5 ms·

Neat release, but the amount of stuff Google adds to Android every year simply pales in comparison to what Apple is doing. Nevermind the fact that 80% of Androi

Neat release, but the amount of stuff Google adds to Android every year simply pales in comparison to what Apple is doing. Nevermind the fact that 80% of Android users won't see this stuff for another 3 years.

lexicality 6y ago
I've not owned an iPhone in a while, but haven't most of Apple's recent headline feature releases been stuff Android has had for years?
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Apple usually isn't the first one to get a tech demonstrator out or the first to integrate the latest and greatest CPUs / panels / etc, but they are often the first to get a new feature in front of a large number of consumers with viable polish as a default option. This kind of news often fails to propagate out of the apple bubble. Random example: filesystem journaling so that you don't have to wait minutes to hours for fsck every time your computer hard resets. It showed up in Windows first -- but only in Windows Server. It was very intentionally excluded from consumer Windows. Then it showed up in Mac OS X. For a decade, hard restarts were painful on Windows and smooth on Mac. Finally, in Windows 8, just in time for SSDs to make it moot, it showed up in consumer Windows. This story repeats over and over. Cameras and video chat out-of-the-box, backlit keyboards, desktop search, retained and GPU composited GUIs, Webkit, and so on. Apple wasn't first, but they were the first to do it well and get it in front of lots of people. People complain about apple users being sheep inside a bubble, but it goes both ways. I'd answer your question more specifically, but I'm currently on the wrong side of the bubble in Android land. When I buy my next phone, I'll do my research, which will include swinging by an apple store to experience qualitative things like stylus/AR latency first-hand. You should too :)
  - vlowther 6y ago
    re: filesystem journaling: Unless you were one of those crazy people that used fat32 in spite of Microsoft's defaults, filesystem journaling has been the default in Windows mainstream consumer OSes since the release of Windows XP using NTFS, which was journalled since day 1. (I am not counting Windows 2000 and before since they were not the default for consumer boxes).
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      Then why did Windows take hours to fsck after a hard reset until Windows 8? That's the actual problem, even though I admittedly might have made a mistake in attributing it to a lack of journaling. I was using Windows on a daily basis across multiple computers and this wasn't a subtle thing. In fact, I still regularly use Windows 7 (oscilloscope, can't update) and occasionally get "reminded" about this, even though I also remember a number of gnarly examples from my everyday computer use. Most people just skipped it, and I did too, until one time it got into a state where no programs would run...
  - vetinari 6y ago
    As sibling commenter wrote, journaled NTFS was part of the Windows XP, which was released before first release of OSX (10.0). Not only that, journaled HFS+ was introduced in OSX 10.2, not in 10.0. It was enabled by default in 10.3. Way later than NTFS. However, there's a reason for all that, and why Windows 9X used FAT filesystem: it was much faster. Computers in '90s didn't have any spare perfomance, and journaling was not needed by most users. It was introduced into consumer releases only when they were fast enough for users not no notice.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      So... I'll repeat what I said to sibling: why did Windows take minutes to hours to fsck after a hard reset when Mac OS didn't between 2003 and 2012 (Windows 8)? I'm even being generous by using past tense here because I still have to live with Win 7 and this particular problem (no, I can't just upgrade, it's a $40k industrial tool). I'd be ecstatic to learn that the ungodly slow fscks are redundant or easily disabled and the whole thing is just a matter of extremely poor defaults.
      - vetinari 6y ago
        If windows took hours to chkdsk (that's the term used under Windows, not fsck), it means it was (is?) something seriously wrong with your hardware and/or filesystem. Normally, it took few minutes. The only way to avoid slow chkdsks in the future is to fix the underlying issue. Also note that I'm not telling you to upgrade. I know that it is impossible with systems that have lab equipment attached. If you want support from the vendor, that is. So the question is, why don't you ask the vendor for support? This is in their scope. Also, it was very easy to have damaged HFS+ and not know about it. There was a thriving market of third party utilities (Disk Warrior & co) that would gladly tell you and fix it, but most users didn't use them.
        jjoonathan 6y ago
        The oscilloscope doesn't take hours to chkdisk, it takes ~5 minutes, which is bad but completely typical of my other experiences with Windows 7, so what should I expect the vendor to do about it? Other than try to sell me a new one that runs Windows 10 for another $40k, I mean? :] The computer that used to take hours to chkdisk was a home computer with a couple 1TB (IIRC) 5200RPM drives containing a lot of files. Chkdisk didn't typically find errors and Windows small-file-access is notoriously slow. I don't think this is a "me" problem or a "my hard drive" problem, I think it's a "chkdisk is slow and obnoxious" problem. Windows users just put up with it and didn't resent it as much as I did because they didn't know there was a better way. Apple cited journaling as the feature that let them drop the slow checks. Maybe that was puffery. Maybe it was uninformed risk tolerance (the NTFS ecosystem has an ecosystem of recovery tools too, so that's hardly an indication of anything). Or maybe it was informed risk tolerance, or better journaling, or better defaults. In any case, the point holds: Windows was first across the "technological accomplishment" finish line while Apple was first across the "relevant to me" finish line, and that seems to happen a lot, even though I have feet firmly planted in both ecosystems.
