7 ms·

This is literally the capstone of iOS. You have no power, or privlidge. You work in the languages the master wants, using the tools the master has you buy, usin

by zanny 11y ago

This is literally the capstone of iOS. You have no power, or privlidge. You work in the languages the master wants, using the tools the master has you buy, using the APIs the master blesses you with. You never come close to owning the device, and you don't own your software for it. The greatest irony is how many walked into this with open arms, and how many continue to praise this. iOS only thrives on the developers who sacrifice their power to Apple's will. Apple stands atop a glass house built on lock in and memes about how good their products are. Its the users that pledge allegiance to that manipulation that hold it together.

will_pseudonym 11y ago
I wouldn't say you have no power or privilege. For their 30%, they are putting your device in a market that has the most affluent users of technology, in the world. There's a reason that they've been able to get away with what they're doing--they're giving consumers what they want. It's just that important things like this aren't decided by popularity, e.g. freedom. They're rights bestowed to us by our government. I'm not saying that what Apple is doing is right or wrong. I am saying that them doing it is a great loss of freedom for users and developers.
- mondoshawan 11y ago
  Rights are not bestowed upon us from our government -- they are natural and inalienable and a part of what makes us human.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - burnte 11y ago
    While I'm a rabid defender of rights, I don't agree they are not bestowed upon us, nor that they are unable to be taken away. Ask anyone in prison or a wartorn or repressive country if they still have all of their human rights. They don't. Rights CAN be taken away, and routinely are. The question is do we fight to retake and retain them.
    - c22 11y ago
      I think it's just a terminology thing. Naturally our rights are inalienable, but we tend to rely on our governments to enforce this reality.
      - mondoshawan 11y ago
        The terminology here is absolutely key, though. A government cannot imbue someone with "rights" -- only privileges.
        Bjartr 11y ago
        For those who are interested, there is more information of the philosophy of natural/inalienable rights available on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights
    - mondoshawan 11y ago
      You misunderstand -- I'm not saying they can't be taken away. What I'm saying is that they cannot be /given/, /granted/, or /bestowed/ because governments don't make or own rights. Every human is innately free whether or not a governmental entity likes it or not. Whether or not those rights are oppressed or not is another story.
      - pkroll 11y ago
        You're making rights out to be something they aren't. Humans, outside of government, humans "in the wild" have exactly the rights an animal has: they're free. Free to be food for something bigger, or to defend themselves if they can. But that's about it. Rights are a human-made concept, and can only be given from one person to others.
        chris_wot 11y ago
        So if rights are bestowed upon someone by another person, who bestowed those rights to the grantee? And who bestowed them to that person, and so on?
  - rnovak 11y ago
    You only have rights as long as your government is willing to respect them. For this purpose, bestowing a right and not taking it away are exactly the same (and you acknowledge below that a government can "take away" rights). Secondly, a "right" is a human concept, born of human logic. It is not natural, the Universe & Reality doesn't care one way or another what "rights" humans have.
fryguy 11y ago
The only way to get apps on the original iPhone was to hack your iPhone. It was only through the incredible demand that users wanted to do this that Apple actually released a store for applications. I'm continually surprised at people that are surprised when Apple does stuff like this. To engage in a little snark, I wonder how long it will be before Apple adds a feature to the next version of iOS that allows f.lux-like functionality, and then claim they invented it.
- MBCook 11y ago
  I doubt it. A few million downloads is still a drop in the bucket and such software has been available for OS X forever and they haven't cared to integrate it.
  - OJFord 11y ago
    There's a tonne of stuff available for OS X forever that they haven't cared to integrate though. Not true of iOS, mobile is somehow different, and as above - it started off completely closed to third-parties!
    - MBCook 11y ago
      And that has saved them from a ton of complexity and security issues. Users (by and large, HN is very skewed from normal) don't seem to mind at all.
- encoderer 11y ago
  Interesting perspective. I've always thought the lack of an appstore in 1.0 was just pragmatic. It definitely made it easier to launch the first version of iOS and cope with the very limited resources -- 128MB of ram!
  - jakejake 11y ago
    At the time, Jobs was showing off how developers could create app-like experiences using HTML - with the ability for people to "install" your app using the add-to-home-screen feature. That was the intended solution for us plebs. Native apps were most likely going to be only for partner companies. Ironically when people starting creating actual apps using HTML via PhoneGap and the like, Apple was resistant to that too!
chrisallick 11y ago
