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?
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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.
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 :(
Also, custom ROMs are great on supported phones, even after the official OTAs gone
I still haven’t quite forgiven Google for abandoning owners of the Nexus 5X the second the Pixel came out…
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.
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 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?
Only security updates.
OS updates are only 3 years
Iphones get a lot more than 3 updates
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Must be another American thing, like blue bubbles. I know plenty of people with iPhones and nobody uses facetime.
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.”
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.
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:
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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.
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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
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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.
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
why do you use iPhone?
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.
I don’t want to get sucked into an ecosystem where my choice of what product to buy is so limited.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I use an iPhone 12 because:
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longevity. Between software updates and an over powered phone cpu I know it will last. Android phones in general barely get security updates.
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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.
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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.
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.
Ah sorry, still getting used to this UI, thought that was in reply to a different level comment.
Updates more than one or two years after the release of a device is the exception, not the norm.
Through the AOSP, many android phones are maintained indefinitely by the community. But I agree that proprietary firmware blobs don’t get maintained for nearly as long as they should.
Custom ROMs are a thing of course. I use them too. Custom ROMs are, again, the exception rather than the norm however; most people use the stock ROMs and that’s what I was referencing.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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 …
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.
