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Having recently switched from an iPhone to an Android smartphone, I really question the "most advanced mobile OS" claim. Apple phones are more polished, more lo

Having recently switched from an iPhone to an Android smartphone, I really question the "most advanced mobile OS" claim. Apple phones are more polished, more logically organized, easier to use, more intuitive... fair enough. But more advanced? Not by a long shot. The amount of features and customizable options on Android is insane. You can argue that this is not necessarily a good thing for the average user, but you can't make the claim that iOS is more advanced. It's simply not. EDIT: OK, fair enough. The word "advanced" is very subjective and means different things to different people.

selectodude 13y ago
It's a completely subjective claim. They can say whatever the hell they want.
- baddox 13y ago
  Unless they're using the claim in countries where you're not allowed to use unsubstantiated subjective claims to describe your products.
austinz 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
jankassens 13y ago
Advancements can be made in many different ways. If it's an advancement in polish, organization, and easy of use it looks like you'd agree it's the most advanced. It's probably not an advancement in customizability.
gress 13y ago
Customization is not advancement. In many ways, iOS is clearly more advanced, for example security, energy consumption, 64-bit. You can debate the merits of these things, but Apple has a sound basis for their claim.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    I'm sorry, did you actually have something meaningful to add besides snark?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - gress 13y ago
    Absolutely. Presumably you're just reacting to the gotofail media flap. A little googling would clarify things for you. There are multiple million+ node android botnets, most devices are vulnerable to year old exploits, and there is a thriving market for remote control malware. Basically the same situation that existed on Windows in the bad old days.
    - rdl 13y ago
      iOS (well, software and hardware) security model blows Android out of the water in design; in implementation, it tends to be much more bug free as well. It's the one area where you can clearly say iOS is superior to Android; openness is the one area where Android is unambiguously better than iOS.
      - gress 13y ago
        Unfortunately Android is unambiguously not open. If you want to make an Android device, you must sign up to a restrictive contract with Google. There is an open source subset of Android called AOSP, which you can use as a basis for your OS, but Google prohibits these from being called Android. No Android system is open.
        rdl 13y ago
        It's entirely better than iOS for openness. As an app developer, it's dramatically more open -- you can override the core functionality of the OS if you want (browser, mail, etc.); you can't on iOS. I'm willing to tolerate the closed nature of iOS for better security and (personally) an interface/hardware I prefer. But stuff like blocking Bitcoin apps is making me question this.
giarc 13y ago
I have never owned an Android device however recently had some exposure when a colleague asked about battery life. I went through her settings etc to see what was enabled/not enabled and found a battery graph. It gave a breakdown of how much power each app was using and a graph of the battery charge over time. I was quite impressed. There is no native iPhone equivalent and I find most 3rd party apps that claim to track data/battery are not 100% accurate.
- gress 13y ago
  Users only need that on Android because the OS doesn't manage power consumption of apps adequately.
  - untog 13y ago
    An iPhone app is capable of sitting in the background tracking your location with battery draining GPS, too.
    - gress 13y ago
      Only navigation apps are allowed to do that.
    - zimpenfish 13y ago
      Location tracking doesn't drain your GPS. I have at least 4 apps running using location tracking on my iPhone (albeit with the help of the M7) and can go 6+ hours only losing 20% of battery life (implying 30 hours of use.) The key, of course, is that the phone was in my pocket for 95% of those 6 hours. Actually using it drains far more battery than all those location tracking apps combined.
  - cheald 13y ago
    It's somewhat disingenuous to say that the OS doesn't manage power consumption adequately; it defers to apps to let them decide what resources they need and when, which permits for a hell of a lot more flexibility than iOS (remember when Pandora wouldn't play music in the background for approximately forever?), at the cost of a misbehaving app chewing up more battery than it should.
sbuk 13y ago
"The amount of features and customizable options on Android is insane." That doesn't necessarily mean it's more advanced.
- nirnira 13y ago
  Out of the box, maybe not, but if you customise it, it can be orders of magnitude more advanced.
  - headShrinker 13y ago
    > more advanced You keep using that word. I don't think it means, what you think it means.
    - sbuk 13y ago
      > orders of magnitude There is another one.
  - MrScruff 13y ago
    What does 'orders of magnitude more advanced' mean? I would associate 'more advanced' with higher levels of abstraction. The fact that Android allows filesystem style access would make it less advanced in that sense. A unix shell is highly customisable and powerful in the hands of a knowledgeable user, but I wouldn't describe it as advanced. C++ is a very powerful programming language with tons of features, but I wouldn't describe it as advanced.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
acqq 13y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso "Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
- zimpenfish 13y ago
  ROMANES EXEUNT DOME
enraged_camel 13y ago
