Other than blue bubbles, why do you use iPhone?
Yes, I'm the one in the group DM that turns the bubbles green, I'm sorry.
But other than that, I don't hear many other reasons why people actually prefer iPhones over Androids. What other reasons are there?
OS updates. It’s frustrating to buy a top of the line android phone just for it to be forgotten by the manufacturer in 6-8 months.
Pixels give you 5 years now same as iphone.
iPhone gets you more like 10 years of security updates
https://www.makeuseof.com/apple-security-updates-for-10-year-old-devices/
My iPad from 2015 is still getting all the updates. It's wild.
Exactly.
Owning Apple products feels less wasteful, somehow. I don’t replace them often.
Yeah I think iPad's are clearly better than any android tablet.
Yeah I don't like Apple. Though unfortunately, the iPad is the only useful consumer tablet imo. Android tablets seem to only be good for like integrated uses like a construction tablet with custom software.
And i would love my Ipad even more if i could have the option to install a custom rom to have the customization options that i just loose with ipados
I just want my Nintendo DS emulator back on my iPad :(
Soon, with the next IOS update everyone in the EU will be able to install apps from third party stores
I am so excited for that
Same
I still haven't quite forgiven Google for abandoning owners of the Nexus 5X the second the Pixel came out...
I kept my Nexus 5X until Pixel 4a came out. That was a good phone. I was lucky that the refurbished i got, after suffering the dead after phone too hot demise, actually lasted and it's still alive as second phone, if needed. Custom ROMs were still a thing. I miss then sometimes or rather i sometimes miss the custom ROM community. Some very dedicated people, lots of asshats and always noobs asking the kind of questions everyone loved.
I hope the Pixel 4a is an outlier regarding support! The 4a will be getting updates until August 2023, and the 4a 5g until November of this year.
I had a Nexus 10 they abandoned after two years. Made me never want to spend money on an android tablet again. Honestly I would probably switch to iOS if I could have ad blockers.
You’ve been able to get ad blockers on iOS for years at this point, they call them “content blockers”. They’re not as full featured as those on android though.
Can I get YouTube AdBlock and can I add custom filter lists?
The 5X was such a garbage device that it makes sense that they’d try to sweep that trash under the rug. I swear I was getting barely more than 40 minutes SoT and it would get stupidly hot if you tried to do anything on it.
I was so happy with my Pixel 1 purchase, Pixel 2 was also a treat. And then I switched to iPhone in 2018 because Google pissed me off when they insisted that the half pink screen on my Pixel 3 was normal and acceptable. I’ve had an iPhone as my daily ever since, but have tried every Pixel since and currently own a 7 as a backup phone.
But the iPhone experience is still overall better, especially since CarPlay is still rock solid compared to Android Auto, which was one of my absolute deciding factors. Apollo was too, but now that’s gone, so if Google could make wireless Android Auto not turn my Pixel 7 into a furnace and improve the battery life in general further for the Pixel 8, I could see me returning to Android.
Also, custom ROMs are great on supported phones, even after the official OTAs gone
Only security updates.
OS updates are only 3 years
Iphones get a lot more than 3 updates
Yes that is my point.
Pixels only get 3 major version updates which is less than the iPhone
If you use the stock rom, if you install a custom one you get updates as long as the developers continue working which is quite a pong time for some of the ROMs that exist right now
However you have to take into consideration what the OS updates do on each device.
On iOS, an update also updates all the system apps, meaning Safari, Maps, weather, notes, mail, health, photos, the calculator and so on are hyper dependent on having OS updates for a long time.
On Android, all of those system apps are updated via the play store, and a lot of deeper features can be updated via Google Play services similarly to how Nearby share was able to be back ported to any Android device running 6.0 or newer when it came out recently. Full OS updates are still important for Android, but they aren’t nearly as critical to the overall user experience.
I use an iPhone, but I’d love them to move all system app updates into the App Store for more frequent updates. The only plus side to the way Apple does it is that everyone gets the update at the same time and you don’t have annoying staged rollouts like you do with Google apps.
This used to be a huge issue for me, but the last couple of Samsung phones I bought they kept them pretty well supported for years.
I switched to iPhone because I was the last in the family thread and was ruining it for everyone's bubbles, and the iPhone mini is just a great size, the android phones I liked just kept getting a bit bigger and bigger to the point that it bothered me.
This was a huge reason for my switch from Android to Apple. Years ago i ran custom ROMs but i found myself spending far too much time flashing updates, and forgetting to backup data and wiping something important.
I will say, some ROMs these days are practically maintenance free. I have been running graphene os for about 3 years now and I have never had issues updsting by just pressing the button.
That is great to hear, too bad manufacturers cannot keep their phones up to date like that.
My s21 is still getting OS updates.
This right here. Lifelong Android user that switched to the iPhone 14 and never looked back.
Edit: iPhone 13, not 14, my bad.
My problem with Apple is that everything's designed to interoperate with other Apple stuff, and nothing else. It feels like a walled garden that doesn't just keep users in, but also keeps those of us out who might want to try a single Apple device without spending many thousands replacing our entire ecosystem.
Literally causing people to get bullied into getting an iphone over stupid chat bubble colors.
Which gets even stupider when you realize apple is being stubborn and that is causing the issue
Absolutely, Apple is being resistant to RCS not because they think iMessage is superior but because they know it weakens their lock in power. I know I’m stating the obvious, but it just annoys me so much.
Not necessarily.
You can get one and try it out, the ecosystem stuff is more enhancement than a detriment if you don’t have them.
Like Apple Watch and my MacBook Air, I can authenticate or unlock the screen using my Apple Watch rather than a password. But that’s just a benefit and I wouldn’t be losing anything but the enhancement if I didn’t have both.
I think they are talkign about if you already have the stuff working with every other device but apple
It’s funny you say that with the 14 that came out less than a year ago :)
Although I made the same jump with the 12 so I do agree.
I’d rather be tracked by apple than google.
because Apple is going to use your data to a less nefarious end? I don't get it.
That’s my belief. They don’t derive revenue from their users data, they get it through hardware sales and service subscriptions. Google has proven that they will monetize their users data in not so pleasant ways. I like Google products a lot but don’t use them because of their business practices overall
Contrary to Apply making products harder to repair, efficiently locking in to their ecosystem with no way out? Apple ducks consumers every day. I doubt they'd gather all your data for the purpose of utilizing storage space.
I'd rather trust the devil I know than the devil that's better at hiding it's evil. Apple isn't some amazing perfect company that cares about you. Almost everything they do is anti-user, they just do it in a way that apple-only users think is a bonus because they've been forced into apple only products already. Not to mention their idiotic pricing.
If you think apple is somehow "trustworthy" or not just as "evil" as Google in any way you've let their marketing team fool you.
assuming this is true, for me it's not what they do with the data it's just them collecting and keeping data they don't need.
It’s been proven in court that Apple refuses to decrypt locked iPhones or messages
You can degoogle your android phone. There are ROMs/OSs which are free from tracking.
But then you lose functionality like Android Auto, where on an iPhone you get CarPlay. Android Auto on my Pixel 7 Pro is fine, honestly like as much as CarPlay, but if you install something like Graphene OS, it no longer works.
Yeah but if that's the price of not being tracked means, I happily say goodbye to android auto. I'm using lineageOS for years and I didn't notice much missing except Google pay and android auto.
When on iPhone, Apple still tracks you when your privacy settings should've disable it.
Why do you need to use a Google app to use NFC payment? Why isn't there an F-Droid app for that?
No. I read somewhere it needs bank agreements or something. Unfortunately microG doesn't support it too... I think that's my biggest con, but as long as banking and money transfer apps works, I don't mind.
Bank apps are a very big one but I really don't care I'm not giving in
Apple’s tracking has also proven to be far less severe than Google’s through Google Play Services on Android. And much easier to opt out of
Apple still tracks you when your privacy settings should've disable it.
I’m responsible for supporting the phones for my family and my wife’s office. When smartphones became available, the iPhones seemed much easier to support with my non-tech-savvy user base then Android and I’ve stuck with that ever since.
I've had to support both in my family, apple has consistently been more of a pain. They're almost impossible to fix when they'd decide to start breaking or doing weird things. Every android is an easy fix, and no matter how bad they get there is always a fix. With apple after almost any point it's "send it in and pay for a repair or buy a new one", just like apple designs them to do.
It really depends on your budget and what you define as an "easy fix." For tons of people I know, they'd rather send something in for repair or buy a new device than spend twenty minutes searching for a solution.
Which is still bad because you don't have the option to do it a cheaper way, you have to do the expensive repair or get expensive licensed stuff from apple. You should be able to do it by yourself at a reasonable cost without issues.
