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Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

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Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#681

Post by cindyllm »

dns_snek wrote: post #487
jorvi wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction. I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click. Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via…

WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless. Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be…

[dead]

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#682

Post by ulfw »

odo1242 wrote: post #343
onli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps? Browsers? No, strictly worse. Youtube app? No, worse. Texting? Worse or equal (Whatsapp). Podcast client? I assume worse, since there is no Antenna Pod. Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in…

iOS apps consistently get updates a few weeks to months earlier than the Android version. Including some of Google’s own apps, sometimes. To give examples: - https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-photos-update-to-reac... - https://www.t3.com/tech/iphones/google-maps-gets-an-iphone-u... Both of the above are updates to Google apps that released on iOS but are planned on Android. Haven't seen any examples of the rever…

I've never understood how Google was able to get PR for the most trivial coding stuff any child coder can do.

"...support for a dynamic light mode. Instead of always viewing photos with a black background, Google Photos will use the light mode or dark mode background that you have set for your device's system theme."

This is literally one IF statement. The sentence is longer than the code.

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#683

Post by pvab3 »

_vqpz wrote: post #340
embedding-shape wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least Since some updates ago, my keyboard is still broken if I type too fast, and autocorrect been essentially broken for the same amount of time. Must be happening for ~years now, still waiting for a new update to finally fix it. At least on Android you can change the keyboard to something else if you'd like, instead of being stuck with what your OS developer force…

I have been using SwiftKey keyboard on iOS exclusively since 2018 and have had very few issues compared to Android where it regularly crashed

iOS keyboards are hardly different from one another

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#684

Post by mh- »

jakub_g wrote: post #209
wiseowise wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less That's precisely the OP's point. They gimped their browser so there's bigger incentive to use their proprietary system frameworks. > iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation That's nonsense. What year are you from? I've heard this like 10 years ago when there only 1 or 2 current iPhone models in circulat…

Re: iOS apps being easier to develop: device sizes are the minuscule of the problem. The real problem is that Android vendors mess up with the OS in weird ways by adding custom ultra battery savers, removing APIs etc. which is much less predictable than dealing with a few Apple devices, that are more homogenous. Then many vendors ship their own apps which are buggy and you need to know that vendor's Z Calendar app ha…

It's very obvious in this thread who has developed both an iOS and Android app - with a real, large userbase - and who hasn't.

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#685

Post by chii »

dmantis wrote: post #200
chii wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they think the audience is now fully captive. the audience is captive. Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device? Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own). Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don'…

Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on. The b…

> or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome?

reskined chrome are still ultimately taking google's changes downstream. For a while, it may be OK, but what happens when google changes the web standards to suit themselves? Will those reskinned browsers fork the standard?

Firefox _is competition_, but not competitive based on market share.

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#686

Post by kernal »

Derbasti wrote: post #180
onli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps? Browsers? No, strictly worse. Youtube app? No, worse. Texting? Worse or equal (Whatsapp). Podcast client? I assume worse, since there is no Antenna Pod. Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in…

Camera apps. Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.

It’s not Android. The Camera 2 API is more than capable of building device independent apps. It’s the developer not using the API for whatever reason.

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#687

Post by Klonoar »

pjmlp wrote: post #599
Klonoar wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name the country if you want this to be a useful data point.

You could have checked their profile.

I'm not clicking the username of every commenter I read just to account for details they should've put in the comment.

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#688

Post by StreamingPanda »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #571
swiftcoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In which category are there better iOS apps? Almost all of the prosumer apps on iOS offer a consistently better experience. This is maybe less relevant on phones than on tablets, but music production, video editing, digital painting and drafting, etc...

That isn't saying much. Even the best possible music editing (etc) app on a tablet is still crappy, by virtue of the form factor. Tablets simply are not suitable for getting actual work done.

While I can't speak to the editing side of things, the live music apps for ios are exceptional. My dad is a musician and I'm a sound engineer. The sheer number and quality of the apps dwarfs the android offerings.

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#689

Post by tjr »

onli wrote: post #56
AlotOfReading wrote: post #12

Google's long term strategy with Android is baffling to me. Apple has had better mobile hardware for years. Apple has higher consumer trust. Apple has better app selection (for most people). Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS. Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees t…

I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps? Browsers? No, strictly worse. Youtube app? No, worse. Texting? Worse or equal (Whatsapp). Podcast client? I assume worse, since there is no Antenna Pod. Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in…

ForeFlight

Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

#690

Post by al_borland »

palata wrote: post #519
al_borland wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it. In contrast, on iOS I get prompted to allow or deny access to my information when the app tries calling Apple’s API to fetch that information. For example, if an app wants access to my contacts to find other people using the app. On iOS I can simply say “no” when it prompts me to allow it to read my contacts. I los…

> Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it. Sounds like it was years ago... I remember that it was being introduced like... more than a decade ago? Of course maybe it took longer than iOS because of how Android works. iOS can just force everybody to use liquid glass with one update, Android has to think more about backward compatibility.

It was there for the launch of the App Store with iOS. They didn’t have to worry about backward compatibility, because they took the time to worry about user privacy and app developer overreach from the very start.
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