I'd argue that more features and customizable options do not necessarily make an OS more advanced, either. Then again, I probably use a different definition of the word "advanced" than most people here. To me, iOS is the more advanced operating system because it manages to hide its complexity from the user. Adding features is easy. What is not easy is making sure those features are coherent and actually make the device easier to use.
songgao 13y ago
iOS is the only mobile OS that has multipath TCP built-in AFAIK. They introduced that only half-year after MPTCP got standardized. I think that's a valid feature for being "advanced". And yes you can enable that by installing custom kernel modules. But I think hacking is out of scope here.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Joeri 13y ago
The iphone has all the same settings, things you must configure to get it to work at all, but far fewer preferences, things you can configure to make it work the way you want. In a case where multiple equivalent behaviors are possible, apple will typically think it through and pick just one, the right one (in their opinion). They give you what you need, but not necessarily what you want.
rednukleus 13y ago
I don't think that iOS is more logically organised, easier to use or more intuitive than Android. The settings system is a mess, and it is often much harder to do simple things on iOS than Android unless you stay strictly within Apple's suite of apps and services.
bananas 13y ago
Lepper here. I have a Windows phone (Lumia 820). I long for an iPhone. Preferably a 5c or above. I don't have the cash and will only buy SIM free phones these days though. I've had piles of Android handsets and a couple of WinPhone handsets. They all sucked. Whilst iOS isn't all that pretty, it actually works properly. My wife has precisely no problems with her 5c and the times I've used it, to be fair, I'm envious. I really couldn't care how the word advanced was applied to the marketing.
superuser2 13y ago
You can't make the claim that a greater number of features makes something more advanced. Especially when many of them are poorly implemented one-offs on one model on one carrier for a few months before support and updates are cut off permanently. (Why the hell should something like screen sharing be a feature of one particular model?!?) In terms of actually working, the iPhone is lightyears ahead of huge swaths of the Android ecosystem. Maybe not Google Nexus, but then you're locked into the inferior network coverage of AT&T or T-Mobile.
- bduerst 13y ago
  Not really. I think the better term is locked out of the ancient CDMA networks of Verizon. Nexus series is GSM, which is used globally, except for Verizon in the U.S. Samsung (w/ Verizon) install so much bloatware on their new Android phones it is bordering ridiculous. Why would new Galaxy S4 users want an uninstallable NFL app? The Motorola and LG Nexus android phones are comparable to iOS in terms of actually working.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    > Not really. I think the better term is locked out of the ancient CDMA networks of Verizon. Nexus series is GSM, which is used globally, except for Verizon in the U.S. Don't overstate the rarity of CDMA or the ubiquity of GSM. Yes, GSM is effectively the global standard, but CDMA is way more popular than you say. Examples of other CDMA networks include China Telecom (40+ million subscribers) and au by KDDI in Japan (20 million subscribers). A full(ish?) list is available on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks Many of those are specialty providers, legacy networks, etc., but a fair number are regular old cell phone providers.
    - bduerst 13y ago
      It is as bad as I am saying it is, regardless of your cherry picking. You can see GSM (red) vs CDMA (blue) global adoption rate here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Cellphone-subscribers-by-technology.svg/800px-Cellphone-subscribers-by-technology.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Cel... The Nexus and Motorola phones work fine on GSM. If anything, it's more of a reason to buy them than avoid them like you said. Edit: And I quote: >"Maybe not Google Nexus, but then you're locked into the inferior network coverage of AT&T or T-Mobile."
skrowl 13y ago
Bundling up a bunch of userspace apps and calling it an OS upgrade is pretty advanced. If you don't think so, you haven't drank enough of the Apple zealot Kool Aid. Don't worry, there are plenty of people here at [Y] that can show you the light!
blibble 13y ago
last year I wrote a short complaint to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about their use of "world's most desktop advanced operating system" to describe OS X. here are the responses I received: 1: http://imgur.com/mflFaHW http://imgur.com/mflFaHW 2: http://imgur.com/ndxyzlM http://imgur.com/ndxyzlM you'll now notice that the UK page doesn't contain that false statement: compare http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/ http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/ vs. http://www.apple.com/osx/ http://www.apple.com/osx/
- amartya916 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. Often times we let things slide w.r.t. marketing speak, but I believe it's important to call companies out on this. Did you have to make a case for "why" that claim was unsubstantiated (fairly obvious to us, but I wonder whether the ASA personnel reviewing the complain knew enough about it)?
- bananas 13y ago
  On what basis did you suggest that it wasn't the most advanced? I'm interested from a technical perspective. From a deep software development point of view, I'm familiar with OSX, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows and know their technical merits well.
  - blibble 13y ago
    I didn't, I just said that the comment was debatable, and that's enough to make the advertising misleading. I don't think anyone could disagree with that, even the most ardent Apple crusader.

