Yes, I’m the one in the group DM that turns the bubbles green, I’m sorry.
But other than that, I don’t hear many other reasons why people actually prefer iPhones over Androids. What other reasons are there?
OS updates. It’s frustrating to buy a top of the line android phone just for it to be forgotten by the manufacturer in 6-8 months.
Pixels give you 5 years now same as iphone.
iPhone gets you more like 10 years of security updates
https://www.makeuseof.com/apple-security-updates-for-10-year-old-devices/
My iPad from 2015 is still getting all the updates. It’s wild.
Exactly.
Owning Apple products feels less wasteful, somehow. I don’t replace them often.
Yeah I think iPad’s are clearly better than any android tablet.
Yeah I don’t like Apple. Though unfortunately, the iPad is the only useful consumer tablet imo. Android tablets seem to only be good for like integrated uses like a construction tablet with custom software.
And i would love my Ipad even more if i could have the option to install a custom rom to have the customization options that i just loose with ipados
I just want my Nintendo DS emulator back on my iPad :(
I still haven’t quite forgiven Google for abandoning owners of the Nexus 5X the second the Pixel came out…
I kept my Nexus 5X until Pixel 4a came out. That was a good phone. I was lucky that the refurbished i got, after suffering the dead after phone too hot demise, actually lasted and it’s still alive as second phone, if needed. Custom ROMs were still a thing. I miss then sometimes or rather i sometimes miss the custom ROM community. Some very dedicated people, lots of asshats and always noobs asking the kind of questions everyone loved.
I hope the Pixel 4a is an outlier regarding support! The 4a will be getting updates until August 2023, and the 4a 5g until November of this year.
I had a Nexus 10 they abandoned after two years. Made me never want to spend money on an android tablet again. Honestly I would probably switch to iOS if I could have ad blockers.
You’ve been able to get ad blockers on iOS for years at this point, they call them “content blockers”. They’re not as full featured as those on android though.
Can I get YouTube AdBlock and can I add custom filter lists?
The 5X was such a garbage device that it makes sense that they’d try to sweep that trash under the rug. I swear I was getting barely more than 40 minutes SoT and it would get stupidly hot if you tried to do anything on it.
I was so happy with my Pixel 1 purchase, Pixel 2 was also a treat. And then I switched to iPhone in 2018 because Google pissed me off when they insisted that the half pink screen on my Pixel 3 was normal and acceptable. I’ve had an iPhone as my daily ever since, but have tried every Pixel since and currently own a 7 as a backup phone.
But the iPhone experience is still overall better, especially since CarPlay is still rock solid compared to Android Auto, which was one of my absolute deciding factors. Apollo was too, but now that’s gone, so if Google could make wireless Android Auto not turn my Pixel 7 into a furnace and improve the battery life in general further for the Pixel 8, I could see me returning to Android.
Only security updates.
OS updates are only 3 years
Iphones get a lot more than 3 updates
Yes that is my point.
Pixels only get 3 major version updates which is less than the iPhone
If you use the stock rom, if you install a custom one you get updates as long as the developers continue working which is quite a pong time for some of the ROMs that exist right now
However you have to take into consideration what the OS updates do on each device.
On iOS, an update also updates all the system apps, meaning Safari, Maps, weather, notes, mail, health, photos, the calculator and so on are hyper dependent on having OS updates for a long time.
On Android, all of those system apps are updated via the play store, and a lot of deeper features can be updated via Google Play services similarly to how Nearby share was able to be back ported to any Android device running 6.0 or newer when it came out recently. Full OS updates are still important for Android, but they aren’t nearly as critical to the overall user experience.
I use an iPhone, but I’d love them to move all system app updates into the App Store for more frequent updates. The only plus side to the way Apple does it is that everyone gets the update at the same time and you don’t have annoying staged rollouts like you do with Google apps.
Also, custom ROMs are great on supported phones, even after the official OTAs gone
This was a huge reason for my switch from Android to Apple. Years ago i ran custom ROMs but i found myself spending far too much time flashing updates, and forgetting to backup data and wiping something important.
