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Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

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Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#201

Post by anthonyhn »

horsawlarway wrote: post #155
ajvs wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux phones, but they're still years off usability-wise.

This is where my mind is - although I don't think they're quite as far off as you might think. Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now). But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years a…

>I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well

which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#202

Post by jrm4 »

ethanbond wrote: post #196
jrm4 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So..Suckers. Got it.

Sure! I hope "other people are idiots" is a helpful model for you. I find much more value in the view that a great product is the confluence of millions of tiny, apparently inconsequential decisions. It seems completely believable that if the product developers are successful, I as the consumer would struggle to reverse engineer what all of those decisions are by looking at the finished product.

No. seriously -- your absolutely content-free justification of a great product implies, e.g. that crack dealers are great developers of a great product. I legitimately find this sort of after the fact justification not just bad, but dangerous.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#203

Post by xuki »

tluyben2 wrote: post #122
kennysmoothx wrote: post #110

For me what keeps me on iOS vs Android is app quality. No matter how many times I try to switch to Android completely, the lack of quality apps on the Play store always bums me out. The best apps on the App Store are unique to iOS, and Android apps always feel like an after thought, and many of the best iOS apps do not have Android counterparts. Apollo for reddit, CoPilot for money management, Flighty for flight trac…

> quality apps on the Play store After 10+ years of making apps, the discussion with new clients is still the same here (EU/USA) every time: Client: we want an app Me: iOS or Android or both? Client: both Me: Ok, which one first? Client: iOS, I have an iPhone 13 Pro max, make it work on that! ... app designed and built in close co-op with the client Me: What do you think? Client: Great! Publish it! Let me put it on m…

Follow the money: https://i.imgur.com/kVDBZuO.jpg

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#204

Post by horsawlarway »

anthonyhn wrote: post #201
horsawlarway wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where my mind is - although I don't think they're quite as far off as you might think. Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now). But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years a…

>I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.

I was using the danctnix arch build running Phosh - https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases

At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months.

And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#205

Post by ethanbond »

jrm4 wrote: post #202
ethanbond wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! I hope "other people are idiots" is a helpful model for you. I find much more value in the view that a great product is the confluence of millions of tiny, apparently inconsequential decisions. It seems completely believable that if the product developers are successful, I as the consumer would struggle to reverse engineer what all of those decisions are by looking at the finished product.

No. seriously -- your absolutely content-free justification of a great product implies, e.g. that crack dealers are great developers of a great product. I legitimately find this sort of after the fact justification not just bad, but dangerous.

But it's not after the fact. Go talk to someone at Apple and they will tell you before the fact how much work goes into the tiny little details. But you're asking users why, and the answer is how could they possibly know? Either everyone is an idiot and you're somehow not hitting a trillion dollar market cap with that knowledge, or the company is doing something very subtle that adds up in ways that are not articulable by laypeople [0].

Not sure what analogy you're getting at with crack. Separate from the moral valence you're trying to ascribe to it, of course it's a great product in some respects. Though I'd suggest that explaining why a single molecule that interacts ~directly with the brain's reward system is a "good product" is much easier than something like a smartphone or car.

[0] One example I happen to know about had to do with the really complex machining that was required on one of the iPhones (forget which) to make the bevel around the screen bezel wrap around the corner in a way that felt (but was not actually) "flat" relative to the straight-line parts of the bevel. Without this multi-axis beveling, which was apparently a complete nightmare to figure out how to manufacture, the corners would've "seemed" sharper. Does that mean someone would pick up an iPhone and remark how nice it is that the corner bevel rotates another 3 degrees or whatever? Obviously not. Does that mean this was a complete waste of time? No one knows. Apple's market cap, margins, adoption, and consumer loyalty point toward them doing something uniquely right though.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#206

Post by kyrra »

criddell wrote: post #126
kyrra wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler opinions are my own. Google has a NYC store, with a second one also in NYC that recently opened. Seems like they want to keep going there. https://store.google.com/magazine/locations?hl=en-US

I don't think Google is serious about stores. I'm in Austin and Google has a sizable presence here. They have offices (I've gone to seminars they host), it's a Google Fiber city, lots of schools use Chromebooks and Google Classroom, and it's become a tech hub. There are Apple stores in malls and those malls all have lots of vacancy. It's a no-brainer that if Google were going to have stores anywhere, they would have…

