I agree with what the article says about sharing data between applications, this really is one of the biggest pain points of iOS right now. Fortunately, it looks like Apple will finally address this in the future, iOS 6 already has infrastructure in place to allow for remote view controllers that (in theory) should allow any application to register itself to handle certain data and events. Right now seems to be only used privately, for example to launch the mail application from other applications, but my guess is that iOS 7 will add public API's for other applications to do the same. Whether this means you can change default applications like Maps etc. I don't know, but the way Apple handled the (lack of) public-transit directions in Apple Maps suggests they are starting to be more flexible about default application handlers.
That said, I wasn't really impressed by any of the other points the article makes. It starts out by saying 'Android on the Nexus 4 is better in almost every aspect', but besides the sharing thing it doesn't make a case for anything else. Some half-hearted observation that 'sometimes it even appears like rendering is smoother on the Nexus 4' and 'not all Android applications look like crap anymore' and that's about it. Oh and of course you can 'customize everything' and here you have 4 examples of the most ugly homescreens I have ever seen on a mobile phone.
Hardly a clear-cut case of 'better in almost every aspect'. Looks like it's more a matter of preference than an objective evaluation on which of the 2 platforms is 'better'.
Oh and of course you can 'customize everything' and here you have 4 examples of the most ugly homescreens I have ever seen on a mobile phone.
Good grief, you speak of personlisation like it's a bug and not a feature. I personally hate the iOS window-dressing. You have this sleek-looking bit of hardware, but the OS looks plastic and Fisher-Price, with safe and chunky buttons to give to your kid with no sharp edges. The way you speak, it sounds like you would deny me my preference for something different because you think it's ugly. What about those who don't think the default skins look good? Why isn't it a good feature that we can customise the way things look?
I really don't understand the Apple-spawned fanboy cult that considers personalisation to be a bad thing - especially since they once had a successful marketing campaign based around personalising your hardware with the coloured macs.
The moment you say "fanboy" and/or "cult" in reply to a comment you lose a lot of credibility.
" the Apple-spawned fanboy cult"
This is a completely meaningless phrase. It's easy to accuse people of this and impossible to prove. Furthermore when you say something along the lines of "you're just a fanboy of company X" the other guy can just come back and say "well you're a fanboy of company Y" and then everyone sounds ridiculous.
But to your point, I personally like the Apple design and I think that too much customization really can make a beautifully designed piece of hardware look like crap. That said, I also understand that other people either really love customizing their phones and/or have awful taste and that's fine and for them, iOS isn't the best choice. Whatevs. It happens. The thing is, you can't please all the people all the time so I'd say it's a great thing that Apple limits what you can do to personalize the phone. That's one thing that attracts people like me to it. Luckily they're not the only game in town so for the others you have choices.
You're really taking this as a direct insult it seems. I wish you wouldn't have made that fanboy crack because you did have a decent point in there under all the anger.
I'm not fond of making the crack either, to be honest, but I was annoyed by the subtext of what was being said: people make things that are ugly to me, so I don't like customisation.
For the record, I have had two android phones. The first got cyanogenmod put on it, not for UI (though it was prettier than stock), but because I was having reception problems and the carrier was dragging feet in upgrading their image (one of the good things about iOS, this one). The second phone runs stock carrier UI, which I haven't changed.
I didn't take the insult personally for me, but it does annoy the living shit out of me when some people say that others should be personally limited because of aesthetic opinion. There does seem to be this form of opinion that because Apple does design really well, that any design choice made is perfect, therefore the default position is 'apple is right and you are wrong', despite apple making some design blunders along the way.
Chill out and take a deep breath, because you're missing the point entirely. I was talking about the arguments the article gives that supposedly show 'Android is better in almost every aspect', not about the merits of customization itself. No one is denying you anything, like I said: it seems to be more like personal preference than objective superiority. Sure enough Android wins on customizability, but that doesn't automatically mean everyone cares for this particular aspect of the OS.
I always find it amusing how fans of customizability seem to over-estimate the importance of dicking around with something the vast majority of people primarily use as a tool, a useful utility. If the defaults work well (which seems to be the case for iOS, even toddlers appear to be able to use it), that's already much, much better than something that sucks by default but can be customized to suck less.
That said, if you really care about customizability, you can always jailbreak your iPhone and do whatever you like, lots of customizations possible on jailbroken iPhones. Or just buy an Android phone if customizability is high on your list of priority features. Again, this is more about personal preference than anything else.
On a side note:
Years ago when I was just starting to use Linux, I spent weeks customizing every aspect of the look & feel of the user interface. After a while I always got bored with what I had and started to get irritated by the various usability issues my customizations had introduced, so I started over. I went from FVWM to fluxbox, to Gnome, to KDE, back to Gnome, to XFCE and then back to Gnome again. The last time I switched to Gnome I stopped caring about customizations and simply stuck with the defaults, I had more interesting and important things going on in my life to spend time on, instead of wasting my time trying to be smarter than the people who designed the user interfaces I was using. I bought my first Mac running OS X and just used it the way Apple designed it, and never looked back. Since then I lost intereset in customizing my computers and phones altogether, realizing it's more like a hobby than actually making anything 'better', because 9 out of 10 times, you're only making things worse.
You seem to think that 'allows customisation' and 'defaults that work well' are mutually exclusive for some reason. Note that I was responding to your characterisation of personalisation, which was essentially "give people the ability to personalise and they make it ugly!". Yes, to you. Not to them.
I've also never really understood the toddler argument for 'well-designed'. 'Simple', sure, but not 'well-designed'. We don't consider this for any other thing we do - board games aren't considered poorly designed if a toddler can't play them; music isn't considered poorly put together if it's not in thirds, which young kids are drawn to; food isn't considered poor just because a toddler won't eat it, and neither are the utensils to prepare it considered shoddy because a toddler can't use them easily. 'Simple' and 'well-designed' can co-exist, but 'simple' does not mean 'well-designed'.
