Google's long term strategy with Android is baffling to me. Apple has had better mobile hardware for years. Apple has higher consumer trust. Apple has better app selection (for most people). Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS. Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
And Google's strategy is to continue removing differentiating features from Android that also help them mitigate the threat of antitrust? Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps? Browsers? No, strictly worse. Youtube app? No, worse. Texting? Worse or equal (Whatsapp). Podcast client? I assume worse, since there is no Antenna Pod. Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage?
Also, while the Play store is an equally ad-riddled and unsearchable hellhole, at least Android does have with F-Droid a high quality alternative. iOS has nothing.
But sure, removing the F-Droid advantage can only hurt Android, the direction of your comment still stands.
I don't know about categories overall, but I'm attached to my iPad and won't switch to Android in part because Affinity is not available there, nor is there any near equivalent as far as I can tell.
I still think Overcast is nicer to use than Antenna Pod.
Microsoft Office apps work much better on iDevices, in my experience. (I know they exist for Android, but I've never had much luck editing there, where it actually works pretty nicely on iDevices.)
I don't game much, but my kids like gaming on iDevices much better than Android. (I have an Android tablet that I use for testing things, and they consistently reject it in favor of iPhone or iPad.)
Flowkey (music instruction app) works much better with my MIDI keyboard on iDevices than on Android (where it doesn't work and has to resort to microphone, which is buggy as hell).
I'm sure some of this is just a matter of the platform being more polished in general, but these are some apps that keep people in my house on iDevices despite having plenty of access to Android. The quality of the Youtube app doesn't move anyone, nor do the browsers.
Correct. Brave on iOS is worse than Brave on Android because Apple forces it to be a Safari skin, but they're still able to achieve some UI improvements over Safari, and achieve their built-in adblocking.
As a mobile Firefox with ublocker user I'm not sure I would call it high quality. I regularly have to force stop it to get pages to load properly. I suspect it might be the hostile google based os at fault but not sure
There's a saying in mobile development that in most companies the Android version of the app is a second class citizen. It usually brings substantially less money and so less money are invested in it. As a result the Android team is often understaffed and the app is almost always behind in feature development, less polished and with overall worse UX and more bugs compared to the iOS app.
Also iOS still has a community of iOS only indie devs that publish polished apps for iOS, it's very common to find very popular iOS app with very curated UX that are exclusive to that platform and have a good fanbase.
This is more because the barrier to entry is so much lower.
Android: have laptop that can do virtualization (...so basically ever laptop that can also do this:) and have enough ram to do run Android studio. Then you theoretically also need an Android device but even that's just because I assume you want to use the app you're making. That's it.
iOS: $100/yr entry fee, plus you need Apple hardware, plus a "server" mode Apple hardware (Mac mini?) if you want to alt store and I assume your main device is a laptop.
Just the money thing and the hardware thing is a huge stumbling block. I know it's rounding error for any even semi serious business but also let's be real, a ton of very important software is basically run on the budget of "the software devs main job and/or EU welfare state benefits".
The www wins. All you need is something that can run a browser. You edit a line, save, refresh and there it is, the real finished product, not emulation.
Apps have terrible reliability too. I just wanted to order a pizza, the restaurant website offered a button for the play store and app store.
There it said the app was for an outdated version of Android.
Perhaps it had been like that for a long time? But lets imagine it happened today. Where are you to get your orders from? Ahh yes, the website.
If apps didn't get the icon on the home screen 90% wouldn't have a reason to exist.
Bunch of pictures with descriptions and an add to cart button. One shouldn't even need to write code, it should be as simple and obvious as serving a document. In stead you need a full time carpenter to keep the store running. The counter and shelves spontaneously collapse, doors regularly get stuck, light fixtures rain down from the ceiling.
People trying to sell pizza deserve better, we can do better.
Almost all of the prosumer apps on iOS offer a consistently better experience. This is maybe less relevant on phones than on tablets, but music production, video editing, digital painting and drafting, etc...
That isn't saying much. Even the best possible music editing (etc) app on a tablet is still crappy, by virtue of the form factor. Tablets simply are not suitable for getting actual work done.
By that token, touchscreen laptops will replace the iPad any day now.