ogre_codes 6y ago
In fairness, a lot of the things Apple added to the iPhone is things which have been on Android for a while. That said, I do kind of agree with Gruber, it kind of feels like the passion for Android has burned out at Google and they are just dialing in a lot of this. The Pixel specific updates seem particularly weird to me too.
- pier25 6y ago
  > I do kind of agree with Gruber, it kind of feels like the passion for Android has burned out at Google This is just speculation... but maybe it's because they are getting ready to finally kill Android and switch to Fuchsia. Android has been getting better over the last 4-5 years and the KitKat days are very far away, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google was ready to start fresh with everything they've learned.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Not just that. This is the calm before the storm. Huawei has employed an army of reportedly 80.000 developers after Trump cut them off play services. A big part of that army is working on their networking gear but I expect a new OS to drop soonish even though we haven't heard much about it. It just makes sense for them to reduce dependency. The mobile duopoly is on its last legs and they might as well start competing with themselves. Also I'm sure Google want stricter control on customisation which would be a good thing (easier updates). It'll be hard to take that back from Android vendors but I bet Fuchsia won't have it.
    - pier25 6y ago
      > Huawei has employed an army of reportedly 80.000 developers Any source on that?
- izacus 6y ago
  What does Gruber, an Apple defender, really know about what Google's attitude towards Android is? He's measuring everything against the Apple stick and is always criticising moves that aren't the same as Apple's. That doesn't seem like a good strategy for a competing product.
c_s_guy 6y ago
Do you have examples of where Apple is ahead? I'm currently trying to decide if I should make the switch to iOS.
- damnyou 6y ago
  The next version of iOS finally lets you select your favorite browser skin over WebKit. Progress!
- djfdat 6y ago
  Switched from Android to iOS 2 years ago. I'll try to keep this limited to where iOS features is specifically ahead of Android. Password API works with third-party password managers. Not perfect, but LastPass works pretty well this way. Security Code autofill is also great for 2FA SMS things. Device performance/reliability, mostly related to launching the camera, although this probably applies all-round. There's nothing worse than trying to take pictures for a group and your camera app just... won't work. Feature polish (although limited). There are a lot of features that I wish existed, and features that I wish I had more control over, but the overall polish on a feature's functionality and feel is great. Airdrop. Supposedly Android has a good competitor coming? Share Wi-Fi password with contacts. Sign in with Apple + Auto-hide your email. :( Shortcuts. This is great, except writing them sucks for anyone even slightly code-proficient. Next to impossible to set up on phones. But again, polished but limited vs Android. Facetime. I really wish Duo was better integrated into Android and marketed. I'm sure I'm missing some, and I'm purposely not listing the things I miss from Android. There are other Apple-specific reasons that I've decided to stick with iOS for the time being that are also good to consider.
  - drampelt 6y ago
    Definitely want improvements on most of those myself but some of them are already here. Third party password manager autofill has been around for a few years now (Android 8), and their Airdrop clone was released last month: https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/ https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/
  - zobzu 6y ago
drampelt 6y ago
Something to keep in mind is most core apps (Maps, Gmail, Messages, etc) aren't baked into the Android OS and are updated with new features regularly throughout the year. Apple often mentions core app updates as new OS features. Even Nearby Sharing (Android's Airdrop clone) was released as a Google Play Services update and is not part of the OS: https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/ https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/
- athms 6y ago
  >Something to keep in mind is most core apps (Maps, Gmail, Messages, etc) aren't baked into the Android OS and are updated with new features regularly throughout the year. Which is Google's weakness. Not only are the core apps not developed by the Android team, but each app is done by a separate team and there is a lack of consistency across the board with different colors, placement of icons, and dark mode support. It took Gmail six months after the release of Android 10 to get dark mode. And dark mode has existed (in limited form) since Android 9. Dark mode for Maps followed Gmail. Oh, and let us not forget Maps had white navigation buttons on a white background, with light grey shadows for a few months with the release of Android 10. When I first upgraded my Pixel, I thought they had removed the bottom navigation because of this regression. Supposedly these are the best and brightest programmers on the planet.