Google doesn’t have vision or taste in my opinion. They released a million messaging apps and STILL haven’t made a decent one. Its been how many years and they still use SMS on most androids and people have to rely on whatsapp, a Fcaebook app… now they’re releasing their new “standard” RCS which has competing versions some with end to end encryption by default and some without.
They STILL don’t have a FaceTime alternative unless you use whatsapp…
Google knows how to show ads and everything else has so little passion and vision i dont trust any of their services because they love to kill their products
I don't even use any Apple products, but I still gotta agree with all this.
How they didn't do an iMessage style client better than Apple given the fact Hangouts was right there and superior in every way for so long is just.... bleh.
Google is losing it. Android is losing more nerd functionality and just copying iOS... but poorly. YouTube Music was better as Google Play Music. "Chats" was better as Hangouts. Where Google Fi at? Where Google Fibre gone? How's Google+ going?
Even their search results are mostly spam now.
-- Sent from my Pixel
Enshitification
This isn't even enshittification, this is just Google still not having their shit together somehow after all these years
They definitely integrated hangouts and had video calling. Apple didn't open up their ecosystem so you just couldn't call them. Why has Apple still not provided a service similar to hangouts?
My counterpoint is that you have to use WhatsApp (I rather use Signal) because iMessage is Apple only. SMS and RCS are stupid. With Signal you can reach users of all devices. Having a messaging protocol that depends on the device used is stupid. And hopefully the EU can end the vendor lock in with messaging apps as well.
Another vote for signal
I understand the "taste" argument, but personally the goal of not having a corporation man-in-the-middle everything I do takes priority. I degoogle my phone to the best of my ability.
Unfortunately, good vision and design takes funding, and there's not a lot of money to be made from not taking advantage of users.
Apple’s hardware sales are about 70% of revenue, whereas Google’s are more like 10%. That’s a lot of funding that doesn’t have to come from user data.
Harvesting user data is a symptom, mitm and taking advantage of users is the root of the problem.
Saying they don't profit much from your data is like saying, "they only kick you in the nuts a little bit."
Isn't Google Meet (previously Duo) kinda like FaceTime?
The fact that most people cant answer that is the problem. More people have android phones than iphones yet everyone knows FaceTime and no one knows a name for video calling on android phones. Android users dont have a culture to video calling where as people with iphones casually facetime eachother instead of doing phone calls.
Must be another American thing, like blue bubbles. I know plenty of people with iPhones and nobody uses facetime.
I personally just don't see why you would do a facetime call at all. There isn't something for me that the video is adding to the conversation, most of the time when people on discord have their camera on i just talk without even looking at the cam. Why do Facetime over normal call?
Because it feels way more like we’re in person when facetiming? Being able to see eachother and show eachother stuff is great. Its much different to discord because you’re focused on eachother not doing other stuff while the video is on the side
Well, I don't really see the reason for myself still. I understand what your reasoning is but I feel like it's because i could just visit anyone i would facetime at any time i could because most of them live in cycling distance
I'm far enough removed from iPhones that I don't know what this means :)
I think messages from other iphones show up as green, with messages from android phones showing up as blue. No clue how this interacts with group chats.
Iphone-to-iphone using iMessage and are blue. Iphone-to-SMS are green. Grey in an inbound message irrespective of source.
What difference does the colour of the bubbles make though? Or am I missing an in joke?
Literally everything. iMessage is a real messaging app with all of the bells and whistles. Blue means all of the features you want will work. Green means SMS, which is garbage.
iMessage gets you end to end encryption, read receipts, reactions, larger media sharing, functal group chats, and more.
RCS solves some of the shortcomings of SMS but it’s not a feature that Apple supports.
Wait, so Apple doesn't support the RCS standard and somehow it's the non apple user to blame?
Yes, that's what the whole thing is about. I think most people don't understand or don't want to care about the issue so they just want to fix the symptoms without fixing the issue
security updates
They last (rocking a solid 4 year old phone)
They are rugged
The 3rd party apps are better
The interoperability with other Apple products is great
They are fast enough
Great accessory market
I’m familiar with the os
The os works well enough for my needs
Privacy - I am not the product
I agree except for third party apps. I used the iphone 12 for about a year before I switched back to android. Now I have an iPhone for my work phone and an android for my personal. Yes, some third party apps are better supported. But in my experience, it's only the big name ones. When you start getting into "indie" apps, I think android wins. The number of time I have tried to do something with my iPhone only to discover I can't is way too high.
And it's usually small things that add up over time. For instance, I use Alarmy for my alarm. With android, you can have the app lock down the phone. You must turn off the alarm the designed way (photos, barcodes, math, etc. It's a really cool app and I highly recommend it). If you try to close it out, it'll start itself again and start alarming. But with iPhone, I can close the app and the alarm goes away and won't ring again. It made it pretty useless when I could still just dismiss the app anyway.
Wanna torrent with your phone? Nope. Want a different keyboard? Sure, unless your typing in a password, then you must use IOS keyboard.
Those are some notable examples I remember off the top of my head.
The keyboard for password limitation makes sense though as a 3rd party keyboard could act as a malicious keylogger. Forcing the native keyboard prevents that.
Oh for sure. I understand the reasoning. But it's still a lack of options. While apple has a good track record, they're still asking me to blindly trust them, and them alone.
From a developer standpoint, I can affirm this. Android is much easier to develop on, presumably because Android doesn't lock down as much functionality as iOS. Neither is "right" or "wrong," they just have different philosophies.
Oh, and Android has a much lower barrier to entry to begin development. Apple charges significantly more to publish apps, and you can't really develop iOS apps without an Apple device. Not a big deal for the big players, but indie projects have a harder time.
I agree with everything except the last one
Why? Apple doesn’t directly make money off our data. They’re def the most privacy focused of the major options.
I would say these are all benefits of using Android, IMO (but with interoperability with Google products, of course).
especially the last point, google is just the best with privacy! /s
Idk it just works and I have the whole ecosystem to support it so why not. I flip flop between Android and iPhone whenever. My previous phone was a Pixel 6 Pro. It really doesn’t matter to me, it’s just about how goofy I feel on the day I decide to buy a phone.
Same. Got an S23U in May, I like it, but I started to miss my iPhone so I popped my sim card back in my 12pro max. Can’t decide if I want to keep using it and get the 15 when it comes out or switch back to my 23U.
My Employer provides me with an iPhone for work use, primarily for remote access.
I was enthusiastic about getting it, as a long time time android user I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but having interacted with it frequently I really don't get why people like it so much.
Completely agree.
I have so much less control and navigating is not easier. I exclusively use it for work and as infrequently as possible.
I'm consistently impressed with Samsung flagship and plan to remain there for the years to come.
Different strokes for different folks, but this is where I land.
Same boat here. Some stuff is so counterintuitive that it's frustrating. For example, I want to turn Bluetooth off, since it's my work phone and I rarely need to connect headphones to it - why cant I turn it off properly through the quick access menu? Same with wifi, who tought it was a good idea to turn off bluetooth and wifi until the next day, with Bluetooth not even being properly turned off and instead just put into "do not pair" mode?
The overall experience is smooth and everything feels uniformous and well engineered, but some design decisions werent made by actual humans I swear.
I use an iPhone 12 because:
longevity. Between software updates and an over powered phone cpu I know it will last. Android phones in general barely get security updates.
Simplicity. I used to root and install ROMs on my android phone. I used to jailbreak iPhones. I’m done with that now. I do enough technical work at work I don’t want to have to mess with my phone.
Security. Ties into updates somewhat, but how often do you hear about iOS malware? It is usually big news when you do.
Not sure why this is downvoted so much. These are very valid points.
Well the claim that Android doesn't receive security updates is plainly false.
Won’t be hard to find two dozen android devices that received 1 or 2 updates and that’s it.
There are nowadays android devices that receive reliable and guaranteed updates for a number of years, but unless you know what you are looking for it’s luck.
My iPhone 6 from 2015 still got updates in 2022 when I lost it.
Comparing iPhone to "Android" isn't fair, because people conveniently compare it to the lowest end. Compare the iPhone 14 Pro Max to the S23 Ultra for example, a phone from a respected company at the same price range. And it isn't "luck". Just a quick Google search will give you the high-end Android devices currently.
The iPhone SE is as low end as Apple gets and it also gets reliably updates. It’s in the brand.
Also if you know what to google for you are already in the know. Plenty of people get their cheap phone from Aldi.
The similarly priced Pixels get similar update levels to the iPhone SE
That's not up to Android, that's up the OEM. Android is constantly updated with the latest security patches. These are the companies who independently decide how long their devices receive updates.
