I don't care if anyone has a Xiaomi, Oneplus, Samsung, etc. Each brand is using a modified version of Android, and they chose to be compatible with each other. But for example the "blue vs green bubble" drama is a thing specifically because of Apple locking their unsuspecting users into a closed ecosystem. And it sure isn't Android's fault for not being compatible with it.
The more power a company like this gains, the worse will it be for the whole industry.
Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.
The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It's about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it's Linux underneath is almost meaningless.
Even as an (older) zoomer in the US, this was never a thing for me. No one cared what phone you used. If you had an Android you wouldn't be in iMessage group chats but no one judged you for it.
Well considering here in Czechia (the country that's 90% "middle of fucking nowhere") it's scary that a third of active phones are iPhones, how does anyone except the people living in big cities afford this shit? People around me are getting iPhones, but it's always like 4-5 year old 11s and 12s, literally the shittiest investment you can do
Also can't wait in a couple of years when this number will probably go up and iMessage will take over any other messaging app
I mean, even those old iPhones have better software support than a lot of low-end/budget Android phones. The iPhone 11 still has iOS 17 and will probably get security patches for another year or two (assuming it gets dropped with iOS 18, maybe Apple will try pushing it another year).
I've owned flagship androids and iphones. I like my iPhone better, sorry. If other companies want to make a better product, I'll switch back again. It's not really about the exclusivity/walled garden nonsense.
I've found the overall performance to be more consistent/better. The "better" part is a bit moot as every time I buy a new phone, the performance should be better than the last one just because it's newer technology.
And while there are a lot of things I don't like, core performance kind of overshadows any other issues I have or features I'm missing out on. Perhaps I should have said "better for my needs" instead of "better product."
Yes, but make a criticism of Apple's monopolistic behaviour online and you'll immediately have a million brain dead Apple fans screaming at you about how iPhones have to work exactly the way they do now or the world will fall apart.
Seems the other way around works just as well. Say you like an Apple product and attract someone who goes „brainless Apple fanboy“ or „Google does it better because freedom“
At least there's choice with Android. I'd much rather it was possible for FOSS phones to actually exist but in the meantime the lock-in with Apple is an absolute non-starter, as is basically everything about their UX philosophy.
It really just depends on if you prefer customization or reliability.
For example, I’m an apple boi because I like that every app in the store is made specifically for an iPhone (which is easy for devs to do since there’s little variation). It leads to better maintained and performing apps because devs can optimize for the device it’s running on.
On android, you have way more choices, which some people prefer. But for myself, I get really annoyed when I launch an app and it fills 95% of my screen, but not all of it, because my phone is slightly taller then the 2000 other variations out there. It’s much harder for a dev to optimize their app when there are so many variables to account for on android.
Neither phone (or company for that fact) is better. They serve different demographics of users is all.
Google is a bit better, Google allows you to both side load and unlock the bootloader. On those 2 things alone gives them at least a couple notches above Apple. Not to mention Android is designed around allowing you to customize things.
That being said, Google isn't some savior, they're still a giant corporation doing giant corporation things
It's really weird that this is what you imagine when someone buys something from a giant corporation that isn't your preferred giant corporation.
For like the fiftieth time, no one that matters cares what phone you bought, what OS it runs, or what color your texts are on other phones you didn't buy. As a person that keeps buying iPhones, I don't care what you buy. Please feel free to stop caring what I buy.
Ah yes, the classic centrist position. Why does it matter if the government performs mass surveillance if you have nothing to hide? Why does it matter if I drive a huge and inefficient car? I can make all these choices secure in the knowledge that I never do bad things so they never occur as a result of my actions.
https://slrpnk.net/comment/6754380
Nobody is forcing me to buy their phones or their stock version of android though. A lot of people manage to live just fine with fully de-googled roms, installable even on google's own phones.
And do those phones that have been degoogled solve the issue of all the slave labor along the production chain?
And even if you install a ROM... You're still supporting them. You're funding Google.
I'm sorry dude but you're comparing apples to apples. They're both horrible disgusting companies, and there really is no picking the morally correct side.
Then you are hanging around with highschool kids that care what shoes you wear. I guaranty nobody working and living a proper life gives a shit on text bubble colours
There is plenty to criticize about Apple when it comes to anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices...
But if you're gonna talk on the level of "evil" and "freedom", Apple's greatest sin is their supply chain.