lexicality 6y ago

I've not owned an iPhone in a while, but haven't most of Apple's recent headline feature releases been stuff Android has had for years?

jjoonathan 6y ago
Apple usually isn't the first one to get a tech demonstrator out or the first to integrate the latest and greatest CPUs / panels / etc, but they are often the first to get a new feature in front of a large number of consumers with viable polish as a default option. This kind of news often fails to propagate out of the apple bubble. Random example: filesystem journaling so that you don't have to wait minutes to hours for fsck every time your computer hard resets. It showed up in Windows first -- but only in Windows Server. It was very intentionally excluded from consumer Windows. Then it showed up in Mac OS X. For a decade, hard restarts were painful on Windows and smooth on Mac. Finally, in Windows 8, just in time for SSDs to make it moot, it showed up in consumer Windows. This story repeats over and over. Cameras and video chat out-of-the-box, backlit keyboards, desktop search, retained and GPU composited GUIs, Webkit, and so on. Apple wasn't first, but they were the first to do it well and get it in front of lots of people. People complain about apple users being sheep inside a bubble, but it goes both ways. I'd answer your question more specifically, but I'm currently on the wrong side of the bubble in Android land. When I buy my next phone, I'll do my research, which will include swinging by an apple store to experience qualitative things like stylus/AR latency first-hand. You should too :)
- vlowther 6y ago
  re: filesystem journaling: Unless you were one of those crazy people that used fat32 in spite of Microsoft's defaults, filesystem journaling has been the default in Windows mainstream consumer OSes since the release of Windows XP using NTFS, which was journalled since day 1. (I am not counting Windows 2000 and before since they were not the default for consumer boxes).
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Then why did Windows take hours to fsck after a hard reset until Windows 8? That's the actual problem, even though I admittedly might have made a mistake in attributing it to a lack of journaling. I was using Windows on a daily basis across multiple computers and this wasn't a subtle thing. In fact, I still regularly use Windows 7 (oscilloscope, can't update) and occasionally get "reminded" about this, even though I also remember a number of gnarly examples from my everyday computer use. Most people just skipped it, and I did too, until one time it got into a state where no programs would run...
- vetinari 6y ago
  As sibling commenter wrote, journaled NTFS was part of the Windows XP, which was released before first release of OSX (10.0). Not only that, journaled HFS+ was introduced in OSX 10.2, not in 10.0. It was enabled by default in 10.3. Way later than NTFS. However, there's a reason for all that, and why Windows 9X used FAT filesystem: it was much faster. Computers in '90s didn't have any spare perfomance, and journaling was not needed by most users. It was introduced into consumer releases only when they were fast enough for users not no notice.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    So... I'll repeat what I said to sibling: why did Windows take minutes to hours to fsck after a hard reset when Mac OS didn't between 2003 and 2012 (Windows 8)? I'm even being generous by using past tense here because I still have to live with Win 7 and this particular problem (no, I can't just upgrade, it's a $40k industrial tool). I'd be ecstatic to learn that the ungodly slow fscks are redundant or easily disabled and the whole thing is just a matter of extremely poor defaults.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      If windows took hours to chkdsk (that's the term used under Windows, not fsck), it means it was (is?) something seriously wrong with your hardware and/or filesystem. Normally, it took few minutes. The only way to avoid slow chkdsks in the future is to fix the underlying issue. Also note that I'm not telling you to upgrade. I know that it is impossible with systems that have lab equipment attached. If you want support from the vendor, that is. So the question is, why don't you ask the vendor for support? This is in their scope. Also, it was very easy to have damaged HFS+ and not know about it. There was a thriving market of third party utilities (Disk Warrior & co) that would gladly tell you and fix it, but most users didn't use them.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        The oscilloscope doesn't take hours to chkdisk, it takes ~5 minutes, which is bad but completely typical of my other experiences with Windows 7, so what should I expect the vendor to do about it? Other than try to sell me a new one that runs Windows 10 for another $40k, I mean? :] The computer that used to take hours to chkdisk was a home computer with a couple 1TB (IIRC) 5200RPM drives containing a lot of files. Chkdisk didn't typically find errors and Windows small-file-access is notoriously slow. I don't think this is a "me" problem or a "my hard drive" problem, I think it's a "chkdisk is slow and obnoxious" problem. Windows users just put up with it and didn't resent it as much as I did because they didn't know there was a better way. Apple cited journaling as the feature that let them drop the slow checks. Maybe that was puffery. Maybe it was uninformed risk tolerance (the NTFS ecosystem has an ecosystem of recovery tools too, so that's hardly an indication of anything). Or maybe it was informed risk tolerance, or better journaling, or better defaults. In any case, the point holds: Windows was first across the "technological accomplishment" finish line while Apple was first across the "relevant to me" finish line, and that seems to happen a lot, even though I have feet firmly planted in both ecosystems.