I agree that many OEMs don't offer long enough support for their android devices. Luckily, virtually all android devices are supported by an open source fork of Android thanks to the AOSP (which Apple would never offer) and most android phones are designed to work with alternate bootloaders/OSes without the need to jailbreak. So when an iPhone hits its end of life, it's a brick; when an android hits end of life, it's still perfectly usable.
I speak my own experience. I owned 3 mid priced android phones over the span of 6 years. The second one got one planned and promised upgrade to the next major android version. This made the phone so slow it was unusable. Each felt not very well built, I didn’t miss them when I abandoned them. None received updates after 2 years.
I now have my third iPhone. The first lasted 4 years before I wanted a bigger one, it was then used up by my son. I carried around the bigger one for 3 years before I decided it’s too large. Now I own a Mini and that’s the best phone I ever had.
Each of the iPhones got major upgrades for years, but instead of slowing it down they added features feeling like I got a new phone.
None of that I experienced in android land. Unless apple makes some major mistakes going forward I don’t see me changing platforms again.
Didn't apple literally get sued for intentionally degrading the quality of their older phones with updates over time?
They say so, and at some point it was even shown in the battery settings. I can’t remember that it affected me much.
If I understood it correctly it mostly affected loading times. Yes, it took much longer to load clash Royale than on the other devices. But it ran astonishingly well. Much better than you would expect from a 6yo device.
What they got sued for was when they detected that the battery was too weak (old, worn-out) to support peak CPU performance, they throttled the CPU. If they hadn't throttled the CPU, then the phone would have just crashed and rebooted. An Android phone with a similarly weak battery will just randomly reboot.
The lawsuit was that they should have told the user the battery was bad and to just (cheaply) replace the battery, instead of people thinking the phone was old and needing a complete replacement. Which is what they do now.
I agree that there are a lot of bad Android experiences available, but having chosen the devices I've used very carefully over the years, tbh your experience with an iPhone matches my experience with Android.
I've never had a phone last me less than 4 years, with the exception of I think my razr maxx which had overheating problems and lasted me 2. Since then I've had a Nexus 5, OnePlus 6, and now have a Pixel 6 Pro running Graphene OS. Each has been a great experience.
My old phones are in the closet, but otherwise perfectly functional. My main reason for upgrading is usually for hardware features (camera/screen quality, etc). But I feel like my eyes are getting older faster than screen tech is getting better, so this might be my last phone 😄.
I don't see how that point is relevant as that claim was never made.
The claim was that Android phones usually barely get updates which maps to my experience. Updates more than one or two years after the release of a device is the exception, not the norm.
Which is also not true, most android deviced i have used got updates every 3-5 months with some small security patches between them.
For the first year or two, that's common. Getting feature updates for anything even approaching >5 years is near unthinkable for Android devices however. You only get that with custom ROMs and even there it's only half of the story as they can't provide security updates for vendor blobs which is kind of a big yikes.
The iPhone 8 will get cut off the newest feature updates in the upcoming iOS 17; 6 years after launch. Security updates will likely be available for years to come. For comparison, my OnePlus 5 from 2017 (1 year younger) received its last update (any update whatsoever) in 2020 (3 years ago).
With an Android device, you'd be lucky to get security patches in any regularity at all, much less >3 years after release. That only happens with a couple few vendors who actually care such as Nokia and maybe Google (to a degree).
For my custom rom i get vendor updates and theres about 1 update per month, open source devs are really
The vendor blobs in custom ROMs come from the stock vendor ROM. When the vendor stops publishing their stock ROM, the custom ROM's will also stop coming. In some cases some BLOBs can be taken from similar devices that might be supported a bit longer but I believe this is quite rare.
The ROM itself still gets updates through the AOSP but vendor BLOBs stay where they are and open source devs can do little to nothing about that.
Couldn't find anything about that online, could you please give me the source of that information?
I homebrew the ROM on my personal phone and I can tell you from first hand experience that you need the vendor dirs extracted from the OEM ROM. You can read up on that on the wiki pages for building any device ROM.
You can also come to that conclusion the other way around: How else would you (or LOS maintainers) get your hands on proprietary blobs full of secret sauce that vendors sometimes even try to actively block access to?
Yeah this is a good point. Tbh I wish there was right to repair legislation around this. If you're not going to maintain it, you should be required to open source it, and you're not allowed to brick people's devices as a workaround.
Nothing is keeping apple from dropping support in the same way, I'm kinda surprised how long they maintain support.
My second paragraph explains in detail why the first is relevant.
I am not sure which second paragraph you're referencing as your original comment only contains one.
Well for one thing Apple rather famously slows down its old phones and lost a lawsuit over it. Apple has plenty of merits but longevity is definitely not one of them.
This keeps getting repeated and it gets further from the truth every time. Apple was throttling phones whose batteries were so bad the phone would shut off when trying to draw peak power. They should have had a message saying, “Replace your Fuckin battery dude”, rather than just throttling the phones, and that’s exactly what the lawsuit made them do. It’s not the case that apple went, “oh this phone is old, slow it down.” At all.
What’s more, they then gave discounted battery replacements to phones of the most-effected generations. As in, for like $50 or something the phone went back to working essentially like new (and had better battery life again to boot).
If their goal with the battery health throttling was to make money by forcing people to buy new phones, they sure went about it in a weird way. 😆
They only offered that cheap battery replacement after the lawsuit was filed.
Thats not an act of kindness, thats ass covering. They then settled the class action about the secret throttling for $300+ millon.
Not exactly just an "opps, we forget to mention what we were doing for your phones health for years, really guys" situation. In every possible way, they were silently hobbling the performance of old phones, which directly helped their sales of new phones.
The right thing to do was very simple : alert people and offer inexpensive battery replacements. We know it was very simple because they did it immediately when their duplicity was revealed in a court of law. Now ask youself why they didnt do it for years.
Iirc they offered battery replacement as part of a settlement, and had an os update out that gave detailed battery health information before that went down and outside of it.
This is so false, and has been debunked so many times that anyone still repeating it is simply a liar.
Batteries are consumable items. A great analogy anyone can relate to is car batteries. Anyone with a car knows the battery goes bad. Batteries wear out. A car battery that works fine in the summer may have a lot of trouble cranking over in the winter under the conditions and extra load of a cold engine full of sludgy oil.
The phone battery is no different. Overtime it starts to go bad. What Apple did, was determine through software when a phone battery could no longer support a phone running at full blast. They INCREASED LONGEVITY of the device, by throttling the speed. By making it run slower, it was less demanding and still would work - where it otherwise would have been prone to random shutdowns and crashes because of the degraded battery. This was a much better user experience. They could have skipped this altogether, and people would have just bought a new device. Instead this software throttling made the device last even longer. In fact, laptops have been doing this for decades. Should Apple have told folks? Sure. But anyone presenting this as a profit motive or forced obsolescence is deluded.
Because ive been sucked into the Apple universe (except my laptop. I just can’t).
Plus, and honestly more importantly, you take it out of the box and it just works.
Oh, and I can’t stand/understand googles UI no matter how hard I try. It’s just not I that I’ve to me.
I've never taken an android out of the box and it not work. Not sure what that statement even means.
Yeah lol
I also never had an android not work out of the box, the setup feels the same as apple complexity wise
As a long time android user I was kind of impressed by the setup process on newer android phones. Easily migrates your data over and sets everything up for you to your liking. Feels very polished.
Well, I buy xiaomi phones and ... well, need to root and flash roms. That is only me though, I am sure there are many users that are okay with OEM phone systems.
Heh, I get your issue with xiaomi. I feel like it's just what you get when buying a chinese phone. MIUI is the absolute worst android ui you can get in terms of advertising, I mean come one who tf advertises IN SYSTEM APPS. But they're aprettx good platform for custom ROMs and rooting
Early non iPhones weren’t always that way.
Oh man the MacBook is the shit, I switched to mac years ago, windows laptops just suckkkkkkk. The touchpad alone is enough for me to never have a windows laptop again. Can dual boot it to windows too to cover all bases. My MacBook is over 10 years old and still running the latest OS smoothly and feels like it's up to todays standards still for what I use it for.
I know, I’ve used macs/MacBooks before. There are a handful of gestures I can’t get used to. And at this point, I’ve got everything setup, and all the software setup for what I’ve got. I actually really like my surface.
Better Touch Tool was one of my favorite apps when I was still using a Macbook as my daily driver. Complete customization of gesture inputs, keybinds, etc.
That's kinda funny because that's probably their product category that I find the most compelling. Watches and earbuds I don't care about, phones can really go either way, but since they switched to the M chips the power and efficiency are just so good the Windows laptop just look a lot worse in comparison to me.