I will say, some ROMs these days are practically maintenance free. I have been running graphene os for about 3 years now and I have never had issues updsting by just pressing the button.
That is great to hear, too bad manufacturers cannot keep their phones up to date like that.
My s21 is still getting OS updates.
This right here. Lifelong Android user that switched to the iPhone 14 and never looked back.
Edit: iPhone 13, not 14, my bad.
My problem with Apple is that everything’s designed to interoperate with other Apple stuff, and nothing else. It feels like a walled garden that doesn’t just keep users in, but also keeps those of us out who might want to try a single Apple device without spending many thousands replacing our entire ecosystem.
Literally causing people to get bullied into getting an iphone over stupid chat bubble colors.
Which gets even stupider when you realize apple is being stubborn and that is causing the issue
Absolutely, Apple is being resistant to RCS not because they think iMessage is superior but because they know it weakens their lock in power. I know I’m stating the obvious, but it just annoys me so much.
Not necessarily.
You can get one and try it out, the ecosystem stuff is more enhancement than a detriment if you don’t have them.
Like Apple Watch and my MacBook Air, I can authenticate or unlock the screen using my Apple Watch rather than a password. But that’s just a benefit and I wouldn’t be losing anything but the enhancement if I didn’t have both.
I think they are talkign about if you already have the stuff working with every other device but apple
It’s funny you say that with the 14 that came out less than a year ago :)
Although I made the same jump with the 12 so I do agree.
I’d rather be tracked by apple than google.
because Apple is going to use your data to a less nefarious end? I don’t get it.
That’s my belief. They don’t derive revenue from their users data, they get it through hardware sales and service subscriptions. Google has proven that they will monetize their users data in not so pleasant ways. I like Google products a lot but don’t use them because of their business practices overall
Contrary to Apply making products harder to repair, efficiently locking in to their ecosystem with no way out? Apple ducks consumers every day. I doubt they’d gather all your data for the purpose of utilizing storage space.
I’d rather trust the devil I know than the devil that’s better at hiding it’s evil. Apple isn’t some amazing perfect company that cares about you. Almost everything they do is anti-user, they just do it in a way that apple-only users think is a bonus because they’ve been forced into apple only products already. Not to mention their idiotic pricing.
If you think apple is somehow “trustworthy” or not just as “evil” as Google in any way you’ve let their marketing team fool you.
assuming this is true, for me it’s not what they do with the data it’s just them collecting and keeping data they don’t need.
It’s been proven in court that Apple refuses to decrypt locked iPhones or messages
You can degoogle your android phone. There are ROMs/OSs which are free from tracking.
But then you lose functionality like Android Auto, where on an iPhone you get CarPlay. Android Auto on my Pixel 7 Pro is fine, honestly like as much as CarPlay, but if you install something like Graphene OS, it no longer works.
Yeah but if that’s the price of not being tracked means, I happily say goodbye to android auto. I’m using lineageOS for years and I didn’t notice much missing except Google pay and android auto.
When on iPhone, Apple still tracks you when your privacy settings should’ve disable it.
Why do you need to use a Google app to use NFC payment? Why isn’t there an F-Droid app for that?
No. I read somewhere it needs bank agreements or something. Unfortunately microG doesn’t support it too… I think that’s my biggest con, but as long as banking and money transfer apps works, I don’t mind.
Bank apps are a very big one but I really don’t care I’m not giving in
Apple’s tracking has also proven to be far less severe than Google’s through Google Play Services on Android. And much easier to opt out of
I’m responsible for supporting the phones for my family and my wife’s office. When smartphones became available, the iPhones seemed much easier to support with my non-tech-savvy user base then Android and I’ve stuck with that ever since.
I’ve had to support both in my family, apple has consistently been more of a pain. They’re almost impossible to fix when they’d decide to start breaking or doing weird things. Every android is an easy fix, and no matter how bad they get there is always a fix. With apple after almost any point it’s “send it in and pay for a repair or buy a new one”, just like apple designs them to do.
It really depends on your budget and what you define as an “easy fix.” For tons of people I know, they’d rather send something in for repair or buy a new device than spend twenty minutes searching for a solution.
