7 ms·

Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android

28 points by retskrad 5y ago

tumblewit 5y ago
I wonder what would happen if both OS were run through a Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things test.
- hs86 5y ago
  My bias is ten years of Android before I switched to iOS, and I failed spectacularly to select multiple images in the Photos app and delete them. It seemed to work sometimes, and sometimes it would only drag the picture under my finger until I noticed a "Select" button in the upper right corner. Doing the same thing in the Google Photos app for iOS is so much easier, and it just works.™ Text input and editing are still my biggest hurdle on iOS. I make more typos than on Android, and editing text in input fields is always a strange experience. Selecting single words and correcting some letters still feels "alien" after over a half year on iOS.
  - lost-found 5y ago
    If you hold down the spacebar in iOS, you can move the text cursor around pretty easily. You can also double tap a word to select it. Sometimes it is a little clunky though…
    - hs86 5y ago
      In the context of Don Norman's book, this is a bad design with hidden affordances and missing signifiers. How should a new user discover that they have to shake their phone to undo some text editing?
criddell 5y ago
This may be true, but the average user isn’t a very interesting one. The average user installs three or four apps and that’s about it. The customization they do pretty much ends at choosing a ring tone and wallpaper. The average user doesn’t really care about privacy, side-loading, customization, developer access, or most of the other things we debate here. A Honda Civic may be a better car for average user than a Porsche 911 or Jeep Rubicon, but that doesn’t mean it’s that interesting to enthusiasts or people who really care about cars.
- soco 5y ago
  The average user definitely stays with the default ringtone, to the extent that when it sounds, you see half the people around you checking their devices.
- Pulcinella 5y ago
  That is a pretty bad metaphor because many, many car enthusiasts love the civic.
  - criddell 5y ago
    And lots of phone enthusiasts love the iPhone.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  I think it is more accurate to say the average user has dozens of apps installed, including some never used or only used once
leoedin 5y ago
I'm a longtime Android user, but I'm increasingly feeling a certain level of existential doubt about my choice. It's basically a choice between using a more open system (which I like) developed by the world's biggest data collection and targeted advertising company, or using a closed and private system (no third party apps, an anti open source attitude) which commits me to giving significant money to a to a company I think is anti-competitive and far too focused on control. Or you go down the Android-without-Google route, which seems to be very impractical for even basic things like banking apps. I honestly don't know what my next phone will be. But I've got to have one to participate in society.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  I can tell you that it's a night and day difference switching to an OS that isn't actively trying to manipulate you. Apple isn't the good guys by any means, but once you've bought their expensive phone, you've largely already done what they want.
  - Copernicron 5y ago
    That may have been true at one point but not anymore. My iPhone - which I'm typing this on - is constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music or some other damn thing I don't want. The way I see it, Apple is trying to manipulate me as much as Google is and for the exact same reason: money. They want to make more money off me and if that means advertising to me in the settings menu then that's what they'll do.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      > constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music "constantly" seems like a strech, sure you need a icloud account for the app store to work, but thats it. i don't recall having been nagged for anything more than once by apple. whatsapp on the other hand ...
      - Copernicron 5y ago
thrdbndndn 5y ago
I used to be a kind of "power user" that was constantly tinkering my phone, but late settled down to basically just install apps, use apps like everyone else. Despite this, I still found iOS way too restricted even for average user. The fact you can't install 3rd party app alone makes certain daily task very miserable. I can't use Youtube vanced to skip ADs on YouTube, for example. The browsers suck due to forced webkit engine too. I do think Apple's hardware and HW/SW integration better, and I think Android should be more open (every major version, you have fewer and fewer things you can modify without rooting).
- op00to 5y ago
  You can pay for YouTube, and not have to see ads.
  - alex-ant 5y ago
    Wrong website?
- bmitc 5y ago
  My major complaint with iOS is multitasking. Apps don’t run in the background, which is terrible for apps like OneDrive that need to run backups. You have to leave the app open to run an upload. Also, Android has split screen, which is pretty useful. For these reasons alone, iOS feels outdated. Other things I hate are all the hidden UI elements. You have to do a Google search to find out how to do things. For example, to close all Safari tabs, you have to press and hold a button. There’s tons of stuff like this. Searching for a word on a Safari webpage is incredibly fickle and still hard to get to. Text editing and the keyboard are awkward and frustrating as well. In general, I find a huge amount of hidden friction on iOS that I don’t find on Android.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    > Apps don’t run in the background afaik there's a setting for that (feature not a bug :)
albertopv 5y ago
On Android I can install real Firefox, on iOS I can't. End of story.
- kyriakos 5y ago
