‘You’re Telling Me in 2023, You Still Have a ’Droid?’ Why Teens Hate Android Phones
wsj.com
(unpaywalled version on archive.today: https://archive.ph/03cwZ)
Interesting figure that comes out of the article: 87% of US teens prefer iPhones. Also the explanations given aren't quite surprising, I guess it's mostly because of iMessage. Teens will feel like outcasts if they get an Android phone while their friends still use iMessage because of the green bubbles.
It's actually hilarious how we allowed consumerism to take us this far and that we have now peer pressure over smartphones.
“You’re telling me in 2023, you still have a ’Droid? [...] You gotta be at least 50 years old.”
ouch 😔
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I tried a full phone cycle on Android. A Wileyfox Swift. I stuck with it for 4 years. I’ve dealt with a handful of Android tablets. I still have to wrangle Android on fire sticks.
I love to mess around with electronics but holyshit never again. These are devices that need to work and perform, I got so damn tired messing with Lineage and TWRP - the alternative being the zero updates from the manufacturer. The whole stack is a janky mess, and a moving target in terms of security and performance. Flagship phones that might stay current and perform well for a couple of years? Wtf?
So many android apps are dogshit. There’s no minimum bar to entry. Malicious apps sneak onto the play store. Out of date apps linger around.
My phone is not a project piece. It’s an essential device. Apple gives me a stringently vetted App Store, strong privacy controls, dependable hardware and performance. They expose the settings that I need and optimise everything else. My iPhone works and does it’s job with far less painful maintenance. I’m definitely willing to trade some freedom for that utility.
Not only that but Apple hasn’t tried to drm the open web lately. Are you sure this is consumerism and peer pressure? And not a dogshit software stack with poor performance, security and hardware driving away the users who are most engaged with their devices?
Do I care what phone you’re using? No. But I think bullshit click bait articles which effectively denigrate an entire demographic for the sake of instigating a tired back and forth about apples vs oranges should stay on the other side of the fucking paywall.
Did you really just compare an iPhone to some hacked version of an android phone? No shit it'll perform better. And complaining that you can't stop yourself from installing bad applications so you need Apple to stop you is kind of a weird flex. Just be a responsible computer owner. Don't just install anything because it's there. Be aware of what you install.
And it's kind of funny how you denigrate the other phone yourself and get mad that someone else did it towards your phone. Dont try too hard defending your decisions.
No I did not and the Swift was (at the time) an official lineage target. It performed well, but the amount of work and effort it took to attain and maintain that performance was simply unacceptable to me. I like the concept of Android and I like how open it is but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be an apologist for it’s shortcomings. Of which there are many. I would love to be able to justify using an android device but it is just not a rational choice for me. And it would seem many others.
Denigrating something is by definition unfair criticism - and I don’t think even the most evangelical of android fans can support the mediocre manufacturer support and security history of the platform.
I think it's a pretty fair comparison because in order to get the lifespan that I expect out of my hardware (3-5+ years), on Android I need to install a custom ROM just to get security updates.
Meanwhile Apple is still publishing updates for devices even 10 years old sometimes.
Yes, I know Google is starting to commit to 5 years of security updates, but if you bought a Pixel phone last year (like I did) then there's a decent chance that yours still only came with 3 years of updates. So if you want a similar level of service then you end up having to do a lot of work yourself to make it happen.
Pretty sure Samsung guarantees 4 years of upgrades and support.
You were pretty unlucky to buy a Pixel 5A in 2022. Every Pixel device that's been released since October 2021's Pixel 6 has had 5 years of security updates*, including the A line starting with the Pixel 6A in mid-2022. So the only phone Google still sold in the first half of 2022 that didn't have that was the 5A.
At this point the Pixel phones specifically do have pretty decent support lifetimes. iPhones are still doing better, and Android phones in general are terrible about it, but for the Pixels in particular this has ceased to be a big issue. It sounds like you managed to snag the very last phone with this problem.
*They still only get 3 years of OS upgrades, but that hasn't made a meaningful difference in several years.
Honestly the only thing Apple vets is that the app maker isn’t trying to weasel their way around Apple’s cut of the revenue. They’ll 100% catch it if you have a link to your sign-up page instead of using in-app purchase, but if you want to make an app called Threads and scam 300,000 people’s info, go nuts.
The Google Store is no better, but if I gave 1000 people money to spend on software, the ones who would be scammed out of the most are the people using these app stores. It’s an absolute travesty that Apple continues to get so much mileage out of their bullshit claims about their strict and thorough review process.
Also, I think it’s kind of hilarious that you just want a phone to work without you needing to mess with it, and then your phone cycle with Android sucked because you apparently picked something called the WileyFox Swift and started fucking around with bootloader replacements.
Except that somehow it just keeps happening to google:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/android-malware-infiltrates-60-google-play-apps-with-100m-installs/amp/
https://www.wionews.com/technology/google-deletes-50-apps-after-joker-malware-attack-users-should-delete-them-if-they-are-installed-501251
https://www.zdnet.com/article/android-warning-these-malicious-apps-had-over-a-million-downloads-from-google-play/
Whatever Apple is doing, you just don’t see this level of compromise on iOS. It’s not just that the google store is no better, it seems to be so much worse.
The Wileyfox Swift was a rebadged device from an ODM, and at the time was quite well known and liked because the company was UK based and touted responsive local support. The hardware was good and the software support certainly no worse than any other at the time. The frustration of using it came from the problems inherent in the android stack, not the device itself.
I wanted to use android and I tried my best to make it a rational choice. The issues I encountered applied all the same to phones many times the price I paid, hence making iOS my only option. All these years later most of those core issues persist.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-app-store-scams-fraud/
https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/84-dangerous-scam-apps-found-on-iphone-app-store-your-stealing-money-check-full-list-of-apps-71658128703429.html
https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-scams-apple-app-store-google-play/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/crypto-scam-apps-infiltrate-apple-app-store-and-google-play/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/pig-butchering-scam-apps-sneak-into-apples-app-store-and-google-play/
https://www.laptopmag.com/news/84-scam-apps-still-active-on-app-store-steal-over-dollar100-million-annually
I could keep going down the rest of page one of the search results, but why?
My concern is with malware that exploits the software stack though, and those links pertain to scams that exploit human nature. Hence they don’t really support the argument that the iOS/android stack is more/less secure.
Scams that exploit human nature are an inevitable part of being online and there is no foolproof way to prevent them. I never said that either company was better or worse at reactive removal.
Scam apps require user interaction to achieve their goals. They largely aren’t doing anything that the user doesn’t allow them to do. So while I would always advocate swift removal, the onus is on me to protect myself rather than the store itself.
The links I posted related to software on the play store exploiting aspects of the Android stack to surreptitiously perform tasks without the users knowledge. If somebody downloads one of those apps they are able to do things that the user isn’t aware of and never allows. This is the kind of exploitation that is preventable by thorough fuzzing. And this is the kind of threat that iOS does a fantastic job at protecting against.
Put it this way: I can safely download any app from the Apple App Store knowing that it is highly unlikely it will fuck with my device. I know that if it does it’ll probably be noteworthy enough to make the news. I can’t say the same for the Google Play Store.
This distinction only exists in your head.
https://privacyis1st.medium.com/abuse-of-the-mac-appstore-investigation-6151114bb10e
Those are apps that got through app review and silently did malicious things in the background with no user action aside from the initial download.
Who cares what the technical exploit was? The net result is that there’s an app in the store that if you download it, does harm to you in a way you can’t prevent except for uninstalling the app.