Show me on good mobile web app that is - Useful - Work offline - Fast - Don't have weird glitches
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I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
91–100 of 524 posts
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#92Galaxy S7 is far superior to any of the iPhones. Take it outside in the rain
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#93I just realized that half of the applications I have on my phone can't be used without a data connection. What happens when I lose signal. The cloud is nice, but I need some offline in my life too.
I have an Ubutu phone, and most of the apps are web based. Its quite a good user experience (way better than Andorid or ios in my opinion, apart from the lack of apps). However, when I went abroad and turned off the data connection it became pretty useless. No offline maps, as the web based apps won't even startup without a data connection.
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#94Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#95Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#96Good post. There's one other challenge though and that is access to native GUI widgets. Just having an app icon and appearing in the task switcher simply isn't enough. It's one of the problems React Native tries to solve, although I have to admit I'm not impressed with it so far. With the momentum Javascript is having I wouldn't be surprised if most vendors will release "native" javascript bindings to their platforms…
To be honest, I've been hoping that Google would lead the way with JS API bindings... Cordova is pretty nice these days, but it would also be nice not to deal with it.
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#97I did the opposite and can't believe how much better my life had gotten because my iPhone is just a simple tool that I use for communications and don't think about it as a project. With Android, I always wanted to tweak silly things and run Cyanogenmod because the handset firmware was always so bad and vulnerable. On several occasions I'd bricked my phone requiring hours of recovery, or had transient failures of cell…
These things that you mentioned, you didn't really have to do. Buy a nexus, and it's as clean as it gets. What you're saying is that you left the freedom of your device to jail yourself into simple interface...? I do agree though, that those samsung/lg/etc phone have lots crapwares + carrier crapwares.
What you're saying is that you left the freedom of your device to jail yourself into simple interface...?
Actually, this is a pattern that many products follow, as they evolve from a newly tinkered thing pioneered by enthusiasts to a mature consumer device.
There is much more "freedom" in 80's and 90's audio equipment. (And markedly higher build quality. Bargain stuff I bought as a teenager is now lauded on ebay as the good old stuff, "built like a tank.") However, there are also a lot more cables to deal with.
The progression is like this:
1) Pure tinkering, no standards
2) Enthusiast market, standards, high modularity/complexity
3) Prepackaged experience, no modularity
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a really good point. Do all Android handsets and tablets ship with Chrome now? I'm guessing lots of cheap tablets don't. And I know Samsung used to have their own browser. Do they ship with Chrome now?
KitKat was the first version to ship with Chrome as the default browser, but IIRC it didn't replace the system webview or become auto-updating until Lollipop. Wikipedia shows 70% of Android users on KitKat+, and about 35% on Lollipop+. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history#/media... I dunno what Samsung ships with, when I was still doing a bunch of mobile web work (early 2014) they used a forked versi…
My Samsung S4 came preinstalled with some off-brand default browser that was worse than terrible. Hopefully they have gotten their act together by the time I'm due for an upgrade this fall.
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#99I think the differentiating factor here is Chrome's push to support and utilize the Service Worker API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...). The opportunity for web apps to have an offline experience and utilize push notifications is not only exciting but game changing for the web platform as a whole.
Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
But unlike in iOS, the browser is a Play Store app which is updatable outside of major OS releases. So a two year old phone can run the latest version of Chrome. Why Apple still doesn't do this mystifies me.
You can install new browsers through the play store, but I do not recall the stock web browser being updatable back when I used Android. Can it be updated on Android 2.3/4.x and how much effort does that require? As for browsers installed through the play store, how many users can reasonably be expected to install them and of them, how many would update them?
My phone (from HTC) doesn't include a stock browser any more (Android 6). Chrome was the default, and I think it is for many Android phones.