10 ms·

Android Is Not Better. Neither Is iOS.

43 points by bozhidar 13y ago

pmelendez 13y ago
I have an experience similar to OP's. I had been user of four platforms (Blackberry, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8) and all of them have benefits and caveats. I only differ with OP in the fact that he pretty much blames device makers in the android case, and I think that the problem is more than just the device, at least that was the case before Ice cream sandwich, and at that point I was just done with Android.
JonFish85 13y ago
You're saying there are tradeoffs to different platforms? No shit. Like anything else in life, it all depends on your situation. Whether it's programming languages, car you drive, food you eat, etc. Want a phone that's expensive but "just works"? Buy an iPhone. Want a phone that has the ability to do interesting wacky things? Buy an unlocked Android phone. Phone wars are stupid (in the "X is better / no, Y is better" sense).
- pmelendez 13y ago
  > "Want a phone that has the ability to do interesting wacky things? Buy an unlocked Android phone" For that matter, I actually would prefer install ubuntu or firefox OS on it.
  - bouk 13y ago
    ... which are both currently only possible on a bootloader unlocked Android phone
    - pmelendez 13y ago
      Well Ubuntu Edge is coming up and I believe Firefox's ZTE Open is already out in several countries, so maybe that statement is only true in USA.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Or a Moto X? Nexus 4?
- pit 13y ago
  That's exactly why I hate articles like this. "Other peoples' opinions don't matter because they're just opinions. Let _ME_ set the record straight."
badman_ting 13y ago
I thought that was the point of Marco's post as well, but I'm sure it got interpreted as "Apple is better, nyah nyah"
jjindev 13y ago
While the author attempts to view the world as a user, I think many of his bad experiences are early adopter woes. Given that most people didn't have smart phones in those early days, I'm not sure ancient history matters. In the long term it will be a battle between mature and slowly changing phone/tablet OSes. Apple knows this, which is why they are desperately designing watches.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  It struck me as very odd to be pissed about app developers not supporting early versions of Android - all the way back to the Android 1.x to 2.x transition. Most of the early customers just stuck with the app versions that were available to them and didn't know or care about lack of back-ports.
pilif 13y ago
Nitpick: > (iOS7 will have multitasking for all apps). Not really. iOS7 allows more situations for the OS to wake up an app for a short amount of time, but there's no real multitasking as in android where you just write your service and stay running. Aside of that, I agree with the article about strengths and weaknesses of the two platforms. I've used both Android and iOS over time, but in the end, many small things just let me prefer iOS, even though it's probably completely subjective at this point. The biggest lock-in to iOS is iMessage though and I hate Apple for that as it makes it next to impossible for me to ever not use an iOS device as my phone any more: When you move your SIM card from an iOS device to a non-iOS device, there's a period of time during which Apple accepts iMessages for your number, especially when you have other devices configured with iMessage. At this point, people sending you an iMessage (it's not as if they get to chose) will think that the message is delivered (it might even say "delivered"), when in fact nothing the like has happened. Worse: Even once this settles and apple's server stop accepting iMessages to a number, now the sender will see green chat bubbles instead of blue ones. This has caused me so much grief with non-technical iOS users, believing that something went wrong with delivering the message, causing them to call me after nearly every message they sent ("the bubble didn't look the same. did you get my message?") This is an ugly mess and I don't see any motivation for Apple to fix it as it only punishes those who don't use iOS, never those using iOS. The other big thing is visual voice mail which I really like and so far is not supported by Android (aside of some crappy carrier specific apps) even though in most cases it's just audio-files-over-imap that's powering the secret sauce under iOS.
- recursive 13y ago
  Google Talk isn't carrier specific.
  - pilif 13y ago
    Google Talk isn't available where I live.
- belthasar 13y ago
  >"When you move your SIM card from an iOS device to a non-iOS device, there's a period of time during which Apple accepts iMessages for your number, especially when you have other devices configured with iMessage." If you turn off iMessage before removing the sim card this won't happen. I do this all the time when switching between my HTC One X and iPhone 4.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