selectodude 13y ago

It's a completely subjective claim. They can say whatever the hell they want.

baddox 13y ago
Unless they're using the claim in countries where you're not allowed to use unsubstantiated subjective claims to describe your products.

austinz 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery

jankassens 13y ago

Advancements can be made in many different ways. If it's an advancement in polish, organization, and easy of use it looks like you'd agree it's the most advanced. It's probably not an advancement in customizability.

gress 13y ago

Customization is not advancement. In many ways, iOS is clearly more advanced, for example security, energy consumption, 64-bit. You can debate the merits of these things, but Apple has a sound basis for their claim.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  I'm sorry, did you actually have something meaningful to add besides snark?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- gress 13y ago
  Absolutely. Presumably you're just reacting to the gotofail media flap. A little googling would clarify things for you. There are multiple million+ node android botnets, most devices are vulnerable to year old exploits, and there is a thriving market for remote control malware. Basically the same situation that existed on Windows in the bad old days.
  - rdl 13y ago
    iOS (well, software and hardware) security model blows Android out of the water in design; in implementation, it tends to be much more bug free as well. It's the one area where you can clearly say iOS is superior to Android; openness is the one area where Android is unambiguously better than iOS.
    - gress 13y ago
      Unfortunately Android is unambiguously not open. If you want to make an Android device, you must sign up to a restrictive contract with Google. There is an open source subset of Android called AOSP, which you can use as a basis for your OS, but Google prohibits these from being called Android. No Android system is open.
      - rdl 13y ago
        It's entirely better than iOS for openness. As an app developer, it's dramatically more open -- you can override the core functionality of the OS if you want (browser, mail, etc.); you can't on iOS. I'm willing to tolerate the closed nature of iOS for better security and (personally) an interface/hardware I prefer. But stuff like blocking Bitcoin apps is making me question this.

giarc 13y ago

I have never owned an Android device however recently had some exposure when a colleague asked about battery life. I went through her settings etc to see what was enabled/not enabled and found a battery graph. It gave a breakdown of how much power each app was using and a graph of the battery charge over time. I was quite impressed. There is no native iPhone equivalent and I find most 3rd party apps that claim to track data/battery are not 100% accurate.

gress 13y ago
Users only need that on Android because the OS doesn't manage power consumption of apps adequately.
- untog 13y ago
  An iPhone app is capable of sitting in the background tracking your location with battery draining GPS, too.
  - gress 13y ago
    Only navigation apps are allowed to do that.
  - zimpenfish 13y ago
    Location tracking doesn't drain your GPS. I have at least 4 apps running using location tracking on my iPhone (albeit with the help of the M7) and can go 6+ hours only losing 20% of battery life (implying 30 hours of use.) The key, of course, is that the phone was in my pocket for 95% of those 6 hours. Actually using it drains far more battery than all those location tracking apps combined.
- cheald 13y ago
  It's somewhat disingenuous to say that the OS doesn't manage power consumption adequately; it defers to apps to let them decide what resources they need and when, which permits for a hell of a lot more flexibility than iOS (remember when Pandora wouldn't play music in the background for approximately forever?), at the cost of a misbehaving app chewing up more battery than it should.

sbuk 13y ago

"The amount of features and customizable options on Android is insane." That doesn't necessarily mean it's more advanced.

nirnira 13y ago
Out of the box, maybe not, but if you customise it, it can be orders of magnitude more advanced.
- headShrinker 13y ago
  > more advanced You keep using that word. I don't think it means, what you think it means.
  - sbuk 13y ago
    > orders of magnitude There is another one.
- MrScruff 13y ago
  What does 'orders of magnitude more advanced' mean? I would associate 'more advanced' with higher levels of abstraction. The fact that Android allows filesystem style access would make it less advanced in that sense. A unix shell is highly customisable and powerful in the hands of a knowledgeable user, but I wouldn't describe it as advanced. C++ is a very powerful programming language with tons of features, but I wouldn't describe it as advanced.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

acqq 13y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso "Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

zimpenfish 13y ago
ROMANES EXEUNT DOME

enraged_camel 13y ago

I'd argue that more features and customizable options do not necessarily make an OS more advanced, either. Then again, I probably use a different definition of the word "advanced" than most people here. To me, iOS is the more advanced operating system because it manages to hide its complexity from the user. Adding features is easy. What is not easy is making sure those features are coherent and actually make the device easier to use.

