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I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

joreteg.com

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Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#131
post #114

I'm amazed when I go to webdev conferences and see 90% iPhones, including many of the most prominent "javascript celebrities". Then I tell myself that just because you work on something doesn't mean you are passionate about it. I'm passionate about the web and couldn't imagine using an OS where all major features get delivered 4 or 5 years after creation (like IndexedDB was).

It depends on what you value – some features take awhile to show up on iOS but others are implemented relatively quickly, so there's both a question of which specific features actually benefit you and how much it's worth to have a much faster experience in general. The Android phones tend to perform much worse because the vendors chose to add multiple slow cores while Apple adds fewer faster cores — and since JavaScript is single-threaded, that adds up to a rather substantial difference:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-andr... got a lot of attention last fall and the situation is generally still true — the Samsung S7 was even slower than its predecessor when it launched (https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/709448306771025920) depending on which version you happen to buy. A lot of people just don't want to have to deal with that when they can pay roughly the same amount of money and get a good, consistent experience. Yes, he dismisses that as “not all of your users have an iPhone 6s” but that ignores the fact that even the flagship Android phones were struggling to match the performance of iPhones which were multiple generations older, greatly extending the usable life of the phone, and that performance issues are quite notoriously user-visible. Yes, it's possible that with optimization heroics you might be able to get close to 60fps even on an old Android phone but it's expensive and most sites don't bother.

The other thing to remember is that people who care about this also tend to care a lot about security (or work at places which do). The Android experience is less dismal but it still requires a lot of of micromanagement and questions about whether e.g. enabling encryption will slow your phone down noticeably (i.e. parity with the iPhone 3GS from 2009) or whether the fingerprint authentication has been implemented competently (it's complicated – see e.g. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Zhang-Fi...).

Again, if you aren't primarily working on this exact problem you might quite reasonably choose not to have to add “phone security analyst and sysadmin” to your workload.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#133
post #70

I 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…

This is an annoying top comment because it has nothing to do with the developer topic of the OP. It's just another boring useless opinion in the fanboy flame wars.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#135
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just to ad servers. Some games that have no need for online-only modes are starting to function that way as well. I suspect it was thoughtlessness on the part of the developers ("When would someone ever be without the internet?" "When they're on a cross-country flight!"). This reminds me, I should find a comment box on their site and suggest they fix this, it was incredibly frustrating being barred from a game I…

I assume it requires the internet so that people can't pirate it or make sure you're on the latest update? I can understand the frustration you're facing but also sympathize for people who are trying to make a living from selling apps.

It's antagonistic behavior towards users and unnecessary for most apps to be always-online. This is the difference between "I'd recommend this to friends" and "screw these guys". The primary reason I buy board and card game apps is to play offline when traveling, usually with other people, versus carting around 100lbs of games. If a simple hot seat version of your game requires an internet connection, you're doing it wrong.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#136

Meanwhile, on the desktop google music doesn't work without flash installed, and there's no desktop client in sight. Great times.

Google Play Music is why I installed Chrome. If I play music from Firefox, after 6 hours, my machine gets choppy and slow. Looking at Task Manager (in Windows 10) it will show me that Firefox is using around 1.4 GB.

So, I use Chrome for music.

Edit: And printing. When I need to print I always use Chrome because Firefox's printing is pretty broken.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#137
post #78
post #70

I 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.

Until your Nexus is out of the short update window.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#138
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Cars also followed this pattern, come to think of it. I remember my dad complaining all through my youth about how the more modern that cars get, the less serviceable you are. That in new cars you need special computers just to tell them that yes, you did fix the problem and the car can stop complaining now. 10 years later ... man, if I have to even think about opening the bonnet and poking at something, I assume t…

>Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

I want to see a two hour debate on that by top engineers from several industries because that seems to be one of the big questions of our time in regards to product development.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#139
post #24

I agree with pretty much everything in this article - I firmly believe that we're due a "post-app" world where progressively enhanced web sites provide 95% of the functionality we require. But we're not there yet - I'd love to see better WebView integration into native UI components (UINavigationController and the like), to provide things like swipe-to-go-back, which is monumentally hard to do on the web. But hey. Ma…

I just tried the https://www.pokedex.org/ site on Chrome for Android, and I could add it to my home screen, but that doesn't add it to my app drawer. That is annoying, I don't want it on my home screen but it seems to be the only way to turn it into a 'native app'. I don't think Progressive Web Apps are ready for the mainstream, but I'm hopeful that in the next few years we can get there.

(I'm the author of Pokedex.org.)

Unfortunately it's a limitation of the Android platform; you can't add arbitrary launch activities at runtime. So the Chrome team is unable to fix this AFAIK.

However, you could imagine a future release of Android that sports a custom homescreen app that just includes Chrome progressive webapps in the main app drawer. Or someone might be able to write a third-party homescreen app already that does that. (Not sure if Chrome exports that data though TBH.)

Also, FWIW, the "add to homescreen" is really just icing on the cake - even without it, PWAs save data locally and are launchable offline. If you remove Pokedex.org from your homescreen, you'll notice you can still navigate to https://pokedex.org while in airplane mode, and Chrome still reports some 6MB of Pokémon data as being stored on your device. (It remains to be seen whether this is a bug or a feature... but we'll see how many PWAs abuse it.)

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#140
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Cars also followed this pattern, come to think of it. I remember my dad complaining all through my youth about how the more modern that cars get, the less serviceable you are. That in new cars you need special computers just to tell them that yes, you did fix the problem and the car can stop complaining now. 10 years later ... man, if I have to even think about opening the bonnet and poking at something, I assume t…

An item that can't be maintained is an dark pattern. It is a sign of planned obsolescence. It is goes against the interests of the user. Items should be designed to have long lifetimes. This only doesn't happen because capitalism incentives manufacturers to sell consumers a new product as often as possible. There is no reason an item can't be user friendly, reliable, and maintainable.
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