I admittedly haven’t looked at the MacBooks since I bought my surface, but size and storage/processing were a large part of my decision. Plus I struggle with some of the Mac gestures. I honestly can’t get past the lack of right click, HOWEVER windows is doing some seriously annoying dumb shit lately, so I’ll look at the MacBook again, when my surface dies.
Every other computer I interact with is on windows. All the software we have is windows (I’m not sure how subscription services work for switching OS).
All I’m saying is it’ll take some doing to switch over, and they hadn’t been worth it to me in past researching. Just like I’d struggle to switch from the Apple phone/watch/AirPod situation.
Right click exists, you just have to turn it on in the trackpad menu then the bottom right corner becomes the area that will react to it. Or I think the default is two finger click for the gesture.
Edit: bottom right corner
Today I learned. Thanks!
You can replace OneUI with a different launcher. I don't have these app pages that are unintuitive boxes. I have an alphabetical app list with a favorites at the top.
Are you using niagara launcher by any chance?
I like android and have a couple android devices (mostly retro handhelds and CCTV, and have spun up a few VMs), I also have many devices with linux (unraid, pihole, vpn servers, web servers) and run a pfsense firewall (FreeBSD), AND my gaming PC is windows...
I say all that because when it comes to mobile devices, however, I am all in pretty much on apple. Phone, watch, Pro 2s, and Ipad mini go with me pretty much every where. Why? not really the app eco-system (because I do so much self-hosting and use a lot of PWAs, and I dont play games on my phone), its the inter-operability between all the devices, its the find my device, Its the earpods going from my ipad to my iphone in an instant, Its the battery life, its (for the most part) security of the devices.
The blue/green bubble thing is weird and I don't understand why people get so upset over it. I use everything, and to be honest the only thing at this point in my life I would like to get rid of is windows, but I can't yet because of gaming.
If not for gaming, I would run Linux. Linux on gaming just isn't on par yet.
Yea I love my steam deck, but I can’t even run holoiso on my main rig even if I wanted to because I have a 3080 and apparently they don’t play nice together. Then on top of that not being able to play online mp games, is a pain as well.
Are you me? The only difference is macbookair for my portable, then two windows machines, one work (nuc on windows) and gaming rig on windows.
The work machine isn’t changing anytime soon due to the applications I need, but with windows 11 crap and how smooth my steam deck is I’m so close to wiping the gaming machine and going Linux. Thankfully with the knowledge from my server, the switch will be more kind than if I’d never touched Linux before.
For real man, close to a decade ago I started off with a raspberry pi b+ and literally copying and pasting every code I found, and today I feel I can do almost anything I want in Linux. Moving from tinkering with Xbmc and retropies, to setting up openhan and pi-holes, then moving on to dockers, home assistant, and web-servers to building out a server/networking closet and running cat6 through the house lol
I love that the steam deck has a desktop mode as well. If steamos was out for desktop AND it supported nvidia (which it currently doesn’t), then that would be my new OS and I’d drop windows today.
It used to be guaranteed OS updates for me. But now that I’m in the ecosystem it’s too much of a hassle to switch.
Between HomeKit, having an Apple Watch & AirPods and now using macOS for work everything is convenient.
The HomeKit part maybe changing though.
Yea I completely forgot to mention HomeKit in my comment! Is it kind of generic and do I wish it could do more? Yea, but damn is it nice to tell Siri “goodnight” and all the light in the house go out, the doors lock, and the alarm sets! Plus my partner can use it better than home assistant, and if I need my bro to come watch my house for a week, I can give him access on his phone and revoke it any time!
Have you integrated Home Assistant with HomeKit yet? I’ve yet to make the jump but really need to
I have and for the most part it’s actually really good and responsive… live video feeds aren’t working like I want (no live video, just an updated scene every 30 seconds), but house alarm, lights, garage door, outlets, door locks all work great and all of it is through home assistant then to HomeKit … none of my devices are “HomeKit” compatible, I use mostly z-wave and have home assistant parse the info and tunnel though home
I don't care at all about the bubbles. I don't use iMessage at all, 0.
Genuinely curious how the price works out to be less?
Not OP but I interpreted the comment to mean “my iPhones last longer so I replace them less often, therefore spending less over time than buying a less expensive android phone more often”
I'm a diehard Android fan and even I admit iPhones tend to hold their resale value a bit better than comparable Android phones as well.
Resale value maybe, but I'm finding phones are just generally lasting longer these days. My phone is coming up to 3 years old and I have no inclination to upgrade. It doesn't feel slow, all the apps still work, its running latest OS. There was a time when I was upgrading every 12 months but that just isn't the case anymore.
High resell value just means you can't get cheap old products. I spent about 300$ on phones in the past decade. I buy used android for ~100$ and use them for 3-5 years. Never had any issue.
Overall I ended up changing a couple of Android devices within the same time frame that I’d be using a single iPhone. I have an XS which is a ~5 years old device and will get the 17. And it’s still a very capable one.
When you say there isn't anything close to an apple watch what features are you talking about? Because I have so far not heard a convincing argument for an apple watch instead of something like Garmin.
Maybe if your main use case is as an activity tracker, you’re probably right. But for me it’s a phone extension. I think Garmins are mainly sport watches with some smart features and the Apple watch is the opposite. Calling someone using siri, or doing things with siri in general are features I use all the time. Apple watch for me is a phone that I can use when cooking and taking care of a toddler at the same time without ever touching it. Garmin simply can’t do it. Alexa is not that great and the general integration is obviously not as good as Apple.
Hopped on the iPhone train with the 5S. That phone was such a performance beast. Blew the competition out of the water. Android phones at the time looked like toys in comparison.
The gap is a lot smaller now than it used to be, but I’ve just stuck with it. I have a 13 mini now and I love the small size with basically no compromise. I’ll cling onto this thing until it dies and then maybe switch to a Linux phone if they’ve caught on by then.
Linux phones are a thing?
Barely lol. Basically just the Fairphone 4 and the OnePlus 6.
I think you're confusing things. The Fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6 are both regular Android phones, but Android is based on Linux.
Edit: maybe you meant they're running stock Android instead if a custom version (with bloatware) like Samsung phones.
Other smaller Adroid brands, like Nokia and Motorola, do that as well. I don't really understand why people still bother with Samsung's bullshit.
PinePhone is an actual Linux phone, though it's nowhere near ready to replace Android or iPhones.
Good call! I forgot about the PinePhone.
Yeah I meant more Linux friendly. All the software is still in alpha.
It's a start I guess. Something to keep an eye on.
Kind of. There is the PinePhone and Librem 5 that both run full Linux. I have a Pinephone. Unfortunately, the hardware is underpowered and the software is not ready to replace iOS or Android. The battery is also not good. The standby has improved a lot, so it can last a day of limited use, but the battery drains very quickly when the device is actively being used. It's definitely fun to play around with, and it even has the convergence feature Microsoft tried to do with Windows Phone. The UI changes to regular desktop Linux when plugging the phone into a monitor and connecting a keyboard and mouse. But again, the hardware really limits what can be done.
In short, Linux phones are a thing, but not reliable enough to be the only phone a person has.
Because over the last 7 years my iPhones consistently delivered very good user experience, including migrating to the next device, which is completed in about an hour or two, and then there’s everything on the new device: apps, configuration and data.
Same deal with android phones these days as long as you actually sync all your apps, photos and contacts with your Google account.
Even my external app licensing transferred successfully on my recent upgrade and it only took about 30 minutes.
Yep, about the only things that don't transfer (in my experience, anyway) are files in your phone's memory—the transfer is usually wireless, so it's understandable—and apps not available on the Play Store—also understandable; the apps "sync" by literally redownloading all the apps from the Play Store (which is honestly for the best; it'll download the best optimized version of the app available for your new phone as opposed to one optimized for your old phone).
Migrating to the next device is super simple and quick on Android. Samsung, as well as Google, have made that available for many years. User experience is subjective. I can't stand the UI when I have to pick up an Apple device
Basically because of company Google became. Not saying Apple is better, just they respect my privacy so much more and support their products for longer, give a shit about security, etc. Matters to me.
a few reasons: I know I'll get product support for the entire life of the phone. I will always be able to update to the latest software. The OS feels a lot more polished, refined, and smoother than android phones that I have used in the past. It works seamlessly with my Apple TV and MacBook, the apps available are generally higher quality, receive updates faster, and some of the specific ones I use are not available on android (foreflight). The camera outperforms other androids that I have used.
I don’t like that a giant tech company today is basically an advertising company. Google that is. And so I don’t like that they made their phone OS “free” so that they could dominate the platform and so increase the reach of their advertising empire.
I like that apples business is products. Make, design and sell them to the customer. So I pick Apple. If Microsoft were still in the game and were not trying to steal google’s advertising business I’d consider them too.