And then there's Google, whose evil I would place somewhere between [Apple’s] pseudo-monopoly and [Apple’s] pseudo-slavery. At least Apple is a tech company. Google is a surveillance company that just happens to make tech so they can monitor you more closely.
Working with the shared-space AR APIs in iOS and Android really drove home the difference in their priorities. The iOS SDK only allowed us to share AR data through a local, SDK-managed connection. The data is opaque, can't be directly serialized, and doesn't work anyway if you try to persist/distribute it yourself. Android, on the other hand... They wanted us to upload your AR data to Google-owned servers, where they could do Google-knows-what with the scans of your living room.
It's sad that we're at a point where you have to either pay for your privacy, or pay with your privacy. But we can at least not be naive about it. Android is more interoperable, more prolific, and more lenient with third-party code. And that's because it's a good strategy if you're a surveillance giant. Not because it's good for consumers.
Edit:
Got a couple of comments that are like "Um, actually, Apple is still subject to government surveillance and exploits".
Let me be clear: You should not expect any off-the-shelf product to shield you from intelligence agencies and state-sponsored hackers. You will have to radically change your life to accomplish that, and "Apple or Google?" won't even be a relevant question for you.
And I'm not saying Apple doesn't do shady monitoring for their own commercial purposes.
All I'm saying is that Google's core business model is shady monitoring, and that directly influences their decisions regarding Android. So painting it as the commoner's hero against the greedy walled-garden warden is a dangerous proposition.
There are no good guys here.
There's some hardware, SDKs, and back-end services that you can evaluate on their own merits if you're capable.
But if you want to just look at business practices:
There's one company that doesn't want to integrate with anything outside of their own products -- because that's good for their bottom line.
And there's one company that wants to integrate with anything and everything -- because that's good for their bottom line.
Constantly amused at how hard android users defend their choice and act like it's iPhone users doing the same.
Always reminds me of the way right wing / Trump supporters behave. They are obsessed with liberals and the Democratic Party in then same way android users are obsessed iPhone users and Apple.
As an iPhone user, I spend no time thinking about android users and I certainly don't post threads looking for others to validate my purchase.
I never think about iPhones until I'm forced to enroll one into my MDM and Apple makes me use their terrible Apple Configurator 2 or some iPhone user lightheartedly mentions my green bubbles. As always the squeeky wheels are gettin' greased.
If I had a dollar for every time a friend or family member asked, "Why don't you just get an iPhone?" I could probably buy the newest iPhone. Added pain that I'm Gen Z in the US where something like 80-90% of people my age use an iPhone.
I swear most of the time people treat having an Android phone as something that needs some sort of defense because they think there's no reason anyone would possibly consider buying anything other than an iPhone.
And why do they make those offers? Perhaps because you're complaining about your device and the problems are things that Apple users never encounter?
And that doesn't explain why android users complain in pseudo-anonymous forums about Apple users. Apple users aren't making memes about how android users are foolish.
If it's because real life friends and family suggest they get an iPhone, that's incredibly passive aggressive.
I always see android users bitching about non android phones. On the other hand, I NEVER see iPhone users who give a shit about android or complain about them. Interesting….
I don't get why people always bring up the "drama" of the bubble color on iphone texts. That "drama"was overblown. I've never met anyone who actually cares if another person's using a different type of phone than them. Those people have got to be such a small minority of the population (and likely have a huge overlap with the ones that are just crap people already.) At this point bringing up the bubble colors is just a convenient way to fill out a dull argument.
You're probably an adult, the whole blue/green bubble is targeted at high school student demographics, ya know, the same demographic who LOVES pointless drama and bullying over stupid shit like the color of a text bubble
Apple likes this setup because by the time you leave HS you'll probably have switched to iPhone due to peer pressure and are unlikely to switch later because "it's just what I've always used" and like you've noted no longer care about the blue/green bubble debate
I agree with your point but imo the drama doesn't even just come from high school kids. I'm a year away from graduating undergrad and still wondering when (or if) people are going to grow up about it. Even then, full grown adults do it about as often as people my age in my experience. Honestly some of the worst offenders when it comes to green bubble shaming have been my family members on the older side who think everyone should just get an iPhone and refuse to use anything other than iMessage.
my issue is that in mixed platform group messages sometimes some messages don’t go through to some people in the group completely at random, nearly always when plans are trying to be made. it’s entirely Apple’s refusal to make imessages compatible with whatever android is using. Not about to shame the people who have androids because of it though, and it’s certainly not about the color of the text.