Which is still bad because you don’t have the option to do it a cheaper way, you have to do the expensive repair or get expensive licensed stuff from apple. You should be able to do it by yourself at a reasonable cost without issues.
Google doesn’t have vision or taste in my opinion. They released a million messaging apps and STILL haven’t made a decent one. Its been how many years and they still use SMS on most androids and people have to rely on whatsapp, a Fcaebook app… now they’re releasing their new “standard” RCS which has competing versions some with end to end encryption by default and some without.
They STILL don’t have a FaceTime alternative unless you use whatsapp…
Google knows how to show ads and everything else has so little passion and vision i dont trust any of their services because they love to kill their products
I don’t even use any Apple products, but I still gotta agree with all this.
How they didn’t do an iMessage style client better than Apple given the fact Hangouts was right there and superior in every way for so long is just… bleh.
Google is losing it. Android is losing more nerd functionality and just copying iOS… but poorly. YouTube Music was better as Google Play Music. “Chats” was better as Hangouts. Where Google Fi at? Where Google Fibre gone? How’s Google+ going?
Even their search results are mostly spam now.
– Sent from my Pixel
Enshitification
This isn’t even enshittification, this is just Google still not having their shit together somehow after all these years
They definitely integrated hangouts and had video calling. Apple didn’t open up their ecosystem so you just couldn’t call them. Why has Apple still not provided a service similar to hangouts?
My counterpoint is that you have to use WhatsApp (I rather use Signal) because iMessage is Apple only. SMS and RCS are stupid. With Signal you can reach users of all devices. Having a messaging protocol that depends on the device used is stupid. And hopefully the EU can end the vendor lock in with messaging apps as well.
Another vote for signal
I understand the “taste” argument, but personally the goal of not having a corporation man-in-the-middle everything I do takes priority. I degoogle my phone to the best of my ability.
Unfortunately, good vision and design takes funding, and there’s not a lot of money to be made from not taking advantage of users.
Apple’s hardware sales are about 70% of revenue, whereas Google’s are more like 10%. That’s a lot of funding that doesn’t have to come from user data.
Harvesting user data is a symptom, mitm and taking advantage of users is the root of the problem.
Saying they don’t profit much from your data is like saying, “they only kick you in the nuts a little bit.”
Isn’t Google Meet (previously Duo) kinda like FaceTime?
The fact that most people cant answer that is the problem. More people have android phones than iphones yet everyone knows FaceTime and no one knows a name for video calling on android phones. Android users dont have a culture to video calling where as people with iphones casually facetime eachother instead of doing phone calls.
Must be another American thing, like blue bubbles. I know plenty of people with iPhones and nobody uses facetime.
I personally just don’t see why you would do a facetime call at all. There isn’t something for me that the video is adding to the conversation, most of the time when people on discord have their camera on i just talk without even looking at the cam. Why do Facetime over normal call?
Because it feels way more like we’re in person when facetiming? Being able to see eachother and show eachother stuff is great. Its much different to discord because you’re focused on eachother not doing other stuff while the video is on the side
Well, I don’t really see the reason for myself still. I understand what your reasoning is but I feel like it’s because i could just visit anyone i would facetime at any time i could because most of them live in cycling distance
They last (rocking a solid 4 year old phone)
They are rugged
The 3rd party apps are better
The interoperability with other Apple products is great
They are fast enough
Great accessory market
I’m familiar with the os
The os works well enough for my needs
Privacy - I am not the product
I agree except for third party apps. I used the iphone 12 for about a year before I switched back to android. Now I have an iPhone for my work phone and an android for my personal. Yes, some third party apps are better supported. But in my experience, it’s only the big name ones. When you start getting into “indie” apps, I think android wins. The number of time I have tried to do something with my iPhone only to discover I can’t is way too high.
And it’s usually small things that add up over time. For instance, I use Alarmy for my alarm. With android, you can have the app lock down the phone. You must turn off the alarm the designed way (photos, barcodes, math, etc. It’s a really cool app and I highly recommend it). If you try to close it out, it’ll start itself again and start alarming. But with iPhone, I can close the app and the alarm goes away and won’t ring again. It made it pretty useless when I could still just dismiss the app anyway.