I also don't really understand your last paragraph - again, you see to be arguing against customisation because you don't enjoy it, despite other people doing it to have fun. Besides, OS UI designers do so for a generic optimal use-case, and can't possibly satisfy all. Even if it's true that 9 times out of 10 you're making it worse, 10% is still a lot of people to satisfy.
>> You seem to think that 'allows customisation' and 'defaults that work well' are mutually exclusive for some reason.
Well often they are, especially in a complex piece of software like a phone OS. Customizability requires trade-offs which may affect usability or performance. More often than not, software that allows skinning looks butt-ugly in the default setting and integrates poorly with the rest of the system (think Java desktop applications etc).
Anyway, you still seem to assume I hate customization just because I have no need for it, while my original comment was about one thing, and one thing only: that customization isn't actually a very strong argument to compare mobile OS'es on, primarily because better defaults always beat customizability (and IMO, looking past the homescreen, taking all aspects of the OS and ecosystem into account, iOS is still miles ahead of Android in that regard), but also because it isn't all that interesting to (I assume) most smartphone users.
>> I've also never really understood the toddler argument for 'well-designed'. 'Simple', sure, but not 'well-designed'.
I'd say 'simple' is almost the penultimate goal of UI design, especially when you are talking about something as complex as a mobile phone. Today everyone takes for granted that even your granny can use a smartphone, but you only have to go back to Windows Mobile to appreciate how much the iPhone has done for smartphone usability. Android users can only be thankful for that because they are profiting from these advancements just as well.
>> We don't consider this for any other thing we do - board games aren't considered poorly designed if a toddler can't play them [..]
I think this is a bit silly, because most board games are intended to be hard, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in playing and winning them. I fail to see the relevance of the other examples. My impression is that you are thinking about 'well-designed' in terms of aesthetics, while I'm thinking about usability and ergonomics. In that context, well-designed is almost a synonym of 'simple' and 'easy to use'. Kids can now operate a smartphone and do things that my parents would have been dumbfounded if they had to do them on a regular PC, yet my mom is perfectly able to find, install and run applications on her iPad, and use it for everything she previously hated to use her PC for. To me, that means we've made progress in terms of usability.
>> I also don't really understand your last paragraph - again, you see to be arguing against customisation because you don't enjoy it
That's a strange way of reading what I wrote, because I what I was saying is that I actually used to enjoy customization until I lost interest in it and found out it almost always makes things worse, not better.
I'd say 'simple' is almost the penultimate goal of UI design
I've run out of time for big swathes, sorry, but I had to comment on this. 'simple' is not the ideal goal of UI design. 'appropriate' is. You want a UI that is best appropriate for the situation. Sometimes this will indeed be simple. Other times it will not be. As an extreme example, could you imagine a cockpit with a single hardware button and a small grid of soft dials?
A more moderate example is that to do serious business work, people still need desktop environments - tablets do not cut it. Mobile OSs are too simple for most serious business work - they don't have an appropriate UI.
Both of your examples are wrong. It is well-known in aerospace industry that cockpit interfaces need vast improvements, and that is actually an active area of research. Pointing to the complexity of an airplane cockpit and saying "look, not all interfaces need to be pretty" betrays a fundamental misunderstanding and/or lack of knowledge about the subject.
Second of all, the reason desktop environments are still preferred for "serious business work" is because of their features, not their UI. I work for a business-to-business software company that has been around for over 25 years, and our product is on version 9. We recently released an iOS app. It is being adopted slowly, but not because of its interface. The interface on it is actually very, very clean and effective. The problem is that we have not yet had the time to port all the features on the desktop version to the iOS version. Therefore it is not used for "serious" work... yet.
I didn't say the cockpit couldn't have improvement, I said could you imagine running one with a smartphone interface. It's really not appropriate for the situation.
Your other example seems to willfully ignore that features are stripped out of mobile OSs for the cause of simplicity, not because they're 'catching up'. Yes, for things that are solely within programs themselves you have a point, but we're talking about the operating system here. Quickly switch between windows? No. Have more than one thing visible at a time? No. Default input mode allows for quick entry of data? No. I mean sure, your program might be the ants pants, but what happens when the user needs to enter data while viewing another document?
>>Yes, for things that are solely within programs themselves you have a point, but we're talking about the operating system here.
I don't think the distinction really matters. In this context, you can think of an operating system as a "master app" that has escalated privileges for things such as root-level access to system functions and the hardware.
>> I mean sure, your program might be the ants pants, but what happens when the user needs to enter data while viewing another document?
This soon won't even be an issue, because the data will not have to be manually transferred between documents by a human user.
Can you really not think of any situation where a person might want to enter data while being able to see another document? Not even a coder looking at a reference guide?
Sure they will. It doesn't have to withstand drop from top of building. Just drop from pocket most of the time. A bit of plastic definitely cushions the blow.
Otter Box seems to be one of the most popular that I see, and it is definitely made to offer some protection.
> That said, if you really care about customizability, you can always jailbreak your iPhone ...
* Yes, you can, for now. There are no guarantees this will happen with future versions of iOS.
* If you jailbreak you are forever a fugitive. You can never again just update, you have to wait and make sure it doesn't kill your setup. You can end up losing your warranty, be refused tech support, etc.
* Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it. I'm OK with the default being locked down, but be like android and give me the checkbox to open up the rest of the world to me (Android devices are certainly not perfect on this front, though).
I agree with the rest of your points. I also have a similar story, but instead of going to OS X, I just started installing Ubuntu and using the defaults without customization. And that's the way I primarily use my devices. I just think it's ridiculous we're even having this discussion about whether people should have full ownership of devices they've paid for.
>> Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it.
Actually, if you buy a phone on contract, you didn't pay the full price and aren't entitled to the same rights as someone who paid the full $650+tax sticker price and gets it SIM-unlocked.