I think the preeminent issue is that touch-native UIs are very imprecise and clunky by nature. The iPad makes a great MIDI controller; it's an awful mixer or plugin host compared to a regular laptop running regular PC plugins. Buying a mouse or keyboard won't port Omnisphere or the U-He plugins to iPad. I doubt the market will ever "catch up" in that regard.
I mean, as someone who is mainly a programmer, same. But high-end cameras, big touchscreens, and an excellent pencil input is sort of the optimal device for a whole bunch of creative tasks
I make the superior picture with my camera but then it sits there on an SD card in the camera. I have to boot a desktop, hope the USB connection works today, find a folder, create and name a folder in the folder, copy the pictures there, find and open something to view and edit the images with, find and open something to upload the images. OR open the camera, take out th SD card, boot up a computer, plug the card into a reader or a laptop and do the same ritual.
People pretend this is a perfectly acceptable workfow. It is not.
The pictures would have to be dramatically better than those made by phones. They are not.
I shoot, review on the much larger phone screen, click share and chose from countless options to publish immediately. OR edit it a bit and enjoy the same.
I also never consciously bring the phone, it's just there in my pocket. Interesting things happen, you unholster it and start shooting. The real camera is more like guard duty. You sit there waiting for the interesting shot. Sometimes that works out and some of those times the extra quality is actually visible and some of that time it is totally worth it. The rest of the time I wonder what it is I think I'm doing.
> but then it sits there on an SD card in the camera. I have to boot a desktop, hope the USB connection works today [...] OR open the camera, take out th SD card [...]
They're good enough to have displaced the vast majority of camera purchases, and be used by professionals (e.g. influencers, photojournalists, pro photographers).
There are benefits to larger sensors, but the best camera is the one you have in-hand.
The multiple lenses and the processing power make smartphones wildly better than almost any consumer camera, particularly for someone without professional photography skills. A professional camera in the hands of a professional photographer can do better, but that means the market has changed from "consumers buy consumer cameras, professionals buy professional cameras" to "consumers use the camera that's always in their pocket and get surprisingly good results, professionals buy professional cameras".
The iOS prosumer apps are, frankly, pathetic. I produce music and every single DAW/plugin on iPad is very clearly a "lite" version of something that would run better on a full-featured OS. There's really no workflow I can imagine that doesn't entail using a real PC for basic mixing and arrangement.
> I produce music and every single DAW/plugin on iPad is very clearly a "lite" version of something...
I agree in several cases, but the question here wasn't "are they better than PC equivalents", it was "are they better than what's available on Android"
> apps nagging to get updated is annoying in fact.
There is no nagging. Apps auto-update on iOS, and have for years. I had 15 apps update in the last week. There was no nagging or notifications. It just happens.
My only gripe is that they seem to want to update right after I take it off the charger in the morning, instead of at night. But I only actually notice this once or twice per year, if I go to use an app that’s in the process of installing within the first few minutes of waking up.
Apps also auto update on Android. Frequently though, the updates reduce functionality or make it more annoying (basics like messages, calculator, photos, calendar, etc have been 'done' for a decade+ and can only really be made worse), so personally I've turned that off for most apps (and I suppose the other poster has too). Of course Google being aggressive assholes, they then have some of their apps start showing popups every time you open it telling you to update when the entire point was to have it not change in functionality and not introduce that sort of thing.
To add more examples, a game I play on my phone got an update that adds controller support on iOS, with controller support on Android expected 6 months down the line.
There are plenty examples to the contrary. It's almost like one of the platforms has the supermajority of phones in most countries, so there are plenty of apps only targeting a single one.
I've never understood how Google was able to get PR for the most trivial coding stuff any child coder can do.
"...support for a dynamic light mode. Instead of always viewing photos with a black background, Google Photos will use the light mode or dark mode background that you have set for your device's system theme."
This is literally one IF statement. The sentence is longer than the code.
The iOS and Android app teams at Google don’t coordinate their releases. They ship it when it’s ready for publication. Why inconvenience the other base just because the other team has other priorities and schedules. That said, Google apps have always been superior on Android than iOS. Just look at Keep.
> Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.
That's only one example, and as I explained in a sibling comment[1] doesn't even seem like something iOS designers were specifically defending against. In light of this, I think it's fair to say this example is poor and that another one is warranted. For instance, I'd consider the app tracking transparency changes to be something where iOS was doing better than Android on, but Android has since reached feature parity on that because you can delete your advertising id, which basically does the same thing.
Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good. Okay let's be honest it's fairly abysmal at preventing fingerprinting. It could almost be accused of not even bothering to try.
Even with graphene I don't believe it mitigates much as far as apps collecting data. The idea for more privacy is you run open source apps instead that just don't collect data.
AFAIK Graphene is oriented towards strong device security with privacy as more of a side effect.
One thing with the sandboxed Play Services being that Google has fewer permissions on the device, so presumably they can collect less data.
Which I believe is GrapheneOS' argument when people praise microG: microG being open source does not fundamentally add privacy: apps using microG will phone to Google's servers (that's the whole point of microG). What microG solves is that it removes the Play Services that are root on your device, and it turns out that sandboxed Play Services do that as well.
> The idea for more privacy is you run open source apps instead that just don't collect data.
Yep exactly, I just wanted to add about the sandboxed Play Services, because it was not obvious to me at first :)
> Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good. Okay let's be honest it's fairly abysmal at preventing fingerprinting.
Hmm... the sandboxing is a security feature, it's not there to prevent tracking (not sure what "fingerprinting" includes here). The sandboxing of Android is actually pretty good (a lot better than, say, desktop OSes).
There is pretty much nothing you can do against an app requesting e.g. your location data and sending it to their servers. Fundamentally, the whole goal of apps is that they can technically do that. Then you have to choose apps you trust, and it's easier to trust open source apps.
What GrapheneOS brings in terms of sandboxing is that the Play Services run sandboxed like normal apps. Whereas on Android, the Play Services run with system permissions.
Color me surprised. But if you run the app using the sandboxing feature that it provides surely it will only be able to see other apps installed within that same sandbox?
What is "the sandboxing feature" you're talking about? The standard app sandbox built into android allows apps to discover each other for various purposes, and grapheneos doesn't do anything to attempt to plug this.
Apologies. I was thinking of Android user profiles which are available from mainline and (AFAIK) prevent the linked workaround from revealing any apps not installed in the same profile. So it's an example of an unfixed leak in Android but not (as I had previously implied) something that Graphene corrects.
Honestly the state of anti-fingerprinting (app, browser, and otherwise) is fairly abysmal but that's hardly limited to android or even mobile as a whole.
>Apologies. I was thinking of Android user profiles which are available from mainline and (AFAIK) prevent the linked workaround from revealing any apps not installed in the same profile.
But there's no evidence that stock android leaks apps installed across profiles? The link you provided doesn't discuss profiles at all, and stock android also has private space and work profile just like grapheneos.
> The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
I seriously doubt this. I agree that this is the perception but anyone working in the mobile space on both platforms for the past ~2 years will know Google is a lot more hard nosed in reviewing apps for privacy concerns than Apple these days (I say this negatively, there is a middle ground and Apple is much closer to it - Google is just friction seemingly in an attempt to lose their bad reputation).
Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
In contrast, on iOS I get prompted to allow or deny access to my information when the app tries calling Apple’s API to fetch that information.
For example, if an app wants access to my contacts to find other people using the app. On iOS I can simply say “no” when it prompts me to allow it to read my contacts. I lose out on that feature to find other people using the app, which I don’t care about, but I can still use the rest of the app. On Android it seemed like by installing the app, I had already agreed to give up my contacts… it was all or nothing. If I don’t like one privacy compromising feature, I couldn’t use the app at all.
Android may have improved this in the last few years, but I found it to be a dealbreaker for the entire platform.
> Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
Sounds like it was years ago... I remember that it was being introduced like... more than a decade ago? Of course maybe it took longer than iOS because of how Android works. iOS can just force everybody to use liquid glass with one update, Android has to think more about backward compatibility.
You still have the same things on android. If an android app requests eg exact location it can refuse to run and there’s nothing you can do.
That sort of behaviour is prohibited on iOS and an app won’t be approved if it does that sort of thing. They have to allow declining location permission or at least approximate location
Not sure I understand. So you're saying that a bad app on Android can request all permissions and tell you that it will refuse to run unless you give them, and the same app would be declined on iOS?
I could agree with that, Apple is more picky. Now personally, if an app does that, I uninstall it.