They are all kind of terrible right now, at least for me. I hate what the big companies are doing, and the smaller projects such as Fairphone simply aren't good enough yet. Guess I'll try to make my existing one last for as long as possible, though that was already the plan.
i feel you, the fairphone 4 works well enough for me though. a lot of software/hardware bugs are yet to be ironed out fully, but fairphones are steadily getting better.
although the 6th gen needs to improve a lot, the 5's launch was disappointing to say the least.
Their 7 (?) years of software support is kind of misleading to me because they stop getting chip-level security updates after something like 3-4 years due to the specific Qualcomm chip they use. Not to mention the chip is on the slower side of today's phones, let alone phones 7 years from now.
I can see how others might be fine with that though, just my 2 cents.
Display, battery life, performance, supported bands, software reliability, camera quality, etc.
I know I am one of those weirdos that asks for a lot from a mobile device, but I want something that can act as a high speed hotspot for 5 devices and a desktop environment at the same time, while playing back high resolution media and charging fast. This kind of thing has always been possible with Samsung's flagship, but now every generation it feels like yet more is removed compared to the older one. I'm still on the S21U and while I'm not very happy with it, I haven't seen anything better, including the new Samsungs.
Maybe I should set my sights lower, but it just frustrates me because these are all things my S9+ could do in 2017.
I used to push android over iOS until a few years ago when Google became just as bad as Apple, if not worse. I’ve been trying to steadily get rid of Google products that they’re probably just going to either stop supporting or discontinue altogether, or gradually reduce features that I use every day.
I switched over to an iPhone because it offers better privacy and allows for ad blockers without having to root your phone. I don’t have any desire to go back even though I still think the android interface makes more sense for me.
I also don’t care what color someone’s bubble is.
May I ask what do you mean by android not allowing ad blockers? You can set up a private DNS and set it to one that blocks ads. A very simple thing to do.
Can you elaborate on how to use AdBlock on iPhone? Everytime I try to look it up I can only find ad block for the web browser. Last time I was told that's all you can do, is this outdated?
Edit: you're not just talking about using DNS right? Since that's just the same as android.
Yeah, I just installed and paid for AdGuard pro, which blocks ads on safari. Doesn’t do anything for any Google app that I install but reading news sites is much better since I did it.
GrapheneOS is where it is at. All the configuration of Android without Googles bullshit.
And if you need Google bullshit it is Sandboxed so they aren't holding your phone hostage
I’m pretty much roped in at this point within their ecosystem, it all just talks together and works most of the time. Possibly I’ll regret it at some point in time when my secret history of browsing Margaret Thatcher furry porn is exposed to the world as punishment for criticizing the newest Apple Butt Plug attachment, but for now it just works better than the alternatives that I’ve seen.
Back on reddit, there was a subreddit called non-golfers. It was created to poke fun at atheists, being a metaphor for a community around something they don't like. It grew, with newcomers not understanding the joke and taking it seriously and unironically being a community about hating golf. (I was one of those people, I'm self aware now). It kinda strikes me as human nature, tribalism, rearing its ugly head once again. I'll leave you with this relevant video, highly worth the watch.
My main beef with smartphones is how easy it is for OEMs to completely lock that piece of shit and make it impossible for anyone without lots of patience and a hacker mindset to get root permission to uninstall bloatware, or a custom rom. "Oh, but you can do that on phone XYZ!" - But you can't with nearly every other phone
If you're an iOS user, you've never been on the other side and experienced the sheer frustration of just trying to communicate or exchange simple things, like pictures or audio clips. Want high res? Nope, Apple devices still downgrade images to resolutions that were bare minimum compatibility for feature phones over a decade ago and the Android recipient gets the terrible quality image. Video of your kid your mother recorded? Forget it, it's been reduced to potato quality that, again, is compatible with feature phones from eons ago and sent to the Android user with the latest flagship. Exchange an audio clip you recorded? That recording is transcoded to a garbled mess and sent to the Android user.
The only way to get quality is to switch to some other communication platform such as Signal. That shouldn't be the case in 2024.
Freedom was when Telephones were still with a cable attached to the wall, before the dependence on always being reachable with these snitches in your pocket.
Not if you care about privacy and security, the environment (comparatively), user experience, industrial design, and any number of things that are important to tons of customers.
No company is perfect, nor are they beyond criticism. But the lemmy Apple-bad hive-mind is a bunch of people who can't see past their Linux memes.
Virtually any company big enough to make a worthwhile phone is going to do terrible things. Think a given company is an exception? They won’t be once they get larger.