The discussion had nothing to do with being SIM unlocked or not, but rather constraints that remain whether you paid full price up front or not.
However the "on a contract" bit is frequently misrepresented I think: when you get a device on contract, in most cases you are being loaned the cost of the device. You have zero recourse to simply return the device when you decide you don't want it any more. There is little to no difference between buying a phone "outright" on a credit card, or getting it "on contract" with your carrier.
>> Yes, you can, for now. There are no guarantees this will happen with future versions of iOS.
[..]
>> If you jailbreak you are forever a fugitive. You can never again just update, you have to wait and make sure it doesn't kill your setup. You can end up losing your warranty, be refused tech support, etc
Well, in a sense that's an inherent risk of customizability, a tradeoff you have to make. Home screen customizations are probably perfectly safe on stock Android, but I'm not sure how more intrusive modifications will affect updating Android phones that are heavily skinned by the manufacturer (ie: most of them). Maybe I'm wrong, but I suppose you can forget about applying major updates to a Samsung TouchWiz or HTC Sense phone without either undoing or screwing up all your customizations, or in the worst case even bricking your phone to the point it needs a factory reset. If customization was at the top of my feature list, I wouldn't risk anything but a stock Android device.
>> Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it.
From a philosophical point of view you can have all kinds of opinions, assertions and beliefs about anything. In reality, what you are calling absurd applies to a very significant majority of products you can buy in stores. You can tune your car, but don't expect the dealer to fix it under warranty. You can modify the OS on your desktop computer, but don't expect Microsoft or Apple to supply patches to the problems you may introduce, or even make sure stock patches don't break your setup. You can make most electronic devices do things they were never designed for, but the risk of breaking them is all on you.
Here on HN, we take customizing hardware and software for granted and think it's only natural to modify it to make it better suit our needs, but I don't think a whole lot of people around here think the same about modifying (for example) their furniture, their clothes, their kitchen appliances, etc. But I'm pretty sure their are lots of people on other websites talking about exactly those kinds of things, people who wouldn't even think about customizing their mobile phone or PC. I realize this is getting a little tangential, but the point here is that if you really want to, you can modify almost anything, but almost always the risk is on you, whether you like it (from a philosophical standpoint or otherwise) or not. I don't see what makes mobile phones so special that you should expect the manufacturer to provide you with the tools to modify them, especially when there are alternatives that allow it out of the box. No-one forces you to use an iPhone ;-)
> Well, in a sense that's an inherent risk of customizability, a tradeoff you have to make.
What? No, it's an inherent risk of customizability that requires violating the companies ToS to achieve.
You really are suggesting that the 'inherent risk' of any kind of customizability is about the same, regardless of whether the vendor intends to support it as a feature, or intends to _prohibit you_ from doing it and does everything they can to prevent it? Really?
Customizability is of the utmost importance if you want to adapt your device to your workflow. I prefer it to adapting my workflow to each device I use (and they are more than one).
But the important part is that a customizable environment works for both parties: those who support and those who oppose customization.
I am happy with the apple default. I would not be happy with the default android layout, and I have tried to be.
I don't spend my time changing my desktop items. I don't customise my chrome borders, fiddle with rainmeter, etc. I don't even change my desktop background from the first one I got years and years ago. This may not be a very "hacker" attitude, but for me I just want function by default.
Personalisation is never a bad thing, but having a worse default is. Not wanting to faff with your display to get something acceptable is entirely within reason. In each case it is a choice, and the ability to personalise your screen is very much a subjective benefit.
I'm totally with you on this. On both my iPhone and Macbook I don't change the desktop background or much else from the day I get it. There are other things like the terminal colors and such that I do but for the most part I leave the design alone. Now, customization is obviously very important to people and if it is then that's a great reason to switch to a platform other than iOS. But is it a reason that iOS is worse or better than some other platform? Absolutely not. There is room in this world for things to just be different rather than better or worse.
I Just changed to Android yesterday. The first thing I missed was the polish of the iOS.
I looked up how to switch applications and all I got was "10 best task switcher apps." I don't have time to evaluate three, much less ten task switcher apps! All I've been able to find is if you hold down the main button and then scroll to task manager, you can get to one.
I like customization, but Apple's defaults were better for me, at least. You say Fisher-Price, I say well conceived and 1960's Braun.
sorry, missing from my comment (lost in a pre-edit, it seems) was that it looks Fisher-Price to me. I know that plenty of people don't see it that way. Even if nothing else, the big chunky soft buttons seem to jar quite strongly against the thin, sleek, hi-tech look of the hardware to me - while the software and hardware might separately tell their own stories well, to me they don't seem to jive well together.
Newer Android releases have a dedicated onscreen button for this, while older releases have a press and hold on the home button menu with the 6 most recent applications.
I haven't read the article but I was an iPhone3 for a year, nexus 1 for a year, nexus s for a year and now iPhone 4S for a year.
Things I still miss:
I still miss that android apps can download in the background so for example when I wake up I the morning any new podcasts I'm subscribed to are already on the phone. Contrast to iOS6 where I have to remember to manually run the app. Which generally means I only run it just as I'm about to get in the car. I then sit in my entry way for 2-6 minutes waiting for my podcast app to download
I miss that apps can register for more events and act on them. For example any app can register to get an event when a new photo is saved. It can then upload, in the background, that photo. That means I can install one Flickr app, one g+ app and one fb app and the photos get uploaded to all 3 services no matter which app I use to take the photo. Contrast to ios6 where either every photo app has to have built in uploading options for every service I could possibly want. Or, I have to manually run the specific app for each service.
I miss auto app updating. I don't have as many apps as most of my friends on my iPhone but it seems like every day or every other day there's a number on the app store bugging me to update stuff. having to manually update is a distraction, chore, and annoyance I don't need.
Of course I miss being able to choose various default apps. I want Camera+ to be my default camera. I want Google maps to be my default maps. I want gmail to be my default mail app. I want a different apps to be my default music player and video player. I want chrome to be my default browser.
