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

471–480 of 539 posts

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

#471

Post by [deleted] »

tasuki wrote: post #274
armadsen wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only really true outside of the US. I only have WhatsApp installed because I've spent time outside the US (Africa, specifically) and it's defacto standard there. I literally never use it to talk to people in the US, nor do I know anyone else here who uses it.

I'm well outside the US (Eastern Europe) and have never needed WhatsApp. I can talk with all the people I know over Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger. Perhaps it's also an age thing? I guess the youngsters use WhatsApp.

[deleted]

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

#472

Post by kaba0 »

fsflover wrote: post #207
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 think there is room for a third platform And it already exists: GNU/Linux phones running desktop OSes, Librem 5 [0] and Pinephone [1]. [0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 [1] https://pine64.org/pinephone

I think there is absolutely no way we should consider it a third platform next to the other two giants. It is way too early to call it that when they struggle with even just being daily drivers for the most enthusiastic.

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

#473

Post by kaba0 »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #206
sylens wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure many would be reluctant to trust m$ as a 3rd party in the mobile phone stakes, particularly with their telemetry, which is the root of the cancer plaguing the existing platforms (including desktop) already.

Microsoft does jackshit of a telemetry compared to Big Google.

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

#474

Post by kaba0 »

lawl wrote: post #87
hellisothers wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic (though I do agree that since then they should have improved the status quo)

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

#475

Post by kaba0 »

fsflover wrote: post #448
rglullis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I did not. I am running the Fairphone, which is guaranteed to be updated for 7 years.

My Pinephone and (soon) Librem 5 are guaranteed to have support for the lifetime.

Notify me when their lifetime actually start. Because other than playing with them, they are currently not up to the definition of a daily driver-ready mobile device.

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

#476

Post by znowcone »

tasuki wrote: post #460
Nimitz14 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp is the number one app in most EU countries. It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners).

> It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners). You couldn't be more wrong. I've lived in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the UK. I've played go competitively at a European level and have travelled a fair bit and socialized with nerds all over. Name a European country, chances are I know several people there.

Most people here have both FB messenger and WhatsApp (and likely Instagram), so if you have one of those you're fine. I've tried not to use /any/ facebook product for a while and that's when I ran into bubble color issues.

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

#477

Post by kaba0 »

KronisLV wrote: post #312
fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now. That's terrible.

Hmm, seeing as even most desktop OSes out there aren't supported for much longer, i'm not sure whether things are terrible in that regard. Debian's EOL comes to mind, even Ubuntu LTS isn't supported for much longer, CentOS was supposed to be the more stable option but that didn't work out either. Though for some reason mobile devices are somewhat crippled in regards to upgrading to new OS releases versus their deskto…

We are talking about the very crippling of devices. So having n years of updates means that the device will effectively die after that, which is a shame and frankly ridiculous at only 4 years.

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

#478

Post by kaba0 »

sircastor wrote: post #317
Silhouette wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now. Four whole years? It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone. That it is not really surprising at all is a sad reflection on how normalised shipping insecure connected devices with inadequate support has become. Obviously we don't yet know how to build 100% sec…

> Four whole years? It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone. I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months. And the market would correct for that, but everyone was doing the same thing - abandoning a device mere months after its release. And fr…

But we are very very heavily in the diminishing returns area now. 5-7 years ago, next-year’s device might easily have doubled its performance, camera performance, etc, but nowadays a 3 years old high-end phone is perfectly adequate if it’s not deliberately crippled by software

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

#479

Post by lawl »

kaba0 wrote: post #474
lawl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic (though I do agree that since then they should have improved the status quo)

> So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic

Here's how niche indie software handles this: https://i.imgur.com/6m809SB.png (excuse the sarcasm)

I don't care anymore though. I've switched browsers since, Mozilla is beyond help. Still, in that moment i was very glad to have root to override their bullshit.

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

#480

Post by tasuki »

znowcone wrote: post #476
tasuki wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not age but the fact youve clearly never socialized outside of your country (or with foreigners). You couldn't be more wrong. I've lived in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the UK. I've played go competitively at a European level and have travelled a fair bit and socialized with nerds all over. Name a European country, chances are I know several people there.

Most people here have both FB messenger and WhatsApp (and likely Instagram), so if you have one of those you're fine. I've tried not to use /any/ facebook product for a while and that's when I ran into bubble color issues.

Indeed, I simply tell people I don't have WhatsApp and we usually end up with FB messenger. My claim was not that I don't know people who use WhatsApp (I do!) but rather that FB messenger + G Hangouts about covers everyone for me.
Post reply on HN