Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 233 posts

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

#91

Post by obarthelemy »

- Widgets on the actual home screen, no swiping required. Every app has widgets (except Skype !), so you can have whichever info you need most right there

- true browser, true addons. Unlike iOS, Android doesn't limit 3rd-party browsers to reskins of the OS' Web engine, but allows desktop-like from-the-ground-up browsers. You can get Firefow and put uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger on it.

- sideloading w/o rooting. Exiting the Walled Garden (not recommended) doesn't require compromising the whole security setup by rooting, flasing a new ROM.... just activate Sideloading from the developer menu, and live only semi-dangerously. Reins in Google's censorship.

- Regular File management, incl. internal Flash, SD card, Network, and Cloud. On of the first apps I install is Asus's File Manager so I can easily move stuff around my LAN etc.. Also makes it easy to use different apps for similar content: I've got my podcasts, audio books, and music in different folders and a separate app for each.

- Plenty of storage: if you get a phone with an SD slot, you can have oodles of storage for dirt cheap, which is very handy if you wander out of cities.

- much more choice about everything: all apps including Phone, Keyboard, Mail, Browser, Text, Homepage (Launcher), Maps,... can be defaulted to any 3rd-party app. This makes for a steeper learning curve (I prefer HERE MAps over Google Maps and Waze; Nova Launcher; Google Messages ...) Only Notifications and Settings are hard-linked to the core OS.

- You get a choice of hardware. You can spend $500+ if you want to or need really good pics, but the $150 Redmi Note 7 or Realme 3 Pro are fine phones. The Note even have FM Radio, an IR blaster... no NFC though.

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

#92

Post by mstaoru »

By far the best feature for me is DUAL APPS: separate copy of an app that runs absolutely separated from the parent app. This way you can have e.g. two Slacks or two Facebooks or LinkedIns logged into two profiles without endless switching.

Other sweet things: support for WireGuard VPN, customizable keyboards (I'm a big fan of "finger slide" typing pioneered by, I think, Swipe), giant Google Calendar widget on the main screen...

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

#93

Post by austhrow743 »

nneonneo wrote: post #82
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.

Apple appears to hate torrents and basically any torrent-related app because I guess they enable piracy. They're not wrong - that would be the #1 use of any torrent app - but I do find that restriction repressive. 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 a…

>That said, many torrent servers support a web-based interface which you should be able to control easily with Safari.

Yeah the deluge webui is what I use on the desktop. Doesn't play nicely with ios safari at all though.

>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.

I ended up just installing an ftp client. 90% of what I wanted to do was add torrents and I can do that just by uploading to a watch folder.

Although your mention of ssh reminds me that I first tried to set up a shortcut that ssh'd the torrent over instead, which would be a preferable set up if it worked. It creates the file on my server but the file size stays at 0 bytes and the shortcut never finishes running. Any idea what I did wrong?

https://i.imgur.com/dbjZtEH.jpg

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

#94

Post by austhrow743 »

scarface74 wrote: post #79
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.

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

Yep!

>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.

Yeah I use a webui for Deluge when I'm accessing it by desktop, it's just not optimised for phones at all. Hard/impossible to click some buttons. I might have to give something else like vuze a go and see if its ui is better. Thanks for the recommendation.

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

#96

Post by sAbakumoff »

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…

I just love the way they describe the app features:

"Have you ever sat on a bus and wondered exactly which arguments tar accepts?"

"Can you imagine a more powerful yet elegant pocket calculator than a readline-powered Python console?"

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

#97

Post by pavelevst »

abrookewood wrote: post #95

I can plug my phone into my computer and copy files to and from it like it was a regular USB drive. Honestly, once I realised this wasn't possible on an iPhone my decision was pretty much made up.

iExplorer (even trial version) gives almost same experience

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

#100

Post by austhrow743 »

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…

I've been using Swiftkey (swipe keyboard) on iPhone for years. No need for your wife to be jealous.
Post reply on HN