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Maybe I'm just a tech philistine but I find my Pixel 8a and my wife's iPhone <N> to be basically indistinguishable in any meaningful way.
by cbdumas 2y ago
Maybe I'm just a tech philistine but I find my Pixel 8a and my wife's iPhone <N> to be basically indistinguishable in any meaningful way.
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoThey are completely different. One of them lets you have the sexy blue text boxes in iPhone group chats, and the other makes everyone see you with the green box of shame.
- yurishimo 2y agoUnless you live outside of the US in which nobody gives a damn and they all use WhatsApp. After moving, I only get sms messages from the doctors office and my friends back in America.
- omnimus 2y agoNot true at all. This effect is pretty common in countries outside of US. It makes sense. WhatsApp is just another messaging app thats popular depending on a local whim. Where as iMessages get sent automatically between iOS users.
- beAbU 2y agoWhat countries other than US is this so prevalent?
- jbarham 2y agoAccording to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-market-share-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma... iPhone also has > 50% market share in Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia and Japan. FWIW I live in Australia and most group chats are via WhatsApp vs SMS/iMessage.
- omnimus 2y agoI didnt say this is so prevalent. Just that it exists. My experience from few european countries is that middle class - tech/business/law people have iOS. Go to tech or business conference and its all iphones. So its really easy to be in such circles. I live in EU country and its all iMessage or Signal. Nobody uses WhatsApp if something its Facebook Messenger or Instagram messages.
- NBJack 2y agoOutside the US, and a handful of other countries, Android is far more dominant than iOS (75% vs 25%). [1] WhatsApp has an estimated active userbase of approximately 3 billion. [2] The number of iMessage users is estimated to be about 1 billion. [3] [1] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users#iphone-vs-android-global-market-share https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users#iphone... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-unique-users/#:~:text=WhatsApp%20is%20estimated%20to%20have%20reached%20almost,channel%20for%20global%20smartphone%20users%20in%202024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-... [3] https://usesignhouse.com/blog/imessage-stats/#:~:text=iMessage%3A%20Number%20of%20users,-Want%20a%20link&text=of%20this%20article%3F-,The%20number%20of%20iMessage%20users%20around%20the%20world%20was%20estimated,the%201%20billion%20user%20milestone. https://usesignhouse.com/blog/imessage-stats/#:~:text=iMessa...
- ksec 2y agoOn [1], If you only look at countries with decent GDP per Capita. iOS will have anywhere from 40 to 65% market share. Even in China iOS is well over 30%. When you consider Africa + ASEAN + India has 3.5B population and has very low iPhone market share that sort of Skew the figures.
- oasisaimlessly 2y agoYeah, weighting the figures by GDP makes sense. Indeed, poor people aren't really people at all.
- 2y ago
- 31337Logic 2y agoY'all bitches gotta get on Signal. ;-)
- dividedbyzero 2y agoI hear even the US government trusts Signal
- dividedbyzero 2y agoI'm sure there are dozens of people in Germany who actively prefer iMessage but I haven't met one yet. Whatsapp achieved pretty much total market capture here back when SMS still were costly and the network effects that arose from that are among the strongest I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure if someone was to do a survey, almost everyone would say Messages is for SMS only and I think most of them wouldn't know it can do more than that.
- virtualritz 2y agoIn Berlin everyone seems to be on Telegram these days. People leaning more left and/or are privacy-aware and/or hate FB/Meta/big tech use Signal. WhatsApp seems only to be used by the elderly/old in my circle of friends lately. The transition has been gradual; started during the pandemic, I'd say.
- AlexKir 2y agoIt doesn't surprise me. Telegram is surerior both technologically and UX side. I have impression that WhatsApp team just dont do anything for years.
- omnimus 2y agoYet i write with most of my German friends using iMessages because its automatic and i dont have Telegram or WhatsApp because nobody uses it in my european country.
- oska 2y ago> Unless you live outside of the US [...] and they all use WhatsApp This is such a ridiculously incorrect over-generalisation. China, Japan & Russia are obvious counter-examples, plus many others.
- homarp 2y agoi don't think China uses SMS though.
- needlesslygrim 2y agoIn China WeChat is the dominant messaging platform, SMS is only used for delivery notifications, spam, etc.
- Macha 2y agoMy understanding is Line is on top in Japan.
- oska 2y agoI understand that. My point was that the original comment was grossly overstating the supposed 'dominance' of WhatsApp.
- thebytefairy 2y agoThe real point of the original comment was that outside the US iMessage is not dominant and so nobody cares about what color a chat bubble is.