My personal favorite theory about why iOS makes more revenue in the app store, is that more rich idiots use iOS. Now, I'm perhaps not serious about that, and I'm just reacting to the tone of "Android users are lesser people" that's been prevalent recently. But I will note that according to this report: http://www.distimo.com/publications/archive/Distimo%20Publication%20-%20May%202013.pdf http://www.distimo.com/publications/archive/Distimo%20Public... A $15.99 Final Fantasy game from Square-Enix made 73% of it's revenue from Android in May 2013 while the "free" Candy Crush Saga and Simpsons: Tapped Out games made much more money from iOS. These "free" games are apparently designed around "Whales", people who spend literally thousands of dollars on them: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/meet-the-whales/all/ http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/meet-the-whales/all/ "Lee says that spending money on games like Clash of Clans is actually saving him money in the long-run: Before he started gaming, he says he and a small group of friends would go out drinking, sometimes spending as much as $6,000 in a single night between them." "He wound up spending nearly $5,000 in that game before trading it for Clash of Clans, but says that’s far less than what he would have otherwise spent on alcohol. “I actually save money playing these games instead of going out and drinking,” he said. ... "Vince P., who also asked us to withhold his last name, has been playing the Facebook game Battle Pirates since early 2011. His total spend: over $16,000. “It does kind of shock me, for sure, that it was that much,” said Vince, who goes by the username “Spoon” in Battle Pirates. “And it’s all for nothing.” Vince is 45 years old, divorced, with a 16-year-old daughter. He says he makes between $200,000 and $400,000 annually. He looked positively distraught over the situation during a Skype interview with Wired, as he tabulated a list of his receipts." It's my semi-serious theory that these people, at least in the US, are more likely to own iOS devices.
- pilif 13y ago
  This could also boil down to the fact that the purchasing experience for in-app purchases is much nicer on iOS (for the better or the worse).
  - Fuzzwah 13y ago
    I haven't ever seen the in-app purchase system in iOS, but the one time I made an in-app purchase on my Android phone it was stupidly slick and easy. PS: I already had google wallet set up due to previously using it to pay for something from my desktop.
dmix 13y ago
Paul Stamatiou wrote specifically about his experience with 4.2. The author having not used Android 4 makes this a very poor analysis. I also hated Android <3.0 and loved iOS for years. Then I bought S3 (and now S4) with Android 4.2 and the improvement was massive. Android only recently got their shit together (design & performance wise) and it's now very competitive with iOS. Arguably much better in favor of Android if you're a hacker. Cyanogenmod is very easy to install. There's no reason to be locked into old versions because of your smartphone vendor (assuming you're moderately technically savvy).
- bozhidar 13y ago
  Not having used Android 4? As noted in the article I installed it manually on my Xperia Arc (CyanogenMod)... I've also played with Android 4.2 quite a lot - but then again that was not the point of the article.
vectorpush 13y ago
I bought my first Android (Galaxy S4) a couple months back, before that I'd only owned iPhones. For me, Android has been a superior experience in almost every way. I could talk about a few dozen different aspects, but one that really sticks out... The browser experience. Chrome and Firefox alone were enough to make the switch worth it for me. Firefox extensions are just as rich as on the desktop, private browsing is quick and seamless, I also really enjoy the tab sharing between devices in Chrome. Tabs stay open all day and don't refresh every time I switch an app, files I download manifest themselves onto a file system I can easily consume with a USB cable. It just feels like a real browser experience, whereas iOS feels like a joke in comparison.
dylangs1030 13y ago
This exactly echoes Marco Arment's "Google Blindness" post. I'm sure a lot of people read "Android is Better" and "Google Blindness" and perceived a direct thesis-antithesis relationship, but that wasn't the case. He actually proposed a compromise view in the middle that (surprise) different people like different things. Different strokes for different folks and all that. I'm also disappointed by everyone succumbing to the usual flame war-ish ideologies surrounding iOS and Android. One does not need to be better than the other. You can develop for both. Developing on either one has strategic advantages and disadvantages, and you can always port to the other later (okay, almost always). It's so annoying that people attempt to crunch all the arguments for and against each operating system into a binary response to using either one. It's childish and uninformed.
YeahKIA 13y ago
Why does this whole thing reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsQxaNKWFfA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsQxaNKWFfA
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I like having one of each, more fun that way. I use a Galaxy S III and an iPad mini - love them both. Using a few services like DropBox and Evernote eliminates some of the down-side of using two portable devices.
Moto7451 13y ago
Sadly cell phone OS choices have become something that straddles the divide between a holy war and a football rivalry. I simply don't understand it.
da_n 13y ago
> you’re trusting an advertising company with all your personal data :-) Although this is probably my single biggest gripe with Android, you should employ just as little trust in any of the big tech companies at this point; Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc are all openly deceiving their customers. As Steve Gibson says, trust no one.