I miss being able to customize my desktop and lock screen. Not just adding widgets but changing it to use other apps. See http://slidescreenhome.com as one example.
I miss geeky things like being able to run an ssh tunnel in one app and use that tunnel in another app.
That said I'm still on iPhone. There's still plenty of things I like about iPhone over Android. I don't see myself switching back for at least a few more generations.
You can do this kind-of on the iPhone. Some apps support the geo fence wake-up thing that lets them update subscriptions.
For example, you can set your home address in Downcast or Instapaper so that when you leave or arrive, those apps will fetch new content without you having to open the app. Downcast will even download the podcasts in the background.
Now, this requires you to move outside the fence, so it's not time based. But I had a decent system where I had my work and home address in Downcast and I set it to fetch whenever I leave or arrive. My regular commute meant that I was always triggering the geo fence.
I'm a very casual podcast listener. I pull up the stock iOS podcast app, hit the podcast I want to listen to, and it streams (plays) while downloading. On non-wifi it takes maybe 4 seconds to start.
Is this unusual? Do other apps make you wait for the whole 'cast to download? Is it a per-podcast thing?
This assumes that you're somewhere with wifi (or 3/4G, I suppose). I do a good chunk of my iPhone media consumption during my commute via the subway - there's no internet underground, so everything needs to be pre-downloaded.
The downside of auto-downloading is that your tablet/phone will run out of battery much faster than on iOS. iOS has stand by times of weeks (31 days?), which is wonderful. My nexus 7 runs dry after days, arguably because of the apps I use, or because the OS allows them. I'm unsure which I prefer, though I'd like to be able to configure a trade-off between the two myself..
+1
I use BeyondPod as my Podcast manager and its set to only download when charging, on WiFi and at 7am. No background processing otherwise. I've used BeyondPod for so long that I don't even realize effective it is until reading all these comments. I have over 40 podcasts that are updated. I listen to them on flights, walking, downtime..etc.
For podcasts, I use Instacast and that definitely downloads in the background, but I believe the app just can't be in suspend state. As long as a bunch of apps have not been opened after instacast, it should download everything fone.
The trade-off is to have background downloading on all the time, which is something I hated about android in the 4 years I used it. Background processes were always killing my battery and it was never obvious what was running.
I think the sane compromise that I wish apple would make is to allow for more permanent background tasks to run, but only when externally powered.
As long as a bunch of apps have not been opened after instacast, it should download everything fone.
See, for me that uncertainty is a killer. I want my podcasts downloaded in the morning. I don't want to have to check before I go to bed that the app is still in memory, that's mad.
There are Android apps that abuse their background abilities, but the vast majority work just fine and don't kill your battery.
I don't think it's a matter of other apps not running after you suspend Instacast. All apps have a limited amount of time to complete something like a download task while backgrounded.
In Downcast, I have set my home as a geo fence, and tell it to fetch new podcasts whenever I leave or arrive.
Downcast is allowed to subscribe to this geofence and wake itself up to fetch new podcasts, all without me opening the app at all. The only catch is if the downloads take more than 15 minutes, they get paused until I open the app again.
You sure make a good case for Android being vastly more capable. After that litany, I'm really curious what are the "plenty of things I like about iPhone over Android". Why are you sticking with the iPhone despite your compelling list of Android advantages? I ask as someone who has used iPhone but not Android, is keenly aware of iOS limitations, but likes the hardware.
I'd say the number one thing that made me switch to iPhone a year ago and that keeps me there is that it still feels like most apps appear on iOS first.
I like checking out new apps and games in particular. My impression is that more games are released first on iOS and then later Android (or not at all).
Others have complained that the average quality of apps on iOS seem to be higher than the average on Android. That's changing but it was certainly true a year ago. It's less true now.
The UX on iOS is still superior IMO to Android. I guess that's far more subjective. Some people like the back button on Android. I hate it since it's impossible to know where it's going to go.
but they require apps to do the right thing (insert fake history so pressing back in one screen always takes you to the same screen). That means there will always be apps that don't follow the rules. iOS doesn't have this issue because it doesn't have a back button.
That's just one example. There's more on that page. The Android team says they are 1/3rd the way there. Not sure how many versions until they are all the way there but I'm definitely looking forward to it.
There's a few issues I'm not sure will ever get fixed. The virtual (home/back/task) buttons really get in the way on games. Playing a game, at least an action game, my fingers slide all over the place. With the current iPhone design it's very unlikely to press the home button by accident but not so on Android (or at least not so for me). I'm sure some players have no problems.
There's a huge accessory market for iOS. Battery cases, Camera cases (lenses), stereos, 20x the case styles. I really wish Google would define some kind of standard for Android docks. iPhone5 broke all of this but I'm sure the market is catching up quick. Of course this is a fragmentation issue for Android but I'm sure someone creative could come up with a solution.
I'm sure there's a few others but that's the few that popped into my head.
I've switched between the two platforms a bit - I had an iphone 3G, a few android phones, and switched back to iOS with iPhone 5. I really like Android but there were a few deal killers:
1) Battery life - pretty much the reason I switched back to iPhone. It doesn't matter how great the software is - if I can't turn on the phone it's useless. I don't know how many times I would be racing to meet friends at night, hoping I would reach them in time before my phone completely died. I spent an unforgivable about of my time tinkering with settings to extend battery using widgets (toggling data, location services, turning down brightness to the point it was barely viewable, etc.). My last phone was a Galaxy Nexus and almost everyone on my team had one. Guess how many people had 4G on? No one - the phone died in hours with it on.
A close friend, who is a diehard Android fan, keeps a stock of 3 charged batteries on him at all times (he has a separate charger). All of this was just too much of a hassle for me to justify. I haven't had a single day where my phone has died before I've gone home with my iPhone; it lasts a full day with my normal usage.
