I was a very vocal supporter of Android from about 2010 up until 2016. At a certain point, Google started chasing the iPhone with its Pixel line instead of trying to highlight the benefits that made Android unique. If I'm paying iPhone prices for hardware, then I might as well get an iPhone.
Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
151–160 of 539 posts
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#152I’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…
Question about that: What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins. To me browsing the web is unus…
> Do you get overlays, autoplaying videos and ads on websites or can you block them?
I use Brave Browser on an iPhone and don’t see any of this, including ads.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#153I sure hope this is just random noise and not a long term trend. I would NOT be happy about having to use Apple, or having any serious fragmentation of the mobile space.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#154I’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…
From my experience if you stay on the Google flagship/Pixel line then everything is great. Pretty much every other vender is garbage and will screw you and you'll have the experience you're talking about.
I owned a Pixel 1 and a Pixel 3 and they were two of the worst phones I have ever owned. You couldn't pay me to take another Pixel phone. I now rock a much cheaper Motorola which is fantastic.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#155I’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…
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Android devices have "Nearby Share" now. Works basically the same as Airdrop. I use it to beam documents to my eReader all the time.
If you need to copy a file to a computer all you need is a cable and a decent OS that supports MTP and you can then just drag the file off like a USB drive. It's great and requires no special software unless you like fruit flavored computers.
One of the things I really like about my Samsung phone is I can have an alphabetical ordering of my apps in the drawer. With iOS you have to painstakingly rearrange every app to get that or use the shitty hidden alphabetical scrolling list they finally graced everyone with after 14 years.
I switched from an iPhone XS to Android. XS still works, had a choice, just got tired of Apples shit.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#156I am an Apple user. I migrated from Windows the the Mac in the late 90s, and the shift to OS X only cemented my relationship with the platform. Having a unixy (well, BSD-y) system with MS Office on it is a powerful combo for my line of work, and so I am still here. I disdained the iPhone at first, but ended up getting won over pretty quickly. At introduction, it was just better than anything else, and the smooth conn…
This seems a little bit like a good thing to me. I agree it’s important to have at least two good options. Whenever one company has too much market share things stagnate.
Android is now at 70%. The closer that gets to 50% the better. I don’t care if that’s because Apple gets closer to 50%, or if they stay near 25% and new competitors take up the rest.
The US has always skewed marketplace percentages. My understanding is in many countries Android had a massive majority. The less that’s the case, the better I think things will be for consumers.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pick your poison. The only reason I'm still on android is because at least I can (still) have root there. I'm saying still because of safety net. But if apple let me have root, i'd probably prefer an Apple over Google. Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage tha…
Call me crazy, but I think there is room for a third platform. Especially if this platform was bootstrapped in a smart way, for example with an emulation layer to be able to run applications from Android. Or perhaps WebAssembly will make it viable to do more things from a (mobile) browser. I really miss the N700-N9 series with Maemo and Meego. It was so elegant and simple.
I have no idea if they will try it again someday, but I would love to see Microsoft give this another go. I think strong messaging about "quality over quantity" of apps would actually be a boon to them. I never go looking in the App Store for new apps anymore - just give me my video streamers, a Reddit client, Spotify, Slack, Discord, and Signal and I'm good to go.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#158It's been mentioned before in other articles, but I don't think it can be understated how much iMessage makes it difficult to be the "odd man out" if you're on an Android phone. And it's not just about teenagers, and it's not about "green bubbles". I recently went on a vacation with friends, 4 other folks on iPhones and me on an Android. Our group chat experience almost made me consider getting an iPhone. The inabili…
As much as I hate promoting Facebook products, "let's make a WhatsApp group" seems to be the socially-acceptable solution to this. Everybody has it installed and always seems to be happy to switch communication over to it if somebody in the group suggests it.
This is really where Facebook can excel against Apple. Although I do prefer my messages to be more like emails and texts - not platform-bound. Currently I have to have Whatsapp, Messenger, Viber, Telegram, Signal to talk to diff groups of people. Why isn't there a unified protocol and system?
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
>people have just resorted to ostracizing android users by co-opting iOS' "green bubbles" as a scarlet letter. What does this mean?
iOS messaging has end to end encryption by default, when that is enabled the messages are shown within a "blue bubble". When this is not possible, it falls back to sending normal SMS, which can be read in plain text by third parties in the middle and has no encryption, when that occurs messages are shown within a "green bubble". Therefore, messaging android users shows a "green bubble". People know its both an androi…
The thing is, zero people I regularly chat with (SF bay area) use iMessage. Most people in my US friend group use Signal, the rest use Facebook, and many of my international contacts use Whatsapp.
Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. There is one reason and one reason only I am on Android: price. A mobile phone does not have enough value to me to pay for Apple's least expensive phone.
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.
I use an iPhone but I was surprised the OP mentioned price as a reason to switch.