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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

#191

Post by Workaccount2 »

kyrra wrote: post #170
Workaccount2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work anywhere near phone stuff. I assume your friend has tried all the debugging on this page? https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en My wife's phone keeps failing to connect and we have to do the carrier services reset to make it work. A terrible solution to me requiring factory resetting your phone. But even then, I have a friend that was never able to get RCS…

Thanks, but I feel I am reaching a point where I need my friend to be able to go to a physical location where they either fix it or clone his phone onto a new one that does work. I can't be google's advocate twisting my friend's arm to troubleshoot their phone anymore.

This is just a tiny sliver of my dissatisfaction too. I feel like the long time lover that sits down one night and after a lot of thinking gives pause with "Wait, why am I still in this relationship?"

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

#192

Post by adamomada »

grumpyprole wrote: post #19
lumb63 wrote: 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…

But the iPhone only "just works" if you completely buy in to Apple's ecosystem. E.g. if you want to buy some FLAC music files from somewhere else, it won't "just work" anymore. Android is still the lesser of two evils in terms of allowing more choice on its platform.

There are third-party apps available that handle FLAC just fine. I use a paid app called Neutron Music Player mainly because it has an SMB client to connect to a NAS with my FLAC collection, but you can also use its built-in server to transfer FLAC to internal storage. I think you can even sync the SMB source to local storage as well but I haven't explored that, since I play them over the network just fine.

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

#193

Post by el-salvador »

jl6 wrote: post #135

What I find quite interesting amongst my colleagues is that they are deeply invested/locked into either the Google ecosystem or the Apple ecosystem. I know zero people who have recent experience of using both iOS and Android - they’re either in one camp or the other, and have only superficial knowledge of what it’s like to use the other. It feels like two parallel universes running side by side, just out of reach of…

Is it unusual in the U.S. to carry two phones?

I've had a work provided phone and a personal phone for a long time and so most of the people I know.

Sometimes I've had a work iPhone and a personal Android, and now a work Android and a personal older iPhone.

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

#194

Post by sharken »

Have owned both Android and IPhone, both are great choices. If you want to configure your phone or want to interact with content, I'd say the Android wins.

To me one of the best Android phones is the OnePlus 8T, it has a large effective screen, modest weight and very good battery life.

But the IPhone X and also 13 are very tough phones, that can take a lot of abuse. With panzer glass it's an extremely durable (and fast) phone.

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

#195

Post by sorenjan »

sylens wrote: post #157
nextos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me crazy, but I think there is room for a third platform. Especially if this platform was bootstrapped in a smart way, for example with an emulation layer to be able to run applications from Android. Or perhaps WebAssembly will make it viable to do more things from a (mobile) browser. I really miss the N700-N9 series with Maemo and Meego. It was so elegant and simple.

I have no idea if they will try it again someday, but I would love to see Microsoft give this another go. I think strong messaging about "quality over quantity" of apps would actually be a boon to them. I never go looking in the App Store for new apps anymore - just give me my video streamers, a Reddit client, Spotify, Slack, Discord, and Signal and I'm good to go.

Exactly. Years ago the number of apps in each app store was portrayed as "more is better" and a moat against new platforms. But realistically, how many apps does the average mobile user actually use, now that the novelty has worn off? I would guess that 75% of all users actually care about maybe 50 different apps combined, like Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp, Spotify, etc.

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

#196

Post by White_Wolf »

hellisothers wrote: post #59
lawl wrote: 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?

on top of what lawl said:

- macros and scripts- it's nice not having to enable, disable etc stuff and just scan qr codes, nfc tags or use ble tags as markers to enable something

- chroot

- faking permisions and data for apps is a must

- sim links to app data folders for easy backup/restore

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

#197

Post by adamomada »

MBCook wrote: post #142
mmastrac wrote: post #3

> Android’s loss of market share boils down to heightened competition within the OS space Yeah, that duopoly is a lot of competition

Maybe a lot of people are just really tired of crappy android phones and want to try the other side of the fence. I’m not referring to the nicer phones like the pixel or some of the galaxy phones. But the cheaper phones that are often given away for free. I’m not saying that’s everything, just a guess. I’m kind of surprised the difference is as big as 8%.

This is a pretty good point I don't think is seen very often: a lot of first-time iPhone users must be completely blown away by upgrading from the crappiest Android devices to something akin to a flagship on Android -- that they would never have considered upgrading to any other way other than switching.

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

#198

Post by nextos »

sorenjan wrote: post #186
nextos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me crazy, but I think there is room for a third platform. Especially if this platform was bootstrapped in a smart way, for example with an emulation layer to be able to run applications from Android. Or perhaps WebAssembly will make it viable to do more things from a (mobile) browser. I really miss the N700-N9 series with Maemo and Meego. It was so elegant and simple.

One problem with relying on emulation is that Google has moved a lot of functionality from the open source Android layer to Google Play Services, and they obviously wont publish that on someone else's platform. https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview

Yes, this is a problem.

But frankly, many users only want messaging, maps, banking and a few other things.

WebAssembly could solve that.

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

#199

Post by have_faith »

mattkevan wrote: post #177
orthoxerox wrote: post #148

I got my wife a new iPhone right before the war started, and I swear, every time the migration process gets worse and worse. I installed iTunes, took a full backup of her old iPhone, restored it to the new one, and it was still missing her music, her movies, her books, despite containing all of that judging by the file size. I had to resort to 3rd party software to rip the data out of it and shove it into the new iPh…

The migration process has never been easier. Just hold the phones near each other, scan the QR code on one with the other and wait a bit. Complete clone of the old phone, no need to go anywhere near iTunes or even a computer.

Just went through this the other day going from an XR -> 13 Pro. Very smooth compared to what I remembered. It didn't copy all of the apps though just the app icons that needed to be tapped to initiate a download for each one.

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

#200

Post by GeekyBear »

throwawayboise wrote: post #70
rejectfinite wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in substantially older features and security patches. Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now. - Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc. iMessage? Everyone here (Scandin…

Yep. There is one reason and one reason only I am on Android: price. A mobile phone does not have enough value to me to pay for Apple's least expensive phone.

The $399 iPhone SE is currently on it's sixth year of OS updates.
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