it's also one the greatest digital publishing platforms ever invented... sooooo sorry that every once in awhile they enforce some rules to keep it so. The alternative is Android. Which, if you ever tried to program for, is literally worse than going to the dentist.
- ehnto 11y ago
  Sorry, your comment is grandiose enough that I couldn't help but comment. The platform is just another package manager under the hood. No doubt based off of the hard work from the unix community on which iOS is based. Apple fanboys have a long history of taking credit for the whole cake when all Apple tend to do is put on the icing. It is delicious icing no doubt, but credit where it is due.
- josteink 11y ago
  > The alternative is Android. Which, if you ever tried to program for, is literally worse than going to the dentist. Parent comment is mostly rubbish, but I'll concede that he has a point about programming for Android. Compared to most other systems I've touched, programming for Android feels incredibly heavy and tooling reliant. Android Studio and an updated toolchain has made it less painful than it used to be with Eclipse, but it's still nowhere as nice as making a standard Web-app, or WinForms app or something like that. I'd love to just blame Java, but really... The Android API could take some sweetening up too.
blinkingled 11y ago
I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86. I can take a bunch of OSes and run them on standard x86 hardware and peripherals more or less, build my own OS if I want to and run my own apps with the compilers, linkers and frameworks of my choice. Skip forward a few years and there's a good chance that will all be gone. x86 is also a less than ideal proposition with Intel the only game in town - sure they are Open Source friendly for now but still it would've been a better world where the likes of AMD and VIA were flourishing in x86 land.
- incepted 11y ago
  > I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86. I've long thought that Apple would have been a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. I'm so glad Android saved us from that.
- parasubvert 11y ago
  "I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86." I don't agree. I grew up with Microsoft ruling the world. The biggest problem wasn't the dictatorship, is was the poor quality of the experience in the face of the dictatorship. Apple has major flaws in its experience, but they're nowhere near as bad as the dog days of Windows 98.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    Right, so dictatorship is pretty good when the experience is ok.
  - blinkingled 11y ago
    What people don't get about Microsoft is however bad they were, they practically enabled a hugely diverse and mostly open hardware and software ecosystem and they had to standardize and open up in order to keep it going. Sure they had their monopolistic ways but fortunately they were reigned in for the better. It's disingenuous to claim user experience requires a closed and non standard system. And besides that Microsoft and Linux distros have made steady progress towards improving the quality and experience while still keeping the PC ecosystem open.
jolux 11y ago
I think I need to preface this by saying that I sideloaded f.lux using the original technique the moment it came out without hesitation and will not remove it from my phone now that it's not kosher. Almost none of this is actually true, just to clarify a few points: - Apps (for the App Store or otherwise) do not have to be written in Objective-C or Swift (see: RubyMotion, Xamarin, PhoneGap/Cordova, React Native, J2ObjC, RoboVM, that thing Microsoft is working on, probably others I don't know about or have forgotten) - You don't have to buy anything to put an app on your personal iOS device, you just download Xcode and work from there (more on this later) I'll concede that you can't access the hardware directly from iOS, meaning yes, it does have to be accessed through APIs, however allowing direct hardware access is a massive legitimate security risk. However, you absolutely do own the device as it exists as hardware. You don't own the software on it, but that's the same for every proprietary software product in existence. What you own is a license to run the software for certain purposes. Whether or not this is a bad thing is for you to decide, but this is not a problem unique to iOS. Furthermore, if you write an app using your free copy of Xcode and put it on your iOS device, you absolutely own the copyright for that app. Now, as for what is true in your comment, yes, you do have to pay $99 a year to distribute apps using the App Store. More than anything else, I believe this is why Apple could not allow this to continue. If this became a trend among iOS app developers, it stands to reason that they would lose a lot of money from developers distributing this way instead of using the App Store. Yes, f.lux is free, but they don't want a trend starting and even with free apps you can still sell advertisements. Again, I'm making no judgment on whether or not it's morally just for Apple to do this, I'm just explaining why it happened in more specific terms. Second, doing this completely subverts Apple's security features. The ability for users to load arbitrary apps onto their devices was to allow people without $99 to run apps that they made on their own devices. This was a privilege originally only afforded to registered developers, and this was intended to lower the barrier to entry for iOS app development. When it's one person writing apps for fun and loading them on their phone to test and show their friends or whatever, the security risk is low. When it's groups of programmers telling people to download a precompiled binary that can't be