songgao 13y ago

iOS is the only mobile OS that has multipath TCP built-in AFAIK. They introduced that only half-year after MPTCP got standardized. I think that's a valid feature for being "advanced". And yes you can enable that by installing custom kernel modules. But I think hacking is out of scope here.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Joeri 13y ago

The iphone has all the same settings, things you must configure to get it to work at all, but far fewer preferences, things you can configure to make it work the way you want. In a case where multiple equivalent behaviors are possible, apple will typically think it through and pick just one, the right one (in their opinion). They give you what you need, but not necessarily what you want.

rednukleus 13y ago

I don't think that iOS is more logically organised, easier to use or more intuitive than Android. The settings system is a mess, and it is often much harder to do simple things on iOS than Android unless you stay strictly within Apple's suite of apps and services.

bananas 13y ago

Lepper here. I have a Windows phone (Lumia 820). I long for an iPhone. Preferably a 5c or above. I don't have the cash and will only buy SIM free phones these days though. I've had piles of Android handsets and a couple of WinPhone handsets. They all sucked. Whilst iOS isn't all that pretty, it actually works properly. My wife has precisely no problems with her 5c and the times I've used it, to be fair, I'm envious. I really couldn't care how the word advanced was applied to the marketing.

superuser2 13y ago

You can't make the claim that a greater number of features makes something more advanced. Especially when many of them are poorly implemented one-offs on one model on one carrier for a few months before support and updates are cut off permanently. (Why the hell should something like screen sharing be a feature of one particular model?!?) In terms of actually working, the iPhone is lightyears ahead of huge swaths of the Android ecosystem. Maybe not Google Nexus, but then you're locked into the inferior network coverage of AT&T or T-Mobile.

bduerst 13y ago
Not really. I think the better term is locked out of the ancient CDMA networks of Verizon. Nexus series is GSM, which is used globally, except for Verizon in the U.S. Samsung (w/ Verizon) install so much bloatware on their new Android phones it is bordering ridiculous. Why would new Galaxy S4 users want an uninstallable NFL app? The Motorola and LG Nexus android phones are comparable to iOS in terms of actually working.
- mikeash 13y ago
  > Not really. I think the better term is locked out of the ancient CDMA networks of Verizon. Nexus series is GSM, which is used globally, except for Verizon in the U.S. Don't overstate the rarity of CDMA or the ubiquity of GSM. Yes, GSM is effectively the global standard, but CDMA is way more popular than you say. Examples of other CDMA networks include China Telecom (40+ million subscribers) and au by KDDI in Japan (20 million subscribers). A full(ish?) list is available on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks Many of those are specialty providers, legacy networks, etc., but a fair number are regular old cell phone providers.
  - bduerst 13y ago
    It is as bad as I am saying it is, regardless of your cherry picking. You can see GSM (red) vs CDMA (blue) global adoption rate here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Cellphone-subscribers-by-technology.svg/800px-Cellphone-subscribers-by-technology.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Cel... The Nexus and Motorola phones work fine on GSM. If anything, it's more of a reason to buy them than avoid them like you said. Edit: And I quote: >"Maybe not Google Nexus, but then you're locked into the inferior network coverage of AT&T or T-Mobile."

skrowl 13y ago

Bundling up a bunch of userspace apps and calling it an OS upgrade is pretty advanced. If you don't think so, you haven't drank enough of the Apple zealot Kool Aid. Don't worry, there are plenty of people here at [Y] that can show you the light!

blibble 13y ago

last year I wrote a short complaint to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about their use of "world's most desktop advanced operating system" to describe OS X. here are the responses I received: 1: http://imgur.com/mflFaHW http://imgur.com/mflFaHW 2: http://imgur.com/ndxyzlM http://imgur.com/ndxyzlM you'll now notice that the UK page doesn't contain that false statement: compare http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/ http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/ vs. http://www.apple.com/osx/ http://www.apple.com/osx/

amartya916 13y ago
Thanks for sharing this. Often times we let things slide w.r.t. marketing speak, but I believe it's important to call companies out on this. Did you have to make a case for "why" that claim was unsubstantiated (fairly obvious to us, but I wonder whether the ASA personnel reviewing the complain knew enough about it)?
bananas 13y ago
On what basis did you suggest that it wasn't the most advanced? I'm interested from a technical perspective. From a deep software development point of view, I'm familiar with OSX, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows and know their technical merits well.
- blibble 13y ago
  I didn't, I just said that the comment was debatable, and that's enough to make the advertising misleading. I don't think anyone could disagree with that, even the most ardent Apple crusader.