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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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211–220 of 233 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my laptop charger for my phone all the time. May I ask what has you scared to do so, because you have me concerned now.

USB-C charging relies on negotiation between both sides. A laptop charger can supply 20+V if it determines there's a high-power device on the other end. I'm not particularly trusting that a cheaply-made power supply won't hit the wrong condition on a case statement and supply 20V to my phone. Implementing USB-C wrong seems to be a passtime of all major manufacturers now. Nintendo got it almost completely wrong with t…

It's worse. Both sides need to negotiate properly, and the cable needs to follow specs, which many don't. Where micro USB has QC and QC2, there's a whole suite of PD (power delivery) and data protocols that cables may or may not support.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/5/9674462/usb-type-c-google... is dated coverage of a Google engineer testing for out-of-spec cables. See also: https://twitter.com/laughing_man.

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

#212
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use YouTube-DL with it, works like a charm. It allows me to have mostly the same toolkit on my phone and on my home server, which is nice.

You might also appreciate mpv with its '--ytdl' option (enables the youtube-dl library). This enables you to directly stream YouTube (or any other YTDL-supported source) audio or video, rather than downloading. mps-youtube (mpsyt) is another streaming tool, which gives the option to interactivley request, search (by title, description, genre, or channel) YouTube (only, this time) content, and create, save, and recall…

mps-youtube is really nice! Thanks for sharing! Never thought this was actually possible to do from an android terminal app.

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

#213
post #113
post #92

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 ma…

Isn't dual apps a miui only feature ?

OnePlus has it

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

#214
The suite of business applications I work on communicate and augment each other behind the scenes depending on which the customer is paying for using intents and content providers. It allows us to also develop bespoke apps that integrate with them. This is a power we wish we had on iOS.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yeah, shortcuts aren’t like UNIX pipes, so “cat >” will create the file but cat will hang forever waiting for data to come in over stdin. I’m guessing you’ll need an scp-type command rather than an ssh command since you need to copy a local file over to the remote end.

Unfortunately Shortcuts only allows for running scripts over ssh, not just general terminal commands. I might be out of luck on this one.

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

#216

- 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. E…

I'm using my third Mi phone now (Note 2, 4, and now a 6), and IR blaster is amazingly helpful. From turning volume in TV to turning A/C on my hotel I paid the fan-price for!

They last just as an expensive phone would (I trek often and get screen cracked in a couple weeks).

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my laptop charger for my phone all the time. May I ask what has you scared to do so, because you have me concerned now.

USB-C charging relies on negotiation between both sides. A laptop charger can supply 20+V if it determines there's a high-power device on the other end. I'm not particularly trusting that a cheaply-made power supply won't hit the wrong condition on a case statement and supply 20V to my phone. Implementing USB-C wrong seems to be a passtime of all major manufacturers now. Nintendo got it almost completely wrong with t…

> The RPi 4 is also wrong, as it bridges two connectors that shouldn't be

Do you have a link or some more info on that?

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

#218

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…

iOS has had inverted mode for as long as I can remember. I think since iPhone OS 1.0 Grayscale mode came in iOS 8, Night Shift in iOS 9. iOS 10 added a red screen filter. iOS 11 added Smart Invert. Android didn't get Dark Mode until last year. To imply Apple has been behind in this area is very misleading.

Android may not have had a system wide dark mode but I could change the launcher to one that had one literally in Jellybean or earlier.

Inverted mode is not dark mode I tried it. Even at the lowest possible brightness with nightshift on iOS was still too bright for my eyes at night. Either way my switch happened before dark mode was implemented and I admitted as such. It's also a preference so I'm not sure what exactly you're defending here.

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

#219

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?

Can't test family purchases on Google as my wife is still in her iPhone as is my daughter and they are both very happy with their phones as they got the type of people who like decisions made for them. Also same issue with the screen lock though it's not just the lock but having to keep the app open in the foreground, which is a boon for battery life just sucks uploading 1k pictures. It's definitely an idea to check but her security practices are already poor and I don't want to encourage further erosion.

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

#220

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…

iOS 13 shipping in a couple months (but available now in public beta) adds native swipe-to-type keyboard functionality. As a Microsoft app, the third-party Swype keyboard has been available for years. (Since iOS 7’s custom keyboards if I recall correctly...) The new iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 really brings iOS forward into the future, with downloads available in safari, native USB file management and more. You can even sav…

It's really funny how many of the things I disliked are being fixed now. There are definitely advantages to the right person using iOS. I really enjoyed their MacBooks for a while, and the iPhone wasn't garbage, I'm just not the target audience because my use cases didn't match up with what they were providing. I'm really not sold on Safari bedding a good browser though. It was universally a bad experience every time I used it. I probably installed one of the Swype style keyboards for myself, just was something I disliked and mentioned and I'm surprised Apple hasn't built naively yet.

I really want to like Apple. I'd love to simplify my life. My wife refuses to get a MacBook because there's no touchscreen and I really can't justify the expense of an iPad with the cost for value.

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