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Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

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Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#81
post #7

I’m not surprised. I used Android devoutly, had a Galaxy S4, then an S8 when that started showing its age. I upgraded to an iPhone 12 when AT&T ran the promotion to get a free one. I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me: - Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in subst…

Long time Google fanboy here, and I'm honestly a hair's breadth away from buying an iphone 13.

I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelized android to for almost as long. I did ground work for google by pushing people into google's services. I have a day 1 pixel 6 pro. I pay for cloud storage and yt premium.

But to me google is just falling apart. I feel like they have lost their technology drive in order to pursue ideological ones. Their tech has become all half-assed with poor/no support. I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. RCS is still a disaster, my one friend on Fi with a pixel 5a still cannot get it working and Google/Fi has pretty said "We don't know".

I do not like Apple, but after almost 20 years a Google fanboy, I'm starting to like Google even less. So much so that I'll have to eat lots of shame from the many iphone people who questioned my android love for years.

*If anyone can convince me otherwise, please do*. I feel like the best thing that could happen is disposing of Sundar and getting someone who can refocus google on being a tech company devoted to making the best tech products.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#82
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there's a reader mode built in to the browser. Ad blockers are available since 2015, although these are declarative ad blockers. Custom web extensions are also available more recently; these can actually run custom JS.

I'm not sure what the implications of "declarative ad blockers" are. Do you need to manually block them or something?

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Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#83
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're talking about. I have zero issues using my FLAC files from elsewhere on my iPhone.

How do you play it? How do you import them into your library? If it's not mp3, aac, or m4a, iTunes won't index it, it won't end up in your library, and any of the standard music apps will not play it. Speaking from experience because this is a continuing pain point for my music collection that includes oddball formats like flac, ogg, and others--none of which I can even get on my phone without using a cloud service.

Nevermind, looks like I had some conversion going on to get those files on my iPhone. It's irrelevant anyways, since AAC is audibly transparent to the human ear.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#84
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're talking about. I have zero issues using my FLAC files from elsewhere on my iPhone.

You must have installed some niche piece of software that the vast majority of iPhone users will never use or hear about. Hopefully the indie dev keeps updating it and Apple never pulls it from the store!

[deleted]

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#85
post #7

I’m not surprised. I used Android devoutly, had a Galaxy S4, then an S8 when that started showing its age. I upgraded to an iPhone 12 when AT&T ran the promotion to get a free one. I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me: - Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in subst…

Long time Google fanboy here, and I'm honestly a hair's breadth away from buying an iphone 13. I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelized android to for almost as long. I did ground work for google by pushing people into google's services. I have a day 1 pixel 6 pro. I pay for cloud storage and yt premium. But to me google is just falling apart. I feel like they have lost their technology drive…

I switched recently, and honestly have found the experience on iPhone to broadly be worse. There are a few things that are a bit nicer, but the downgrade in the notifications system alone just tanks the experience.

That said I switched for mostly privacy reasons, so won't be going back.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#86

It's been mentioned before in other articles, but I don't think it can be understated how much iMessage makes it difficult to be the "odd man out" if you're on an Android phone. And it's not just about teenagers, and it's not about "green bubbles". I recently went on a vacation with friends, 4 other folks on iPhones and me on an Android. Our group chat experience almost made me consider getting an iPhone. The inabili…

As much as I hate promoting Facebook products, "let's make a WhatsApp group" seems to be the socially-acceptable solution to this. Everybody has it installed and always seems to be happy to switch communication over to it if somebody in the group suggests it.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#87
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pick your poison. The only reason I'm still on android is because at least I can (still) have root there. I'm saying still because of safety net. But if apple let me have root, i'd probably prefer an Apple over Google. Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage tha…

What does having root on your phone improve for you?

A few example of the top of my head:

- DriveDroid to boot a PC, I haven't used a USB stick to boot off in... years?

- /etc/hosts

- Viper4Android for system wide EQ

- Messing with user hostile apps such a firefox when they disable your addons although they still work, proven by the fact that I was able to make them work again as root

Edit: more things

- Wireguard kernel module

- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself

you can add as many of these as you want, i'm not giving up root. The crippled API model that's in fashion these days kills innovation.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#88
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>people have just resorted to ostracizing android users by co-opting iOS' "green bubbles" as a scarlet letter. What does this mean?

iOS messaging has end to end encryption by default, when that is enabled the messages are shown within a "blue bubble".

When this is not possible, it falls back to sending normal SMS, which can be read in plain text by third parties in the middle and has no encryption, when that occurs messages are shown within a "green bubble".

Therefore, messaging android users shows a "green bubble". People know its both an android user and unencrypted.

This also results in a worse messaging experience for the iOS users, as all of their other rich media is disabled and handicapped as long as that conversation involves an android user.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#89
post #7

I’m not surprised. I used Android devoutly, had a Galaxy S4, then an S8 when that started showing its age. I upgraded to an iPhone 12 when AT&T ran the promotion to get a free one. I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me: - Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in subst…

Quoted post unavailable.

> The impression I get is that every iPhone user has heard all the arguments before and understand the accuracy of those arguments and its the android users that lack the self awareness in that area and other areas of their life,

This might be the most ironic comment I've read in a long time. 90%+ of users on both platforms are purely religious about their choice, and if there's one thing I can say that most of them have in common, it's (over)confidence that they understand "the other side" while utterly failing to. There are 3 topics that I used to discuss regularly but now avoid with most people because too much processing happens in the Amygdala: religion, politics, and phone religion (aka iphone v. android).

I think it's also worth adding that a lot of "preference" just comes down to choice based on values. If you highly value cohesive user experience, security (especially from own mistakes), and brand recognition/status, more curated app store, then iPhone is a good choice. If you highly value device ownership (for example my device, my choice to sideload or root, ability to run apps that can reach deeper into the device, unlock bootloader and install custom ROMs), price (not really true anymore though), etc then android is for you.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it also have extensions like redirect to old.reddit and such? If so, then it sounds like it would allow more user control than the latest versions of firefox of android, is this really true?

Yes https://apps.apple.com/us/app/oldr-redirect-for-reddit/id158... You can also have Reddit links opened automatically in eg Apollo.

I’m looking for a plugin where I can define my own custom mappings (via regex-like patterns). Anyone know such a plugin?
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