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I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android
by SkyeCA 10mo ago
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoDunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being. Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
- rr808 10mo agoI think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoThat’s a good observation, I think you’re right.
- bigyabai 10mo agoYep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
- mceachen 10mo agoFollowed by “where is the back button.” Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
- tempest_ 10mo agoDoes apply still sometimes put the back button in the top left? That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches
- phantasmish 10mo agoYou mean the “roulette-wheel do-something-vaguely-backish” button?
- nozzlegear 10mo agoI can't remember the last time I've encountered an app that didn't let you swipe to go back. That's practically built into iOS at this point.
- Groxx 10mo agoiOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
- loloquwowndueo 10mo ago> ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone. This is actually hilarious because Android had all-screen phones with only virtual buttons long before iPhones did :)
- bigyabai 10mo agoSure, but neither my Pixel nor Samsung handset defaults to gesture navigation. I consider myself pretty tech savvy but just never use Apple's multitasking provisions on iOS and iPadOS.
- phantasmish 10mo agoI’ve been using iOS since 2013 or so, and even spent five or so years off-and-on developing for the platform. I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
- klooney 10mo agoPixels do now
- andy99 10mo agoI had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good). But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is. But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work” Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates
- rootusrootus 10mo agoYeah that's the joke. 10 years ago all of this basic stuff was working well. Now, autocorrect and cursor placement regularly make me want to chuck the phone into a chipper shredder.
- macNchz 10mo agoI've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time. It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
- Groxx 10mo agoIf you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher. I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
- beezlebroxxxxxx 10mo agoAndroid has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course. NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
- rootusrootus 10mo ago> NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iPhone though I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS. RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).
- bigstrat2003 10mo agoTeenagers supposedly care. But I've never seen adults who care in the least what kind of phone someone has.
- rootusrootus 10mo agoI've heard that, but anecdotally, neither of my two teenagers care at all. Maybe it used to matter in the past, but these days all the kids seem to be on Discord and any phone will do.
- tempest_ 10mo agoFair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade. The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
- nyarlathotep_ 10mo agoThings like media playback via a web browser (and really browsing in general) are so superior to iOS it's not even a fair comparison.