inspected to ensure its safety and load it onto their devices, it becomes a massive security risk. (as a free software person, you should know that even for us that chose to load it, we don't know what the fuck it contains. f.lux is not open source. for all we know, we just loaded a ton of malware onto our iOS devices.) It should be noted that there are shit tons of open source iOS apps, and so far Apple has not told them to stop providing the source for people to download, compile, and sideload. https://github.com/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps https://github.com/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps There are so many reasons aside from locking down iOS that Apple could have locked this down for. You can't read the source, it's a proprietary app, it subverts their developer agreement, and it's actively encouraging people (176,000 by their count) to load a binary onto their phone the source of which they can't read and that by the developer's own admission is using undocumented APIs. Now, if Apple said that you were no longer allowed to load apps onto your devices without a developer license period, as used to be the case, then that would be a different story and saddening to boot. However, as it stands, f.lux is the only app I know of that this has happened to and there is ample reason for it having happened.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jakejake 11y ago
Meh, Apple wants to control everything because they want a seamless, dead-simple device for non-techies. Because that's the majority of customers - not the power users who want to get down to the bare metal of their machine. They are tyrannical about protecting that experience and basically not allowing you to screw up your device no matter how hard you try. Of course they're making a ton of money on the App Store as well, but I still think it's more about protecting the device. Otherwise they'd just approve every app and collect their commissions.
pjmlp 11y ago
It is how many of us worked in industry before FOSS was a thing. Some of us don't have an issue with this model.
- AUmrysh 11y ago
  It's also possible to have issues with the model but still participate. I've spent the last few years working on a .NET stack doing Android and iOS apps. I'd really prefer building on linux, but sometimes you make compromises because it's what the job requires.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Same applies to me. I started coding on a Timex 2068. So buying tools was the only legal option. Well, we could also type them from books and magazines. Eventually I became a bit of FOSS zealot with the rise of GNU/Linux. However, after a few years and head bumps, I came to realise that I care more about cool technology than being religious about FOSS.
72deluxe 11y ago
Very true, and an interesting comment. It is interesting to see the other platforms attempting to model themselves after this (such as the Windows application store or whatever it is called), although you obviously have the power to install and run whatever you want there. I truly hope that OSX does not become the crippled/locked-down OS that iOS is. I know the new rootless feature is a warning sign, as is only allowing signed applications to run. The hard part for us as developers is that we have to eat and pay bills, so all fleeing to Linux to write desktop software there won't pay our bills. The wide adoption of these Internet appliances (eg. iPad) means we railroaded into writing for them, or find another occupation.
mattlutze 11y ago
> The greatest irony is how many walked into this with open arms, and how many continue to praise this. Show me an alternative that allows me the same level of Just Works as an iPhone. Because Android ain't it. I don't need a reason to spend hours every week having to tweak, poke at, marshal and police the various apps on my phone to make sure normal behavior isn't messing something up. I put up with that for 4 years and never felt like I had a digital partner in my pocket. It was always a consciously present "thing" I had to be wary of eating a battery, crashing a workflow, failing to connect to something or transfer something or save something. I love the linux "always be tinkering" idea but I don't need that to be something I spend part of my decision points on each day. So if Google tightens up implementations of Android to a point where I can trust a device to get out of my way like I can this most recent iPhone, I'm all for giving it another go. But my money's not on that at the moment.
- _yy 11y ago
  My Android phone just works™. No tinkering required. It's not even rooted anymore. I don't have to think about it at all. Maybe you just had a bad device?
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    3 bad devices from HTC and LG, I guess. But the work-supplied iPhone 4 and my now personal iPhone 6S haven't been issues. Never have to worry about batteries, don't hang, etc. etc.
    - _yy 11y ago
      My Galaxy S2 has a battery life of about 2 days and I haven't experienced any hangs for a long, long time.
- davidy123 11y ago
  Through several generations of Android I had problems with battery life. However I never had problems with apps like you describe. Since my Note 4 I cannot complain about battery life, and now that iPhone has taken on some Android features like multitasking, friends I know with older iPhones are having battery issues (including one with an iPhone 5 that just had the battery replaced). So it was a tradeoff of emerging features, where Android had included many more from the start (Apple is more careful/conservative) and they are at parity now.

