Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

joreteg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 524 posts

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#251

Post by lake99 »

harshreality wrote: post #237
lake99 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It must either be maintained or treated as disposable. While I agree with this, I understand where Swizec's comment is coming from. I have a few business acquaintances who have been automotive engineers for 30-40 years now. They have an excellent idea of how their cars work. And yet, they rue that earlier, they could open any broken car and get it to run. Now, there's not much they can do to fix their own cars. Pre…

> Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic. Why? Don't they have OBD-2 readers?

Don't know. The last I met them was about 10 years ago.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#252

Post by ruraljuror »

krzrak wrote: post #170

Sidenote: I checked the Google's Project Fi - damn, it's expensive. For $20/month you get unlimited calls and texts, but you have to pay extra $10 for every 1GB of data. Here in Poland for $10 I get the same unlimited calls and texts plus 4GB of LTE included (and then you're limited to 1 Mbps - but you can take the $13 plan and get unlimited GBs too).

If you think Project Fi is expensive, you will be shocked by the rates of other carriers. Fi is trying to disrupt phone carriers through cheap pricing and transparent billing.

I have been experimenting with Fi and I think it is good but has some significant drawbacks. I am about ready to cancel my Verizon service to go all in with Fi, but a major factor is the fact that I'm going back to school and will be counting pennies. Verizon's 3GB plan is attractively priced, but that significantly better service is still double what I pay on Fi in a typical month.

The Fi service is fine in metro Boston, but on a recent trip to parts of rural AZ I was without service for long stretches. Another downside with Fi is that I don't seem to be able to talk on the phone and get data service at the same time.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#253

Post by bobbles »

danjoc wrote: post #248
mostafaberg wrote: post #152

>I don’t know about you, but the idea of having a fully capable web browser in my pocket was a huge part of the appeal. A: Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ? >I’m talking about stuff that QA should have caught, stuff that if anybody at Apple was actually building ? apps this way would have noticed before they released. A: They do pass QA, that's why features are r…

>A: Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ? Specifically he mentions his WebRTC video streaming app "just works" on Android Chrome and Firefox. http://caniuse.com/stream According to that, it does not work on iOS Safari. Not any version. Ever. Apple only allows Safari on iOS. Therefore, any application that would like to do streaming will have to be native on iOS. Will…

> Apple only allows Safari on iOS

Blatantly false?

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#254

Post by SiVal »

Apple is just taking a page from Microsoft's old playbook, sabotaging the Web platform in order to prop up the competitiveness of its native platform. When MS owned the dominant platform, they made sure that the Web browser they shipped pre-installed on every Windows machine was always just good enough to claim to be a usable Web browser (or it might have driven people away from Windows), yet always bad enough to make the Web itself look bad compared to Windows. With the biggest benefit of the Web being its reach, anything that could limit the reach of new powers could hold back its spread, and MS did hold back its spread for years.

At the same time Apple, having no leverage from their own native OS of the present, touted their hardware/OS/browser stack as the best way to use the platform of the future--the Web--to make themselves more relevant in a MS-dominated world and sell more hardware. They did a lot of good for the Web platform in the past.

Fast forward to today: the iPhone ignited the explosion of mobile computing and made Windows' dominance of the desktop into being merely the biggest frog in a smaller and smaller pond. MS no longer had a monopoly to defend, repented for its sins, and began to build first-rate, evergreen browsers to stay relevant in the new world. (Competition is a wonderful thing.)

And Apple took their place, not as the monopoly OS in the new, big pond, but as an OS that was a large enough part of it that it could make things "not work on the Web" by making them not work on iOS. They manage to frequently be behind in getting new things to work in Safari (cf: caniuse.com), while being careful not to be so far behind that it affects their reputation with the general public and weakens them in competition with Android, and they prohibit any superior browser from interfering with this delicate "hurt the Web without hurting yourself" strategy by banning all others from iOS.

The result is that anything iOS Safari can't do, Web developers can't use: iOS Safari's shortcomings appear to be the Web's shortcomings, which can be overcome by committing to Apple-proprietary alternatives.

They can't afford to fall too far behind, though, or conventional wisdom will gradually emerge that iOS isn't as good as Android at "Web stuff". And as "Web stuff" improves on other platforms, the Web matters more and more as does your reputation for supporting it.