Wanna torrent with your phone? Nope. Want a different keyboard? Sure, unless your typing in a password, then you must use IOS keyboard.
Those are some notable examples I remember off the top of my head.
The keyboard for password limitation makes sense though as a 3rd party keyboard could act as a malicious keylogger. Forcing the native keyboard prevents that.
Oh for sure. I understand the reasoning. But it’s still a lack of options. While apple has a good track record, they’re still asking me to blindly trust them, and them alone.
From a developer standpoint, I can affirm this. Android is much easier to develop on, presumably because Android doesn’t lock down as much functionality as iOS. Neither is “right” or “wrong,” they just have different philosophies.
Oh, and Android has a much lower barrier to entry to begin development. Apple charges significantly more to publish apps, and you can’t really develop iOS apps without an Apple device. Not a big deal for the big players, but indie projects have a harder time.
I agree with everything except the last one
Why? Apple doesn’t directly make money off our data. They’re def the most privacy focused of the major options.
I would say these are all benefits of using Android, IMO (but with interoperability with Google products, of course).
especially the last point, google is just the best with privacy! /s
Other than blue bubbles,
I’m the one in the group DM that turns the bubbles green,
I’m far enough removed from iPhones that I don’t know what this means :)
I think messages from other iphones show up as green, with messages from android phones showing up as blue. No clue how this interacts with group chats.
Iphone-to-iphone using iMessage and are blue. Iphone-to-SMS are green. Grey in an inbound message irrespective of source.
What difference does the colour of the bubbles make though? Or am I missing an in joke?
Literally everything. iMessage is a real messaging app with all of the bells and whistles. Blue means all of the features you want will work. Green means SMS, which is garbage.
iMessage gets you end to end encryption, read receipts, reactions, larger media sharing, functal group chats, and more.
RCS solves some of the shortcomings of SMS but it’s not a feature that Apple supports.
Wait, so Apple doesn’t support the RCS standard and somehow it’s the non apple user to blame?
Yes, that’s what the whole thing is about. I think most people don’t understand or don’t want to care about the issue so they just want to fix the symptoms without fixing the issue
Idk it just works and I have the whole ecosystem to support it so why not. I flip flop between Android and iPhone whenever. My previous phone was a Pixel 6 Pro. It really doesn’t matter to me, it’s just about how goofy I feel on the day I decide to buy a phone.
Same. Got an S23U in May, I like it, but I started to miss my iPhone so I popped my sim card back in my 12pro max. Can’t decide if I want to keep using it and get the 15 when it comes out or switch back to my 23U.
My Employer provides me with an iPhone for work use, primarily for remote access.
I was enthusiastic about getting it, as a long time time android user I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but having interacted with it frequently I really don’t get why people like it so much.
Completely agree.
I have so much less control and navigating is not easier. I exclusively use it for work and as infrequently as possible.
I’m consistently impressed with Samsung flagship and plan to remain there for the years to come.
Different strokes for different folks, but this is where I land.
Same boat here. Some stuff is so counterintuitive that it’s frustrating. For example, I want to turn Bluetooth off, since it’s my work phone and I rarely need to connect headphones to it - why cant I turn it off properly through the quick access menu? Same with wifi, who tought it was a good idea to turn off bluetooth and wifi until the next day, with Bluetooth not even being properly turned off and instead just put into “do not pair” mode?
The overall experience is smooth and everything feels uniformous and well engineered, but some design decisions werent made by actual humans I swear.
I don’t like that a giant tech company today is basically an advertising company. Google that is. And so I don’t like that they made their phone OS “free” so that they could dominate the platform and so increase the reach of their advertising empire.
I like that apples business is products. Make, design and sell them to the customer. So I pick Apple. If Microsoft were still in the game and were not trying to steal google’s advertising business I’d consider them too.
Also, apple products have always done well for me. There’s a bit of a knack to picking the right time to buy, probably happens one out of every few years that there’s a sweet spot.