Also, apple products have always done well for me. There’s a bit of a knack to picking the right time to buy, probably happens one out of every few years that there’s a sweet spot.
But IME, if you do you’ve got a good reliable product for years. I’ve been using Apple stuff since ~2005 and basically only had two laptops and two phones. Second laptop could do with an upgrade shortly (latest OS isn’t supported and M2 looks pretty good), though it doesn’t have to be and the second phone is going strong still.
This. When you buy an iPhone, the phone is the product. When you buy an android phone, you are the product.
What's this about bubbles? I never heard anything about it before until last week, and it didn't make sense.
Android user.
People with iPhones use iMessage for texting which turns their bubbles blue (green for any other type of phone) and with iMessage there are a whole slew of features that people enjoy like chat bubbles to show active typing, read receipts, sending over Wi-Fi, etc. Often there's one member of a group chat with an Android who can't take advantage of those features and it limits the group chat features since they use SMS/MMS/RCS protocol instead. Here's an article about it:
https://www.androidauthority.com/green-bubble-phenomenon-1021350/
Android to Android uses RCS: feature rich
iPhone to iPhone uses iMessage: feature rich
Android to iPhone uses SMS or MMS: bland, boring, and unsecure
Why you ask, Apple won't let anyone else use the iMessage protocol and also won't add RCS to their phones so they just use a protocol from the 90s instead
Who uses SMS in this day and age? Have these people not heard of sending messages using the internet?
It's very common here in the states actually. Not really by choice though. Around the time many messaging apps were taking off iMessage kinda established itself as "the" way to do stuff like group chats. I hear in the rest of the world apps like Whatsapp are way more common but they're more of a niche thing here overall
That's so weird to hear, but I guess it makes sense. I think I've heard people say that across the pond you never really had to pay for texts? Internet-based messengers really took off on phones because you'd have to pay 10p per text back in the day!
Yeah back before most plans did "unlimited" data, many of the deals were for unlimited texts. I remember texts costing about that much at first then we moved my family to an unlimited texting plan and never thought much about it again
I think that was the case here too, but even with limited data you can send pictures, videos, and attachments as well as have group chats, whereas SMS never evolved beyond text (and MMS probably still costs 50p a message to this day!)
So basically the expected experience of literally any non sms/mms messaging protocol? But somehow designed to cause weird elitism? We had those features when we would hop onto whatever popular messenger on the pc after elementary school... or the coloured translucent all in one apple computer before it was cool to have apple products.
It's an American thing. If you live anywhere else probably use WhatsApp so you don't have that problem.
To be truthful the FCC should have forced apple to move off iMessages. Especially due to them registering numbers which they shouldn't have control over. Friend got a new number recently when they changed providers, the new number of course didn't work for any messages that came from iPhones because it was previously used by an Apple user.
So essentially someone buys a service from Company A. Puts it in their hardware from Company B, yet company C is dictating their ability to recieve messages. The user did this ~June 15th, didnt figure out iPhones weren't able to send her messages to June 20th. So her birthday was June 18th, the same day as fathers day. Most plans almost fell through because her dads iPhone just lies and says the iMessage is read immediately.
There really should just be a class action lawsuit against Apple that requires them to stop hijacking services from users that are not their customers.
Sidenote: Apple's first solution they provide for this is to move your sim card to one of their products to deregister from their services. That is so fucking disgusting to me. Thankfully the site now has a "No longer have your old device option" to de-register from the servoce you never signed up for... on a product you never owned.
...end rant, sry
As an ex apple support, this scheme is an absolute bullshit. You cannot imagine how many times it doesn't even work, and when you contact your seniors because of it, nobody knows why and we had to tell customers to just try in a few days (for the X number of times already). I was never a huge fan of apple, but after working for them, I just physically won't ever be able to buy their products.
Privacy
Switched to iphone for first time. This is what I like: Camera Compact size Shortcuts
What I hate: Recent call log sucks, only displays few calls No call recording No back button gesture. Swipe to go back only works in few apps. Have to tap 3-4 times to come back to home screen from wifi/bt joining setting No whatsapp backup without icloud, I already have gdrive subscription, why should I also purchase icloud Google photos backs up all photos, cant select to backup just camera photos, because of iphones fucked up storage management. Keyboard sucks, google keyboard was way fast for me. I could just just hold and input characters form it without switching everytime. Nzb360 dosent work because of app store policy.
In response to a couple of those hate lines:
Re keyboard: Surprised you hate the keyboard, I have never been remotely as accurate on an android phone (I do have to interact with them frequently for work). But you can install gboard from the App Store, and I believe that is the same Google keyboard as on android, but I may be mistaken. Doesn’t let you use it on password fields tho, which can get annoying.
Re nzb360: check out LunaSea. I ended up migrating to qBit with vuetorrent as a webui so I can just use a PWA tho, then I don’t have to worry about app compatibility, at least for torrents. Sonarr/radarr/others have been fine for me in a PWA
Re iCloud: you pay for Google drive, which is googles version of iCloud. on an iPhone, you get iCloud. I imagine Android won’t let you backup your WhatsApp stuff to onedrive, iCloud, etc, so why would it be different on iPhone?
Re storage management: this really comes down to how you think about things. Apple goes for a more “tag” like approach with albums where Google goes for a more “folder” like approach. Some people think about it one way, some another. Personally, I lost all my photos from both my previous android phones because it could never figure out how/where to save them (back in the micro sd card days). I’m sure it’s better now, but boy howdy did it suck the last time I used it.
As for Google photos, I use Immich, which is a self hosted alternative, and it lets you backup based on album(s) or everything. I would imagine Google photos could do the same, but if it can’t, that’s on Google.
What I have found when people switch (either direction) is complaints about compatibility with services they are used to. So iPhone to android, complaints about losing iMessage, or iCloud Drive, or whatever other stuff may only be available to apple customers. The same holds true in the opposite direction, so android to iPhone, complaints about RCS (which yeah, apple should support anyway) or backup to Google drive. But really, it’s a completely different platform. While some things come over and are compatible, not everything is due to competing platforms having competing services. And at the end of the day, that’s what makes both platforms better.
Personally, I’ve been on iOS for probably 10 years with maybe a single Pixel in there for a brief period before I returned it. I like it because it’s familiar and what I’m used to. When it comes to my phone, I don’t have patience for troubleshooting things, I just want it to do what I need, and get out of my way. My last android phone, it felt like all I did for 2 weeks before returning it was tinker with it to make it cooperate, and in the end, I just didn’t care anymore, so back to iPhone I went.
And none of that was intended to be hostile if it came off that way, text is hard sometimes. Hope some of those replies help you!
The more you buy into the ecosystem, the better it all gets. I use a Mac for work and at home, so an iPhone is a natural choice.
I don’t trust Google with a goddamn thing, and Microsoft couldn’t get its shit together.
Bubbles are literally no part of the reason why I use one, I genuinely could not give less of a shit about that. The real reason is pretty simple: my old phone died and I needed a new one pretty quickly. At the time it was basically a decision between a Pixel 4a and an iPhone SE 2020, which seemed like the best options at that price point. The Pixel had a better battery, camera, and used android, with the possibility of flashing a custom rom (which all else equal I'd prefer), while the iPhone's main advantages were the much faster chip and longer support period. I probably would have gone the Pixel, but as it turned out it wasn't in stock at the time, so I got the iPhone.
The iPhone was the first smartphone. I got my 3G before android phones were a thing. Once you are used to an ecosystem, it just is easier to stay there. I struggle when someone hands me an android.
That is true, it goes the other way too. The only reason I can somewhat use an IPhone proficiently is because of the amount of tech support I have given for them.
I don't know why people say this is a feature of iphonesm All I hear is people complaining that texting g doest work very well on iphone.im an android guy, and have never had a problem texting nobody.
It's an issue with apple not wanting to either share their message protocol(which is understandable) or integrate rcs which would make almost everything to work as intended
It boggles the mind that people won't just install WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or anything of the sort, and would rather exclude people from group chats or deal with a worse experience. I mean, it's not that big of an ask! I'm sure most people have more than one app on their phone that just sits there and wastes space, why not replace it with one of those? Heck, even Facebook's Messenger could be an alternative.
I guess its American culture. iPhone is an American company, I can imagine a nationalist feeling very proud of their accomplishments. I've seen screengrabs of "when I see the green text, I block", which sounds very meme'y (word?) but feels like it could be true.
An Android version of an iPhone 13 Mini doesn’t exist. At least it didn’t when I bought the iPhone.
The Zenfone seems to make a pretty nice compact phone. I've been tempted to get one but I got hooked on Pixels.
I have a Google Pixel 6a. It's probably pretty close to what you want from a iPhone Mini. It's still a bit bigger than the iPhone Mini and I would like an even smaller version.
