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I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

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Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#51

Post by brianmcc »

setquk wrote: post #36
Siemer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Buy a flagship phone. My S7 hasn't crashed once since I got it over a year ago. 2. Buy a flagship phone (or get better laws? Pretty sure EU has laws against that sort of behavior). 3. Disable the 2 or 3 settings in Google Maps that make your phone ask those nosy questions [a]. [a] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/161704/turn-off-...

1. I had a flagship from Samsung. It’s google’s Estate that is buggy as hell. 2. I’m in the UK. Forget it. We have good laws. Law should be a last resort but would have to be first call to get anything useful out. 3. And the 9,000,000 other places it does the same thing. Honestly the last straw was when I was sitting down having a shit and it asked me to rate the public toilet and suggested taking a photo. So I did a…

And now I'm wiping coffee off my monitor :-D

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#52

Post by dingaling »

chrischen wrote: post #24
askafriend wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were some of the things that made you switch back?

The #1 reason is Apple's focus on user privacy and the device's purpose to serve the user through of specific set of features (note I do not mean they give us control of the features, just that they designed it for specific purposes). Apple's business model does not rely on monetizing user data and it shows in its products. At the time I switched (Nexus 5) there were abundant issues with the Android OS from a memory…

> you can't just walk into an Apple store and get an issue fixed

The vast majority of people can't do that anyhow due to the rarity of Apple stores. For example there are two on the island of Ireland, for a population of seven million.

Most people have to get the i-devices fixed by a third-party just like they do with Android.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#53

Post by dingaling »

lwansbrough wrote: post #31
chrischen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they've improved their OS and features, but as far as I know their revenue model is still advertising based.

Anyone know if you can still get a high quality Android experience without being a slave to Google? Obviously things like Google Now are only particularly useful if you submit to Google, but other than that, what can be expected? Can I root it and disable all the bullshit?

Of course it's entirely possible, depending upon your use-cases. If you want to use your phone as a communication, navigation and browsing device then there is no need to touch Google. You can disable Play, Maps, Chrome, Drive etc and install alternatives. Even WhatsApp offer a direct APK download, I wish more vendors did.

But if you want to play the latest games , install your bank's app or use voice agent then you'll need Google Play and an account.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#54

Post by aldanor »

hellofunk wrote: post #43
cm2187 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have beefs with my iPhone and iPad but not those. 1. Nagging for Apple paid services 2. Gestures changing every month and becoming increasingly complicated with small variations doing different things, inconsistent experience between iPad and iPhone 3. Audio jack 4. Anything that involves editing is a catastrophe. Selecting an element of a table on a web page or trying to copy the text of a link (not the url) is ne…

> Gestures changing every month and becoming increasingly complicated with small variations doing different things, inconsistent experience between iPad and iPhone Why would the phone's gesture controls change for you every month?

He might have meant, e.g., that iPhone X has a wildly different set of gestures and shortcuts. Like, guided mode being triple-power instead of triple home, battery/volume/etc menu swiping from upper left corner instead of from below, apps being minimized vía swiping up instead of home button, etc, the list is long.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#55

Post by teekert »

I'm thinking of going from android to iPhone for privacy reasons. But, whenever I hold an iPhone that list of notification puts me off, in android they are grouped, meaning 3 new exchange mails is 1 notification, I can pull on the notification to expand the 3 and then even more for every email. Short replies can be done inline in the notification even. I use that constantly. You can also swipe away a notification group. In iOS apparently everything is one notification, that really increases the amount of work handling them significantly.

I did try google-less Lineage [0], but it's pain. Installing and keeping apps up to date is more work and some apps don't have notifications.

So for now I'm on lineage with the nano Gapps package.

I am curious though, with android I can easily ssh into my server, and make tunnels (use it as proxy), use vnc etc. Can you also do that with iOS?

[0] https://lineage.microg.org/

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#56

Post by dmitriid »

jb1991 wrote: post #42
wvenable wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think sometimes it's a grass-is-greener situation. I had an iPhone bug where the camera/gallery would just crash on startup or basically anytime I had to do anything camera related. I eventually fixed it (after months of trying) by connecting to a PC with a 3rd party app, navigating the file system, and deleting a bunch of thumbnail cache files. I had plenty of problems answering phone calls on my iPhone -- it woul…

> Even more annoying about the iPhone is the always growing "Other" space on the phone. I was constantly short on disk space with no way of knowing what the cause was or how to clean it up. Hm? There is a very simple Storage page in the Settings that shows you exactly how much storage each app is taking up (including things the app is storing) and it is ordered by size so you can immediately see what's using up your…

I find this area the single most useless display of information on an iPhone.