But IME, if you do you’ve got a good reliable product for years. I’ve been using Apple stuff since ~2005 and basically only had two laptops and two phones. Second laptop could do with an upgrade shortly (latest OS isn’t supported and M2 looks pretty good), though it doesn’t have to be and the second phone is going strong still.
This. When you buy an iPhone, the phone is the product. When you buy an android phone, you are the product.
It used to be guaranteed OS updates for me. But now that I’m in the ecosystem it’s too much of a hassle to switch.
Between HomeKit, having an Apple Watch & AirPods and now using macOS for work everything is convenient.
The HomeKit part maybe changing though.
Yea I completely forgot to mention HomeKit in my comment! Is it kind of generic and do I wish it could do more? Yea, but damn is it nice to tell Siri “goodnight” and all the light in the house go out, the doors lock, and the alarm sets! Plus my partner can use it better than home assistant, and if I need my bro to come watch my house for a week, I can give him access on his phone and revoke it any time!
Have you integrated Home Assistant with HomeKit yet? I’ve yet to make the jump but really need to
I have and for the most part it’s actually really good and responsive… live video feeds aren’t working like I want (no live video, just an updated scene every 30 seconds), but house alarm, lights, garage door, outlets, door locks all work great and all of it is through home assistant then to HomeKit … none of my devices are “HomeKit” compatible, I use mostly z-wave and have home assistant parse the info and tunnel though home
Because ive been sucked into the Apple universe (except my laptop. I just can’t).
Plus, and honestly more importantly, you take it out of the box and it just works.
Oh, and I can’t stand/understand googles UI no matter how hard I try. It’s just not I that I’ve to me.
I’ve never taken an android out of the box and it not work. Not sure what that statement even means.
Yeah lol
I also never had an android not work out of the box, the setup feels the same as apple complexity wise
As a long time android user I was kind of impressed by the setup process on newer android phones. Easily migrates your data over and sets everything up for you to your liking. Feels very polished.
Well, I buy xiaomi phones and … well, need to root and flash roms. That is only me though, I am sure there are many users that are okay with OEM phone systems.
Heh, I get your issue with xiaomi. I feel like it’s just what you get when buying a chinese phone. MIUI is the absolute worst android ui you can get in terms of advertising, I mean come one who tf advertises IN SYSTEM APPS. But they’re aprettx good platform for custom ROMs and rooting
Early non iPhones weren’t always that way.
Oh man the MacBook is the shit, I switched to mac years ago, windows laptops just suckkkkkkk. The touchpad alone is enough for me to never have a windows laptop again. Can dual boot it to windows too to cover all bases. My MacBook is over 10 years old and still running the latest OS smoothly and feels like it’s up to todays standards still for what I use it for.
I know, I’ve used macs/MacBooks before. There are a handful of gestures I can’t get used to. And at this point, I’ve got everything setup, and all the software setup for what I’ve got. I actually really like my surface.
Better Touch Tool was one of my favorite apps when I was still using a Macbook as my daily driver. Complete customization of gesture inputs, keybinds, etc.
(except my laptop. I just can’t).
That’s kinda funny because that’s probably their product category that I find the most compelling. Watches and earbuds I don’t care about, phones can really go either way, but since they switched to the M chips the power and efficiency are just so good the Windows laptop just look a lot worse in comparison to me.
I admittedly haven’t looked at the MacBooks since I bought my surface, but size and storage/processing were a large part of my decision. Plus I struggle with some of the Mac gestures. I honestly can’t get past the lack of right click, HOWEVER windows is doing some seriously annoying dumb shit lately, so I’ll look at the MacBook again, when my surface dies.
Every other computer I interact with is on windows. All the software we have is windows (I’m not sure how subscription services work for switching OS).
All I’m saying is it’ll take some doing to switch over, and they hadn’t been worth it to me in past researching. Just like I’d struggle to switch from the Apple phone/watch/AirPod situation.
Right click exists, you just have to turn it on in the trackpad menu then the bottom right corner becomes the area that will react to it. Or I think the default is two finger click for the gesture.
Edit: bottom right corner
Today I learned. Thanks!
You can replace OneUI with a different launcher. I don’t have these app pages that are unintuitive boxes. I have an alphabetical app list with a favorites at the top.
