apple’s music player. It’s the same reason you can’t have root, re-theme your phone heavily, replace the dialer, or a lot of other heavy customizations. That’s not what they focus on.

It’s just their ethos.

Because it is difficult to do.

> If you’re the kind of person who wants to do things that are far out of the mainstream you’re never going to be happy with an iPhone.

FLACs are not the act of an extremist.

No, at this point I think the vast majority of people just use streaming services.

The second biggest group, but probably much smaller, it’s people like me who both have a library and a streaming service.

After that, smaller again, I would assume it’s people who have just a library. The majority of these are probably files bought from Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. Those are all formats that the iPhone can play.

In last place is people who use more unique formats like FLAC. I understand why you would want it over the other formats. But I think it’s by far the least common case.

I find that hard to believe when so many music stores and labels (especially classical music and jazz) are selling FLAC downloads. It all works fine on Android with great polished and featureful apps like "USB Audio Player Pro".

GOOG phones used to cost less than half of APPL ones. And for a while to have physically wider screens which made them better book readers. Unfortunately the price difference seems to be nearly negligible now.

1) you can connect it a computer open Finder go to apps section drag the file there

2) put the file in the iCloud and access it from any device with the files app on

3) in Safari if a link is a media file you can share it with VLC

and that's just 3 off the top of my head, I think there's a couple more. It's really not that hard, gone are the days where apps needed to run local webservers to slurp content. But actually VLC can actually probably get media that way too.

2. Requires a proprietary apple service. I'm starting to notice a trend with your suggestions.

3. Are you really suggesting people manually download their files one by one? Rofl.

What is the options for Android?

I don’t know of any native android solution that allows for sync to sync desktop or online platform for specifically FLAC files without a backend user/server/client service that is native.

What’s your alternative?

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

> A media library, with WiFi Uploads & Downloads, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, OneDrive & Box.com integration and optional passcode lock.

>Web Interface for easy uploads and downloads to/from device.

I would be shocked if > 20% of Android users manage their own music library rather than using one of the standard music streaming services.

You've picked on iOS (incorrectly) for not being able to playback FLAC, then shifted argument. The point was proven that you don't need to buy into Apples ecosystem for this.

Speaking from experience because this is a continuing pain point for my music collection that includes oddball formats like flac, ogg, and others--none of which I can even get on my phone without using a cloud service.

I don't use iTunes, ever, anywhere; and I feel sorry for anyone who does.

It's not 2008 anymore.

Although before that, I made my own ringtone using GarageBand off a ripped mp3 and didn’t buy anything through the apple store.

https://www.reviewgeek.com/105739/googles-pixel-6-is-disappo...

It sounds to me like it is E2EE, but people can opt in to back up the message after decryption. How is this different to any other E2EE program?

For me, the downsides are:

- Notifications really suck. Everything has the same sound, unless the developer really cares. Its far harder to have custom alert sounds vs Android.

- Garmin watch notifications can't be filtered. I realize this is partly Garmin's fault, since apparently competitors have worked their way around it.

- I hate that "firefox" on iOS is a wrapper for Safari, and I can't use add-ons like uBlock

But they were on a strange schedule, they released a new flagship every 6 months instead of every year. They of course could not support all the models at the same time, so the support was shorter that competition.

While I’m firmly entrenched in the iPhone/iPad ecosystem, nowadays there’s quite a lot of little things that don’t “just work”, but instead behave (or are designed) in quirky and inconsistent ways, or fail randomly. I’m not talking about third-party apps, but iOS functionality and essential built-in apps. I can only imagine it’s worse on Android.

I definitely miss frequent OS and security updates, but I wasn't prepared to spend a similar amount on a slightly newer secondhand iPhone, or three times the amount or more on a new iPhone, which still won't have as good a battery as the Ulefone Power Amor 13, the thing weighs in at a little over 1 pound, just under half a kilogram, and requires recharging so infrequently I forget to, versus having an iPhone charge cable every couple metres at home and work.

Another added benefit of having a phone that is mostly battery and weights over a pound it that I rarely drop it, because you certainly know you've got hold of it!

If Apple did an iPhone that had a huge battery, and was ruggedized for us in the trades, and others who work in dusty / greasy environments, I'd be straight on to it.

If my only choice was between a flagship Android from any manufacturer or an iPhone, it'd be the iPhone.

Fortunately they aren't the only two options, and Android doesn't feel disappointing below about the $500 mark.

[1] https://scontent-ams4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.8562-6/271639644_...

[I have an Android phone, and don't love it or hate it.]

I keep an eye on the libre phone space, so when I hopefully finally ditch android, it will be in that direction (unless perhaps regulations force Apple to open their walled garden, then we'll see.)