  this and the fact that browser engine updates are not bound to OS updates. Android phones may not get such very long term OEM support as iPhones but the browser is a big attack surface and being able to update it frequently without full OS update is a big plus.
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  Same here.
- fsflover 5y ago
  If this is the most important thing to you, then I'd like to say that on a GNU/Linux phone you can install desktop Firefox with any desktop plugins.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    As fun as that was to do on my Palm Pre for about 5 minutes back in the day I doubt it's much more practical on a modern phone even with the bigger displays and faster devices. Can you use the mobile interface on desktop Firefox?
    - fsflover 5y ago
      I can use desktop Firefox on my Pinephone just fine. It scales very well to the screen size.
matwood 5y ago
I've used both Android and iOS pretty extensively over the years. I'm currently on iOS, but just picked up a Pixel 4a for app testing. It's a fine device for $350. IMO, phones have mostly been commoditized. Not necessarily in pricing (see flagships), but in features. They run the same few apps people want to run and work fine. Where iOS I think shines is in the total ecosystem. AirPods and Apple Watch integration comes to mind, though some Android specific alternatives are out now. Then there's iOS and macOS integration. Things like copy and paste between devices just works as expected. I'm not going to argue about Apple and absolute privacy, but if you look at relative privacy between Apple and Google, Apple also comes out ahead. But for most, for just a phone, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter.
Copernicron 5y ago
For a technically focused site they sure do present an awful lot of misinformation. Android may have more malware hiding in apps but that's not the same as claiming iOS is more secure. Some security researchers have stated that Android is actually more secure than iOS and the fragmented nature of the ecosystem is actually something of a benefit at times. Android isn't being hit with something like Pegasus. The privacy claims are laughable. As we've seen recently Apple and Google are collecting virtually identical data on you but only Google is open and transparent about both the collection and the use. Apple likes to be secret about everything. The upcoming CSAM scanning is going against everything Apple has claimed to be about for the past ten years. The way I see it they're both equal these days but at least Google is open about it. Lest anyone claim I'm some Android fanboy defending my platform of choice, I've been using both side by side for years. I'm well aware of their strengths and weaknesses and Apple's claims of being the most secure and private OS have been shown to be nothing but marketing fluff as of late. I do agree with the premise of the article. iOS is still what I recommend to non-technical people who want something that's going to mostly stay out of the way and mostly stay the same over time. It's still the best option for long term and third party support.
- 0x38B 5y ago
  The real gold is XDA's forums, where users and developers talk about rooting and hacking their devices. In contrast the articles on the front page are low on content, like this article on Surface Pro 9 rumors one day after the release of the Surface Pro 8 [1]. 1: https://www.xda-developers.com/surface-pro-9/ https://www.xda-developers.com/surface-pro-9/
  - Copernicron 5y ago
    I used to spend a lot of time in the forums back when android was new and I was flashing custom ROMs every other day. I haven't felt the need to do that in years though. I remember the front page having more substantive content though.
    - kyriakos 5y ago
rvz 5y ago
> Like it or not, iOS is a better OS than Android for the average user. It seems the original title itself painfully admitted defeat that iOS is the clear winner for the average user which is a first from XDA developers. The case is true for Android, but we'll see if this is the case with Fuchsia when that eventually replaces Android in the foreseeable future.
drewg123 5y ago
Having switched from Android to iOS ~1.5 years ago, the things I miss the most are Google Assistant and more customizable notifications. In terms of Google Assistant: Siri is nearly useless when trying to do things "hands free" (or eyes free). If I ask a simple question like "what is a safe temperature to cook pork", it gives me "I found this on the web", where Google Assistant verbally gives me an answer back. As to notifications.. It just seems like notifications are just harder or worse on ios? For the longest time, Gmail refused to allow a different notification sound per account (looks like that's fixed). On android, my Garmin watch could allow on-watch notifications from a list of apps you select; on iOS its all or nothing and I even get the notifications from apps that I've tried to silence on the phone.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  i guess if your notifications make sounds you have bigger problems than not getting a spoken reply to emergency cooking advice
  - drewg123 5y ago
    That flew right over my head. I'm 51, I need reading glasses these days. My goal is not to have to search for my glasses each time my phone makes a noise, so differentiating notifications by sound is important to me.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  The Garmin thing is Apple frustratingly limiting non-Apple smart watches. Apple Watches have better control over notifications and allow for things like replies from the watch. It's such bullshit that they are allowed to cripple third parties to make their devices more appealing.
  - drewg123 5y ago
    Coros claims to have worked around this. I was shopping for a new watch a few months ago when my old Garmin died due to physical damage. They got back to me too late, but they claim to be able to filter notifications on iOS. Had they replied sooner, I probably would have gotten a Coros rather than another Garmin.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