Are you using niagara launcher by any chance?
I like android and have a couple android devices (mostly retro handhelds and CCTV, and have spun up a few VMs), I also have many devices with linux (unraid, pihole, vpn servers, web servers) and run a pfsense firewall (FreeBSD), AND my gaming PC is windows…
I say all that because when it comes to mobile devices, however, I am all in pretty much on apple. Phone, watch, Pro 2s, and Ipad mini go with me pretty much every where. Why? not really the app eco-system (because I do so much self-hosting and use a lot of PWAs, and I dont play games on my phone), its the inter-operability between all the devices, its the find my device, Its the earpods going from my ipad to my iphone in an instant, Its the battery life, its (for the most part) security of the devices.
The blue/green bubble thing is weird and I don’t understand why people get so upset over it. I use everything, and to be honest the only thing at this point in my life I would like to get rid of is windows, but I can’t yet because of gaming.
If not for gaming, I would run Linux. Linux on gaming just isn’t on par yet.
Yea I love my steam deck, but I can’t even run holoiso on my main rig even if I wanted to because I have a 3080 and apparently they don’t play nice together. Then on top of that not being able to play online mp games, is a pain as well.
Are you me? The only difference is macbookair for my portable, then two windows machines, one work (nuc on windows) and gaming rig on windows.
The work machine isn’t changing anytime soon due to the applications I need, but with windows 11 crap and how smooth my steam deck is I’m so close to wiping the gaming machine and going Linux. Thankfully with the knowledge from my server, the switch will be more kind than if I’d never touched Linux before.
Thankfully with the knowledge from my server, the switch will be more kind than if I’d never touched Linux before.
For real man, close to a decade ago I started off with a raspberry pi b+ and literally copying and pasting every code I found, and today I feel I can do almost anything I want in Linux. Moving from tinkering with Xbmc and retropies, to setting up openhan and pi-holes, then moving on to dockers, home assistant, and web-servers to building out a server/networking closet and running cat6 through the house lol
I love that the steam deck has a desktop mode as well. If steamos was out for desktop AND it supported nvidia (which it currently doesn’t), then that would be my new OS and I’d drop windows today.
Hopped on the iPhone train with the 5S. That phone was such a performance beast. Blew the competition out of the water. Android phones at the time looked like toys in comparison.
The gap is a lot smaller now than it used to be, but I’ve just stuck with it. I have a 13 mini now and I love the small size with basically no compromise. I’ll cling onto this thing until it dies and then maybe switch to a Linux phone if they’ve caught on by then.
Linux phones are a thing?
Barely lol. Basically just the Fairphone 4 and the OnePlus 6.
I think you’re confusing things. The Fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6 are both regular Android phones, but Android is based on Linux.
Edit: maybe you meant they’re running stock Android instead if a custom version (with bloatware) like Samsung phones.
Other smaller Adroid brands, like Nokia and Motorola, do that as well. I don’t really understand why people still bother with Samsung’s bullshit.
PinePhone is an actual Linux phone, though it’s nowhere near ready to replace Android or iPhones.
Good call! I forgot about the PinePhone.
Yeah I meant more Linux friendly. All the software is still in alpha.
It’s a start I guess. Something to keep an eye on.
Kind of. There is the PinePhone and Librem 5 that both run full Linux. I have a Pinephone. Unfortunately, the hardware is underpowered and the software is not ready to replace iOS or Android. The battery is also not good. The standby has improved a lot, so it can last a day of limited use, but the battery drains very quickly when the device is actively being used. It’s definitely fun to play around with, and it even has the convergence feature Microsoft tried to do with Windows Phone. The UI changes to regular desktop Linux when plugging the phone into a monitor and connecting a keyboard and mouse. But again, the hardware really limits what can be done.
In short, Linux phones are a thing, but not reliable enough to be the only phone a person has.
I use an iPhone 12 because:
-
longevity. Between software updates and an over powered phone cpu I know it will last. Android phones in general barely get security updates.
-
Simplicity. I used to root and install ROMs on my android phone. I used to jailbreak iPhones. I’m done with that now. I do enough technical work at work I don’t want to have to mess with my phone.
