4 ms·

I feel like many people love iOS, but many also hate it (not open enough, lock in etc.) but they hate the cheapishness and crappiness of Android even more. Is

I feel like many people love iOS, but many also hate it (not open enough, lock in etc.) but they hate the cheapishness and crappiness of Android even more. Is there any development ongoing for a mobile OS that is not full of crap like Android, but not as restrictive as iOS? Not sure if Windows Phone or PalmOS were like that, but those are both gone…

chrisseaton 4y ago
Maybe what makes iOS great is the restrictions? If you take away the restrictions maybe what's great is gone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Macha 4y ago
Windows Phone apps were absolutely mostly shovelware, which had a not insignificant contribution to it's failure I feel. Never used PalmOS to comment. I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps, and then fourth might genuinely be GNU/Linux but there's massive dropoffs between third and fourth, and between second and third.
- bpoyner 4y ago
  But you may have used the Palm OS successor, webOS, which is used by LG smart TVs. It blew me away that Palm OS is still around in some form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
  - anthonyhn 4y ago
    There is also LuneOS [0], its sort of a successor that is built using a combination of Open webOS components and android components, and uses a web rendering engine (Qt WebEngine) for UI and app development. It's available on a few devices (I have it running on a pinephone; also tried running on a galaxy 4 but got stuck in a boot loop). The wiki is a bit out of date, but there is an active community on their IRC [1]. [0] https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/About https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/About [1] https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Contributors https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Contributors
  - rascul 4y ago
    Palm is back now too. They make ear buds and a mini phone. https://palm.com/ https://palm.com/
- anthonyhn 4y ago
  >I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps, iirc third place is KaiOS, a proprietary fork of the discontinued FirefoxOS [0]. It's primarily used on feature phones though. As for app support, an official youtube and whatsapp app are available on KaiOS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
ajvs 4y ago
Linux phones, but they're still years off usability-wise.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  This is where my mind is - although I don't think they're quite as far off as you might think. Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now). But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years ago that Apple has now (height of the "do no evil" stage). It turns out that companies literally cannot help themselves. So just like I've moved almost exclusively to linux on non-work computers, I plan to move exclusively to a free OS on my phone hardware. Right now that's un-googled forks of android, but I genuinely hope to see usable phones running on debian/arch/etc in the very near future. We're tantalizingly close with things like the pinephone pro, and the librem. I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well. And despite sounding negative - that's frankly a huge jump from where we were 5 years ago when a working linux phone (in any shape) was mostly a pipe-dream. I think there's a lot of interest in this area right now.
  - anthonyhn 4y ago
    >I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
      I was using the danctnix arch build running Phosh - https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months. And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.
seydor 4y ago
i think more people like apple's hardware than their software (myself included) android is not full of crap if it doesnt come preloaded with it. the google apps , which you can download are pretty great and the interface can be replaced with another launcher. The app selection in the stores seems identical to me
- coldpie 4y ago
  Yeah. I switched to iPhone late last year, since Apple is the only manufacturer that builds a phone that fits in the human hand. I'm pretty blown away by how bad iOS is compared to Android. Way fewer features, many more bugs, less customizable. Android is a far better software experience, but Apple is my only choice for a reasonably sized phone. Sucks.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - whynaut 4y ago
    I always found Android buggier, even when I wanted to love it. Even just opening the camera could crash my phones pretty often.
herbst 4y ago
> cheapishness and crappiness Not trying to attack but can you explain what you mean with that? There are at least 200 current android phone models and at least 50 popular flavours of android around. Sure you don't find a stock Samsung phone feeling 'luxury' but even a cheap Xiaomi with cleaned up stock android feels 'luxury' to me.
hamaluik 4y ago
I fall exactly here.. I used Android for a long time, until I got tired of my phone becoming non-functional after just a year or two. Switched to iPhones, and now they’re lasting 4+ years. I miss the flexibility of Android and iOS is full of bugs and design-based papercuts, yet it still manages to beat Android in just about all the areas that truly matter to me.
- rjh29 4y ago
  What do you mean by non-functional? The phone still works even if you don't get Android updates, but presumably there are some negative effects?
  - whynaut 4y ago
    not having security updates is a big deal, but apps also target minimum OS versions, and oftentimes the “minimum” is a year-old OS
- rthomas6 4y ago
  You might want to check out Pixel phones. I'm still rocking a Pixel 2 and it still works great.
  - ssizn 4y ago
    It hasn’t received updates, not even security updates, for years. It’s unacceptable for me to use a phone that doesn’t have security updates. On the other hand the other day Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s, released in 2013.