ogre_codes 6y ago

In fairness, a lot of the things Apple added to the iPhone is things which have been on Android for a while. That said, I do kind of agree with Gruber, it kind of feels like the passion for Android has burned out at Google and they are just dialing in a lot of this. The Pixel specific updates seem particularly weird to me too.

pier25 6y ago
> I do kind of agree with Gruber, it kind of feels like the passion for Android has burned out at Google This is just speculation... but maybe it's because they are getting ready to finally kill Android and switch to Fuchsia. Android has been getting better over the last 4-5 years and the KitKat days are very far away, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google was ready to start fresh with everything they've learned.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Not just that. This is the calm before the storm. Huawei has employed an army of reportedly 80.000 developers after Trump cut them off play services. A big part of that army is working on their networking gear but I expect a new OS to drop soonish even though we haven't heard much about it. It just makes sense for them to reduce dependency. The mobile duopoly is on its last legs and they might as well start competing with themselves. Also I'm sure Google want stricter control on customisation which would be a good thing (easier updates). It'll be hard to take that back from Android vendors but I bet Fuchsia won't have it.
  - pier25 6y ago
    > Huawei has employed an army of reportedly 80.000 developers Any source on that?
izacus 6y ago
What does Gruber, an Apple defender, really know about what Google's attitude towards Android is? He's measuring everything against the Apple stick and is always criticising moves that aren't the same as Apple's. That doesn't seem like a good strategy for a competing product.

c_s_guy 6y ago

Do you have examples of where Apple is ahead? I'm currently trying to decide if I should make the switch to iOS.

damnyou 6y ago
The next version of iOS finally lets you select your favorite browser skin over WebKit. Progress!
djfdat 6y ago
Switched from Android to iOS 2 years ago. I'll try to keep this limited to where iOS features is specifically ahead of Android. Password API works with third-party password managers. Not perfect, but LastPass works pretty well this way. Security Code autofill is also great for 2FA SMS things. Device performance/reliability, mostly related to launching the camera, although this probably applies all-round. There's nothing worse than trying to take pictures for a group and your camera app just... won't work. Feature polish (although limited). There are a lot of features that I wish existed, and features that I wish I had more control over, but the overall polish on a feature's functionality and feel is great. Airdrop. Supposedly Android has a good competitor coming? Share Wi-Fi password with contacts. Sign in with Apple + Auto-hide your email. :( Shortcuts. This is great, except writing them sucks for anyone even slightly code-proficient. Next to impossible to set up on phones. But again, polished but limited vs Android. Facetime. I really wish Duo was better integrated into Android and marketed. I'm sure I'm missing some, and I'm purposely not listing the things I miss from Android. There are other Apple-specific reasons that I've decided to stick with iOS for the time being that are also good to consider.
- drampelt 6y ago
  Definitely want improvements on most of those myself but some of them are already here. Third party password manager autofill has been around for a few years now (Android 8), and their Airdrop clone was released last month: https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/ https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/
- zobzu 6y ago

drampelt 6y ago

Something to keep in mind is most core apps (Maps, Gmail, Messages, etc) aren't baked into the Android OS and are updated with new features regularly throughout the year. Apple often mentions core app updates as new OS features. Even Nearby Sharing (Android's Airdrop clone) was released as a Google Play Services update and is not part of the OS: https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/ https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/

athms 6y ago
>Something to keep in mind is most core apps (Maps, Gmail, Messages, etc) aren't baked into the Android OS and are updated with new features regularly throughout the year. Which is Google's weakness. Not only are the core apps not developed by the Android team, but each app is done by a separate team and there is a lack of consistency across the board with different colors, placement of icons, and dark mode support. It took Gmail six months after the release of Android 10 to get dark mode. And dark mode has existed (in limited form) since Android 9. Dark mode for Maps followed Gmail. Oh, and let us not forget Maps had white navigation buttons on a white background, with light grey shadows for a few months with the release of Android 10. When I first upgraded my Pixel, I thought they had removed the bottom navigation because of this regression. Supposedly these are the best and brightest programmers on the planet.