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

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

#181

Post by qsdf38100 »

notatoad wrote: post #86
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

It'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.

No way I let Facebook get access to my phone contacts. I guess this is worth billions for them, because it’s a huge social graph they were missing. Interestingly the option to use the app without giving away all your contacts has been removed years ago. It tells a lot. Note that Signal still works without your contacts.

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

#182

Post by howinteresting »

finiteseries wrote: post #38
fsa3d4uyuiy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Safari has extensions you can get from the App Store including ad blockers, overlay removers etc

Those extensions don't work with other browsers, though.

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

#183

Post by adamomada »

fsa3d4uyuiy wrote: post #17
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…

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…

There is a systemwide ad-blocker available called MYbloXX[0] that I've been using on a jb iPhone, but you can also use it on a stock iOS device with the caveat that you have to do a device restore to be able to apply the configuration. The web site is a bit cheese but the developer has been doing this for years and it works really well, across all apps. You can see the PAC file it uses here[1]

Alternatively, I've just signed up for the Orion browser beta[2] for Mac and there is a testflight available for iOS. This can apparently use (some) WebExtensions, notably uBlock origin. I cannot run testflight apps on my old jb iPhone so I can't speak to how well it works

[0] https://myxxdev.github.io/depictions/MYbloXXforiOS/MYbloXXfo...

[1] https://myxxfm.com/script

[2] https://browser.kagi.com/

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

#184

Post by 62951413 »

grumpyprole wrote: post #19
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…

But the iPhone only "just works" if you completely buy in to Apple's ecosystem. E.g. if you want to buy some FLAC music files from somewhere else, it won't "just work" anymore. Android is still the lesser of two evils in terms of allowing more choice on its platform.

I have never been able to make an Apple laptop recognize my phone as a USB storage device to copy photos from it.

GOOG phones used to cost less than half of APPL ones. And for a while to have physically wider screens which made them better book readers. Unfortunately the price difference seems to be nearly negligible now.

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

#185

Post by lawl »

hellisothers wrote: post #120
Georgelemental wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a custom ROM on my Pixel phone to strip out all the user-hostile tracking. It works quite well honestly, no major usability sacrifices

Would the tracker blocking available on iOS at the OS level mostly suffice for this?

Not the person you asked, but no. Because that would mean you have to trust iOS to not track you. I can be convinced that Apple is less bad than Google in that regard, but if Apple has nothing to hide, then they can let me have root, so I can verify, right :) ?

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

#186

Post by sorenjan »

nextos wrote: post #50
lawl wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

One problem with relying on emulation is that Google has moved a lot of functionality from the open source Android layer to Google Play Services, and they obviously wont publish that on someone else's platform.

https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview

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

#187

Post by manmal »

cloudwizard wrote: post #42

I can't stand Apple's required software like iTunes. Apple HW is great. Just hoping Asahi Linux is ready soon. Until then, Linux Chromebook is my dev machine

I only ever connect my iPhone for debugging purposes (can be done wirelessly btw), and sometimes I hook it up to transfer files faster to VLC, but that will go away once I have Plex up and running.

Between streaming services, cloud backup, iCloud Drive (like Dropbox), and Airdrop (secure file sending via peer-to-peer WIFI) there‘s absolutely no need to own a Mac or PC to drive an iPhone.

I‘m also holding out for Asahi though, and hope they get things like Proton to run.

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

#189

Post by devinegan »

grumpyprole wrote: post #111
lotsofpulp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I type in the URL shown in the VLC app on my computer and drag and drop files to it, when I am connected to same network of course. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html > A media library, with WiFi Uploads & Downloads, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, OneDrive & Box.com integration and optional passcode lock. >Web Interface for easy uploads and downloads to/from device.

But how do you "sync" music libraries with the phone storage? Dragging and dropping files is still not a great experience and doesn't scale.

I use Plex/Plexamp… syncs my FLAC albums and playlists. I can use it on any platform if I choose to do so.
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