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I'm amazed when I go to webdev conferences and see 90% iPhones, including many of the most prominent "javascript celebrities". Then I tell myself that just beca

by Touche 11y ago

I'm amazed when I go to webdev conferences and see 90% iPhones, including many of the most prominent "javascript celebrities". Then I tell myself that just because you work on something doesn't mean you are passionate about it. I'm passionate about the web and couldn't imagine using an OS where all major features get delivered 4 or 5 years after creation (like IndexedDB was).

acdha 11y ago
It depends on what you value – some features take awhile to show up on iOS but others are implemented relatively quickly, so there's both a question of which specific features actually benefit you and how much it's worth to have a much faster experience in general. The Android phones tend to perform much worse because the vendors chose to add multiple slow cores while Apple adds fewer faster cores — and since JavaScript is single-threaded, that adds up to a rather substantial difference: https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-android-in-2015-is-poor/33889 https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-andr... got a lot of attention last fall and the situation is generally still true — the Samsung S7 was even slower than its predecessor when it launched (https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/709448306771025920 https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/709448306771025920) depending on which version you happen to buy. A lot of people just don't want to have to deal with that when they can pay roughly the same amount of money and get a good, consistent experience. Yes, he dismisses that as “not all of your users have an iPhone 6s” but that ignores the fact that even the flagship Android phones were struggling to match the performance of iPhones which were multiple generations older, greatly extending the usable life of the phone, and that performance issues are quite notoriously user-visible. Yes, it's possible that with optimization heroics you might be able to get close to 60fps even on an old Android phone but it's expensive and most sites don't bother. The other thing to remember is that people who care about this also tend to care a lot about security (or work at places which do). The Android experience is less dismal but it still requires a lot of of micromanagement and questions about whether e.g. enabling encryption will slow your phone down noticeably (i.e. parity with the iPhone 3GS from 2009) or whether the fingerprint authentication has been implemented competently (it's complicated – see e.g. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Zhang-Fingerprints-On-Mobile-Devices-Abusing-And-Leaking-wp.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Zhang-Fi...). Again, if you aren't primarily working on this exact problem you might quite reasonably choose not to have to add “phone security analyst and sysadmin” to your workload.
- criddell 11y ago
  > It depends on what you value I'm not sure why so many people don't understand that there's no one-size-fits-all solution out there. I have a Nexus 5x that I'm pretty happy with. However, when asked I've only ever recommended Apple phones (and tablets and computers) to friends and relatives. Having a place where you can take your device to get support is pretty valuable.

by Touche 11y ago

acdha 11y ago

It depends on what you value – some features take awhile to show up on iOS but others are implemented relatively quickly, so there's both a question of which specific features actually benefit you and how much it's worth to have a much faster experience in general. The Android phones tend to perform much worse because the vendors chose to add multiple slow cores while Apple adds fewer faster cores — and since JavaScript is single-threaded, that adds up to a rather substantial difference: https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-android-in-2015-is-poor/33889 https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-andr... got a lot of attention last fall and the situation is generally still true — the Samsung S7 was even slower than its predecessor when it launched (https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/709448306771025920 https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/709448306771025920) depending on which version you happen to buy. A lot of people just don't want to have to deal with that when they can pay roughly the same amount of money and get a good, consistent experience. Yes, he dismisses that as “not all of your users have an iPhone 6s” but that ignores the fact that even the flagship Android phones were struggling to match the performance of iPhones which were multiple generations older, greatly extending the usable life of the phone, and that performance issues are quite notoriously user-visible. Yes, it's possible that with optimization heroics you might be able to get close to 60fps even on an old Android phone but it's expensive and most sites don't bother. The other thing to remember is that people who care about this also tend to care a lot about security (or work at places which do). The Android experience is less dismal but it still requires a lot of of micromanagement and questions about whether e.g. enabling encryption will slow your phone down noticeably (i.e. parity with the iPhone 3GS from 2009) or whether the fingerprint authentication has been implemented competently (it's complicated – see e.g. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Zhang-Fingerprints-On-Mobile-Devices-Abusing-And-Leaking-wp.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Zhang-Fi...). Again, if you aren't primarily working on this exact problem you might quite reasonably choose not to have to add “phone security analyst and sysadmin” to your workload.

criddell 11y ago
> It depends on what you value I'm not sure why so many people don't understand that there's no one-size-fits-all solution out there. I have a Nexus 5x that I'm pretty happy with. However, when asked I've only ever recommended Apple phones (and tablets and computers) to friends and relatives. Having a place where you can take your device to get support is pretty valuable.