If developers, blogs, pundits would talk and post about it every time iOS Safari fails, yet again, to support some new Web technology, and even release some features that work nicely on Android/Chrome but require a native app on iOS, "because, you know, the iPhone's Web support is not very good, as everyone knows...", it will increase the pressure on Apple to shift the balance of "good but not too good" farther forward.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#255

Post by guelo »

mostafaberg wrote: post #152

>I don’t know about you, but the idea of having a fully capable web browser in my pocket was a huge part of the appeal. A: Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ? >I’m talking about stuff that QA should have caught, stuff that if anybody at Apple was actually building ? apps this way would have noticed before they released. A: They do pass QA, that's why features are r…

> A: I'm not here to judge your decisions or why you did it that way, but IMHO a chat product doesn't really belong in a "web browser"

Slack built a very successful chat app on top of the desktop browser.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#256

Post by victorhooi »

ryao wrote: post #80
untog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you aren't worried about provided a first class experience to your iOS customers, then build for Chrome + Android. Although, that sounds a little like "build for IE6 + Windows" 15 years ago. Except that Android is the open one that is implementing agreed upon standards, and Apple is the laggard left behind.

> Except that Android is the open one that is implementing agreed upon standards, and Apple is the laggard left behind. Given that many of these things are potential exploit vectors, I am not inclined to fault Apple for taking its time to implement them. Also, we are at the point where the standards are driven by a select few companies. If I recall correctly, those are Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. Opera used…

Do you have any evidence for your claim about "potential exploit vectors", or is it just speculation?

I don't know if you can claim Chrome is insecure, simply because it supports more web standards.

e.g. look at the results of the recent pwn2own contest:

http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/18/pwn2own-2016-chrome-edge-a...

There are other variables that probably have a greater impact on the security of a browser.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#257

Post by lallysingh »

rubber_duck wrote: post #210
vecinu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. Not quite. The whole purpose of maintenance is to increase the longevity of a product by making small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear. Everything lasts longer if you maintain it. A good knife, a high performance vehicle, a good pair of shoes, a couch, etc ... I don't know of any product that is "as good as new" after years of…

>Maintenance is the work of the caring Agreed - which is why building mass market convinience stuff that require it is a bad idea - I have limited hours in a day - I do not want to spend any of them doing chores such as maintenence - I'd rather just buy a new working thing every x years and not care. Paying someone else to do the maintenence is nice in theory but finding someone reliable who won't ripp you off is too…

You know, there are reviews - on the internet - for mechanics and dealer service departments. And really, anyone able bodied can change oil.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#258

Post by avn2109 »

Retric wrote: post #246
vecinu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. Not quite. The whole purpose of maintenance is to increase the longevity of a product by making small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear. Everything lasts longer if you maintain it. A good knife, a high performance vehicle, a good pair of shoes, a couch, etc ... I don't know of any product that is "as good as new" after years of…

You don't maintain CPU's. 1,000,000,000+ parts and it just works.

But they do degrade over time (slowly).

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#259

Post by threeseed »

criddell wrote: post #226
billyhoffman wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah Google owns my life, but I wouldn't feel better if Apple owned it instead Why? Apple makes money selling you hardware. Google makes money selling you to advertisers. I'm not comfortable with any company figuratively "owning" my life, but if I have to choose, the one that isn't built on scummy ads will get my money every single time.

> Google makes money selling you to advertisers. That's a little misleading. Google makes money showing you ads. It's not like I can call up Google and buy billyhoffman's data.

Governments can however.

And with Apple they have a demonstrated history of protecting privacy at any cost. Google not so much.

Re: I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS

#260

Post by jamisteven »

I for one could never go back to Android. iOS is just such a better user experience, much more fluid. Android feels like Cisco Voice's product lineup, all pieced together. fragmented applications and processes that dont work side-by-side with eachother. The other reason, which is huge to me, is the hardware. I am huge on how things feel in the hand and in my opinion apple's hardware is just far superior to anything offered for Android. Best thing I have seen hardware-wise was the Samsung Galaxy Alpha, and the Oneplus2. I miss the old Nokia days, e61/e62, that build quality was top notch, although running symbian made it a bit of a snail. I tried switching out of iOS and over to a nexus5 when it was released, I had pre-ordered it and was super excited for it to come in, but the hardware felt like total shit to me, and after a month I swapped back to iOS. Im still rocking an original iphone5 thats jailbroken, works better than that N5 any day of the week. Much like cars, it isnt about the size of the engine, or the tech it comes with, its about the whole package and how it all works together, as a unit.
Post reply on HN