- oska 2y agoI appreciate that I was a bit too confrontational in my first reply and should have just added that WeChat, Line and Telegram are also used (plus many others), not just WhatsApp. Why I think I (over) reacted is that it was, to me, an example of only partial escape from US American insularity. They understood that ppl outside the USA don't use SMS much, but only suggested a US American messaging platform as what was used instead.
- colonial 2y agoTrue, but God does WhatsApp suck. They've got a billion-strong userbase and yet the Android app still dumped literally every attachment I received into my camera roll until I manually added '.nomedia' files in the right places. And, oh man, the API for businesses is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Maybe it was good before it got Zucked, but I had to fight with their support for over a week to get an automated ban-hammer overturned... only for it to get auto-banned again two days later. We hadn't even deployed the damn thing yet!
- ksec 2y agoDont know about Andriod but iOS you can select not to save images into camera roll.
- joseda-hg 2y agoThat's a feature, not a bug Users are conditioned to look there for any kind of image on their device
- hu3 2y ago> literally every attachment I received into my camera roll There's a global setting for this: media visibility: off. Then you can enable that per chat. I have all chat images contained to only Whatsapp by default. Then I only enable some chats (family, friends) to expose images/videos to the phone. Google Photos scoops those and backsup all family pictures shared to whatsapp to my Google Photos. I'm the family's reliable source of truth when it comes to family photos.
- viraptor 2y agoWhat's "camera roll"? WA images go into the "WhatsApp Images" folder. They're separate from "Camera".
- colonial 2y agoEvery Android "gallery"-type app I've ever used defaults to a view that mixes together every known album/folder on the device. That works fine (and is in fact easier than remembering the exact album) when I get to pick and choose exactly what I photograph/save, but it became borderline unusable once WhatsApp started vomiting hundreds of stupid GIFs and throwaway screenshots into it.
- alabastervlog 2y agoNeither of them causes anyone else to see your messages as green. Or blue.
- jokethrowaway 2y agoThe camera - the only reason I would buy an iPhone is for the better camera. Sure, the Pixel 8a camera is not bad for the price but it's still noticeably worse. The kind of difference you notice when someone with an iPhone shares photos with you. Apps and the whole phone experience are a sh*tshow on both sides and I hate both with a passion. I'm still waiting for a decent linux experience on a phone - possibly with stupid banking apps support.
- izacus 2y agoPixels have been beating iPhones in camera quality for years now on pretty much every blind test. Even the cheap ones.
- gman83 2y agoWhenever they do these blind tests for different phone cameras, the iPhone never wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRoTOE3FqT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRoTOE3FqT0
- Yeul 2y agoI play videogames and I can tell the difference between 60 and 120herz screen. Always amused me that a so called premium device had worse hardware than a flagship killer. Apple apparently finally caught up with their latest phone?
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoHigh refresh on its own is not enough to constitute a better screen. While Apple could certainly stand to bump the minimum refresh rate to 120hz across the board, I wouldn’t want that to come at the expense of the other more important specs as has been common outside of the Apple sphere, particularly on budget devices. If one has to choose, a color accurate screen is preferable to a fast but less accurate one in most circumstances for instance.
- sho_hn 2y agoAlmost anyone can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz. Seriously, if you haven't upgraded your desktop PC to a higher refresh rate screen yet: It's the biggest "feels like a new computer!" upgrade since we swapped HDDs for SSDs and the days when your new CPU was 2.5x as fast as the old one. There is no turning back after having experienced the buttery smoothness, and the impact is IMHO higher during regular usage than during games.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y agoI upgraded to 144 hz on my primary monitor in 2016 and it's absolutely noticeable and makes things feel so smooth. Last week I went to 240 hz and while it's noticeably even smoother, it wasn't nearly the upgrade, so there's certainly diminishing returns. Though I did go from IPS to OLED and THAT is really nice. This is usually the point where someone will chime in and say something dumb like "The human eye can't see more than X frames per second" which is just hogwash. It's not about individual frames, but the fluidity of motion. At 60 fps, an object moving across the screen is moving 4x as many pixels per frame as 240 fps. When you get used to 240 fps, 60 fps feels like it's strobing.
- 2y ago
- Krssst 2y agoIn my understanding, animations cannot be fully disabled on iOS (please tell me if I am wrong) while they can on Android. This leads to much better usability since you don't have to wait after every interaction.
- delite 2y agoYou can enable reduce motion[1] which effectively replaces all transitions with a brief fade. https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/iphone/iph0b691d3ed/ios https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/iphone/iph0b691d3ed/io...