You can detect wifi network strengths and channels with Android.
Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
31–40 of 233 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#32In addition to the other things mentioned, like Firefox, launchers and Shell access:
1. Real multi-user, with fully separate profiles
2. Apps on SD card
3. Side loading
4. Connect to monitors on Samsung phones
5. Use USB-C card readers
6. Run torrents, run in the background
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#33Where i live most people use android and it's hard to transfer files via Bluetooth. I wish ios support universal Bluetooth protocol.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#34In addition to the other things mentioned, like Firefox, launchers and Shell access: 1. Real multi-user, with fully separate profiles 2. Apps on SD card 3. Side loading 4. Connect to monitors on Samsung phones 5. Use USB-C card readers 6. Run torrents, run in the background
I forgot about the running in the background thing. Arguably a strength and a weakness, depending on what's actually running.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#35Real Firefox and Real Chrome. The iOS versions is just a wrapper around the painfully bad mobile Safari.
Please do not confuse MobileSafari, an application with features, and UIWebView/WKWebView, a rendering API.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#36Primarily the custom launchers. But to be honest, the novelty of that is quickly waning with all these "Hey, how'd you like Home Depot?" notifications that I can't turn off without crippling the android experience. NOYB, that's how I liked it. I'm probably going to be in the market for an iPhone next time around.
What app gives you those notifications? What do you have to disable to stop them?
(I haven't seen them so I assume I already have whatever turned off, though I'm not sure what experience I'm missing out on!)
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#37One probably very niche thing is availability of a terminal along with full linux-y environment (including package manager for all the usual tools) on Android via the termux app. Pretty useful if you want to, for instance, make minor code changes (in vim or similar) or deployments on the go. I googled around out of curiosity if such a thing exists on iOS and turned up nothing, which seems reasonable considering the m…
iSH ( https://ish.app/ ) works well for this, though it's in a public TestFlight beta currently.
Cool, thanks! Looks great, and I'm glad it exists because this is a useful enough thing that it might have stopped me switching to iOS, something I'm tempted to do for my next phone.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#38Having a hardware keyboard. I just can't get away with it so I'm still using my 3 year old BlackBerry Priv.
Blackberry KEY2 is quite good, with timely security updates from both BB and Google.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#39I feel like Android's overall quality in the past couple of years has dramatically improved. Any modern half decent phone will be quite snappy nowadays, and the software has been polished up a lot.
Yes. In particular (for me) One UI by Samsung. Their new S10 phones are a fantastic upgrade, and the new software is a major part of that. Last versions of Touchwiz weren't too bad, but One UI lifts the experience to a new level.
I agree, One UI would definitely win for "most improved" of the skins. Even stock (Pixels) is really great now.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#40Primarily the custom launchers. But to be honest, the novelty of that is quickly waning with all these "Hey, how'd you like Home Depot?" notifications that I can't turn off without crippling the android experience. NOYB, that's how I liked it. I'm probably going to be in the market for an iPhone next time around.
If you slide the Google Maps notification to the right, a settings gear will pop up. From there you can disable some or all Google Maps (or any other app) notifications by category, so you still get the ones you want.