28 points by retskrad 5y ago

tumblewit 5y ago

I wonder what would happen if both OS were run through a Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things test.

hs86 5y ago
My bias is ten years of Android before I switched to iOS, and I failed spectacularly to select multiple images in the Photos app and delete them. It seemed to work sometimes, and sometimes it would only drag the picture under my finger until I noticed a "Select" button in the upper right corner. Doing the same thing in the Google Photos app for iOS is so much easier, and it just works.™ Text input and editing are still my biggest hurdle on iOS. I make more typos than on Android, and editing text in input fields is always a strange experience. Selecting single words and correcting some letters still feels "alien" after over a half year on iOS.
- lost-found 5y ago
  If you hold down the spacebar in iOS, you can move the text cursor around pretty easily. You can also double tap a word to select it. Sometimes it is a little clunky though…
  - hs86 5y ago
    In the context of Don Norman's book, this is a bad design with hidden affordances and missing signifiers. How should a new user discover that they have to shake their phone to undo some text editing?

criddell 5y ago

This may be true, but the average user isn’t a very interesting one. The average user installs three or four apps and that’s about it. The customization they do pretty much ends at choosing a ring tone and wallpaper. The average user doesn’t really care about privacy, side-loading, customization, developer access, or most of the other things we debate here. A Honda Civic may be a better car for average user than a Porsche 911 or Jeep Rubicon, but that doesn’t mean it’s that interesting to enthusiasts or people who really care about cars.

soco 5y ago
The average user definitely stays with the default ringtone, to the extent that when it sounds, you see half the people around you checking their devices.
Pulcinella 5y ago
That is a pretty bad metaphor because many, many car enthusiasts love the civic.
- criddell 5y ago
  And lots of phone enthusiasts love the iPhone.
newaccount2021 5y ago
I think it is more accurate to say the average user has dozens of apps installed, including some never used or only used once

leoedin 5y ago

I'm a longtime Android user, but I'm increasingly feeling a certain level of existential doubt about my choice. It's basically a choice between using a more open system (which I like) developed by the world's biggest data collection and targeted advertising company, or using a closed and private system (no third party apps, an anti open source attitude) which commits me to giving significant money to a to a company I think is anti-competitive and far too focused on control. Or you go down the Android-without-Google route, which seems to be very impractical for even basic things like banking apps. I honestly don't know what my next phone will be. But I've got to have one to participate in society.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I can tell you that it's a night and day difference switching to an OS that isn't actively trying to manipulate you. Apple isn't the good guys by any means, but once you've bought their expensive phone, you've largely already done what they want.
- Copernicron 5y ago
  That may have been true at one point but not anymore. My iPhone - which I'm typing this on - is constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music or some other damn thing I don't want. The way I see it, Apple is trying to manipulate me as much as Google is and for the exact same reason: money. They want to make more money off me and if that means advertising to me in the settings menu then that's what they'll do.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    > constantly trying to get me to sign up for iCloud or Apple Pay or Apple Music "constantly" seems like a strech, sure you need a icloud account for the app store to work, but thats it. i don't recall having been nagged for anything more than once by apple. whatsapp on the other hand ...
    - Copernicron 5y ago

thrdbndndn 5y ago

I used to be a kind of "power user" that was constantly tinkering my phone, but late settled down to basically just install apps, use apps like everyone else. Despite this, I still found iOS way too restricted even for average user. The fact you can't install 3rd party app alone makes certain daily task very miserable. I can't use Youtube vanced to skip ADs on YouTube, for example. The browsers suck due to forced webkit engine too. I do think Apple's hardware and HW/SW integration better, and I think Android should be more open (every major version, you have fewer and fewer things you can modify without rooting).

op00to 5y ago
You can pay for YouTube, and not have to see ads.
- alex-ant 5y ago
  Wrong website?
bmitc 5y ago
My major complaint with iOS is multitasking. Apps don’t run in the background, which is terrible for apps like OneDrive that need to run backups. You have to leave the app open to run an upload. Also, Android has split screen, which is pretty useful. For these reasons alone, iOS feels outdated. Other things I hate are all the hidden UI elements. You have to do a Google search to find out how to do things. For example, to close all Safari tabs, you have to press and hold a button. There’s tons of stuff like this. Searching for a word on a Safari webpage is incredibly fickle and still hard to get to. Text editing and the keyboard are awkward and frustrating as well. In general, I find a huge amount of hidden friction on iOS that I don’t find on Android.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  > Apps don’t run in the background afaik there's a setting for that (feature not a bug :)

albertopv 5y ago

On Android I can install real Firefox, on iOS I can't. End of story.

