Custom keyboards - on iPhone, long-pressing the mic button in Gboard has to run as a separate app instead of integrating directly into the keyboard. Also on iPhone "secure" screens (that use logins and passwords) never yield to 3rd party keyboards; instead they always revert back to the iPhone keyboard. Browser plugins - as you pointed out, browsers on iPhone are not allowed to run plugins, so no ad blockers in the t…
Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
81–90 of 233 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#82Iphone 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.
That said, many torrent servers support a web-based interface which you should be able to control easily with Safari. If you need something more custom, there's plenty of good SSH clients on the App Store and most will support fancy screen/tmux/TUI interfaces so you can control your command-line torrent client.
And, well, there's always the option of slapping something together with Python, using the Pythonista app; if the protocol is popular odds are someone's written a Python package to interact with it, at which point you just have to decide how much of a GUI (or TUI) you want to put on it.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#83Torrent
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#84Jailbroken IOS 9.3.3 had Little Brother, and there is a way to do it by modifying system files -- but if you mess up, you're totally screwed. With ro.sf.lcd_density, its as easy as taking the number and breaking it down by 5% increments until you find a sweet spot.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#85Termux. 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…
For starters.
The apps often aren't all that, and search costs alone in trying to find one exceed time to complete of a typical task. With no additional overhead for bugs, incompleteness, ToU, privacy policy, or EoL / business continuity concerns.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#86Termux. 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…
There's iSH for iOS, that tries to be similar to Termux. I don't know if it has feature parity or not since I've only heard about it, not used it myself, but I don't want to say this area is an Android-only feature.
Does seem quite preliminary though, yet.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#87Termux. 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…
Here's a silly photo from a Nairobi hotel room. The tv is hooked into a raspberry pi b, $75 2014 phone running android terminal, and a laptop... The phone iirc was providing internet and local network for the other two. (And I was trying to compile Sage on the pi, which ended up, at the time, taking close to a week, due to one memory hungry dependency...) https://inventingsituationsdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/0..…
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#88As no one’s mentioned it yet, the stock Android Dialer supports VoIP to a degree that most iOS apps do not. If you use a SIP provider that doesn’t support a native iOS app, Android will likely give you a nicer experience out-of-the-box. Also some Android tablets have half decent OLED screens, though stock iPhone OLED will out-perform them. Android has USB-C support that iOS is only now starting to get with the iPad P…
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
First thing I do on any new Android phone. It's also a great parlor trick, people are almost always amazed you can make their phone "faster" in under a minute. For those who don't know, enable Developer Options, then change "Window animation scale", "Transition animation scale" and "Animator duration scale" all to "0.5x". It should really be the default and I'm surprised there isn't a "0.25x" as of yet.
i can't find these settings anywhere on lineageOS
Re: Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
First thing I do on any new Android phone. It's also a great parlor trick, people are almost always amazed you can make their phone "faster" in under a minute. For those who don't know, enable Developer Options, then change "Window animation scale", "Transition animation scale" and "Animator duration scale" all to "0.5x". It should really be the default and I'm surprised there isn't a "0.25x" as of yet.
i can't find these settings anywhere on lineageOS