Why not just go full Apple right now and just rebrand iOS? That seems to be the ultimate outcome.
Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
471–480 of 762 posts
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a developer too, but the developer experience doesn’t matter to users. As a user of the app, it’s fast enough, cleanly designed, seems to be reasonably private and secure, and I haven’t hit any website with it where I’ve had to download chrome to view it or something.
You're a developer but you can't connect the dots between features being hard to build and the inconsistencies between other browsers vs Safari to how that might effect the user?
I can be a user separate from being a developer. The user experience of Safari is basically perfect for a browser. The development experience is completely irrelevant from that perspective.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#473Earlier 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…
> 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...
The iOS prosumer apps are, frankly, pathetic. I produce music and every single DAW/plugin on iPad is very clearly a "lite" version of something that would run better on a full-featured OS. There's really no workflow I can imagine that doesn't entail using a real PC for basic mixing and arrangement.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do those updates matter? Not for me at least usually (exception might be something like an rpg game expanding the world), apps nagging to get updated is annoying in fact.
> apps nagging to get updated is annoying in fact.
There is no nagging. Apps auto-update on iOS, and have for years. I had 15 apps update in the last week. There was no nagging or notifications. It just happens.
My only gripe is that they seem to want to update right after I take it off the charger in the morning, instead of at night. But I only actually notice this once or twice per year, if I go to use an app that’s in the process of installing within the first few minutes of waking up.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think an edit is in order, as your post, in the current form, doesn't make any sense.
He's saying people at Google use iPhones. I don't know if that's true, but the times I've visited silicon valley I didnt see many android phones.
You're typically issued a corporate phone, it's the only phone that can open work email. You have a choice between an Android (something like a Pixel and a Samsung) and an iPhone, with some companies incentivising Androids with things like a faster upgrade cycle or more premium trims. The culture is split between having just the one free corporate phone and having two phones - one personal, one corporate.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#476I take the opportunity to let people know that there are alternatives to Google/Apple duopoly on mobile. Link: https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/ Sure, GrapheneOS is often suggested but Ubuntu Touch is a really interesting alternative, their own store and ecosystem. The community is amazing and welcoming. If there are Android apps which you can't do without, they can be emulated and used anyway. Imagine switching to Linux…
Unfortunately, apps have always been the barrier to entry for competing options.
If your platform doesn't have apps, then your platform won't have users, which won't attract developers and BigCo's to write apps for your platform. Rinse and repeat.
This is how Windows Phone was wiped out, despite them spending *a lot* of money trying to attract companies and developers to write stuff for their OS.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#477At least they aren't removing it like originally planned. A warning from `adb sideload` or `adb install` that can be bypassed with an environment variable is reasonable IMO.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
So... installing software? >Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source. Just like 99% of software running on computers in the world today? How is it different from "installing software"?
>How is that different from "installing software"? It's easy to see this play out if try to replace "sideloading" with "installing software". If you apply it to OP's headline of >Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android You get >Google confirms 'high-friction' installing software flow is coming to Android which isn't at all accurate. You still need the distinct concept of "installing soft…
Sure, you could argue it helps to express a distinction but that doesn't mean it has to live inside the verb install. Historically installing software was the general act and provenance was handled with qualifiers eg installing from "third-party sources", "manual install" etc. Android is alone among computing platforms in collapsing that qualifier into a new term that implicitly recenters the Play Store as the default meaning of "install."
In other ecosystems the store path is described as "store install" not the other way around. Android chose the inverse framing and that choice isn't neutral.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Sideloading is a neologism to scare users and lawmakers, it just means "Installing software" and should be a basic right. No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source. You might not agree the restriction should exist, or that even the concept of first party source at all, but for c…
>No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source It's amazing how many confidently wrong people are springing up out of the wordwork to present revisionist history about the meaning of "install" like it's ancient wisdom. Pre-mobile computing treated "install" as neutral and primary and…
>Even now, that's not a term used in Windows or Linux.
No, it's existed in windows 10 (and probably windows 8.1) for over a decade.
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/13/how-to-enable-developer-mo... (note the date)
>So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
None of that refutes anything I said. You're basically arguing "back in the good old days, all installs were not from first party source and there was no distinction", but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now. Otherwise it's like arguing "immigration" is some "neologism" because back before the advent of the nation state, people just moved wherever, there wasn't random lines that turned "moving" to "immigration", and the word "immigration" is coined by statists that want to impose their worldview on the populace.
Re: Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage? This is incorrect. The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly. Sure the best way would be for people not to use them, but if you "have" to, then it's better to use those on IOS.
I agree with the thrust of the GP comment but: > The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly. I seriously doubt this. I agree that this is the perception but anyone working in the mobile space on both platforms for the past ~2 years will know Google is a lot more hard nosed in reviewing apps for privacy concerns than Apple these days (…
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 lose out on that feature to find other people using the app, which I don’t care about, but I can still use the rest of the app. On Android it seemed like by installing the app, I had already agreed to give up my contacts… it was all or nothing. If I don’t like one privacy compromising feature, I couldn’t use the app at all.
Android may have improved this in the last few years, but I found it to be a dealbreaker for the entire platform.