by zanny 11y ago

will_pseudonym 11y ago

I wouldn't say you have no power or privilege. For their 30%, they are putting your device in a market that has the most affluent users of technology, in the world. There's a reason that they've been able to get away with what they're doing--they're giving consumers what they want. It's just that important things like this aren't decided by popularity, e.g. freedom. They're rights bestowed to us by our government. I'm not saying that what Apple is doing is right or wrong. I am saying that them doing it is a great loss of freedom for users and developers.

mondoshawan 11y ago
Rights are not bestowed upon us from our government -- they are natural and inalienable and a part of what makes us human.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- burnte 11y ago
  While I'm a rabid defender of rights, I don't agree they are not bestowed upon us, nor that they are unable to be taken away. Ask anyone in prison or a wartorn or repressive country if they still have all of their human rights. They don't. Rights CAN be taken away, and routinely are. The question is do we fight to retake and retain them.
  - c22 11y ago
    I think it's just a terminology thing. Naturally our rights are inalienable, but we tend to rely on our governments to enforce this reality.
    - mondoshawan 11y ago
      The terminology here is absolutely key, though. A government cannot imbue someone with "rights" -- only privileges.
      - Bjartr 11y ago
        For those who are interested, there is more information of the philosophy of natural/inalienable rights available on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights
  - mondoshawan 11y ago
    You misunderstand -- I'm not saying they can't be taken away. What I'm saying is that they cannot be /given/, /granted/, or /bestowed/ because governments don't make or own rights. Every human is innately free whether or not a governmental entity likes it or not. Whether or not those rights are oppressed or not is another story.
    - pkroll 11y ago
      You're making rights out to be something they aren't. Humans, outside of government, humans "in the wild" have exactly the rights an animal has: they're free. Free to be food for something bigger, or to defend themselves if they can. But that's about it. Rights are a human-made concept, and can only be given from one person to others.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        So if rights are bestowed upon someone by another person, who bestowed those rights to the grantee? And who bestowed them to that person, and so on?
- rnovak 11y ago
  You only have rights as long as your government is willing to respect them. For this purpose, bestowing a right and not taking it away are exactly the same (and you acknowledge below that a government can "take away" rights). Secondly, a "right" is a human concept, born of human logic. It is not natural, the Universe & Reality doesn't care one way or another what "rights" humans have.

fryguy 11y ago

The only way to get apps on the original iPhone was to hack your iPhone. It was only through the incredible demand that users wanted to do this that Apple actually released a store for applications. I'm continually surprised at people that are surprised when Apple does stuff like this. To engage in a little snark, I wonder how long it will be before Apple adds a feature to the next version of iOS that allows f.lux-like functionality, and then claim they invented it.

MBCook 11y ago
I doubt it. A few million downloads is still a drop in the bucket and such software has been available for OS X forever and they haven't cared to integrate it.
- OJFord 11y ago
  There's a tonne of stuff available for OS X forever that they haven't cared to integrate though. Not true of iOS, mobile is somehow different, and as above - it started off completely closed to third-parties!
  - MBCook 11y ago
    And that has saved them from a ton of complexity and security issues. Users (by and large, HN is very skewed from normal) don't seem to mind at all.
encoderer 11y ago
Interesting perspective. I've always thought the lack of an appstore in 1.0 was just pragmatic. It definitely made it easier to launch the first version of iOS and cope with the very limited resources -- 128MB of ram!
- jakejake 11y ago
  At the time, Jobs was showing off how developers could create app-like experiences using HTML - with the ability for people to "install" your app using the add-to-home-screen feature. That was the intended solution for us plebs. Native apps were most likely going to be only for partner companies. Ironically when people starting creating actual apps using HTML via PhoneGap and the like, Apple was resistant to that too!

chrisallick 11y ago

it's also one the greatest digital publishing platforms ever invented... sooooo sorry that every once in awhile they enforce some rules to keep it so. The alternative is Android. Which, if you ever tried to program for, is literally worse than going to the dentist.

