Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by saargrin » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

tomtheelder wrote: post #85

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…

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.

same here switched for privacy/security reasons

i expected IOS to be this perfect experience, but in fact many of apple's own apps are buggy ,and some quality of life features dont exist

and then theres TrueCaller :(

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

#492

Post by roldie » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

tim-- wrote: post #322

The manufacturers of flagship Android devices are a major cause of this. I love being able to put an SD card in my phone to get a bit of extra storage, without paying Samsung the extra $200 to double the provided storage. In the S6 era, they removed the SD card, only for it to return (briefly) with the S7. Since the S20, it has once again been removed. I will keep my S10 until it dies, but there is no point me 'upgra…

Glad to find someone in the same boat.

Holding on to my S9 for as long as I can. I want a headphone jack and sd card slot, and it looks like the Xperia 1 series is the only option.

If I didn't care about those, I would probably jump ship to get an iPhone.

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

#493

Post by drdec » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

skinnymuch wrote: post #250

drdec wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I was recently talking to a guy who had had his iPhone stolen. But it was no big deal - he had replacement insurance and the deductible was only $200. Which is more than I have ever paid for a phone in my life.

Price of phone shouldn’t be used as a barometer. It should be the price you end up paying per month when all is said and done.

I buy unlocked phones without financing them and use Ting for mobile service. I don't buy phones from the cell providers.

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

#494

Post by kaba0 » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

bengalister wrote: post #442

I really don't understand the hype for the iphone. I own a oneplus 8t on Android 12, I particularly like the 120Hz display and the very fast charging (65w). When my battery is almost dead I can get to 30% in just a few minutes. Android 12 has been a big improvement, it is really snappy and good looking (Android 11 was already good). I bought the phone 550Euros, and during the last black friday it was sold for 350Euro…

What advertisement are you talking about?

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

#495

Post by Oanid » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

I've been using Android since Google's Nexus One release. Although I enjoy the Android platform, I have huge issues with Google's services strategy and overall consideration for interoperability between their services. There's magic that's missing — magic that exists on Apple's platforms.

Also, the apps that Google does have are pretty terrible. Google Keep is not a strong competitor to Apple's offerings. The UI is terrible, it provides you with a long running list of your notes, labels instead of folders which is a fine option, but I'd rather have both for my workflow. Google Maps is an ad infested mess with more bugs than I can count. I'd be interested in knowing if it's as inconsistent and unreliable on iOS. There are features that straight up just do not work — it's unacceptable.

My biggest annoyance though? Google's love for A/B updates. There have been times where I've had a feature or option exposed to me just to disappear a few months later. I remember reading about new offerings in Google apps that could be accessed by doing x, y, and z. Often times the feature would be unavailable to me because it was "rolling out." I'd spend weeks repeating the steps to see if that new feature was available to me, but nope, it still was not. I eventually lost interest.

I'm not sure what I want to do for my next phone. The benefits of Android outweigh the cons, but on the other hand, maybe it's time for a change to experience what iOS is doing more. If Apple improves how notifications are handled with iOS 16, that might just provide me with the push that I need.

Oh... I also really love Twitter and iOS really seems like the best platform for Twitter. They have Tweetbot which has always been a gold standard, but there's also timeline syncing via iCloud. Mind you to take advantage of that I'd have to get an iPad and a Mac, too. At least the option's there though. Android relied on tweetmarker and when they died it left Android users SOL. Also, the only good third-party Twitter client on Android, Flamingo, is starting to show it's age and is no longer updated.

Ugh. The gaps between Android & Windows are becoming more and more apparent to me. Heck, Windows 11 still doesn't come with a good native calendar app. The default one by Microsoft is not optimized for productivity or even desktop displays. I digress, but still...

Anyways, I'll likely continue living in the Android world as its offerings are more aligned with my views. It's just hard accepting the recent mediocrity as a UX designer.

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

#496

Post by skinnymuch » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

drdec wrote: post #493

skinnymuch wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price of phone shouldn’t be used as a barometer. It should be the price you end up paying per month when all is said and done.

I buy unlocked phones without financing them and use Ting for mobile service. I don't buy phones from the cell providers.

I wasn’t critiquing you. Just pointing out what makes sense. I’m positive you come out with less paid in every metric than most. Since I live in the US and my cousin and brother want to be on Verizon. The price of Verizon with 4-5/lines and carriers that piggyback off the big three are not too different, for me, I do end up getting a $1K phone every 3 or so years without paying anything directly. I’m locked to the big 3 carriers at that point for 2 years.

It’s not as flexible but my end cost for the phones is usually $5 more a month in plan cost and being stuck to a big 3 carrier, I haven’t paid much for a phone since I started doing this after Att paid T-Mobile equivalent of $4B in break up fees a decade ago and that pushed for more competition. Though back then I was rocking webOS then Windows Phone before sadly going from iPhone to iPhone. I believe it was iPhone 6 to 8 to 13 Pro. So 3 year and 4 year gaps waiting for deals where I wouldn’t pay anything except a trade in and being tied to the carrier.

I also use a ton of data. Except during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. During that time period I for sure was wasting money.

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

#497

Post by skinnymuch » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

Dayshine wrote: post #278

skinnymuch wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price of phone shouldn’t be used as a barometer. It should be the price you end up paying per month when all is said and done.

I pay £10/3 months plus £200-300 every 4 years for a phone.

Wow the 10 every 3 months is cheap. Even if little data is included. Nice.

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

#498

Post by Silhouette » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

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…

I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months.

Given that many new phones were bundled with two-year contracts it seems likely that consumer protection laws in many places would have meant a phone that was not properly supported for at least that long after the time of purchase would have fallen foul of fitness-for-purpose rules and potentially entitled customers to partial refunds or updated replacements.

And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.

Sure but again that's why we need consumer protection rules. Any security patch implies that the original product was defective. Buyers are entitled to reasonable corrective action if a defective product was sold to them. It may be unrealistic to release a product with no defects, and the corrective actions are typically intended to compensate for actual loss of value rather than being punitive, but the basic rules still apply.

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

#499

Post by mackrevinack » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

kgarten wrote: post #451

Long time iOS user and spare-time developer. Switched from iPhone 13 to a Google Pixel running GrapheneOS for my phone and Samsung Fold 3 for mobile Internet. I love the freedom to develop and sideload apps. Syncthing for Android is amazing! (all my pictures/music/files are synchronized between devices without any cloud service, no longer Apple Music deciding to delete some of my music and replace it with less ). Gad…

everyone once in a while i think about getting an iPhone or iPad for one reason or another, maybe for the camera or some music making apps that you can't get anywhere else, but i quickly scrap that thought once i remember that i can't use syncthing

there's no way i could go back to manually transferring files, or being limited by ISP network speeds or "cloud" storage space, or most importantly, having to pay monthly fee for the rest of my life!

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

#500

Post by mmcnl » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

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…

Regarding messaging, contrary to popular belief WhatsApp is great for privacy as well. It is now end-to-end encrypted since it recently adopted the Signal protocol [1]. It's cross-platform and more widely used on a global scale.

[1] https://scontent-ams4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.8562-6/271639644_...