I know a lot of people who revised their relation to phone during that time (me included), and going for simpler things seemed to be a overall theme. Including those who went the other way and gave up iOS for the Pixel 4a for instance, or even some much smaller “dumber” phone.

What security guarantees would iMessage have if it ran on arbitrary hardware instead of only iPhones and Macs? To some people, that's important, not a gimmick. Totally fine for you to have your own opinion about it, but it's probably a good idea to be able to think about why people might disagree.

That's super surprising. I bought 120fps Phone back in 2019 and it still works great and I can't imagine using anything below 120fps since then.

you would be surprised, try it sometime.

The new iPhone has 120 FPS.

1) I can't afford that shite.

2) I don't want control of my device taken from me.

On #1 - I buy a cellphone to be contactable, and to browse the web on the move with a reasonable modicum of speed. I rather dislike the whole "hey, our app is far better than our website" movement in the industry, because I know that "far better" means "far better for tracking and targeting you", based on my experience in adtech. And I don't need whatever bollocks tech (two cameras so your photos can do a little swoopy thing!) Apple is chucking in and charging big bucks for. I just need a smartphone that has enough CPU to run things okay.

But I get other people might want fancy camera stuff without forking out for a proper camera, all good.

And I find Android phones offer far more options at varying price points along the spectrum in this regard than Apple.

On #2 - I've never had to wait for someone to find a vulnerability in my phone before I can root it, and do whatever I like with it. I can easily install APKs from others or myself without going through an app store, or paying Apple for a developer licence to write code to run on my own frigging phone.

My non-technical wife can't grok Android, she's been on iOS since the earlier iPhones, so when her iPhone 5S' browser began to routinely crash when loading websites she read on the regular, I caved and got her an iPhone 13, at much expense, and she's generally unimpressed at the upgrade (she really misses that physical button). She doesn't care about any of the bollocks that they're advertising as a reason to upgrade - macro-photography, night photography, cinematic mode? She gives zero shits.

Having to Google how to restart her phone when an app wouldn't stop playing audio really pissed her off though, I will say.

The price of that thing was fucking ridiculous, but she can at least use it for the things that she always used her phone for, until something happened that caused the browser in her last iPhone to start shitting the bed - lack of browser upgrades? Bad browser upgrades? I'm unsure. I'm not a fan of Safari on any platform, so I'm just going to glare accusingly in that direction.

TL;DR - iPhones are pricey AF, glad you got the iPhone 12 for free, and I really dislike Apple's approach to letting me do stuff with the small computer I bought that can incidentally do phone calls.

This might be the most ironic comment I've read in a long time. 90%+ of users on both platforms are purely religious about their choice, and if there's one thing I can say that most of them have in common, it's (over)confidence that they understand "the other side" while utterly failing to. There are 3 topics that I used to discuss regularly but now avoid with most people because too much processing happens in the Amygdala: religion, politics, and phone religion (aka iphone v. android).

I think it's also worth adding that a lot of "preference" just comes down to choice based on values. If you highly value cohesive user experience, security (especially from own mistakes), and brand recognition/status, more curated app store, then iPhone is a good choice. If you highly value device ownership (for example my device, my choice to sideload or root, ability to run apps that can reach deeper into the device, unlock bootloader and install custom ROMs), price (not really true anymore though), etc then android is for you.

its not the early 2000s anymore!

In this case its just tech enthusiasts that fall for evangelizing the technical prowess while ignoring that the social aspect of a technically good-enough system is more important to people. tech enthusiasts do this in other areas of their life too. just a heavy correlation, which people experience nationwide.

If you need to copy a file to a computer all you need is a cable and a decent OS that supports MTP and you can then just drag the file off like a USB drive. It's great and requires no special software unless you like fruit flavored computers.

One of the things I really like about my Samsung phone is I can have an alphabetical ordering of my apps in the drawer. With iOS you have to painstakingly rearrange every app to get that or use the shitty hidden alphabetical scrolling list they finally graced everyone with after 14 years.

I switched from an iPhone XS to Android. XS still works, had a choice, just got tired of Apples shit.

What does this mean?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuaKzm7Kq9Q

The comments cover other aspects like middle school teachers seeing it first hand amongst students

When this is not possible, it falls back to sending normal SMS, which can be read in plain text by third parties in the middle and has no encryption, when that occurs messages are shown within a "green bubble".

Therefore, messaging android users shows a "green bubble". People know its both an android user and unencrypted.

This also results in a worse messaging experience for the iOS users, as all of their other rich media is disabled and handicapped as long as that conversation involves an android user.

I was guilty of being on the Team Linux vs. Team Windows war back in the day and then I had an epiphany! You could like both. You could actually use what suits you when it suits you. Cheers.