I almost went the mini route, but landed on the pixel 7 due to the insane trade-in deals last year.
The ecosystem. (For better or worse.)
I prefer Android but the ability to do things such as use my AirPods on multiple Macs, iPhones, and iPads is very convenient. Ditto for things like Apple TV and HomeKit (though I use Home Assistant to control my HomeKit devices).
Other things:
Hardware has a longer useful life (Android phone manufacturers "commit" to n years of updates, but the timing of releases is slow and usually limited to 3 years, at most.) There are still iPhone 6 devices in the wild running the latest version of iOS.
Standardized hardware and consistently updated software results in more and better apps.
In short: iPhone is an appliance but an Android smartphone is/can be a pocket computer with greater flexibility.
YMMV
EDIT: Also, my wife and kids use iPhone. When I used an Android phone, I had them all install signal so we communicate securely. With iPhone, that's built in.
That's built in to android now with Rcs which uses the exact same encryption as signal.
And funny enough, apple decided not to support it so now apple users are the ones who force it to revert to MMS.
There's always that one apple guy in the group chats killing the high res photos and videos.
Your airpods comment I feel it's a downside because you're limited to Apple devices. My Galaxy buds seamlessly work on and automatically switch between my phone, tablets, and Windows PC. And they don't look like there's a string hanging out of my ear
In my case, because I had a bad experience with Android phones in their early years. Each model I used had one or the other issues, either battery life, camera issues, screen issues or something else. Around the Samsung S3 days I finally moved to iPhone and "everything just worked".
I am sure things are better now in the Android world hardware-wise (and software-wise Android has always been able to do more), but over the years I have become firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem with the Apple Watch, Airpods, Macbooks, Apple TV etc so it doesn't make sense for me to switch again because there isn't a compelling reason for me to do so.
That's why I avoid apple products. I don't want to get sucked into an ecosystem where my choice of what product to buy is so limited.
I wouldn’t worry about it. You can make things work just as well as android phones work with everything else. AirPods work with android phones and you can sync data through google apps, etc. just as well on iphone. I have both and android (Pixel) and iPhone and don’t feel “sucked in” to anything.
The main difference for me is that iphones have been more durable. I went through three Pixel upgrades, two times there was some minor hardware issue that bricked the phone. The one I have now had a cracked screen - even though I got a tempered glass screen protector and always keep it in the case. If my iPhone gets bumped around I don’t need to worry. With my second Pixel I dropped the phone four feet onto linoleum ( not a super hard surface) and a capacitor came loose. It cost almost as much as a new phone to get it fixed and it was not a typical repair, so trying to even find a place to do this specialized kind of repair was going to be a hassle.
For me knowing that my phone isn’t just going to spontaneously break is a big factor.
It feels like gambling to me when other people drop their phones, I somehow drop mine about 5-6 times a day and the only thing breaking is the screen protector
So far I've had 6 phones each for around 3-4 years average. Only dropped my phone once ever so I'd say the odds are very much in my favor.
This isn't actually the case in my experience, because non-Apple products work just fine with the iPhone unless it's some Android-specific accessory. No one wants to ignore the iPhone market so they make sure that their product is well-supported on iPhones. For instance, I use a bunch of headphones from various manufacturers, apart from AirPods, and they all work great too.
The actual issue is that if you want to move from iPhone to Android later you may have issues getting some Apple devices you have to work with Android, e.g. I don't think the Apple Watch works at all with Android.
I'm not an Apple person, but this makes perfect sense to me. I think it was Steve Jobs himself who talked about the iPod "halo effect", which was the idea that if they could sell you an iPod because it was cool (and it was), and they made the iPod experience on PC worse than on the Mac (which it was initially), then people were more likely to buy a Mac as their next machine. If they didn't, they got FOMO, because they already bought the iPod and obviously want the best experience out of it. (That's an oversimplification and not sure it was Jobs, but the gist is there).
Now the Apple ecosystem is designed so that every Apple product is pretty tightly integrated with every other one. Unless you have some deeper reason to get away from it (privacy concerns, cost, lack of features, customizability, etc), there isn't a reason at all to leave.
Couldn't care less about blue bubbles cause I mostly use Telegram. I'm currently running two phones, on iOS & one Android.
My iPhone syncs nicely with my iPad which i appreciate. I also find the photos app better, especially how you can sort by date (metadata) or date-uploaded. Also the 6.1inch iPhone gets better battery than any of the similar-sized Androids I've tried.
My first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS. Android wasn’t really an competitive option yet. Since then, I’ve stayed on iOS because I already had purchased apps I’d loose if I switched. (Remember when you bought mobile games, instead of endlessly paying for them with in-game currency?) Vendor lock-in is real.
My guest smartphone was also the 3GS. I switched to android because it didn't have copy and paste or flash.
I literally just switched to the iPhone 14 after a lifetime of android phones. Honestly I’ve just gotten older and don’t use my phone like I used to. I don’t need to have android for anything specific anymore and the iPhone AirPods Apple Watch combo really just can’t be beat. You can do the combo with android but honestly nothing is as seamless as the Apple options.
My biggest concern is the longevity of the phone. My android phones all hold their charge well and rarely have issues. My Apple work phone has had its battery crap out after only a year and a half. But still I needed an upgrade and it just made sense.
Reliability, battery life, OS optimization, long term support.
These things may be normal for today’s android handsets, but back when I switched from the Samsung Galaxy S6 to the iPhone, they definitely weren’t the norm. I went through about 6 different android phones, got into custom roms and bootloaders, did all that fancy stuff. I got real comfortable with it and I got used to the idea that my phone app might just lock up randomly for no reason. Or my GPS app would freeze when I’m miles and miles away from civilization. I got tired of troubleshooting and stuff and I just wanted something reliable.
One thing for me is honestly how great the operating system is. A lot of people just look at phones as the basic call text, download apps, etc. but I’ve been trying to use my phone to answer questions that I would normally Google or two to look at stock prices or two Google definitions for words, or even using the native translator app inside.
My employer (a mid-sized tech company) had a policy that employees could access corporate Slack, email, etc. from personal iPhones but not personal Android phones. I think it was for security reasons.
I was using Android, but I needed mobile phone access for on-call shifts. The company gave me a choice of either replacing my Android with an iPhone (and they would partially reimburse the cost) or they would issue me a corporate iPhone and I'd have to carry both phones when I was on-call. I picked the first option and switched to iPhone.
I personally prefer the two devices. Keeps my work live separate from my personal life.
Exactly. And when you're not
expectedrequired to answer, it should be turned off and out of sight.Every android phone I've owned has crapped out by the 2 year mark, and that's even when not using custom ROMs or rooting. IMO iPhones are more reliable and provide a more consistent UX. They also offer a better baseline level of privacy. (Granted, you can't beat GrapheneOS and the like on android)
I have a Samsung s5 that's still fully functioning, I use it as a music player when I'm driving as I don't use Spotify or any of that.
Samsung hardware is generally pretty solid, so I'm not surprised - but are you still getting OS and security updates? That's the real downside of Android (at least to me).
No, it's EoL was November 2021, but the s5 was pretty easy to root, so as soon as it was out of warranty I put a CFW on it.
Now a question for you. Is the iPhone 6 still getting OS and security updates?
I generally buy used, and get 5 years of use from a phone, the ones I buy new basically never die. I keep the newer ones for a back up in case something happens to my current one, and the older ones I give away to friends or family that need a phone.
iPhone 6 updates ended with iOS 15. Still, that's a pretty good run. Unfortunately, you can't root an iPhone and install a custom ROM like you can with Android.
2019 I think? Yeah, a decent run. Still would be good if they provided security updates for longer, there's loads of 6s still out there in the wild.
Jailbreaking is possible, and allows for some 3rd party security updates if i recall correctly, but not really on the same level as a custom ROM.
Glad to hear you've had a good experience with long term use. I'd love to stick to android but from personal experience they just don't last when I get a hold of them.
I work in construction, lots of dust, I used to go through phones like crazy. That s5 was the first one I got a proper dust/damp/impact resistant case for. I bought it new about a year after it came out and it's still kicking.
Out of curiosity, what is it that usually goes wrong with the androids you bought? And what kind of androids did you get? I definitely have bought cheaper androids and had them last a handful of months.
Almost always software issues. Of course with the cheap ones I got when I was young weren't great when they were new. The one I remember being underwhelming was the Oneplus 6T, which I bought new. It was great for the first year, then it started crashing, lagging under fairly normal use. Funnily enough the performance was fine in games, normal usage was the problem. It also had a tendency to turn itself off at random.
I've had my iPhone longer than I had the Oneplus and it runs just as well today as it did when I bought it.