Yes, you can see which app takes how much space. Then what? There is no way to control or clean up that space. You can hope that an app has a setting somewhere that let's you delete old data, and that's it.

The biggest offender? Apple's own Photos app especially with iCloud and Photo Stream: there's exactly zero ways to make it give up space (unless you "want to delete photos from all connected devices")

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#57

Post by rxhernandez »

cm2187 wrote: post #40
wvenable wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think sometimes it's a grass-is-greener situation. I had an iPhone bug where the camera/gallery would just crash on startup or basically anytime I had to do anything camera related. I eventually fixed it (after months of trying) by connecting to a PC with a 3rd party app, navigating the file system, and deleting a bunch of thumbnail cache files. I had plenty of problems answering phone calls on my iPhone -- it woul…

I have beefs with my iPhone and iPad but not those. 1. Nagging for Apple paid services 2. Gestures changing every month and becoming increasingly complicated with small variations doing different things, inconsistent experience between iPad and iPhone 3. Audio jack 4. Anything that involves editing is a catastrophe. Selecting an element of a table on a web page or trying to copy the text of a link (not the url) is ne…

I have definitely known too many people to experience issues with missed calls on iPhones to ever consider buying one. I have had android phones since the HTC Dream and I have never had something as simple as that go wrong - although the 911 bug seems far worse; I've just never met anyone with that problem.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#58

Post by rvschuilenburg »

lwansbrough wrote: post #31
chrischen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they've improved their OS and features, but as far as I know their revenue model is still advertising based.

Anyone know if you can still get a high quality Android experience without being a slave to Google? Obviously things like Google Now are only particularly useful if you submit to Google, but other than that, what can be expected? Can I root it and disable all the bullshit?

I've run CopperheadOS a while ago (https://copperhead.co/android/) and in my opinion it's only gotten worse. As someone else mentioned; the "Google Play Services" are an essential part of apps these days. So expect any "mainstream" app not to work. You're forced to use open source alternatives from F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/en/)

Yes it's possible, but i wouldn't call it a "high quality android experience"

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#59

Post by gls2ro »

dmitriid wrote: post #56
jb1991 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even more annoying about the iPhone is the always growing "Other" space on the phone. I was constantly short on disk space with no way of knowing what the cause was or how to clean it up. Hm? There is a very simple Storage page in the Settings that shows you exactly how much storage each app is taking up (including things the app is storing) and it is ordered by size so you can immediately see what's using up your…

I find this area the single most useless display of information on an iPhone. Yes, you can see which app takes how much space. Then what? There is no way to control or clean up that space. You can hope that an app has a setting somewhere that let's you delete old data, and that's it. The biggest offender? Apple's own Photos app especially with iCloud and Photo Stream: there's exactly zero ways to make it give up spac…

On the General > Storage there are some options I have on my iOS (v 11.3):

- Offload Unused Apps

- Auto Delete Old Conversations

Or I can manually offload apps one by one.

I think you are referring to the iCloud Storage settings on the iPhone when talking about deleting photos from all connected devices.

Probably the confusion is because they decided to put two storages: General > iPhone Storage (managing local storage) and Accounts > iCloud > iCloud Storage.

The last one (iCloud Storage) manages the iCloud so if you delete something from iCloud it will delete it from all devices.

edit: formatting

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#60

Post by atl4s »

teekert wrote: post #55

I'm thinking of going from android to iPhone for privacy reasons. But, whenever I hold an iPhone that list of notification puts me off, in android they are grouped, meaning 3 new exchange mails is 1 notification, I can pull on the notification to expand the 3 and then even more for every email. Short replies can be done inline in the notification even. I use that constantly. You can also swipe away a notification gro…

I use an app called Blink (http://www.blink.sh/) on iOS to manage servers on the move, has mosh support as well for areas with spotty cell service.
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