chrisseaton 4y ago

Maybe what makes iOS great is the restrictions? If you take away the restrictions maybe what's great is gone.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Macha 4y ago

Windows Phone apps were absolutely mostly shovelware, which had a not insignificant contribution to it's failure I feel. Never used PalmOS to comment. I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps, and then fourth might genuinely be GNU/Linux but there's massive dropoffs between third and fourth, and between second and third.

bpoyner 4y ago
But you may have used the Palm OS successor, webOS, which is used by LG smart TVs. It blew me away that Palm OS is still around in some form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
- anthonyhn 4y ago
  There is also LuneOS [0], its sort of a successor that is built using a combination of Open webOS components and android components, and uses a web rendering engine (Qt WebEngine) for UI and app development. It's available on a few devices (I have it running on a pinephone; also tried running on a galaxy 4 but got stuck in a boot loop). The wiki is a bit out of date, but there is an active community on their IRC [1]. [0] https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/About https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/About [1] https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Contributors https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Contributors
- rascul 4y ago
  Palm is back now too. They make ear buds and a mini phone. https://palm.com/ https://palm.com/
anthonyhn 4y ago
>I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps, iirc third place is KaiOS, a proprietary fork of the discontinued FirefoxOS [0]. It's primarily used on feature phones though. As for app support, an official youtube and whatsapp app are available on KaiOS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

ajvs 4y ago

Linux phones, but they're still years off usability-wise.

horsawlarway 4y ago
This is where my mind is - although I don't think they're quite as far off as you might think. Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now). But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years ago that Apple has now (height of the "do no evil" stage). It turns out that companies literally cannot help themselves. So just like I've moved almost exclusively to linux on non-work computers, I plan to move exclusively to a free OS on my phone hardware. Right now that's un-googled forks of android, but I genuinely hope to see usable phones running on debian/arch/etc in the very near future. We're tantalizingly close with things like the pinephone pro, and the librem. I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well. And despite sounding negative - that's frankly a huge jump from where we were 5 years ago when a working linux phone (in any shape) was mostly a pipe-dream. I think there's a lot of interest in this area right now.
- anthonyhn 4y ago
  >I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    I was using the danctnix arch build running Phosh - https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months. And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.

seydor 4y ago

i think more people like apple's hardware than their software (myself included) android is not full of crap if it doesnt come preloaded with it. the google apps , which you can download are pretty great and the interface can be replaced with another launcher. The app selection in the stores seems identical to me

coldpie 4y ago
Yeah. I switched to iPhone late last year, since Apple is the only manufacturer that builds a phone that fits in the human hand. I'm pretty blown away by how bad iOS is compared to Android. Way fewer features, many more bugs, less customizable. Android is a far better software experience, but Apple is my only choice for a reasonably sized phone. Sucks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- whynaut 4y ago
  I always found Android buggier, even when I wanted to love it. Even just opening the camera could crash my phones pretty often.

herbst 4y ago

> cheapishness and crappiness Not trying to attack but can you explain what you mean with that? There are at least 200 current android phone models and at least 50 popular flavours of android around. Sure you don't find a stock Samsung phone feeling 'luxury' but even a cheap Xiaomi with cleaned up stock android feels 'luxury' to me.

hamaluik 4y ago

I fall exactly here.. I used Android for a long time, until I got tired of my phone becoming non-functional after just a year or two. Switched to iPhones, and now they’re lasting 4+ years. I miss the flexibility of Android and iOS is full of bugs and design-based papercuts, yet it still manages to beat Android in just about all the areas that truly matter to me.

rjh29 4y ago
What do you mean by non-functional? The phone still works even if you don't get Android updates, but presumably there are some negative effects?
- whynaut 4y ago
  not having security updates is a big deal, but apps also target minimum OS versions, and oftentimes the “minimum” is a year-old OS
rthomas6 4y ago
You might want to check out Pixel phones. I'm still rocking a Pixel 2 and it still works great.
- ssizn 4y ago
  It hasn’t received updates, not even security updates, for years. It’s unacceptable for me to use a phone that doesn’t have security updates. On the other hand the other day Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s, released in 2013.