2) OS upgrades - I was debating between the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 5 for my last phone purchase. Besides battery issues, a major con was that I knew the S3 would probably never be updated. Some of my favorite Android features are recent updates (Google Now) and it'd be painful to know that I probably miss out on new features for the 2 years of my phone contract. If the phone you want is a Nexus, this won't be that much of an issue, but that severely limits your device options. And it still somewhat applies to Nexus phones - the Verizon Galaxy Nexus is 3 OS updates behind due to Verizon's approval process.
3) UI/design - There is still a lack of UI/design consistency across the Android ecosystem. It means that the learning curve for the ecosystem is still higher than iOS and sometimes things don't behave the way you expect. Anyone who uses a combination Maps, Nav, and the back button heavily will feel this. I find that the Google Maps iOS app is significantly more consistent than the Android version (although less powerful). This is a consistent theme with iOS vs. Android - better UI but less power.
4) Camera - The camera is one of my most frequently used applications and Galaxy Nexus camera was pretty bad; Google sacrificed camera quality for shutter speed. There are a few Android phones with great cameras (S3) but they are not part of the Nexus line (see #2)
5) App polish - There is still a gap in the quality of applications on the two ecosystems. This is due to many developing on iOS first and Apple's review process. This is a minor complaint since the gap is narrowing and I expect this advantage to be gone by the end of 2013.
6) Maintenance & Depreciation - Have a cracked screen? Good luck finding a shop that will replace your phone model at a decent rate. Screen replacement on my Galaxy Nexus was $100+ while you can easily get your iPhone screen replaced for $30. Depreciation is a "feature" many don't think about, but it's nice to know that I can sell my phone for a decent rate if I switch back to Android (http://priceonomics.com/phones/)
I'm still a big fan of Android and will probably switch back when there's a Nexus phone released with a solid battery & camera.
>And it still somewhat applies to Nexus phones - the Verizon Galaxy Nexus is 3 OS updates behind due to Verizon's approval process.
It really is fairly straightforward to unlock the bootloader and update the ROM yourself, though. It would certainly be nicer if you didn't have to, but it's definitely an advantage of the Nexus devices that there's always good community support for this.
It also lets me use 4G wireless tethering on my unlimited data Verizon plan -- for that reason alone I'm not even a little tempted to switch to an iPhone. Really, the huge difference in camera quality is the only thing I'm jealous of.
Sent from a Starbucks where the internet is down. :)
Its probably not that straightforward for the non-techie crowd; at the end of the day these devices are built for the general population and not just hackers.
And to go on that reasoning, it should be just as easy to jailbreak an iPhone to allow tethering as well.
Regardless, my point was not that iPhones have a better feature set than Android (this isn't the case) but rather to outline a few deal breakers that made me migrate back to iOS.
Android users will tell you that battery life is not an issue anymore but that hasn't been my experience at all. I think that it's a case of you can get good battery life as long as you don't take full advantage of most of the Android features. In particular GPS based apps are horrible on Android, most of them seem to poll constantly.
The article talks up the app data sharing, but I haven't found many apps that take advantage of it. Sorry, it just feels kinda gimmicky to me.
As a diehard iPhone User (Original, 3G, 3GS, 4, 4s, 5) - I'd like to point out that the iPhone isn't without it's "GPS Battery sin" also. 90% of the time when my battery goes crashing to zero (while simultaneously heating up the chassis), it's some crappy (or even quality) Application sucking on the GPS in the background without me wanting it to. DarkSky (Weather App) has been a bad culprit recently, but there have been a host of them.
My single most desired feature of the iPhone that I know I will never, ever, get - is a list of how much power each app has used in the last 1/2/4/12/24 hours. I understand that data is available through xcode telemetry, but Having to search for purple icons throughout the environment, reboot your iPhone, switch into Airplane mode - just to get full control over your battery gets old after a while...
The closest I've seen, though I haven't really looked hard and it's not a full analysis, is Battery Doctor by Kingsoft, which shows current draw for apps, both active and inactive, and system. It's only good for hints, and if there's something better I'd like to know about it.
I've got a GSM Galaxy Nexus. I picked up a 3.5 Amp-Hr battery on amazon, and the phone lasts 3-4 days on a charge now. It's a massive quality-of-life improvement. The only things I switch on/off are GPS and wifi.
I had an iPhone 3G. I despised the thing. It just made me wait allthetime for everything I wanted to do. It was probably the slowest iPhone ever made (bad RAM decisions), but after I left, I'm happy never to go back. Most importantly, I can avoid the iTunes ecosystem now. I can stream my music on my work linux box, off my phone, or any other device I want.
My 4G Xoom dies really quickly with 4g on. it's kept me off of 4g as a technology for at least a year.
I've got a GSM Galaxy Nexus. I picked up a 3.5 Amp-Hr battery on amazon, and the phone lasts 3-4 days on a charge now. It's a massive quality-of-life improvement. The only things I switch on/off are GPS and wifi.
The fact that you still have to turn off GPS and wifi to get 3 days battery life with a 3500mAh battery sort of proves the original point.
Most importantly, I can avoid the iTunes ecosystem now. I can stream my music on my work linux box, off my phone, or any other device I want.
That's funny because in Canada, iTunes is the only realistic way to buy digital music on a smartphone. On Android I really missed Sound-hounding a song, and then clicking on the link to buy it in iTunes instantly.
My 4G Xoom dies really quickly with 4g on. it's kept me off of 4g as a technology for at least a year.
I don't have 4G, but a friend has an iPhone 5 and even though he's always on 4G he gets great battery life. YMMV.
I routinely read through the comments before I actually click on the link to the article. It's a quick indicator to the quality of the article and often, I learn more from the comments vs. the article itself.
I used to do the same thing until I realized how much it affected my interpretation of the article. It colored my thoughts, making me part of the hivemind. Now I read the article first, then wait a few seconds before looking at what other people think so I can better for my own opinion.