I've never had a OnePlus unit, but from what my 3 friends who did said, they're really good until they're not. And none of them had one for longer than a year and a half.
What are you doing to your phones mate? I've had two androids in the last 8 years and only because I dropped the first one under a bus.
I used Android for over a decade. Then recently my work bought me an iPhone. My biggest struggle was finding a replacement for Reddit Is Fun, until I found Apollo. I mourned for its loss until I found Lemmy and Wewef. In the end a phone is a phone but Lemmy is life!
There are plenty of reasons.
A robust ecosystem Privacy protection features and measures that are given first rate support - at least as far as you can say about a closed source platform Simplicity
I have years of experience with iPhones and flagship Galaxy phones since the 5.
I’m settled on the iPhone for now because those blue bubbles make keeping in contact with family easy. Sure you could use WhatsApp but if it’s not already being used, most people won’t want to download another app just to communicate. They’d rather use the built in texting app.
It also syncs well with my watch that I use for fitness tracking, and my Mac Studio that I use for professional work.
with it's proprietary software, no one knows whether or not ios is good for privacy or not. it certainly sends data back to apple automatically, without user consent.
Yeah. I added an addendum although I clearly did not format it properly.
They claim to be about privacy and seem to consider it a first class concern or however you want to put it.
I weighed the risks and the inconvenience of using a degoogled phone severely outweighs its utility for me.
In an ideal world I could be using GrapheneOS but a lot of OSS still has some ways to go in terms of design and functionality.
Also before the “HA GOTCHA GO SUPPORT THEM YOURSELF” etc etc, I financially support many open source projects and foundations and am working on sharpening my dev skills to contribute more.
I have 15 years worth of apps
For me, a big one is integration with email / calendar / contacts services that aren't Google. I don't know where Google dropped the ball here - Android was originally amazing for this kind of thing - but at some point they started bolting a lot of features specifically on top of Google accounts, and out of the box Android doesn't even understand how to sync with CalDAV / CardDAV. So if I want my Nextcloud stuff to work at all I need to go and install a third party app. The third party app works great (I happily used DAVx5 for many years), but it's ridiculous when iOS has all that integration officially supported and available straight out of the box. And it even does clever things, like suggesting contact details it learns from my (Fastmail) email. Android has that stuff, but it is completely on the cloud, and it only works if you give everything to Google.
Thankfully outlook and corporate outlook accounts are wonderfully supported under Android these days and have been the industry standard for decades.
You want to use some niche calendar protocol from 2007, you're going to need a plugin or third party app.
Hey, there's nothing wrong in a protocol that's been created in 2007.
Email and http are way older and are still used everyday.
Just because outlook does it better now (that's arguable) doesn't mean it's the only one solution.
True words. Like anything else though, if you want niche - you get niche. You've got to put in the work yourself. I assume apple supports calDAV better because they stole the protocol and based their own calendar events system on it.
I sort of get it. Outside of Gmail and Exchange, mail with calendar and contacts is a bit hit and miss. There just isn't the all ecompassing protocols like Exchange that can cater for it all, so you have to use the "niche calendar protocol from 2007" to fill the gaps.
I pay for O365 mainly for this purpose, as Exchange is the defacto mail provider of todays age. I used to host my own Exchange but in the last couple of years and vulnerabilities kept on getting more and more worrying and the patches became more involved, so I just decided to pay MS for the service. Perhaps I played right into their hands ...
I'm a dedicated Android user, and really none of my friends or family use iPhone. What is a blue or green bubble??
When you send a text from an iphone to another iphone the text bubble is blue. When you send a text from an iphone to a non iphone user it is green.
Thank you! I've never experienced that so I had no idea.
It’s a very US thing since they’re still texting normally and in iMessage, normal SMS show up as green bubbles instead of blue.
In the rest of the world, messaging apps like WhatsApp are more popular which doesn’t have this.
I'm in the US and rarely use regular text. I'm mostly texting through Facebook messenger actually although I don't really use Facebook itself. Just most of my friends use that method to send messages.
To elaborate, blue bubbles indicate that the message is being sent via iMessage, whereas green is SMS/MMS. iMessage is basically all the promises of RCS, realized. In the case of group messages, if just one person in the group is not on iPhone, the entire group has to fall back to SMS. The iPhone users get annoyed because they lose all the nifty messaging features that they’ve become accustomed to.
There are two obvious solutions here: Apple could embrace RCS, or Apple could open up iMessage to Android. So obviously this problem will never be solved.
Here in Japan iPhones are massively popular, more than in most other markets. I just Googled it: iPhones are 67%, Android 33%. That's crazy.
The reasons are: people think they're stylish/cool (in Japan this is SUPER important), they think they must be good because they're expensive, and they think Android is 'scary' because they've never used it before. They literally don't know that Android does everything iOS does, usually better/with more customisation, and that it offers way more control (you can make Android even more simple and basic than iOS if you tinker a bit).
To be honest, even talking about places other than Japan, 98% of people probably have never even stopped to think why they're on either Android/iOS - it's only the 2% of people like us who talk about it.
It is funny though that iPhone users here in Japan have so little idea about why their phones aren't working properly, and have to make actual reservations to have a 'genius' look at their phone and fix it for them. Usually it's just clearing cache or something. They also pay literal hundreds of dollars to have their data transferred over when they get a new iPhone, unaware that cloud storage is capable of doing all of this for you for free.
Because in my opinion, it’s the best product in its class. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
I’m a mobile dev. iOS is just a lot more powerful, both software wise as hardware wise. There is so much shit you just can’t do on Android.
As a user, there's so much shit you can't do on iOS.
For me as a developer by far the biggest restriction on Android is raw performance, it's just so much slower than iOS, even the high-end phones.
Next is the lack of proper updates, if you build an app for Android and you want to reach a decent audience you have to target an ancient version of Android since hardly anyone ever gets OS updates so you can't use any of the newest functionality.
Combined with this is the lack of widely supported APIs. We're doing a bunch of GPU compute, on iOS this is no problem: you can use Metal Compute and it's supported on iPhone 6S and later (which is practically every iPhone still in use). On Android there is nothing comparable. There is RenderScript which is deprecated and lacks a lot of functionality, it's also slow and you can never be sure it actually runs on the GPU (it can fall back to CPU on certain devices and you have zero control over this). Newer OpenGL ES versions support compute, but it's only available on a handful of devices, same goes for Vulkan. Even then, which features are supported differs per device and per GPU. Sometimes there are even different versions of the 'same' device (at least: same marketing name) with completely different internals and different GPUs (I'm looking at you Samsung).
Android is a fucking mess.
Yeah, if you're working on really high-performance apps, I can see why iOS would be easier. I'm guessing it's because the hardware that runs iOS is exclusive, so they can create simpler and more reliable APIs for that kind of thing. Android supports pretty much anything, so consistent APIs and performance is much more difficult.
But I'd posit that your development case is somewhat narrow. Tons of apps only rely on more basic APIs and base-system components--where computations are happening (CPU vs GPU) isn't even considered, and doesn't matter. There's still more variation in performance, but it's usually negligible.
I can certainly sympathize with your case, though.
There is the advantage that they control both the hardware and software, but it's also that the hardware is several years ahead of the competition. Especially CPU and GPU performance. Apple's SoC's are just crazy fast, and they do it while using very little power as well. It's really impressive.
I don't get the performance argument, even midrange phones are powerful enough to run most apps
You got that backwards. The the apps are made to be able to run on the phone, not the other way around. For example: the app I work on works reasonably well on Android but that’s mainly because we downgraded it compared to the iOS version. It runs at much lower resolution and frame rate on Android.
wait, you don't write universal apps?
you need to write apps for specific device needs?
that doesn't sound right
I thought you just need to write apps for armv8 and with a certain language like kotlin swift flutter or whatever
also which app are you talking about? Lemmy check
hehe Lemmy
You write apps to target the majority of devices on a specific platform, as you want your app to work for most people. Since the average Android phone is a piece of shit, your app can’t be too demanding. It’s not about the language or instruction set, it’s about how much work you try to get your app to do per frame.
I'm a web developer, but work with people that do mobile apps, and I'm well aware of the differences between both OSes. But as an end user, I couldn't care less. I have used both iOS and Android devices, and currently only own Android ones.
I don't consider myself a power user, but the apps I enjoy in Android are miles ahead of their iOS counterparts; yes, I get many of them via alternative stores or github repos, so I'm definitely not a regular user (I work with linux, so maybe I'm THAT kind of guy lol). I can tolerate some annoyances in exchange of the freedom I get and the vast amount of apps, but I don't expect regular user to do the same.
Also, I absolutely see the appeal of iOS devices for most people, they're snappy and have no surprises. My wife and children love them.
