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I'm not convinced that Apple's dominance in the US is a result of anything other than simply producing a better product. I was an Android user for a decade and

by _mlbt 3y ago

I'm not convinced that Apple's dominance in the US is a result of anything other than simply producing a better product. I was an Android user for a decade and recently switched when the iPhone 12 came out. This is going to read like an ad, but within 48 hours I realized that barring Apple really screwing things up, I was never going back to Android. It's simply better at almost everything I want a smart phone to do. Also, the integration with the rest of the ecosystem is superb. There is nothing else like it on the market. I'll admit that there are things that Android does better. The biggest being the variety of hardware available, such as folding screens, gaming phones with built-in liquid cooling, or phones that work with styli for drawing and taking notes. However, when I consider the whole package, Apple is the one that will be getting my money for the foreseeable future. Also the whole iMessage blue versus green bubble controversy is overblown. Nobody above the age of 18 cares. They may joke about it, but at the end of the day you just use something like WhatsApp or Discord if you need more features than what green bubbles in iMessage can provide.

neodymiumphish 3y ago
I had the exact same experience switching to the 15 Pro Max last month. I was adamantly anti-iOS and pro-Android, using Samsung’s latest flagships (S10 Ultra, S21 Ultra, Fold4), until our carrier had a pretty amazing trade-in deal and I said screw it, let’s give iPhone a shot. It’s just so much better. Apps work better, focus modes and Shortcuts are incredible, sharing contact and experiences (SharePlay, shared albums and reminders lists, etc) are just a perfect experience. The Watch is also orders of magnitude better than Android Wear (or WearOS, whatever its latest name is).
realusername 3y ago
To each their own, I had to use one for a year to not create more ewaste and it's one the most buggy experience I ever had, I was to lazy to reformat it after one last breaking bug and I switched back. I find the software stack looks like hold together with duck tape. And iMessage lost in the EU so that never been a selling point for me. I never liked their software practices but I left them because of the software quality actually.
- _mlbt 3y ago
  > I find the software stack looks like hold together with duck tape. That’s how I feel about the Android platform! Non-upstream Android and Samsung specific patches on the Linux kernel, a weird Franken-Java runtime that doesn’t support modern Java features, which means most developers use Kotlin now to make for a tolerable developer experience. There’s tons of compatibility libraries that must be bundled with your app to account for the fact that a significant amount of your user base will be running embarrassingly old versions of Android, each with their own unique set of features and bugs. Like you said though, to each their own.
  - realusername 3y ago
    That's the same on Apple side, custom kernels for each device except you can't see them at all and the user space is even more Frankenstein than Android. At least on Android the system apps are actually real apps with real APIs! Anything related to icloud, accounts and the appstore is in a state of decay with custom patches all over the place which break if you are not 100% on the expected happy path. Sometimes just traveling abroad, adding a foreign credit card or upgrading the OS makes the whole thing not work anymore. (Yes all of those happened to me) And I'm not going to talk about the dev tooling for obvious reasons, it barely works and it's the worst dev environment I ever seen on all platforms. At least the users aren't going to see it, that's the upside I guess.
    - _mlbt 3y ago
      What specific issues do you have with the dev tooling on iOS? I've actually found Xcode and the simulator to be pretty nice to work with and haven't encountered any show stopping bugs. I've noticed the vast majority of issues I do run into can be quickly solved by doing a clean rebuild of my project.
      - realusername 3y ago
        Xcode takes 13GB and the updater is not capable of resuming downloads, if your internet stops, well here you go again from the start. The whole thing is as sluggish as an electron app and each click takes 2s to do anything. The app upload process is so broken, Apple themselves issued a third party tool to bypass it. The config format is undocumented and plays badly with git, I guess that's okay if you are working alone.

by _mlbt 3y ago

neodymiumphish 3y ago

I had the exact same experience switching to the 15 Pro Max last month. I was adamantly anti-iOS and pro-Android, using Samsung’s latest flagships (S10 Ultra, S21 Ultra, Fold4), until our carrier had a pretty amazing trade-in deal and I said screw it, let’s give iPhone a shot. It’s just so much better. Apps work better, focus modes and Shortcuts are incredible, sharing contact and experiences (SharePlay, shared albums and reminders lists, etc) are just a perfect experience. The Watch is also orders of magnitude better than Android Wear (or WearOS, whatever its latest name is).

realusername 3y ago

To each their own, I had to use one for a year to not create more ewaste and it's one the most buggy experience I ever had, I was to lazy to reformat it after one last breaking bug and I switched back. I find the software stack looks like hold together with duck tape. And iMessage lost in the EU so that never been a selling point for me. I never liked their software practices but I left them because of the software quality actually.

_mlbt 3y ago
> I find the software stack looks like hold together with duck tape. That’s how I feel about the Android platform! Non-upstream Android and Samsung specific patches on the Linux kernel, a weird Franken-Java runtime that doesn’t support modern Java features, which means most developers use Kotlin now to make for a tolerable developer experience. There’s tons of compatibility libraries that must be bundled with your app to account for the fact that a significant amount of your user base will be running embarrassingly old versions of Android, each with their own unique set of features and bugs. Like you said though, to each their own.
- realusername 3y ago
  That's the same on Apple side, custom kernels for each device except you can't see them at all and the user space is even more Frankenstein than Android. At least on Android the system apps are actually real apps with real APIs! Anything related to icloud, accounts and the appstore is in a state of decay with custom patches all over the place which break if you are not 100% on the expected happy path. Sometimes just traveling abroad, adding a foreign credit card or upgrading the OS makes the whole thing not work anymore. (Yes all of those happened to me) And I'm not going to talk about the dev tooling for obvious reasons, it barely works and it's the worst dev environment I ever seen on all platforms. At least the users aren't going to see it, that's the upside I guess.
  - _mlbt 3y ago
    What specific issues do you have with the dev tooling on iOS? I've actually found Xcode and the simulator to be pretty nice to work with and haven't encountered any show stopping bugs. I've noticed the vast majority of issues I do run into can be quickly solved by doing a clean rebuild of my project.
    - realusername 3y ago
      Xcode takes 13GB and the updater is not capable of resuming downloads, if your internet stops, well here you go again from the start. The whole thing is as sluggish as an electron app and each click takes 2s to do anything. The app upload process is so broken, Apple themselves issued a third party tool to bypass it. The config format is undocumented and plays badly with git, I guess that's okay if you are working alone.