It's a mix of good and bad. The iPhone is generally very good, and the integration with other Apple products is unmatched.

...but my Android runs Firefox with uBlock Origin. I forget that cookie banners exist until I use my iPad. It also runs two background apps pretty reliably: a GPS logger and Syncthing. It respects my default web browser and music player choices.

Quality is subjective. For my specific needs, I prefer Android. If those things were solved I would have an iPhone.

Safari for iOS also has adblockers

I pay 4$ a year for ad block plus for iOS. Totally worth it and blocks YouTube ads

That aren't as good as Ublock Origin for Firefox. There's also no AFAIK way to do something like what NoScript does for Firefox.

Same situation. I have both, my work phone is an iPhone. I just don't like using it. There's nothing major, both operating systems are capable, but there's little reminders everywhere that Apple is the one dictating how the phone can be used. Can't organize home screen icons. Uncontrollable notification spam by the system. Apple's apps mostly don't have individual privacy controls. Apple maps. Limited optical zoom. Having to find and use a special cable.

All of these are minor gripes (and the latter even resolved going forward), but why pay a premium for a device that irritates me?

GPS Logger, Syncthing, and a decent/ad-blocking/extensible browser (in my case Kiwi) are exactly the things that make Android my preference.

I was a long time iPhone user for about 15 years - never had an Android. My iPhone 8 Plus finally reached end of support for OS updates and I'd heard great things about Samsung Dex so I ordered a Samsung Ultra S22 last week and I absolutely love it. Once you get it set up and used to it, I've found the experience to be superior to the iPhone. I just find it quicker to do the things I want to do because of the way it's set up. Things like editing the settings is just way better thought out - the search works really well in the main settings app and if you want to change the settings for a particular app (e.g get rid of the notification badge) you simply have to long press on the app, hit the "i" button on the pop up, and you're taken straight to the settings for the app.). And Samsung Dex is fucking awesome, especially if you've got a pair of AR glasses. My entire computing setup now fits in a small reporter bag. I'm now going to sell my Macbook and use the Ultra as my sole device which means I will have completely exited the Apple ecosystem. In the early smartphone days, I think iOS was superior to Android but I really don't think that's the case anymore.

I hope you had a look at Samsung's privacy policy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/xtq9pq/samsungs_pr...

Yeah, Samsung collects data and sells it. So does every other company. Not going to stop me using the phone. At least Android actually asks me every time if I want to opt into a service or not. If Apple want me back, they can:

- Build a Dex competitor

- Allow apps to communicate outside their sandboxes if I allow them to

- Make it quicker and easier to edit settings

- Stop doing ridiculous things like borking USB-C ports on non-pro models

I'm adding another comment and eating humble pie because I found out this evening that the Samsung keyboard application saves up to 100 items in the Samsung Keyboard clipboard in plain text, with no way to set any kind of auto clear and it does this no matter what other keyboards you install and use. For example, you can install gBoard (Google Keyboard) and set it as the default keyboard, copy something to the clipboard, and it will be there in your Samsung keyboard regardless of whether you set gBoard to auto clear the clipboard every hour. The only way to completely clear the clipboard is via manually pressing five buttons: first the clipboard button followed by the trash can icon, followed by select all, followed by delete, then confirm. This is obviously a massive security risk if you are using a 3rd party password manager and, despite lots of requests for many years, Samsung have declined to do anything about it.

Thankfully, it does look like you can uninstall these packages and most of the other Samsung bloatware using adb or the Universal Android Debloater[1] but it is still some of the most exceptionally disgusting behaviour I've ever seen from a major tech company and I hope that either the EU or some other governing body forces them to fix it or Google bakes something into Android that makes it impossible for them to do. Either way, I will be jumping ship to a more trustworthy brand as soon there is one that has an adequate desktop mode with Quadlock case support.

https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater

I don't know who would be telling you that android phones have better hardware specs. And if I did, I would confidently tell you that they don't know what they are talking about.

Signed, a decade+ android user.

However, will end users really notice the gap? Not really.

I find that Apple indisputably has better hardware and build quality, but Android has the better operating system.

These downvotes for a genuine question (-3 points at time of writing) are why I don't participate in HN tbh. And maybe they're exclusively for my parenthetical request for feedback, in which case, still, like, come on guys. Those downvotes are why my posts and comments always shadowbanned in the first place. And they all started with downvotes for genuine questions. The typical response from HN is "I dunno, maybe post better content." But I post the best content I have in both submissions and comments. So yeah, I guess this community is not for me, that's all I can conclude.

(I imagine you did get some downvotes for your request for feedback because it's off-topic)

Your request is honestly a little difficult for anyone to answer. "As a long-time Apple user I've long suspected that despite the public specs, Android phones are crap. Can any long-term Android users confirm for me whether their phone is crap?"

If there is a long-term Android user out there who finds Android phones to be crap I'd assume they would have long since switch to a different type of phone.

> If there is a long-term Android user out there who finds Android phones to be crap I'd assume they would have long since switch to a different type of phone.

That's a wrong assumption to make. I think there are a lot of reluctant Android users around.

I'm one of them, and I've been using Android phones for well over a decade now.

I don't mind Android itself and the selection of apps, but I've never liked the phones themselves.

The Android phones I've used weren't sensibly sized, or had quality and reliability issues, or were generally tolerable except for one fatal downside (like a bad camera, or limited storage), or were too expensive for what was being offered.

The iPhones I've used have generally been decent, from a hardware perspective. I find the software situation to be terrible, however.

For me, a bad Android phone with tolerable software is at least kind of usable.

A great iPhone phone with unsuitable/insufficient/frustrating software is unusable.

Given that those have been the only viable options for a while now, I resort to using Android phones, even if I've consistently disliked the phones themselves.

My guess is that your question isn't seen as relevant to the post (it's more of a general Android topic) and it has an ad for your failed submission which could be seen as manipulation, which is highly frowned upon on this site. There's a bias against the stereotype of Apple users too.

Your posts and comments are not "shadowbanned" (or dead). If they were, we wouldn't be able to reply to you.

Not every post or comment does well. You'll be better off if you don't take it so personally.

You posted an opinion suggesting that Android isn't the best in a thread about an Android phone. You inadvertently poked an audience self-selected to dislike questions phrased as yours was.

I own a Pixel 7 Pro (and owned the Pixel 6 Pro), and I regularly have iPhones of friends/family in my hands.

Especially for the flagship Android phones like the Pixel Pros, I really don't think there is a noticable difference. They have excellent build quality, camera quality is so similar to iPhones that I couldn't tell which one is better, and on the software side I think it's a matter of being used to it (where I'm a lot more comfortable on Android).

I can't speak for stock android, but I can say AOSP (GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, lineageOS and such) is a much better experience than iOS.

The free software ecosystem is nice cause the mobile apps are way more functional. You can do almost anything you can do on your laptop. Syncthing, K-9 mail, newpipe, firefox (with ublock), orbot, libretorrent, etc. are a few pretty good reasons to use AOSP.

its kind of stylish too. google put out this "material you" thing which basically makes it so the whole OS uses the same color pallete.

The only thing I miss about my iphone was that it was nice and small and could be used in one hand.

Sorry to hear about your shadowban, it's annoying.

It was the reverse for awhile. The Pixel had an outdated image sensor, but managed to pull off decent photos through software: https://www.theverge.com/21496686/pixel-5-camera-comparison-...