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

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

stockapps.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 539 posts

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

#351

Post by wallacoloo »

Kye wrote: post #269
howinteresting wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just ask everyone to install Signal or even WhatsApp? They're friends of yours, so it seems like the least they can do for you.

Either you have especially pliant friends, or you've never tried to do this.

what's the alternative? of all the friend groups i've had only _one_ has ever been among a group that has all iphones. i'm having a hard time imagining that, in a world of 70% android share, finding yourself in a group that can actually make use of the iOS-only stuff could ever be the _norm_? like, the statistics of this just don't make sense to me unless the OS distribution is _extremely_ skewed along a handful of metrics and you find yourself at an extreme end of multiple of those.

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

#352

Post by goosedragons »

GeekyBear wrote: post #200
throwawayboise wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Android phones don't break even if they stop getting updates. Big popular apps like Firefox, Kindle, etc. work on old versions of Android like 6.0. $400+ is still a steep upfront cost to a lot of people.

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

#353

Post by pt_PT_guy »

Who's surprised?

- More and more locked down bootloaders

- Less and less support and updates guarantee

- A mess on the interfaces provided: each brand as its own that no one can expect to be consistent

- Devices loose support after 2 years and enter in maintenance mode after that

- Expensive as iphone

So why would I want an iPhone? for locked down expensive experience then I should got an iPhone. Apple is pushing for updates and device support, so yes.

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

#354

Post by cercatrova »

skinnymuch wrote: post #262
cercatrova wrote: post #216

I'd use iOS if they let me install whatever apps I wanted ("sideloading" as a term feels weird, as if they deign their users to load apps on the side, by their good graces. No, it's our hardware, we should be able to run whatever we want). Android lets me do that, so I use it. No way I'd be without Vanced (rip) and other such apps. Android also has more interesting form factors, such as the folding phones, which Appl…

Do you have a folding phone?

Not yet, looking to buy one this year though once some new models come out

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

#355

Post by kenoph »

Long time Android user, switched to iPhone when I broke the screen of my Google-gifted Nexus 3a. Final straw was the latest update. Every widget became bigger, with a border radius taking way too much space on the screen. Some widgets (e.g.: calendar) had part of the text hidden by the round edges. On top of that, I had a black-ish/brown-ish background and after the update all the UI was brown.

I honestly don't know what Google designers/engineers get paid to do if they can't even QA the software of one of their main devices.

I don't like Apple but I'm way happier now. Main complaint is the stupid photo/file separation. Just give me a normal filesystem please.

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

#356

Post by adoxyz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #81
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…

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 from Google to Apple after being in the Google ecosystem since the early days of Android. I had pretty much every single Nexus, Pixel, and a variety of Samsung devices. But Google's lack of support, half-assed one-foot in one-foot out, and lack of support made me switch to Apple about 3 years ago and I've never been happier.

Apple's ecosystem, while it doesn't offer as much, is a much superior and polished experience. iMessage works great, integration with Apple Watch is top notch, and the whole ecosystem is very fine-tuned. There are still a bunch of things to complain about, for sure, but overall comparing the two is a night and day difference.

I've slowly started phasing out all my Google products.. and not by choice either. Had Google Nest and Nest Secure for over 3 years until Google decided to just cancel Nest Secure all-together. Google Home devices are increasingly being less and less effective. Google just can't seem to commit to anything longer than 2-3 years and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather deal with getting features much later but thoroughly thought out, then half-assed and cancelled in 2 years. I will say the one thing I do miss is native Google Assistant, Siri is complete ass in comparison.

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

#357

Post by throwawayboise »

GeekyBear wrote: post #200
throwawayboise wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iPhone SE on the Apple website today is $429.

$250 is about the max I would consider spending on a smartphone.

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

#358

Post by goosedragons »

62951413 wrote: post #184
grumpyprole wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never been able to make an Apple laptop recognize my phone as a USB storage device to copy photos from it. GOOG phones used to cost less than half of APPL ones. And for a while to have physically wider screens which made them better book readers. Unfortunately the price difference seems to be nearly negligible now.

You need Android File Transfer because Apple doesn't support MTP.

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

#359

Post by alimov »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #81
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…

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…

Not really here to convince you of one os / ecosystem or the other, but wanted to say that you can get an iPhone, try it for two weeks and return it if you don’t like it.

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

#360

Post by qsdf38100 »

SergeAx wrote: post #295
qsdf38100 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way I let Facebook get access to my phone contacts. I guess this is worth billions for them, because it’s a huge social graph they were missing. Interestingly the option to use the app without giving away all your contacts has been removed years ago. It tells a lot. Note that Signal still works without your contacts.

So, you would never give up your contact list to one mega corp, but readily give it away to another. How do you made that decision? Asking not rhetorically and without sarcasm.

Huh? I didn’t give away my contact list. Neither to Facebook nor to Signal. As I said you can use Signal without allowing access to contacts. You can enter telephone numbers directly. Was I being unclear?
Post reply on HN