-
Security. Ties into updates somewhat, but how often do you hear about iOS malware? It is usually big news when you do.
Not sure why this is downvoted so much. These are very valid points.
Well the claim that Android doesn’t receive security updates is plainly false.
Won’t be hard to find two dozen android devices that received 1 or 2 updates and that’s it.
There are nowadays android devices that receive reliable and guaranteed updates for a number of years, but unless you know what you are looking for it’s luck.
My iPhone 6 from 2015 still got updates in 2022 when I lost it.
Comparing iPhone to “Android” isn’t fair, because people conveniently compare it to the lowest end. Compare the iPhone 14 Pro Max to the S23 Ultra for example, a phone from a respected company at the same price range. And it isn’t “luck”. Just a quick Google search will give you the high-end Android devices currently.
The iPhone SE is as low end as Apple gets and it also gets reliably updates. It’s in the brand.
Also if you know what to google for you are already in the know. Plenty of people get their cheap phone from Aldi.
The similarly priced Pixels get similar update levels to the iPhone SE
That’s not up to Android, that’s up the OEM. Android is constantly updated with the latest security patches. These are the companies who independently decide how long their devices receive updates.
I agree that many OEMs don’t offer long enough support for their android devices. Luckily, virtually all android devices are supported by an open source fork of Android thanks to the AOSP (which Apple would never offer) and most android phones are designed to work with alternate bootloaders/OSes without the need to jailbreak. So when an iPhone hits its end of life, it’s a brick; when an android hits end of life, it’s still perfectly usable.
I speak my own experience. I owned 3 mid priced android phones over the span of 6 years. The second one got one planned and promised upgrade to the next major android version. This made the phone so slow it was unusable. Each felt not very well built, I didn’t miss them when I abandoned them. None received updates after 2 years.
I now have my third iPhone. The first lasted 4 years before I wanted a bigger one, it was then used up by my son. I carried around the bigger one for 3 years before I decided it’s too large. Now I own a Mini and that’s the best phone I ever had.
Each of the iPhones got major upgrades for years, but instead of slowing it down they added features feeling like I got a new phone.
None of that I experienced in android land. Unless apple makes some major mistakes going forward I don’t see me changing platforms again.
Didn’t apple literally get sued for intentionally degrading the quality of their older phones with updates over time?
They say so, and at some point it was even shown in the battery settings. I can’t remember that it affected me much.
If I understood it correctly it mostly affected loading times. Yes, it took much longer to load clash Royale than on the other devices. But it ran astonishingly well. Much better than you would expect from a 6yo device.
What they got sued for was when they detected that the battery was too weak (old, worn-out) to support peak CPU performance, they throttled the CPU. If they hadn’t throttled the CPU, then the phone would have just crashed and rebooted. An Android phone with a similarly weak battery will just randomly reboot.
The lawsuit was that they should have told the user the battery was bad and to just (cheaply) replace the battery, instead of people thinking the phone was old and needing a complete replacement. Which is what they do now.
I agree that there are a lot of bad Android experiences available, but having chosen the devices I’ve used very carefully over the years, tbh your experience with an iPhone matches my experience with Android.
I’ve never had a phone last me less than 4 years, with the exception of I think my razr maxx which had overheating problems and lasted me 2. Since then I’ve had a Nexus 5, OnePlus 6, and now have a Pixel 6 Pro running Graphene OS. Each has been a great experience.
My old phones are in the closet, but otherwise perfectly functional. My main reason for upgrading is usually for hardware features (camera/screen quality, etc). But I feel like my eyes are getting older faster than screen tech is getting better, so this might be my last phone 😄.
I don’t see how that point is relevant as that claim was never made.
The claim was that Android phones usually barely get updates which maps to my experience. Updates more than one or two years after the release of a device is the exception, not the norm.
Which is also not true, most android deviced i have used got updates every 3-5 months with some small security patches between them.
For the first year or two, that’s common. Getting feature updates for anything even approaching >5 years is near unthinkable for Android devices however. You only get that with custom ROMs and even there it’s only half of the story as they can’t provide security updates for vendor blobs which is kind of a big yikes.