ehnto 11y ago
Sorry, your comment is grandiose enough that I couldn't help but comment. The platform is just another package manager under the hood. No doubt based off of the hard work from the unix community on which iOS is based. Apple fanboys have a long history of taking credit for the whole cake when all Apple tend to do is put on the icing. It is delicious icing no doubt, but credit where it is due.
josteink 11y ago
> The alternative is Android. Which, if you ever tried to program for, is literally worse than going to the dentist. Parent comment is mostly rubbish, but I'll concede that he has a point about programming for Android. Compared to most other systems I've touched, programming for Android feels incredibly heavy and tooling reliant. Android Studio and an updated toolchain has made it less painful than it used to be with Eclipse, but it's still nowhere as nice as making a standard Web-app, or WinForms app or something like that. I'd love to just blame Java, but really... The Android API could take some sweetening up too.

blinkingled 11y ago

I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86. I can take a bunch of OSes and run them on standard x86 hardware and peripherals more or less, build my own OS if I want to and run my own apps with the compilers, linkers and frameworks of my choice. Skip forward a few years and there's a good chance that will all be gone. x86 is also a less than ideal proposition with Intel the only game in town - sure they are Open Source friendly for now but still it would've been a better world where the likes of AMD and VIA were flourishing in x86 land.

incepted 11y ago
> I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86. I've long thought that Apple would have been a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. I'm so glad Android saved us from that.
parasubvert 11y ago
"I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86." I don't agree. I grew up with Microsoft ruling the world. The biggest problem wasn't the dictatorship, is was the poor quality of the experience in the face of the dictatorship. Apple has major flaws in its experience, but they're nowhere near as bad as the dog days of Windows 98.
- bad_user 11y ago
  Right, so dictatorship is pretty good when the experience is ok.
- blinkingled 11y ago
  What people don't get about Microsoft is however bad they were, they practically enabled a hugely diverse and mostly open hardware and software ecosystem and they had to standardize and open up in order to keep it going. Sure they had their monopolistic ways but fortunately they were reigned in for the better. It's disingenuous to claim user experience requires a closed and non standard system. And besides that Microsoft and Linux distros have made steady progress towards improving the quality and experience while still keeping the PC ecosystem open.

jolux 11y ago

I think I need to preface this by saying that I sideloaded f.lux using the original technique the moment it came out without hesitation and will not remove it from my phone now that it's not kosher. Almost none of this is actually true, just to clarify a few points: - Apps (for the App Store or otherwise) do not have to be written in Objective-C or Swift (see: RubyMotion, Xamarin, PhoneGap/Cordova, React Native, J2ObjC, RoboVM, that thing Microsoft is working on, probably others I don't know about or have forgotten) - You don't have to buy anything to put an app on your personal iOS device, you just download Xcode and work from there (more on this later) I'll concede that you can't access the hardware directly from iOS, meaning yes, it does have to be accessed through APIs, however allowing direct hardware access is a massive legitimate security risk. However, you absolutely do own the device as it exists as hardware. You don't own the software on it, but that's the same for every proprietary software product in existence. What you own is a license to run the software for certain purposes. Whether or not this is a bad thing is for you to decide, but this is not a problem unique to iOS. Furthermore, if you write an app using your free copy of Xcode and put it on your iOS device, you absolutely own the copyright for that app. Now, as for what is true in your comment, yes, you do have to pay $99 a year to distribute apps using the App Store. More than anything else, I believe this is why Apple could not allow this to continue. If this became a trend among iOS app developers, it stands to reason that they would lose a lot of money from developers distributing this way instead of using the App Store. Yes, f.lux is free, but they don't want a trend starting and even with free apps you can still sell advertisements. Again, I'm making no judgment on whether or not it's morally just for Apple to do this, I'm just explaining why it happened in more specific terms. Second, doing this completely subverts Apple's security features. The ability for users to load arbitrary apps onto their devices was to allow people without $99 to run apps that they made on their own devices. This was a privilege originally only afforded to registered developers, and this was intended to lower the barrier to entry for iOS app development. When it's one person writing apps for fun and loading them on their phone to test and show their friends or whatever, the security risk is low. When it's groups of programmers telling people to download a precompiled binary that can't be inspected to ensure its safety and load it onto their devices, it becomes a massive security risk. (as a free software person, you should know that even for us that chose to load it, we don't know what the fuck it contains. f.lux is not open source. for all we know, we just loaded a ton of malware onto our iOS devices.) It should be noted that there are shit tons of open source iOS apps, and so far Apple has not told them to stop providing the source for people to download, compile, and sideload. https://github.com/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps https://github.com/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps There are so many reasons aside from locking down iOS that Apple could have locked this down for. You can't read the source, it's a proprietary app, it subverts their developer agreement, and it's actively encouraging people (176,000 by their count) to load a binary onto their phone the source of which they can't read and that by the developer's own admission is using undocumented APIs. Now, if Apple said that you were no longer allowed to load apps onto your devices without a developer license period, as used to be the case, then that would be a different story and saddening to boot. However, as it stands, f.lux is the only app I know of that this has happened to and there is ample reason for it having happened.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jakejake 11y ago