43 points by bozhidar 13y ago

I have an experience similar to OP's. I had been user of four platforms (Blackberry, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8) and all of them have benefits and caveats. I only differ with OP in the fact that he pretty much blames device makers in the android case, and I think that the problem is more than just the device, at least that was the case before Ice cream sandwich, and at that point I was just done with Android.

JonFish85 13y ago

You're saying there are tradeoffs to different platforms? No shit. Like anything else in life, it all depends on your situation. Whether it's programming languages, car you drive, food you eat, etc. Want a phone that's expensive but "just works"? Buy an iPhone. Want a phone that has the ability to do interesting wacky things? Buy an unlocked Android phone. Phone wars are stupid (in the "X is better / no, Y is better" sense).

pmelendez 13y ago
> "Want a phone that has the ability to do interesting wacky things? Buy an unlocked Android phone" For that matter, I actually would prefer install ubuntu or firefox OS on it.
- bouk 13y ago
  ... which are both currently only possible on a bootloader unlocked Android phone
  - pmelendez 13y ago
    Well Ubuntu Edge is coming up and I believe Firefox's ZTE Open is already out in several countries, so maybe that statement is only true in USA.
mtgx 13y ago
Or a Moto X? Nexus 4?
pit 13y ago
That's exactly why I hate articles like this. "Other peoples' opinions don't matter because they're just opinions. Let _ME_ set the record straight."

badman_ting 13y ago

I thought that was the point of Marco's post as well, but I'm sure it got interpreted as "Apple is better, nyah nyah"

jjindev 13y ago

While the author attempts to view the world as a user, I think many of his bad experiences are early adopter woes. Given that most people didn't have smart phones in those early days, I'm not sure ancient history matters. In the long term it will be a battle between mature and slowly changing phone/tablet OSes. Apple knows this, which is why they are desperately designing watches.

Zigurd 13y ago
It struck me as very odd to be pissed about app developers not supporting early versions of Android - all the way back to the Android 1.x to 2.x transition. Most of the early customers just stuck with the app versions that were available to them and didn't know or care about lack of back-ports.

pilif 13y ago

Nitpick: > (iOS7 will have multitasking for all apps). Not really. iOS7 allows more situations for the OS to wake up an app for a short amount of time, but there's no real multitasking as in android where you just write your service and stay running. Aside of that, I agree with the article about strengths and weaknesses of the two platforms. I've used both Android and iOS over time, but in the end, many small things just let me prefer iOS, even though it's probably completely subjective at this point. The biggest lock-in to iOS is iMessage though and I hate Apple for that as it makes it next to impossible for me to ever not use an iOS device as my phone any more: When you move your SIM card from an iOS device to a non-iOS device, there's a period of time during which Apple accepts iMessages for your number, especially when you have other devices configured with iMessage. At this point, people sending you an iMessage (it's not as if they get to chose) will think that the message is delivered (it might even say "delivered"), when in fact nothing the like has happened. Worse: Even once this settles and apple's server stop accepting iMessages to a number, now the sender will see green chat bubbles instead of blue ones. This has caused me so much grief with non-technical iOS users, believing that something went wrong with delivering the message, causing them to call me after nearly every message they sent ("the bubble didn't look the same. did you get my message?") This is an ugly mess and I don't see any motivation for Apple to fix it as it only punishes those who don't use iOS, never those using iOS. The other big thing is visual voice mail which I really like and so far is not supported by Android (aside of some crappy carrier specific apps) even though in most cases it's just audio-files-over-imap that's powering the secret sauce under iOS.

recursive 13y ago
Google Talk isn't carrier specific.
- pilif 13y ago
  Google Talk isn't available where I live.
belthasar 13y ago
>"When you move your SIM card from an iOS device to a non-iOS device, there's a period of time during which Apple accepts iMessages for your number, especially when you have other devices configured with iMessage." If you turn off iMessage before removing the sim card this won't happen. I do this all the time when switching between my HTC One X and iPhone 4.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

