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Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

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Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#11

Post by dizzystar »

nsenifty wrote: post #9

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps.

We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#12

Post by lostlogin »

amorphid wrote: post #7
kumarm wrote: post #2

iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium phone? I am surprised :).

I went through that process. After I stopped buy good phones subsidized by the phone company & started paying full retail phones upfront, I became less interested in having a top of the line phone. I just don't wanna fork out $900 for any phone. I bought two versions of a sub-$100 phone, they both sucked and/or were defective in some way. I bought a $240, and it was OK, but I was constantly fishing for an excuse to g…

By my maths that was $840 minimum, versus $900 iphone. As is often the case, it seems that things cost a little often, or a lot but less often.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#14

Post by [deleted] »

dizzystar wrote: post #11
nsenifty wrote: post #9

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps. We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

[deleted]

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#15

Post by opencl »

dizzystar wrote: post #11
nsenifty wrote: post #9

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps. We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

Android has supported apps on SD cards for ages. First with Apps2SD then since 6.0 Adoptable Storage which just treats internal+SD as one big storage pool. A lot of higher end phones have disabled the UI for Adoptable Storage due to performance concerns though it is still possible to set up with ADB commands. This type of phone however is the exact sort of thing it's meant for.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#16

Post by hayksaakian »

vidanay wrote: post #5

I'd be interested to know how these $60 phones perform compared to a 9 year old Motorola Droid. Obviously, the level of content 9 years ago was at least an order of magnitude less than today, but how much of these devices slowness is content vs delivery technology? Is it because web apps are dynamic instead of static? Is it a matter of framework bloat? What is really the root cause of the terrible performance?

Operating system bloat and app bloat.

A motorola droid was super fast, I had it for years.

If you made a brand new motorola droid today with the same exact hardware and software it would be too.

Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time: https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth

It's for iOS but the same logic follows for android

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#17

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

dizzystar wrote: post #11
nsenifty wrote: post #9

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps. We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

You can run apps from SD on Android provided the vendor hasn't neutered it. It was a custom Moto feature for KitKat but was upstreamed for Lollipop and up.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#18

Post by ranji2612 »

This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based on my experience.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#19

Post by chiph »

andy_ppp wrote: post #3

I remember buying a burner phone in India once and it hurt my ears when I received calls. It turned out the phone only had one loudness setting which was at a level able to pierce through the din of Mumbai. Ear bleedingly loud.

Well, except when I'm indoors, I wouldn't mind that. The few times I've had to call 911 by the side of the road to report accidents[1], the phones I had just couldn't produce sound loudly enough to be heard over passing traffic. I know there was an initiative to protect people's hearing a few years ago by limiting volume - but sometimes you really need it.

[1] Other people's - not mine!

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#20

Post by nsenifty »

dizzystar wrote: post #11
nsenifty wrote: post #9

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps. We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

As of Marshmallow, you can format the SD card as internal storage. I did that on my dad's phone just this week and it doesn't seem to have the limitation you described.
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