Meh, Apple wants to control everything because they want a seamless, dead-simple device for non-techies. Because that's the majority of customers - not the power users who want to get down to the bare metal of their machine. They are tyrannical about protecting that experience and basically not allowing you to screw up your device no matter how hard you try. Of course they're making a ton of money on the App Store as well, but I still think it's more about protecting the device. Otherwise they'd just approve every app and collect their commissions.

pjmlp 11y ago

It is how many of us worked in industry before FOSS was a thing. Some of us don't have an issue with this model.

AUmrysh 11y ago
It's also possible to have issues with the model but still participate. I've spent the last few years working on a .NET stack doing Android and iOS apps. I'd really prefer building on linux, but sometimes you make compromises because it's what the job requires.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Same applies to me. I started coding on a Timex 2068. So buying tools was the only legal option. Well, we could also type them from books and magazines. Eventually I became a bit of FOSS zealot with the rise of GNU/Linux. However, after a few years and head bumps, I came to realise that I care more about cool technology than being religious about FOSS.

72deluxe 11y ago

Very true, and an interesting comment. It is interesting to see the other platforms attempting to model themselves after this (such as the Windows application store or whatever it is called), although you obviously have the power to install and run whatever you want there. I truly hope that OSX does not become the crippled/locked-down OS that iOS is. I know the new rootless feature is a warning sign, as is only allowing signed applications to run. The hard part for us as developers is that we have to eat and pay bills, so all fleeing to Linux to write desktop software there won't pay our bills. The wide adoption of these Internet appliances (eg. iPad) means we railroaded into writing for them, or find another occupation.

mattlutze 11y ago

> The greatest irony is how many walked into this with open arms, and how many continue to praise this. Show me an alternative that allows me the same level of Just Works as an iPhone. Because Android ain't it. I don't need a reason to spend hours every week having to tweak, poke at, marshal and police the various apps on my phone to make sure normal behavior isn't messing something up. I put up with that for 4 years and never felt like I had a digital partner in my pocket. It was always a consciously present "thing" I had to be wary of eating a battery, crashing a workflow, failing to connect to something or transfer something or save something. I love the linux "always be tinkering" idea but I don't need that to be something I spend part of my decision points on each day. So if Google tightens up implementations of Android to a point where I can trust a device to get out of my way like I can this most recent iPhone, I'm all for giving it another go. But my money's not on that at the moment.

_yy 11y ago
My Android phone just works™. No tinkering required. It's not even rooted anymore. I don't have to think about it at all. Maybe you just had a bad device?
- mattlutze 11y ago
  3 bad devices from HTC and LG, I guess. But the work-supplied iPhone 4 and my now personal iPhone 6S haven't been issues. Never have to worry about batteries, don't hang, etc. etc.
  - _yy 11y ago
    My Galaxy S2 has a battery life of about 2 days and I haven't experienced any hangs for a long, long time.
davidy123 11y ago
Through several generations of Android I had problems with battery life. However I never had problems with apps like you describe. Since my Note 4 I cannot complain about battery life, and now that iPhone has taken on some Android features like multitasking, friends I know with older iPhones are having battery issues (including one with an iPhone 5 that just had the battery replaced). So it was a tradeoff of emerging features, where Android had included many more from the start (Apple is more careful/conservative) and they are at parity now.