It's a slow process. There were rumors of other stores opening, but it seems like the pandemic slowed it down a bit.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#207

Post by thiht »

jrm4 wrote: post #31

Are there any "real" (come on, techy people, you know what I mean) reasons for going Apple besides I suppose the genuine convenience of fully interoperable phone/messaging across devices (which I fully concede is probably a big one for a good number of people?) The price differences between Android and Apple still strike me as absurd. On the other side, I went from "picking an Android very carefully for rooting" grad…

Maybe specific to me, but hear me out. 5 years ago, I was all Windows + Android. For both, you get hardware choice. This made me buy mid-range because it felt like a good deal to me. But every laptop I had was cheaply built and became slower and slower. I've never had an Android phone for more than 2 years because they all died for reasons: I had 2 Nexus 5 x that died in a bootloop (a well known issue with this model that Google has always refused to acknowledge), and a Pixel (3a I think?) that stopped charging for no reason.

Now with Apple you don't have a choice in hardware, you can't buy low-cost or mid range. You have to make the choice the make for you. Thiw works for me because I've never had better hardware in my life. I've had a MBP and an iPhone for 2 years and they're still as strong and efficient as the first day. The only non Apple device I still have are my Jabra earbuds, but the left one is randomly dying now. Can't to buy Airpods Pro instead :)

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#208

Post by toddrossdiy »

kramerger wrote: post #152
toddrossdiy wrote: post #69

I was a big fan and supporter of Android all the way from version 2.2 up to version 8. The final straw was when my brand new 800 dollar motorola phone, which was owned by google at the time stopped getting updates barely a year after I bought it. I also noticed that everything I liked about Android was slowly being stripped away, and Apple was slowly adding all the things I felt were missing. Still not the biggest fa…

To be fair, Moto got sold to Lenovo and overnight went from poster child to black ship of the Android family. Also note that your issue is not with Android, it's with moto.

That's fair, but when I buy a laptop made by Lenovo or Dell or whatever, that doesn't prevent me from upgrading Windows to a new version, so why is that the case with Android? (I know the real answer to this, but really, how is this still a problem?) If I bought a google pixel phone, would they support it with new versions for 5+ years? Just sucks that no android phone manufacturers have any incentive to try and keep a phone up to date for more than a year or two any more.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#209

Post by raydev »

tluyben2 wrote: post #122
kennysmoothx wrote: post #110

For me what keeps me on iOS vs Android is app quality. No matter how many times I try to switch to Android completely, the lack of quality apps on the Play store always bums me out. The best apps on the App Store are unique to iOS, and Android apps always feel like an after thought, and many of the best iOS apps do not have Android counterparts. Apollo for reddit, CoPilot for money management, Flighty for flight trac…

> quality apps on the Play store After 10+ years of making apps, the discussion with new clients is still the same here (EU/USA) every time: Client: we want an app Me: iOS or Android or both? Client: both Me: Ok, which one first? Client: iOS, I have an iPhone 13 Pro max, make it work on that! ... app designed and built in close co-op with the client Me: What do you think? Client: Great! Publish it! Let me put it on m…

I worked for a similar company that put in real effort to make quality, well-designed, native Android apps to match the iOS offerings. I left in 2019, so my info might be out of date.

On iOS we inevitably made anywhere from 2x to 10x the amount of money through IAPs. No matter how good or fast the Android app was, no matter how many good reviews, no matter if we saw 2x or 3x or 4x as many installs on Android.

If our clients wanted to actually profit, the answer was clear: do iOS first, and then decide whether an Android version is even necessary.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#210

Post by fuzzythinker »

toddrossdiy wrote: post #69

I was a big fan and supporter of Android all the way from version 2.2 up to version 8. The final straw was when my brand new 800 dollar motorola phone, which was owned by google at the time stopped getting updates barely a year after I bought it. I also noticed that everything I liked about Android was slowly being stripped away, and Apple was slowly adding all the things I felt were missing. Still not the biggest fa…

Unfortunately, many Android phone has no correlation between MSRP and quality. If your decision is based on that phone, it isn't really sound.
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