Somewhere between 50-75% of the time I don't read the articles posted to HN. The comments are frequenty more interesting, and almost always have commenters that are more informed about the original topic.
Well, there are quite beautiful homescreens and widgets for android. You don't have to use them but i would say that iPhone users are just missing out on something.
Sure, you are used to just take what Apple gives you and praise that but i couldn't.. I want high customizability and i love to change the entire phone setup when i get bored by the current setup.. or try out a new home screen once in a while. It's painless and fun for me to do :)
But surely, what really is missing on iOS is the whole intent/sharing system. It's just painful to try to interact between several apps on my iPad.
This is I feel like I can't trust anyone on this sort of thing. I had an Android tablet. Widgets are almost universally ugly and useless. "Beautiful Widgets" is a great example of what passes for well designed on Android, and it's ugly as sin and useless.
Did you ever change the theme from the default for the widget? The default is exceptionally bad and mimics the one from HTC Sense (also extremely ugly).
Not bad, but I still prefer the consistency Notification Centre widgets provide. Swiping down from the top and swiping to the side are pretty equivalent actions IMO.
Yeah, if you're comparing those two things, I'd agree it's about the same difficulty to access either. Normally, I just look at my lockscreen though if i want the weather (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24904191/2013-01-05%2000.45.21.png). I'm using Cyanogen 10 in that screen shot before lockscreen widgets, so that wouldn't be found on stock Android, but I assume there's some sort of lockscreen widget for 4.2 that can do something similar.
True. For the record I'm in favour of using device's lockscreen for more, that does feel like wasted space that could be used for more at-a-glance information. When the iOS jailbreak rolls around for my current model I typically hop on board and install LockInfo so I can have twitter & weather at a glance.
The thing is though I don't really miss it when I don't have it, it's just a nice extra when it's available so it's never been a convincing reason for me to consider Android. TBH I find LockInfo to look nicer as well.
Android widgets always felt really inconsistent to me, however I've never used CyanogenMod and I do like the look of that screenshot. Clean, consistent, and most of all not gigantic and flashy.
They also have an option to add your calendar notifications to the lockscreen as well for daily events. I don't have them added there, but it's a nice touch to see what is on your literary next with a quick glance. Cyanogen is really the only ROM I trust and the most professional. I don't agree with all their decisions (though that's kind of typical of any project), but they're more professional than most other projects and have higher standards for gerrit commits they accept.
They have a built in updater for their ROMs since Cyanogen 9 (4.0) so no more having to download from a website. Delta updates may have been merged in recently, but have not had time to stay on top of their changes. Killer feature for me though has always been switching music tracks with the volume buttons (like how Blackberry would do it by hold pressing the volume button). I never knew how much I missed it until trying to run one day without it. It's a pretty trivial thing to add to the AOSP source though (add maybe 50 lines total to a few Java files in the framework base) and wished Google would do it. I can only assume there must be some sort of patent/licensing reason as to why they don't.
You're right about wasted space and stock devices have yet to really find a good way to use it. I don't really like how Google implemented lockscreen widgets in 4.2 if you tried them out yet. They're either full out maximized (by pulling them down and thus no easier than unlocking the device) or they're minimal. Someone will probably mod them to be more customized in the community I would guess. I'm still using 4.1.2 on my Galaxy Nexus just for stability since CM 10.1 (4.2.1) is still in early development.
Random question, but how is the post-jailbreak modding community for iphone? I mean I could look it up, but I'm guessing you have some first hand observations.
> but how is the post-jailbreak modding community for iphone? I mean I could look it up, but I'm guessing you have some first hand observations
Pretty good, you would be surprised. I've always been of the opinion that even the iPhone jailbreak community is better organized than anyone who hasn't tried it in person realizes. Via tweaks like DreamBoard you can customize anything and everything. Even total overhauls like turning it into an Android style or WP8 style device. It's pretty remarkable.
It's worth getting ahold of a 4S and jailbreaking to check it out firsthand if possible. The impression I get from Android users is that they feel iOS is completely impossible to customize in any real way. IMO installing total overhauls is actually easier assuming you're past the jailbreak process, which also tends to be simpler than rooting (although obviously that depends on the specific Android device you're trying to root).
Yeah, I'd love to try it out if I happen to find one cheap or one falls into my hands one day. Just as a device to hack around on and play with would be nice. I knew you could theme on iphone, but I didn't realize there was more in the modding community for it than that.
You're correct about the average Android user assuming that there's nothing you can really mod with an iOS device. The fact they assume that is sort of odd to a point, given how many in the Android community readily accept and mod phones without a complete source tree by Samsung, HTC and others in a similar fashion by reversing the dalvik byte code into Smali.
> I knew you could theme on iphone, but I didn't realize there was more in the modding community for it than that.
I definitely have to throw together a video demonstrating various jailbreak tweaks. If I still had my 4S I would do it right now, but I'm waiting on the iOS 6.1 release to jailbreak my iPhone 5. I'll be sure to send you a link if you're still interested.
> The fact they assume that is sort of odd to a point, given how many in the Android community readily accept and mod phones without a complete source tree by Samsung, HTC and others in a similar fashion by reversing the dalvik byte code into Smali.
No doubt, I was astounded at how much I had to figure out and how many attempts I had to make to root an EVO 3D for a friend. And this was after someone had already made a handy tool for the process and spent months developing it.
All that just to take it past the awful stock HTC ROM Rogers left it on and to peel out the crapware. Jailbreaking, by contrast couldn't be simpler. However you can get away with a fair bit more on an unrooted Android device than you can with stock iOS so in reality it's just a tradeoff.
It's nice to see the phone market becoming a Windows/OS X/Linux situation though, where the differences aren't so drastic and what you use basically comes down to personal preference instead of any blatant advantages. Every time I have a chance to play around with a more recent Android device the experience has become better.
Sure, send the video my way whenever you have time :). I'd like to see what is possible just out of hacker curiosity and I do like to enlighten some of the more diehard Android users whenever possible for assuming everything about iOS is bad, haha.