The iPhone 8 will get cut off the newest feature updates in the upcoming iOS 17; 6 years after launch. Security updates will likely be available for years to come. For comparison, my OnePlus 5 from 2017 (1 year younger) received its last update (any update whatsoever) in 2020 (3 years ago).
With an Android device, you’d be lucky to get security patches in any regularity at all, much less >3 years after release. That only happens with a couple few vendors who actually care such as Nokia and maybe Google (to a degree).
For my custom rom i get vendor updates and theres about 1 update per month, open source devs are really
The vendor blobs in custom ROMs come from the stock vendor ROM. When the vendor stops publishing their stock ROM, the custom ROM’s will also stop coming. In some cases some BLOBs can be taken from similar devices that might be supported a bit longer but I believe this is quite rare.
The ROM itself still gets updates through the AOSP but vendor BLOBs stay where they are and open source devs can do little to nothing about that.
My second paragraph explains in detail why the first is relevant.
I am not sure which second paragraph you’re referencing as your original comment only contains one.
Ah sorry, still getting used to this UI, thought that was in reply to a different level comment.
Updates more than one or two years after the release of a device is the exception, not the norm.
Through the AOSP, many android phones are maintained indefinitely by the community. But I agree that proprietary firmware blobs don’t get maintained for nearly as long as they should.
Custom ROMs are a thing of course. I use them too. Custom ROMs are, again, the exception rather than the norm however; most people use the stock ROMs and that’s what I was referencing.
Well for one thing Apple rather famously slows down its old phones and lost a lawsuit over it. Apple has plenty of merits but longevity is definitely not one of them.
This keeps getting repeated and it gets further from the truth every time. Apple was throttling phones whose batteries were so bad the phone would shut off when trying to draw peak power. They should have had a message saying, “Replace your Fuckin battery dude”, rather than just throttling the phones, and that’s exactly what the lawsuit made them do. It’s not the case that apple went, “oh this phone is old, slow it down.” At all.
What’s more, they then gave discounted battery replacements to phones of the most-effected generations. As in, for like $50 or something the phone went back to working essentially like new (and had better battery life again to boot).
If their goal with the battery health throttling was to make money by forcing people to buy new phones, they sure went about it in a weird way. 😆
They only offered that cheap battery replacement after the lawsuit was filed.
Thats not an act of kindness, thats ass covering. They then settled the class action about the secret throttling for $300+ millon.
Not exactly just an “opps, we forget to mention what we were doing for your phones health for years, really guys” situation. In every possible way, they were silently hobbling the performance of old phones, which directly helped their sales of new phones.
The right thing to do was very simple : alert people and offer inexpensive battery replacements. We know it was very simple because they did it immediately when their duplicity was revealed in a court of law. Now ask youself why they didnt do it for years.
Iirc they offered battery replacement as part of a settlement, and had an os update out that gave detailed battery health information before that went down and outside of it.
Well for one thing Apple rather famously slows down its old phones and lost a lawsuit over it. Apple has plenty of merits but longevity is definitely not one of them.
This is so false, and has been debunked so many times that anyone still repeating it is simply a liar.
Batteries are consumable items. A great analogy anyone can relate to is car batteries. Anyone with a car knows the battery goes bad. Batteries wear out. A car battery that works fine in the summer may have a lot of trouble cranking over in the winter under the conditions and extra load of a cold engine full of sludgy oil.
The phone battery is no different. Overtime it starts to go bad. What Apple did, was determine through software when a phone battery could no longer support a phone running at full blast. They INCREASED LONGEVITY of the device, by throttling the speed. By making it run slower, it was less demanding and still would work - where it otherwise would have been prone to random shutdowns and crashes because of the degraded battery. This was a much better user experience. They could have skipped this altogether, and people would have just bought a new device. Instead this software throttling made the device last even longer. In fact, laptops have been doing this for decades. Should Apple have told folks? Sure. But anyone presenting this as a profit motive or forced obsolescence is deluded.
-
Basically because of company Google became. Not saying Apple is better, just they respect my privacy so much more and support their products for longer, give a shit about security, etc. Matters to me.
