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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

#481

Post by sixbrx »

adamomada wrote: post #192
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.

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.

Yep Foobar 2000 for iOS is free and plays Flac (and many others), and has a convenient built in FTP server that you can temporarily enable to tranfer them over the network into its music library.

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

#482

Post by sixbrx »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #58
xvector wrote: 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.

I use Foobar2000 on iOS where you can toggle its embedded FTP server to transfer files, either to its own music library or one shared with iTunes. It's very easy.

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

#483

Post by kyriakos »

There is another reason, there were way more brands of android phones in the past. I'm looking to buy a new phone, a flagship and my choices are basically Samsung, oneplus and xiaomi, each with its own issues. Samsung s22 in Europe reviews show that its a failure. Oneplus software took the wrong direction the last few models and xiaomi is just xiaomi with ads all over the place.

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

#484

Post by GeekyBear »

goosedragons wrote: post #470
GeekyBear wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android phones don't break even if they stop getting updates. So when Google issues a kernel patch for an actively exploited zero day you aren't vulnerable? Don't be ridiculous.

Vulnerable != Broken. An iPhone SE is vulnerable to the same bug used by checkra1n. Is it broken?

Checkra1n relies on a hardware issue that cannot be patched.

Software zero days can be patched and on Android even the vendors with the best support policies only cover half as many years.

Cheap Android phones don't even get that.

The OG iPhone SE is on it's sixth year of OS updates.

The iPhone 5s just got it's eighth year of security updates.

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

#485

Post by grumpyprole »

zeagle wrote: post #464
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.

Perhaps not the best example because my brand new pixel 6 has a horrible DAC and can't pass through properly to a USB DAC which iPhones have no issue with. (I'll believe a fix is coming then I see it.) https://www.reviewgeek.com/105739/googles-pixel-6-is-disappo...

Tell him/her to use USB Audio Player Pro, it has its own USB driver that supports bit perfect playback and integrates with streaming services also.

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

#486

Post by goosedragons »

GeekyBear wrote: post #484
goosedragons wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vulnerable != Broken. An iPhone SE is vulnerable to the same bug used by checkra1n. Is it broken?

Checkra1n relies on a hardware issue that cannot be patched. Software zero days can be patched and on Android even the vendors with the best support policies only cover half as many years. Cheap Android phones don't even get that. The OG iPhone SE is on it's sixth year of OS updates. The iPhone 5s just got it's eighth year of security updates.

Which means it's permanently broken by your standards right? Or do you have some sort of non-nonsensical exception for hardware vulnerabilities?

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

#487

Post by kaba0 »

privacyking wrote: post #465
ninjakttty wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC is currently #18 in the app store in the media player category. It's not just some linux app. As to how to get flac files on the iPhone, 1) you can connect it a computer open Finder go to apps section drag the file there 2) put the file in the iCloud and access it from any device with the files app on 3) in Safari if a link is a media file you can share it with VLC and that's just 3 off the top of my head, I thin…

1. Requires a Mac. 2. Requires a proprietary apple service. I'm starting to notice a trend with your suggestions. 3. Are you really suggesting people manually download their files one by one? Rofl.

2: what do you expect here? Apple has their own authentication and authorization - should they just leave an ssh port open on every phone or what?

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

#488

Post by GeekyBear »

goosedragons wrote: post #486
GeekyBear wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkra1n relies on a hardware issue that cannot be patched. Software zero days can be patched and on Android even the vendors with the best support policies only cover half as many years. Cheap Android phones don't even get that. The OG iPhone SE is on it's sixth year of OS updates. The iPhone 5s just got it's eighth year of security updates.

Which means it's permanently broken by your standards right? Or do you have some sort of non-nonsensical exception for hardware vulnerabilities?

By your standards a flaw that will never be patched is perfectly acceptable.

Even if it's a software flaw that can easily be patched, but the vendor prefers to force you to buy another device and toss the first into a landfill.

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

#489

Post by kaba0 »

vetinari wrote: post #268
coolsunglasses wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iPhone 13 Pro Max has 120 hz, so that feature is available. I don't mind that it was Android only for a bit, very little on that platform can actually render a non-static UI at that rate.

> very little on that platform can actually render a non-static UI at that rate. you would be surprised, try it sometime.

My friend’s brand new 1500 dollars flagship samsung gets sweared at constantly for failing to do so.

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

#490

Post by my123 »

danielEM wrote: post #446
my123 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclaimer: I work at Qualcomm) > Mobile devices have no UEFI Since the Snapdragon 835, Android devices with Qualcomm processors use UEFI all the way to the kernel. However, custom UEFI binaries aren't part of the boot flow, with an Android UEFI boot application running instead. > no bus enumeration It's device tree instead of ACPI, but apart from that the situation isn't _that_ different from PCs today. We aren't i…

Hey @my123 > However, there's a catch still: there isn't a central update service. So while you might use a custom OS that way, you'll still need to update the vendor partitions (with the drivers, both kernel and user-mode ones) out of band in that scenario to get updates for those. > This mechanism allows to have universal Android images that work across all of the ecosystem, and can be used for GNU/Linux distributi…

> what is the remaining work I would need to have done in order to get it working under

A good chunk of the Linux community on phones didn't want to have to rely on binary drivers for non-technical reasons, and that's one of the reasons why it isn't exactly well taken care of today.

For Ubuntu Touch specifically:

https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction/Intr... for Ubuntu Touch.

https://github.com/ubports/porting-notes/wiki/Generic-System...

An upgraded Halium (https://github.com/Halium) image on a can work unmodified across the whole ecosystem of Android devices.

However, the latest currently developed experimental Halium works on an Android 11 base at most, so that devices launched with Android 12 might be using drivers too new for it at this point in time.

(https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/jenkins-ci/generi...)

This can be fixed with an engineering effort to do so to make it work on devices launched with Android 12. The Linux on phones community is very small and that causes problems in this case.

Together with the unified kernel image (GKIs) on Android 12 which allows to have kernel image binaries built with GNU/Linux-specific features that work across the whole fleet, a full straightforward experience can be made possible. This would fill the last chunk of custom per-device bits.

I wonder how big the audience would be for such a project though. :)

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