My first Android phone was an HTC, I know where you're coming from with that. Was not the easiest thing to deal with for rooting. Nexus devices are thankfully a bit easier since you don't have to deal with working an exploit to get the bootloader unlocked and root. I pretty much vowed to avoid anything Non-Nexus in the future for that reason and a few others.
I always felt like the lockscreen itself is a total waste.
Most people don't use complex security mechanism on it but rather some slide stuff and why? It wasn't possible to disable the lockscreen for a while but at least now it's possible to disable. It never turns on by accident and i'm right in my homescreen, much better (imo)! :)
I've considered disabling mine, but I figured I may still turn it on by accident in my pocket. Risk is far reduced from say when I had a blackberry (and pocket dialed at times), but I figured it could still happen.
Mh, no, the 3D cylinder is not even default ( i think ) and it's just one option of many. I have set it to normal scrolling behaviour as we know from other home screens.
The 3D cylinder is just one option. This example shows that you can have a very different homescreen (an option you don't even have on the iOS).
Another homescreen with a totally different layout was slidescreen. Sadly it was discontinued: http://slidescreenhome.com/
My point is: Customization is a great thing to have. Atleast for me. All the examples i show you are just a tiny fraction of what is possible, i just don't care so much for nice looking as i care for useful and handy.
The Weather widget is hell of a lot of themes and is quite awesome, the animations on opening etc. They did redesign it recently and it looks just nice. I get that "looks nice" is very subjective but i don't see your point. I can read all texts perfectly fine on the phone.
Another point is: I couldn't live without a calendar widget anymore. It's too nice to have the agenda for the next days right on your homescreen.
Yes, inter-app communication is a major difference for developers. On iOS, apps will say "Supports Twitter and Facebook" and the developers have hand-written the integrations; on Android, the app integrates with whatever the user has installed and the developer does no work at all to integrate with any specific service or app. So it's a win for developers as well as users.
Twitter and Facebook is integrated at a OS level with iOS. A few lines of code gets me access to the user's accounts (with their permission of course).
A bit more generic than that; there's no global setting where user says "this is my preferred App.Net app". When user hits Share in any app (many apps provide such a feature), a menu appears with all available apps user might want to share to. Any app can opt in to be in the menu, based on MIME type of what's being shared.
Does it take you out of the app or bring up a part of the other app which you use to share and then dismiss and you are back exactly where you were before you attempted to share?
That's how it usually works though there's a lot of flexibility. In some cases, it might not even be interactive at all, e.g. adding to your Pocket queue, you'd just hit the Pocket menu item and you're back where you were.
Apps can register to handle URIs, which can be local, or something like http://*.reddit.com/* so whenever a link to reddit is found in say an email or web page, you can choose how to handle it, either via the browser app, or a reddit client.
Launching other apps can be done by any app right now, but the app package needs some info saying the app is able to handle a certain data type or open a certain URL protocol.
I am an Objective-C developer and I love the SDKs on the iPhone, but I am just so tired of Apple's bullshit regarding using our devices the way we want to. I'm tired of waiting for them to enable basic features like phone number black/whitelists.
My next device will be a Nexus. Then I can run apps in the background other than music, share data between apps, sideload apps from third parties, run a mobile terminal, run mobile scripting languages, and basically be free to use my hardware as I'd like.
"I'm tired of waiting for them to enable basic features like phone number black/whitelists."
Keep in mind that's a basic feature for you, not necessarily for all. I wouldn't use it, so I'd prefer Apple to work on X/Y/Z feature instead. Feature priority is hard to work out at the best of times, because no matter what gets picked someone will be disappointed.
My long term interest is in Android, but I switched to an iPhone a year ago to follow that ecosystem, too. The first thing I did was buy three call blocking apps from the App Store, none of which worked at all. After reading all the horror stories about the vaunted App Store approval process to protect innocent iPhone users from bad apps, I realized it was all marketing FUD. When an app has 99% bad reviews, all saying "doesn't work" and it stays in the app store, that is Apple fraud.
Developer community demanded Apple reduced their ban hammer swing, they did. They get a lot of crap that slips through the net because of it, however when complaints are made they seem to respond, the problem being a review isn't a complaint. Well, the problem being Apple isn't draconian enough now really.
I just want to confirm my understanding of the argument you are making: Because Apple backed off a bit on the huge list of things one cannot do with an app, they now have a pass to approve apps that, by definition, cannot ever work on their platform, and can be demonstrated to not work at all by ... trying to use them?
What you're arguing against is not the point of my statement.
If the vendor does not implement something like that, it should still be available as a third-party software. It doesn't need to be a security problem using a system like permissions. If they had a reasonable system there would be multiple options for blacklists.
I'm not irritated that they choose to implement feature X over feature Y, I am irritated because there's no way to implement feature Y at all without their most holy consent.
Something like a blacklist is simple and useful, why can't we have it? Why can't we have mobile interpreters for our scripting languages? Why can't we have apps that download articles while we sleep, without us babysitting the phone to make sure they are open, and add them to a reading list?
It's a small computer. It's ridiculous to restrict it as it is.
> iOS 6 already has infrastructure in place to allow for remote view controllers that (in theory) should allow any application to register itself to handle certain data and events.
As far as I understand, it doesn't provide for an application "register[ing] itself to handler certain data and events", which would probably be an extension to UIActivityView and UIActivity[0]. Remove View Controllers provide two features of interest, one of which could work with UIActivity for sharing:
* An application or framework providing views to an other one (said view could be invoked by a UIActivity of some sort, so that the Facebook application would provide a "Share on Facebook" remote view and the corresponding activity, a sharing application would invoke the activity view, then display the correct remote view upon selection by the user)
* Isolated cross-process communication between the embedding application and the embedded view, which allows different security settings (and thus things like JIT-ed UIWebView, or more simply a twitter remote viewcontroller being able to use the data the Twitter app has access to without leaking it to third parties)
Interestingly it seems like Apple is doing something with remote view controllers with their 12 Days of Christmas app, which could imply they're trying to test it as much as possible in a live context.
