Meanwhile, over in Androidtown • Hacker News Board

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#51

Post by MBCook » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 4:12 AM UTC

anaisbetts wrote: post #35

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not exactly apples to Apples to compare your 2022 iPhone to an Android phone from 2019 I kind of disagree. If you can't make a UI run fluidly on a phone from 4 years ago, you might be doing it wrong. UIs have tight timing budgets, true, but computers are _plenty_ fast enough to keep up. Android has more overhead than iOS and it shows. I put up with Android because I can run my own code on my own hardware. But I'm i…

Keeping your frame times low is one thing, but it's not fair to compare a 60Hz display to a 120Hz one

He is talking about frame pacing/skipping/hitching issues not 120 vs 60 Hz (confirmed in a reply below).

The iPhone was 60 Hz until the 13 in 2021. It still felt perfectly smooth.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#52

Post by MBCook » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 4:14 AM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #6

I'm on Android and use Mastodon in the browser. I wonder whether this is disproportionately common on Android relative to iOS, and so there's less interest in Android native clients?

Why do you choose to use the browser instead of an app?

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#53

Post by MBCook » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 4:17 AM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #3

Meanwhile, over in iOS land, you cannot call route calls through another service, filter notifications, or run emulators. There is missing functionality, which can never be fixed, not just missing UI niceties in particular apps with (let's be honest) relatively low usage, which get fixed over time as usage increases.

It’s not a trade off though. Having those abilities shouldn’t do anything to prevent Android apps from being just as good.

All it should do is enable Android to have even more good apps.

So when both platforms are capable of making an app, such as Mastodon, why does the disparity exist?

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#54

Post by whynotminot » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 4:35 AM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #2

Look, it's a blast from 2012, when iOS partisans were fond of claiming that the fatal flaw with Android was lower number of niche, low-audience apps or low app quality or something. It feels like these 10 years later, we should have some some pretty solid intuitions about how much of a competitive advantage this actually is for iOS.

Seems like a pretty big competitive advantage? Isn’t iOS actually gaining market share?

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#55

Post by howinteresting » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 6:05 AM UTC

I used iOS for many years full time and everything felt very slow, even with Reduce Motion turned on. The menus pop up slowly, the animations take too long. Everything looks nicer but functions worse. I'm sure normies like it but I hated it, it just gets in the way.

On Android the default experience already has faster animations than iOS, and you can tweak them to run quicker which makes it feel like a device that is interested in getting me to the things I want rather than one that wants to show off. And the scrolling on a $500-600 phone (Pixel 7) is much smoother than on a similarly-priced iPhone (90 vs 60Hz). And use real uBlock Origin. It's so much nicer.

We clearly prioritize very different things in life.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#56

Post by howinteresting » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 6:09 AM UTC

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #9

does ios allow web browsers to have ad blocking extensions? because that's literally the only thing that will ever matter to me about the difference between the platforms

Only if you use Safari (which means you can't sync your data if you use a browser on a non-Apple OS), and all of them are significantly worse than uBlock Origin. I don't know if any of them even have anti-adblock blocking to the quality level that uBO does.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#57

Post by howinteresting » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 6:12 AM UTC

friedman23 wrote: post #24

politelemon wrote: post #11

This is a strange read. Making assumptions about an entire platform from a few cherry picked examples. That's a very low quality post. Having worked in both platforms I can say their conclusions are demonstrably false, if not outright biased.

Can you prove the results are cherry picked? Android app quality being worse than iOS is my personal experience as well. There are many reasons for this too. Show us well known consumer Android apps where the iOS and Android app experiences are on par.

Firefox on Android is significantly better than on iOS.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#58

Post by armadsen » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 6:14 AM UTC

akmarinov wrote: post #27

politelemon wrote: post #11

This is a strange read. Making assumptions about an entire platform from a few cherry picked examples. That's a very low quality post. Having worked in both platforms I can say their conclusions are demonstrably false, if not outright biased.

Obvioulsy Gruber is extremely pro-Apple He's also been showing his age quite a bit, being against a lot of recent developments, like being anti-remote work.

I like John Gruber and usually agree with him. But his anti-remote work thing is baffling, and made even more so by the fact that he himself has worked from home for going on 20 years.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#59

Post by armadsen » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 6:20 AM UTC

yellow_lead wrote: post #30

> years ago my friend Brent Simmons wrote about why he chose to create apps exclusively for the Mac, despite the Windows market being so much larger: >> One of the reasons I develop for OS X is that, when it comes to user interface, this is the big leagues, this is the show. What?

He was writing in the context of Windows vs Mac 20 years ago. At that time especially, the overwhelming majority of people who really cared deeply about UI design used and designed for Macs, despite the overall small size of the Mac market.

For some evidence of design’s importance on the Mac (and now iOS), Apple has been awarding Apple Design Awards for many, many years. Winning one is considered by Mac/iOS designers and developers to be a high honor. I’m aware of no equivalent for Windows or Android.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#60

Post by armadsen » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 6:22 AM UTC

tsm wrote: post #8

If it were about something older than Mastodon, this post feels like it could've been written in 2011. Anyway, I'm a happy user of Tusky. It has all the features I want, and while the UI looks dated it's not at all hard to use. I'm in fact probably happier with a Tusky-style UI than overly-animated whitespace-filled configuration-free apps made by big companies that I also use (and look "prettier"). And yes: > Androi…

He talks at length in this post and the follow up about him being able to understand why some people prioritize things other that UI design and experience. He says that having other priorities is reasonable. He’s pointing out that _his_ priorities (and those of many others, myself included) are not well-met by Android apps.