That being said, the fact that “everybody does it” doesn’t make it okay. The “blue vs green bubble” shit is nonsense that’s totally unnecessary.
In 2020 I tried to buy a burner tracphone at a Walgreens, and the clerk was just shocked and incredulous that someone might really want to pay money for such a thing.
GrapheneOS, based on AOSP, is really the only truly private and secure option. Android offering interoperability is not a downside and Apple having a walled garden does not mean it provides increased security. Apple is decidedly not transparent and this is ultimately not a good thing.
You’re talking about data stored in the apple cloud (I think without the account recovery turned off, but I’m not 100% on that). The same is true of googles cloud services.
Agencies haven’t been focusing on getting the actual texts that say “here I go, doing something you don’t like!” For quite a while because of the amount of variability involved. What I hear spooks talking about is building enough pc for a rubber hose interrogation with unsecured parallel data streams like push notifications.
After months of claiming that Apple's privacy protections had stalled its investigation, the Justice Department said Monday that it had accessed a terrorism suspect's iPhone
it took "months" for the fbi to crack one iphone, that belonged to a terrorist...
and that was in 2020, those holes have long been patched.
Who is unsuspecting? I choose to use a iPhone because:
It is a closed ecosystem, a billion apps is enough for me.
I wanted to be able to update the phone for many years
I didn’t want to have preinstalled 3rd party bloatware
I wanted a device that was less prone to malware
Android is a great OS, and it is better in some areas than iOS, but nothing particularly important to me.
Only Americans are concerned about green and blue bubbles. If it’s so upsetting to you, use WhatsApp. Don’t blame Apple because Google couldn’t standardise on a single messaging app for more than 5 minutes.
Using Google devices and pointing at Apple and saying “they’re evil, don’t use them” is laughable. They’re all bad companies, no organisation should be worth trillions.
I pretty much agree with all of that but wanted to add that when BlackBerry BB10 was discontinued (miss you, Z30) I had the option of Microsoft, Google or Apple. I chose the least bad of a poor bunch… The original monopolists or an ad-obsessed stalker were of no interest to me.
I wanna throw in my 2 cents as I'm considering getting an iPhone after only ever using Android
Recently I've started noticing how much disrespect for your time and attention I've experienced on Android. It's not so much Android itself, but the ecosystem around it:
A layer of bloatware from most major manufacturers
The Play Store and Samsung store trying their hardest to sell you some bullshit app with the most obnoxious clickbait banner.
My Samsung phone forcing me to install some random apps I don't want with a prompt that I can't dismiss.
Google or Samsung (I can't remember which) trying to get me to agree to personalised ads by presenting it as if it's a 'we've updated our terms' type prompt.
Google ads being generally annoying.
And more general malware-like behaviour trying to sell me shit.
I don't care.
I'm not my grandma who's just going to blindly fall for whatever slight of hand that gets them 10c when I install some borderline malware app, it's just annoying.
I just want a phone that's reasonably powerful, and works.
Android itself is great, and I've been able to improve the experience by using an ad blocker and f-droid where possible, but it's rough.
I can't install a custom ROM as my banking apps don't work if I do :////
I hate looking up to Apple as a solution here as they're do a bunch of shitty things
Why is it always people that use android bragging about that people that use apple don't want to communicate with them and completly ignore them. And right after they go play ps5 exclusives.
Playstation or Nintendo have no open hardware or software you can install on those products so why Apple is different from them ? Only because they make mobile phones or PCs ?
If they decide they don't do PC or mobile phone and rename their products to something different, abandon standards that in fact they established and then market their products as it's not a phone people, it's not a pc, don't use it if you want a pc or mobile phone, would this make people feeling happy ?
That's stupid.
I use my iOS devices for convenient basic computing / communication. I use my actual computer for actual computing. I live in a multiverse thank you very much.
I once wanted to repair an older Ipad because the screen was cracked. The repair would have cost 600€ at an Apple reseller. A new Ipad would have been about 700€ at the time.
There is a reason why Apple is so against the right to repair.
Even their "self-repair" option nowadays is a load of bollocks. You have to rent the expensive machine, order a new part (which can only come from them of course), send out your part and wait before they will send the replacement part, then hope you don't fuck up slightly, causing you to break the screen and you having to pay through your nose again to order a replacement.
So it only costs slightly less, but you will not have a phone for weeks.
There really is no reason third party hardware can't be installed at the users own risk. But that would mean competition for Apple, and they don't like that.