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Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#71

Post by lstamour »

dredmorbius wrote: post #50

Termux. https://termux.com I've got an actual userland Linux shell and package ecosystem, with 1,231 available packages (compare against ~6k for Red Hat / CentOS, 70k for Debian), including standard shell tools, editors, and scripting languages, plus several Android-specific tools and APIs. The scripting tools open up broader archives via pip (python), npm (node.js), and cpan (perl). Many of the "Linux" shell and scr…

So... when I jail-broke my iPhone 3G S years and years ago, I remember using an SSH prompt natively with all the fixings, including native BitTorrent over comparatively slow 3G speeds.

These days, though, there are apps and websites to do everything under the sun. If you need the power, why do the heavy lifting locally? Just use these cloud-friendly devices to connect to an SSH server via Panic’s Prompt app, or use the Shortcuts app to run Pythonista or an SSH-executed command via Siri or at a certain time (prompted). If you need something more advanced than Pythonista can support, perhaps for push notifications, you’ll probably have to use a third party app, or write your own with a Mac to set it up, but iOS is really more extensible with each new release.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#72

Post by copperx »

CraftThatBlock wrote: post #4

I 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.

I use a Pixel 2 and I felt the phone extremely sluggish compared to my old iPhone 7 from day one. The Pixel 2 was supposed to be a flagship model, so it makes me reluctant to ever buy an Android phone from another manufacturer; I can only assume non-flagship phones are slower than the official Google one. Is this a correct assumption?

The most frustrating thing about Android is its excruciating scrolling performance. When scrolling webpages you can see the animation isn't synced: the bottom part of the screen struggles to keep up with the top part, and it feels like the text is made up of a bunch of dancing ants, especially if you scroll slowly. iOS's scrolling is flawless. Reading stuff a primary use case of smartphones, why hasn't Google addressed this? Fortunately, Chrome on Android has decent scrolling performance and it's the only reason I haven't thrown this phone in the trash.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#74

Post by [deleted] »

diafygi wrote: post #46

Have a fully functional ad-blocker. Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only thing that makes mobile browsing tolerable. IPhones don't let you install add-ons in browsers, so you're stuck with rule-based content blocking, which has caps and can't do some of the things add-ons can do. I'd love to switch to an iPhone, but this feature is a deal-breaker for me.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#75

Post by scarface74 »

lstamour wrote: post #71
dredmorbius wrote: post #50

Termux. https://termux.com I've got an actual userland Linux shell and package ecosystem, with 1,231 available packages (compare against ~6k for Red Hat / CentOS, 70k for Debian), including standard shell tools, editors, and scripting languages, plus several Android-specific tools and APIs. The scripting tools open up broader archives via pip (python), npm (node.js), and cpan (perl). Many of the "Linux" shell and scr…

So... when I jail-broke my iPhone 3G S years and years ago, I remember using an SSH prompt natively with all the fixings, including native BitTorrent over comparatively slow 3G speeds. These days, though, there are apps and websites to do everything under the sun. If you need the power, why do the heavy lifting locally? Just use these cloud-friendly devices to connect to an SSH server via Panic’s Prompt app, or use t…

This exactly. I have complete access to any resource I could imagine for my job by spinning up what I need in our dev AWS account or at home with my personal hobby AWS account (which admittedly I hardly ever use). I have unlimited data and tethering (albeit slow 512Kbps.

I’ve even used AWS Workspace app in a pinch with my iPad.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#76

Post by nneonneo »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #66

Let's see up until recently they didn't have a dark mode. You can't switch owners of shared family purchases on an iPhone. You need to rebuy the apps under a new family owner after dissolving the previously family which is not easy or seamless. Plex picture uploads don't work in the background on Apple so you constantly have to take the screen to keep it active. Basically if you like having someone else make all your…

If you're doing big uploads, I would probably just set the screen lock to "never" and stick it on a charger. I've done that before with a long-running Pythonista script and it works great.

Sorry to hear about the family purchase stuff. How does family purchasing work on Google? Is it easy to switch owners there?

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#78

Post by nneonneo »

Arbalest wrote: post #3

You've pretty much covered the bases. The snappiness you describe is because iPhone is more strict with it's app quality. You've also nailed the main use cases for customisability. The big question is, are you ready and willing to root and/or custom rom your phone? If not, the advantages you described on Android are not as substantial as you may hope. Yes, you can use Netguard, but the approach is janky (out of necce…

iOS is very, very particular about what gets to run in the background. This is a major differentiating factor between iOS and Android. On Android, it's easy to write apps to run in the background, but on the flip side it's easy for someone else's app to accidentally (or intentionally) run in the background and suck up your battery and/or data and making your phone slow. On iOS, apps can only run in the background for very specific (but gradually expanding) purposes; many other features (like push notifications) that appear to be "background" functions are really handled by Apple or the iOS system itself with minimal app intervention and thus minimal system impact. This contributes to the snappiness of iOS.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#79

Post by scarface74 »

austhrow743 wrote: post #63

Iphone user. Recently i tried to find an app to manage torrents on a server. Nothing for iPhone but it looked like there are options for Android.

Do you mean control another computer running bit torrent to initiate downloads, view and change status?

If so, at least with Vuze, you can do that by going to remote.vuze.com and pairing it with your computer running the vuze client.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

#80

Post by scarface74 »

CraftThatBlock wrote: post #4

I 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.

I bought my son a Moto G last year because that was suppose to be a good mid range phone. It was an awful experience - far from snappy. The performance was sluggish. He happily “upgraded” to my old iPhone 6s that was 3 years older and it was a lot faster.
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