661–670 of 982 posts
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I really liked my Pixel4 but in 2025 the hardware and software are getting too out of date.
Still does everything that I want it to and the photos are still excellent. I don't think I'm missing much.
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I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple…
FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face. I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.
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As a consumer, I lament most of all about Pixel devices (or any other Android device really) that I have to wipe the OS and install a different one to get features that matter to me, particularly around privacy. Thats why I don't use Pixel devices, or any Android devices really. I know its a precarious situation with Apple since they could reverse their stance at any point and sometimes they get it wrong, but they ha…
/e/ Foundation sells phones with /e/OS preinstalled if you'd like an ungoogled Android phone without having to wipe the OS and install an ungoogled Android yourself. I haven't tried /e/, I prefer installing a raw lineage with microG myself (although I don't currently use the microG part), but it seems like you and your parent commenter would be in the intended target. I do agree that an alternative would be great. I'…
It did encourage me to provide my Google account credentials, which I refrained to do, which made the appstore essentially equivalent to F-droid.
I can't really get excited about it.
That fake zoom with AI is gross ugh If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo
Digital has never been light-to-pixel. At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing…
I am considering switching to Google, I am getting annoyed by Apple more and more, but the critical feature for me is AI assistant. I am the first to criticize the LLM hype and I do not expect much out of them - but the fact that I cannot get Siri to turn a single light in my room instead of all of them is just FUBAR from my perspective. Siri is such garbage at this point that the gap between it and ChatGPT app is un…
Have they fixed the ability to easily transfer your existing Android data to the new Android phone? I find that every time I upgrade, despite choosing the options to transfer apps/settings, that 90% of the apps I open just greet me with the login screen and I have to set everything up completely from scratch. I remember maybe a handful of apps, I think one was Uber, that were able to transfer everything including the…
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For me, it is the ability to tether my laptop to an iPhone to use the data service on my iPhone. This alone made me give up on Windows laptops and Android phones. Sure, you can tether Windows laptops to Android phones. But, it is a slow and cumbersome process. I use this functionality frequently enough that it was worth it to switch platforms over it.
When I switched off Android >5 years ago, even then, it was as simple as turning on the hotspot and connecting to it. It was no more cumbersome than any other wifi network. This was with a Pixel device and Linux laptop, and I am sure it works on Windows too.
I am very familiar with the Android hotspot feature. I used it for years. It works OK. But, it is not as fast as the Mac/iphone combo. Not even close. I am speaking from extensive experience.
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Pick a decently up-to-date fork of Signal on GitHub and look at its Actions. You can also just do it yourself if you'd like, the process is effectively just doing a build in a docker container and comparing the result. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
The github action finishing is not the same as "reproducibility built it", which implies verification against the official build.
The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple. There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me: 1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles. 2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unso…
Number 1 being moving between two system is difficult. The biggest obstacle is WhatsApp. And Meta / Facebook / Zuck is making it hard for people to switch. While it is not yet a thing in US, WhatsApp has 2B user world wide. And their life lives on WhatsApp. Less of an issue if you are on Line, KaKaoTalk and WeChat.
Number 2 is choice of phones. Android is basically Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy and Chinese Brands. I don't even think Pixel has double digit market share and Google Pixel isn't available everywhere. Their distribution channel is still appalling 10 years later. Making it pretty much the choice of Samsung or Chinese Brands.
These two obstacles are there before user could even make a choice and compare.
At one point I really thought Microsoft could get back into the game of Mobile. But after many years of waiting it doesn't seems that is a direction they want to go to.
I think the iPhone 17 coming later next month won' wobble. So that is one problem solved.
In the long game it seems we can better count on "Apple can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”