Most of those things are deliberate restrictions on Apple's part, rather than technical ones (it is really shitty though).
Yeah, like shake-to-undo. I was dumbfounded when I discovered that the ability to undo was not implemented on Android.
Isnt that wholely dependant on what kind of dev and project youre working on. For example, browser devs would diaagree given that all browsers on IOS must use Webkit.
Ironically, I just buy whatever’s cheaper lol. That was android for a few phones, and I was happy as a clam. Then the time came for an upgrade, and my carrier had a crazy sale for the previous year’s iphone. So I gave it a shot.
Still happy as a clam lol. I think of myself as being very “techy”, I use linux, etc., but I really don’t need my phone to do anything special. I use like 6 apps that are all multi platform. Very little about my flow changed.
I prefer the keyboard on android actually, and I like firefox on android better than safari. But everything else is pretty much fine. I’d be okay going iphone again, or back to android. Whatever’s cheaper when the time comes.
So generally I believe that Apple respects privacy more than google overall.
That doesn’t mean Apple is some privacy beacon.
But I have never had Apple randomly turn a setting on my phone on. Google got caught redhanded doing that. I had been using android for years until that incident.
Apple I buy my phone. Google I am the product.
I am on android rn but at least in europe, apple is forced to allow 3rd party appstores soon which was the main dealbreaker for me. Their ui + cross device integration is very nice. Hopefully they are going to release a foldable soon! Handwriting apps are much more polished on iPads than on Android.
I think it’s easier and more reliable
I personally wouldn't voluntarily use Apple products myself, but I have people close to me that buy iPhone because they think that's the best smartphone they can buy. There are some truths to it from the standpoints of warranty policies, technologies, privacy policies, update policies, securities, and reputations.
I used to use an iPhone simply because of the jailbreak community. When it became increasingly slower for a jailbreak to release I jumped ship. I got on iPhones around the time of iOS 7 and got off around 11.4.
I got frustrated by buggy behavior from Android in general. Even with Google software (Android Auto), it wasn’t uncommon for functionality to break after updates.
I’ll take consistency over more (but buggier) features. Quality over quantity.
Oh, and the cinematic mode was a game changer for this Vidiot.
Integration. When I copy on my [Mac|iPhone|iPad|AppleTV] I can then paste on the other devices. When I enter the search field on the AppleTV my phone lets me type to the screen. I can transfer web pages from screen to screen if I wanna change where I'm browsing. All my devices work seamlessly with my AirPods. Etc.
More reliability, more polished OS and longer support cycle.
I bought one because I thought that the camera would be better, but I'm having a hard time telling the difference between phones these days.
Also, Mini.
Because Apple is still the only company to do a small smartphone without seriously degrading its performance.
Zenfone!
Here in Non-USA-istan (aka the rest of the world), most Chinese midrange phones hold their own for years and are not frowned upon by the local population for being "poor people phones".
Got my Xiaomi Redmi Note 11T near its launch date for a third of the cost of an iPhone and I don't regret it at all. Battery life is still exceptional (a full day and change with heavy YouTube and
RedditLemmy usage), I can pretty much play anything I throw the phone at (I can emulate anything up to Dreamcast/Naomi without a hitch, PS2/GameCube/Wii with some caveats, any handheld device up to 3DS/Vita almost flawlessly), and the camera does a decent job capturing good photos and video at up to 4K@30fps. I'm not filming a freaking documental with the device, but I can catch vacation photos with printing quality and that's enough for me.I would suggest you to give a look at the Sony Xperia 5, but we know that's a lousy motivation.
integration with the ecosystem. i have a mac, ipad, apple watch, airpods. it’s all so seamless. i can use my watch to ping my phone when i lose it in the blankets even when it’s on silent, i can copy text on one device and paste it on another, all my tab groups are on my computer, phone, and tablet and sync.
i like iOS. i had an ipod touch in the 2010s, so i’ve used it for over 10 years. i’m used to it, i know all the little tricks and shortcuts. i really like how it looks aesthetically.
magsafe. i don’t even use a wireless charger, but i have a magsafe pop socket, and it’s a game changer for me. i have small hands, and a pop socket is very convenient for me, but i don’t like that the regular ones take a lot of effort to remove, and sometimes i want my phone to lay flat, or need to remove the pop socket to put my phone in its dashboard grip. the magsafe pop socket holds strong enough to be effective, but can easily be removed when needed. unlike the pop socket that grips the side of the case, with the magsafe one my phone sits flat instead of wobbling when propped up.
I actually use magsafe with my Pixel 6 Pro. They sell adapters you can put on your case. I recently tried some of my magsafe stuff on a friend's Iphone and holy crap is it terrible on the Iphone. Not as strong is the only drawback but, it was significantly weaker
interesting! I didn’t know they made those. is it bulky at all? my fiancée uses a pixel 5a, i wonder if she would be interested in that.
i’m curious that you found the iphone magsafe to be weaker, in my opinion it’s just right, strong enough to hold, but not so strong that i struggle to take it off. were you using it directly on the iphone or did the iphone have a case on it? it might not have been a magsafe compatible case. but i’m speculating of course.
Because I get a phone that is updated and working for more years. I’m not buying a $1,000 smart phone every two years. Still on a XR and it works great. Was on a 6 before that. And then a 4 before that. They last a long time if you don’t drop/step on them.
I like that I don’t have to customise or complicate the phone experience. I just want it to browse and communicate. I leave customisation for desktop. Blue bubble is a plus. Same system as my wife is important. And honestly I just like iPhones inertia when scrolling. Androids don’t look or feel right to me.
I don’t want to be the guy with low res photos in the group chat
Literally no reason other than blue bubbles.
I was all ready to switch and then someone asked “so you don’t care about the blue bubbles eh?” and I chickened out and got yet another iphone
The optimisation. And the ecosystem of iPad iPhone AirPods Mac. Watch
For fun. My last iPhone was a 4S, and after that I had a couple Sony Xperias and a Samsung Galaxy. When it was time to upgrade, I decided to get an iPhone 11 for a change, for no other reason than to see what they're like nowadays.
I've been really happy with it, it does everything I need it to do, and I don't miss the Galaxy at all.
How would you rate the Xperia compared to the galaxy?
So I had a Z1 and Z2, and the Galaxy was an S8+. To be honest, I don't remember much about them, but overall I think I'd rate the Xperias higher than the Galaxy simply because I don't remember ever being annoyed with them. They were just reasonable, good phones that didn't try to do anything crazy.
My two major gripes with the Galaxy were:
There was a HUGE physical button that would activate the Bixby voice assistant thingy so I'd often press it by accident. The button could only disabled in the Bixby app... which required a Samsung account. So I had to create an account just so I could go into the settings and flip a switch to disable that stupid button, and then never use the app or account again.
The fingerprint reader was totally useless. It was so small that it wouldn't work unless I hit it just right, and it was placed on the back of the phone right next to the camera so it was basically impossible to hit reliably, and chances are I'd accidentally get fingerprints on the camera instead. It was even worse with a protective case on because the reader was recessed inside the hole for the camera.
The one thing I really liked about the Galaxy was the always on display. It was nice being able to check the time in the dark without lighting up the entire screen and blinding myself. For my next phone, I'll probably get something that has that feature.
Smaller brands, those with fewer customers, also have lower repurchase rates. iPhone being such a large brand has a high repurchase rate. For most people who own an iPhone simply buying another iPhone is the most convenient option.
It's purposely designed to get you in the ecosystem easily an comfortably and make your exit hard, so you stay and keep buying all gadgets from them
Yep the walled garden approach. But I guess my point is the bigger the garden the easier it is to find and the harder it is to exit.
I mean, apple makes it really hard to leave their ecosystem... Once you're in...
It's basically a non issue to go from eg Samsung to LG to Google. So it's easier to "leave" those specific brands.
Ease of use: I don’t want to even have the ability to tinker with my UI, etc. I like the fact that it’s simple and predictable. Plus iMessage is so good.
Ecosystem: iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, Apple TV, Mac. They all work together and very well.
Health/Fitness: Apple actually puts effort into this category when no other Android manufacturer consistently does. Goes along with Apple Watch.
I like the clean design of iOS, and I like being able to Apple Pay my whole family if needed cause we still share like a phone bill and stuff, so it's easier to Apple Pay than bank transfer or download an app.
Plus I like Apple's credit card and now I have their savings account too....
Have you tried getting a human on the phone with any Google product ever ?
Leave a comment if you have ever talked to a google/alphabet employee during their work hours about a problem that you have with a google/alphabet service or product ?
I had two android phones. The first one bricked itself after about a year, and the replacement was unusable a year later (even google maps was laggy). The second one suffered the same fate, with the added fun of being abandoned by Samsung after only 1 major android update
Consistency.