kyriakos 5y ago
this and the fact that browser engine updates are not bound to OS updates. Android phones may not get such very long term OEM support as iPhones but the browser is a big attack surface and being able to update it frequently without full OS update is a big plus.
AndrewDucker 5y ago
Same here.
fsflover 5y ago
If this is the most important thing to you, then I'd like to say that on a GNU/Linux phone you can install desktop Firefox with any desktop plugins.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  As fun as that was to do on my Palm Pre for about 5 minutes back in the day I doubt it's much more practical on a modern phone even with the bigger displays and faster devices. Can you use the mobile interface on desktop Firefox?
  - fsflover 5y ago
    I can use desktop Firefox on my Pinephone just fine. It scales very well to the screen size.

matwood 5y ago

I've used both Android and iOS pretty extensively over the years. I'm currently on iOS, but just picked up a Pixel 4a for app testing. It's a fine device for $350. IMO, phones have mostly been commoditized. Not necessarily in pricing (see flagships), but in features. They run the same few apps people want to run and work fine. Where iOS I think shines is in the total ecosystem. AirPods and Apple Watch integration comes to mind, though some Android specific alternatives are out now. Then there's iOS and macOS integration. Things like copy and paste between devices just works as expected. I'm not going to argue about Apple and absolute privacy, but if you look at relative privacy between Apple and Google, Apple also comes out ahead. But for most, for just a phone, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter.

Copernicron 5y ago

For a technically focused site they sure do present an awful lot of misinformation. Android may have more malware hiding in apps but that's not the same as claiming iOS is more secure. Some security researchers have stated that Android is actually more secure than iOS and the fragmented nature of the ecosystem is actually something of a benefit at times. Android isn't being hit with something like Pegasus. The privacy claims are laughable. As we've seen recently Apple and Google are collecting virtually identical data on you but only Google is open and transparent about both the collection and the use. Apple likes to be secret about everything. The upcoming CSAM scanning is going against everything Apple has claimed to be about for the past ten years. The way I see it they're both equal these days but at least Google is open about it. Lest anyone claim I'm some Android fanboy defending my platform of choice, I've been using both side by side for years. I'm well aware of their strengths and weaknesses and Apple's claims of being the most secure and private OS have been shown to be nothing but marketing fluff as of late. I do agree with the premise of the article. iOS is still what I recommend to non-technical people who want something that's going to mostly stay out of the way and mostly stay the same over time. It's still the best option for long term and third party support.

0x38B 5y ago
The real gold is XDA's forums, where users and developers talk about rooting and hacking their devices. In contrast the articles on the front page are low on content, like this article on Surface Pro 9 rumors one day after the release of the Surface Pro 8 [1]. 1: https://www.xda-developers.com/surface-pro-9/ https://www.xda-developers.com/surface-pro-9/
- Copernicron 5y ago
  I used to spend a lot of time in the forums back when android was new and I was flashing custom ROMs every other day. I haven't felt the need to do that in years though. I remember the front page having more substantive content though.
  - kyriakos 5y ago

rvz 5y ago

> Like it or not, iOS is a better OS than Android for the average user. It seems the original title itself painfully admitted defeat that iOS is the clear winner for the average user which is a first from XDA developers. The case is true for Android, but we'll see if this is the case with Fuchsia when that eventually replaces Android in the foreseeable future.

drewg123 5y ago

Having switched from Android to iOS ~1.5 years ago, the things I miss the most are Google Assistant and more customizable notifications. In terms of Google Assistant: Siri is nearly useless when trying to do things "hands free" (or eyes free). If I ask a simple question like "what is a safe temperature to cook pork", it gives me "I found this on the web", where Google Assistant verbally gives me an answer back. As to notifications.. It just seems like notifications are just harder or worse on ios? For the longest time, Gmail refused to allow a different notification sound per account (looks like that's fixed). On android, my Garmin watch could allow on-watch notifications from a list of apps you select; on iOS its all or nothing and I even get the notifications from apps that I've tried to silence on the phone.

hansel_der 5y ago
i guess if your notifications make sounds you have bigger problems than not getting a spoken reply to emergency cooking advice
- drewg123 5y ago
  That flew right over my head. I'm 51, I need reading glasses these days. My goal is not to have to search for my glasses each time my phone makes a noise, so differentiating notifications by sound is important to me.
salamandersauce 5y ago
The Garmin thing is Apple frustratingly limiting non-Apple smart watches. Apple Watches have better control over notifications and allow for things like replies from the watch. It's such bullshit that they are allowed to cripple third parties to make their devices more appealing.
- drewg123 5y ago
  Coros claims to have worked around this. I was shopping for a new watch a few months ago when my old Garmin died due to physical damage. They got back to me too late, but they claim to be able to filter notifications on iOS. Had they replied sooner, I probably would have gotten a Coros rather than another Garmin.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]