My personal favorite theory about why iOS makes more revenue in the app store, is that more rich idiots use iOS. Now, I'm perhaps not serious about that, and I'm just reacting to the tone of "Android users are lesser people" that's been prevalent recently. But I will note that according to this report: http://www.distimo.com/publications/archive/Distimo%20Publication%20-%20May%202013.pdf http://www.distimo.com/publications/archive/Distimo%20Public... A $15.99 Final Fantasy game from Square-Enix made 73% of it's revenue from Android in May 2013 while the "free" Candy Crush Saga and Simpsons: Tapped Out games made much more money from iOS. These "free" games are apparently designed around "Whales", people who spend literally thousands of dollars on them: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/meet-the-whales/all/ http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/meet-the-whales/all/ "Lee says that spending money on games like Clash of Clans is actually saving him money in the long-run: Before he started gaming, he says he and a small group of friends would go out drinking, sometimes spending as much as $6,000 in a single night between them." "He wound up spending nearly $5,000 in that game before trading it for Clash of Clans, but says that’s far less than what he would have otherwise spent on alcohol. “I actually save money playing these games instead of going out and drinking,” he said. ... "Vince P., who also asked us to withhold his last name, has been playing the Facebook game Battle Pirates since early 2011. His total spend: over $16,000. “It does kind of shock me, for sure, that it was that much,” said Vince, who goes by the username “Spoon” in Battle Pirates. “And it’s all for nothing.” Vince is 45 years old, divorced, with a 16-year-old daughter. He says he makes between $200,000 and $400,000 annually. He looked positively distraught over the situation during a Skype interview with Wired, as he tabulated a list of his receipts." It's my semi-serious theory that these people, at least in the US, are more likely to own iOS devices.

pilif 13y ago
This could also boil down to the fact that the purchasing experience for in-app purchases is much nicer on iOS (for the better or the worse).
- Fuzzwah 13y ago
  I haven't ever seen the in-app purchase system in iOS, but the one time I made an in-app purchase on my Android phone it was stupidly slick and easy. PS: I already had google wallet set up due to previously using it to pay for something from my desktop.

dmix 13y ago

Paul Stamatiou wrote specifically about his experience with 4.2. The author having not used Android 4 makes this a very poor analysis. I also hated Android <3.0 and loved iOS for years. Then I bought S3 (and now S4) with Android 4.2 and the improvement was massive. Android only recently got their shit together (design & performance wise) and it's now very competitive with iOS. Arguably much better in favor of Android if you're a hacker. Cyanogenmod is very easy to install. There's no reason to be locked into old versions because of your smartphone vendor (assuming you're moderately technically savvy).

bozhidar 13y ago
Not having used Android 4? As noted in the article I installed it manually on my Xperia Arc (CyanogenMod)... I've also played with Android 4.2 quite a lot - but then again that was not the point of the article.

vectorpush 13y ago

I bought my first Android (Galaxy S4) a couple months back, before that I'd only owned iPhones. For me, Android has been a superior experience in almost every way. I could talk about a few dozen different aspects, but one that really sticks out... The browser experience. Chrome and Firefox alone were enough to make the switch worth it for me. Firefox extensions are just as rich as on the desktop, private browsing is quick and seamless, I also really enjoy the tab sharing between devices in Chrome. Tabs stay open all day and don't refresh every time I switch an app, files I download manifest themselves onto a file system I can easily consume with a USB cable. It just feels like a real browser experience, whereas iOS feels like a joke in comparison.

dylangs1030 13y ago

This exactly echoes Marco Arment's "Google Blindness" post. I'm sure a lot of people read "Android is Better" and "Google Blindness" and perceived a direct thesis-antithesis relationship, but that wasn't the case. He actually proposed a compromise view in the middle that (surprise) different people like different things. Different strokes for different folks and all that. I'm also disappointed by everyone succumbing to the usual flame war-ish ideologies surrounding iOS and Android. One does not need to be better than the other. You can develop for both. Developing on either one has strategic advantages and disadvantages, and you can always port to the other later (okay, almost always). It's so annoying that people attempt to crunch all the arguments for and against each operating system into a binary response to using either one. It's childish and uninformed.

YeahKIA 13y ago

Why does this whole thing reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsQxaNKWFfA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsQxaNKWFfA

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I like having one of each, more fun that way. I use a Galaxy S III and an iPad mini - love them both. Using a few services like DropBox and Evernote eliminates some of the down-side of using two portable devices.

Moto7451 13y ago

Sadly cell phone OS choices have become something that straddles the divide between a holy war and a football rivalry. I simply don't understand it.

da_n 13y ago

> you’re trusting an advertising company with all your personal data :-) Although this is probably my single biggest gripe with Android, you should employ just as little trust in any of the big tech companies at this point; Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc are all openly deceiving their customers. As Steve Gibson says, trust no one.