I ended up coming down with a cold/flu bug so I was a bit useless and missed the opportunity. My quick notes on it basically go along the lines of:
- 12 Days App remains constant, no outward transition to other app, 12DA is last in tray, normal application switch over/switch back as seen with Facebook auth etc leaves app as 'used' in tray.
- Remote views seem to be getting called as downloads are instantly in store apps on that device, not globally on all devices that can pull them, writing off a trick with the 'download content' settings.
- Not web views as capable of accessing local stored credential for itunes account, unless apple has begun exposing that in some specific and bizarre way.
Wish I hadn't been sick, my plan was to watch the processes to see if they were running something like the mail composition one, or whether it was getting done like the Facebook one.
The coolest bit is that I can install both of these on my phone and tablet (which is back at home and not with me) right now via the links you just shared without having to interact with either device.
What's funny is that this feature gets often pointed out as one of the cool Android exclusives, but iOS has it too: you just need to turn on Automatic Downloads in the store settings, it works for apps as well as media and books purchased from the store.
It's more limited, in that it will download all purchases made on any other device (or iTunes) connected to the same account, but it seems like very few people are aware of it.
Apple does not have a web bases store right? You still have to use itunes and download the app to the computer? Android install can be done via the web store from what I understand
you have to do it from iTunes, but you don't have to download to the computer or do any syncing. It works the same way as Android, just from the iTunes app instead of a web browser.
I know you don't need to sync but buying an app in itunes automatically starts downloading it to the computer. That's how I remember it. Has it changed?
Hopefully, there has been some serious work done on iOS 7 and it'll probably address most of the OP's concerns.
However, I do hope they introduce none of these customization shenanigans. I don't care for widgets (nor do I want another icon or thing I cannot remove from my homescreen). If the base OS is sufficiently good UI-wise, there is no reason ever to need to customize its looks besides the wallpaper (e.g. OS X).
I disagree - widgets are enormously important to me, and were the deciding factor in my choosing an android phone. I'm quite forgetful, and I have a tendency to focus on one thing to the exclusion of others. Widgets allow me to display important information on my home screen that will be shown to me every time I look at the phone.
This means that I can have a list of (for example) upcoming birthdays on my phone that I see over and over again, enough that I will eventually see the reminder at a point when I am in a position to do something about it. Alarms are useless by comparison, because I will inevitably be busy with something else when they go off. Calendars/todo apps are equally useless to me, because they require me to remember to open up an app all the time.
I realise my use case is relatively niche, but I imagine there's a lot of different niche users out there that benefit from customisability.
I do the same thing. I have a birthday calendar and todo list on my home screen, it's immensely helpful. Even more so now that I can also have it on my lock screen.
But see, you have analyzed that you desperately needed some kind of birthday widget and that iOS didn't suit your particular needs. You switched over or went directly to Android. That's fine, you have an alternative and you seem happy with it.
However, I despise such things. I've analyzed that I wouldn't stand using Android for those reasons, and that I'm better off with iOS.
I go with Apple's motto: "there's an app for that".
That's absolutely fair enough - I love that there's a variety of options out there for everyone, and I'm never going to criticise someone for finding what works for them.
I guess my point was more about the statement that there's no need for customization if the OS is well-designed - to my mind, there may be no need for customization for many (or perhaps even a majority) of users, but there is for some. An OS that tried to serve all niche needs without allowing customization would likely be a confused mess - and yet, for those users, having their niche need served can be extremely important.
This is basically what I miss most from Android. My home screen was taken up largely by my upcoming calendar items. It was a nice ambient awareness of what I had coming up, with absolutely no effort on my part.
My understanding was that at least on the lock screen there was no easy way to distinguish between different calendars - I want birthday reminders to show up persistently for at least a week before the event, which is obviously undesirable for most other events.
If the lock screen gets/has that functionality, I'm not sure what the real difference between that and a widget is - except that mine displays on the home screen while yours displays on the lock screen.
And those things only work in cases where Apple has made special agreements. It's going to look silly when Facebook and Twitter are no longer things and iOS rushed to integrate them instead of just opening an API to enable it.
If the base OS is sufficiently good UI-wise, there is no reason ever to need to customize its looks besides the wallpaper
I take it you share Jobs' opinion on clothes? Same jeans, sneakers, turtleneck every day. Hey, it's perfectly functional, why would anyone want to vary things or look different? I mean, everyone has the same use-case, right?
Actually, now that you mention it, I pretty much wear the same-looking clothes all year long. I have one brand and a favorite cut for each of my garments and I stick to it. I even have 20 pairs of identical black socks for easy selection in the morning.
I like how iOS and OS X force us into one particular set of minimalistic UI. I despise skeuomorphism and I'm eager to see it go away on iOS. But I realize others may want to customize their OS, and for that they have to be grateful to have alternatives, namely Windows/Unix and Android/WP.
Yes, because android has always been buttery smooth. And the battery life has always been excellent. The density of the screen was impressive from day one.
I agree, though I think some of the "not all Android applications look like crap" type stuff is just pointing out that some of the things people have used to beat Android with in the past are no longer true which is fair enough.
That said, I wasn't really impressed by any of the other points the article makes. It starts out by saying 'Android on the Nexus 4 is better in almost every aspect', but besides the sharing thing it doesn't make a case for anything else. Some half-hearted observation that 'sometimes it even appears like rendering is smoother on the Nexus 4' and 'not all Android applications look like crap anymore' and that's about it. Oh and of course you can 'customize everything' and here you have 4 examples of the most ugly homescreens I have ever seen on a mobile phone.
Hardly a clear-cut case of 'better in almost every aspect'. Looks like it's more a matter of preference than an objective evaluation on which of the 2 platforms is 'better'.