I also have an SE and love it. The OP, and various posts above are slightly wrong to say that Apple is a hardware company. Apple is a PRODUCT company; They design, sell, and support the whole product. That’s why is all Just Works, which is what most folks of any ilk want. Even their Unix (basically BSD) Just Works. Yeah, a little more Open would be great, but when I want to build something else, like a house, I really don’t need to be worrying about recompiling my screwdriver. Like the OP said, I want a phone that’s a phone and works. I want a Unix that’s stabdards compliant and works. I want a laptop that works. And I’m willing to pay a little more for someone else to build and maintain the roads and bridges so I can get where I want to go. And, yeah, not to spy on me while I’m getting there.
Why I'm Ditching Android
51–60 of 258 posts
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#52"Most of the bloatware on Android devices I’ve used over the years cannot be removed as they’re marked as system apps."
I believe you can use the Application Manager in Android to disable any of these Apps, even though you cannot remove them.
Just don't disable an App the phone actually needs.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#53I put lineage on two devices and I must say it's shockingly refreshing to be able to have some say in how much Google you get. I am used to the idea of OEM and carrier bloatware but it's surprising how much unwanted Google software appears in a stock image. On lineage I am pretty happy with the "nano" set of OpenGApps which is about the amount of Googleyness I want. I install a few more from Play on top.
Lineage seems like a reasonable solution. Dropping Android for iOS is a joke.
Yeah, if you don't like something Apple puts in their image good luck...
On the other hand it's not always as reasonable as it should be. I do find it frustrating that devices are so locked down, to the point where finding something to run lineage well and has the feature set you want can be tough. With my latest attempt I found a phone where several models, depending on what country and carrier, would not unlock the bootloader. And online sellers of phones are not always specific about what sub-model you get. I had to return a few because the seller sent me a Rodgers or an AT&T one that wouldn't unlock. I can definitely see how enough rounds of this can make some people throw their hands up and let Apple make all the choices.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#54What about iOS being a walled garden? Moving to a proprietary OS isn't going to safeguard the interests of data security in the long term. Also see the rich custom rom scene for Android phones, with highly active communities building rooms for even phone models long abandoned by their manufacturers.
> Moving to a proprietary OS isn't going to safeguard the interests of data security in the long term.
They did say in TFA (or perhaps another comment) that Apple uses privacy as a marketing jab against Google since they don't really want all your datas to sell ads.
Which does seem to hold true in practice, their newest crypto-chip thing they can't access even if they want to, going to the mat to against the FBI and various other instances over the years.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#55I remember when Ubuntu tried making a mobile phone OS( Ubuntu Touch ), but it never was a commercial success. I was extremely dissatisfied to hear about Google and their phone upload requests. It makes me question whether Android is a good choice after all( not that I agree with Apple, either ). That is the problem with modern-day tech, there is not enough choice in the market. Everything is either bought out or chok…
I would use Ubuntu Touch tomorrow if I could.
I think there's still an opportunity for such devices.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#56Notifications, as you rightly mentioned, are a huge problem with Android. Some manufacturers implement battery saving measures which force kill applications so they can no longer process notifications. I used to work at a team messaging startup Flock and we used to get a lot of complaints from users about missing notifications. We were able to detect impacted users and reduce complaints substantially using duplicate…
Notifications need teirs. You have notifications, that are not important, so low priority. But equally you have notifications that are important, those should be sent and logged message queue style, so they stay on the send queue until processed and processing acknowledged by the client.
Actually Google does have the concept of priority in Notifications. https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/concept-opt... . On a Google/Stock Android OS and on some good manufacturers like motorola notifications do work as expected.
It's just the custom battery saver stuff that some manufacturers implement on top of Android which causes issues. Google doesn't have much control over the privileged process that manufacturers install on devices.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#57Based on the stated concerns, data sent to Google, bundled apps that can't be removed... And given the author's interest in FOSS... Really interesting Lineage failed. He claims apps kept nagging about the lack of Google app support. How pervasive is that? Could he have just found a couple app alternatives rather than throwing them all out at once? It's hard to disentangle whether the problems we have are with our pho…
As someone who also tried Googleless Android before giving Android a kick to the curb, it's often specific service clients with no alternative. Like I needed Skype, and despite Microsoft being a Google competitor, their app didn't work without Play Services.
And with security being key to me, I'm not interested on depending on a third party hack with all my sensitive data.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not have any extra bloatware from any manufacturer, due to the fact that I run a Xiaomi Mi A1 as my daily driver, but I still would appreciate the choice to be able to manually install only the apps that I would use, e.g. Firefox instead of Chrome. I do have 64Gb of internal storage, but I obsess about every lost megabyte due to something I don't use( even when disabled or not used, Chrome still runs functions o…
Chrome is the webview for all apps, might be tricky to remove.
Boy, this is really starting to remind me of the controversy over bundling IE in Windows 98. Makes me think that all products eventually end up as bloated due to market pressure.
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#59I put lineage on two devices and I must say it's shockingly refreshing to be able to have some say in how much Google you get. I am used to the idea of OEM and carrier bloatware but it's surprising how much unwanted Google software appears in a stock image. On lineage I am pretty happy with the "nano" set of OpenGApps which is about the amount of Googleyness I want. I install a few more from Play on top.
I've been using CyanogenMod and now LineageOS since my first Android phone, and I love it over OEM. I'm unfortunatly still tied to GApps, but at this point it's basically contacts and calendar sync along with Maps, along with a random Play-store-only app (e.g. Transit). (I find almost everything I need in F-Droid.) (Yes, I have OSMand and offline maps, but I still like Google Maps for some things.)
My biggest problem right now is finding an Android phone smaller than 5", preferably under 4½", that I can both install lineageOS on and actually purchase :-\
Re: Why I'm Ditching Android
#60I made the switch to a refurbished 6s a couple of months ago when we started work on a new iOS app, and I am happy that I did. For the foreseeable future, I'll be purchasing iPhones. (I even purchased the recently announced Mac Mini in order to access the Apple software ecosystem; though, I suspect that I'll continue to prefer my Ubuntu laptop for productivity).
Why switch? After all this time (embarrassed to say), I've finally started to take my data privacy seriously. I really respect Google as an engineering company, and even as a product company. Products like Search/PageRank, Maps, StreetView, SkyMap, Translate, Books/Scholar, AdWords/AdSense/AdMob, Places, Trends, TensorFlow (and CoLab w/ free 12 hr sessions of TPU or GPU), BigTable, Gmail, Glass, and of course Android all are/were really great products. The only problem: those offerings are for the direct purpose of collecting your personal data (or the indirect purposes of making their other products - which collect your data - more efficient, or to bring more people online to collect data from).
I would love Google as a product company; I hate them as an ad company (85%+ of revenues resulting from advertising activities). I have migrated from, or I am currently migrating from, every Google product with the exception of YouTube (difficult to break from that, so I try to mitigate by having multiple accounts) and TensorFlow.
Notifications on Android were never an issue for me. Maybe I didn't have a similar suite of apps as OP. (iOS notifications have been more annoying thus far).