But technically, the Android rules are that you shouldn't do that, and when you request a permission you need to explain to the user why you request it.
It would be nice if the app stores offered different levels of requirements. Let the market decide how much it cares about privacy (and security, and ...), reduce the friction for developers who want to do a particular thing, and give end users more confidence in the entire system.
You'd think this would be more known! I feel like general sentiment says the opposite is the case.. What can one point to in the future to show what you are saying here?
Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.
I'm only familiar with this as a user and not a developer, but I've had multiple Android phone where not all camera features available in the Camera app were available to other apps via the APIs:
The iOS version of most social media apps is better. IOS simply has better API integration to it's hardware, where with android, many OEMs (hell this was even the case to a certain extent with older pixel phones), do a number of things that make the hardware not as easily accessible as quickly from the OS API for said feature.
This is especially relevant for the camera, but also various other sensors and hardware modules that exist inside these phones.
That said, in recent years there are just a number of other areas that android is much better at such as deeper AI integration, which goes back to even prior to the current LLM craze.
The iOS YouTube app is not worse than the one in Android. Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least, there is one more app to choose (Messages). And I’m curious to know what makes Antenna Pod so much better than the thousands of other podcast apps out there.
Social media apps have historically been worse in Android, because of lax app and privacy controls.
> What else is there, where is the advantage?
Personally, I’d rather not have Google buried deep inside all aspects of my phone.
Everyone I know on iOS just uses Messages, they don’t feel a need for other apps.
People on Android I’ve run into seem to have a half dozen apps and use anything but the built in messaging.
A few months ago while on a trip I ran into an older couple that wanted some picture I took in a place they weren’t physically up to going. They were not tech savvy at all. Had they been on iOS, they would have just been using Messages and it would have been easy. They had Android, and the guy opened about 5 or 6 different messaging apps, not really knowing what any of them were, it seemed like a real mess. I sent them using Messages over RCS, assuming they’d go to Google Messages, or whatever the default equivalent standard app is for Google (they seem to have changed it a dozen times). It could be that the pictures were taking a while to send, my phone showed they sent, but he had no idea where to look or where they might have went, despite having so many messaging apps. I hope he is able to find them or they came through with a notification once he had a better single.
Having one good app that everyone uses is better than the default app being sub-par, or so constantly in flux that the users and smattered about to dozens of different apps that can’t talk to each other.
> Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least
Since some updates ago, my keyboard is still broken if I type too fast, and autocorrect been essentially broken for the same amount of time. Must be happening for ~years now, still waiting for a new update to finally fix it.
At least on Android you can change the keyboard to something else if you'd like, instead of being stuck with what your OS developer forces on you. Wish I had that option now.
A lot of the apps, not just the banking apps, but food delivery etc, restrict using alternative keyboards, leaving you with a default one, which is especially jarring for a multi-lingual countries where you typically need keyboards for English + language 2 and 3.
I had to give ap on a swiftkey iOS for that reason
You could say that there are Apple devices that do not work well or don’t work at all without another Apple device, and off the top of my head I would say the only ones are the Watch and the HomePod, but most alternative devices work fine with Apple ones, e.g Chromecast, Garmin watches, Google Home hubs, etc.
And even so, the same could be said about Android only features and devices, e.g. Samsung Watch doesn’t work without an Android phone, Google Earbuds are feature capped on iPhone, etc.
IMO, if we are looking at rent seeking behaviors, Google shoving Gemini down the throats of Google Home users, with no chance of rolling back if they don’t like it, is way worse.
The difference between Apple vs Google is that with Apple you ARE the ad. They don't need advertising when they know people will adopt them and then be forced into their ecosystem.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Even if that was true, my point was that an ad driven business like Google, would be incentivized to monetize all the aspects of my life they could have access to. If that’s not what Apple is doing, compared to Google, then that’s a win I guess?
Google most profitable business line is ads. They profit from literally knowing everything about you, then selling access to that to ad bidders. Apple makes the most money from devices. It is not the same.
Then why is it that they advertise? We just last week had a thread about how the Apple app store is making ads blend in more with organic results. So not only are they advertising to users (which admittedly was news to me), they are engaging in dark patterns to make those ads more enticing. It doesn't seem like being locked into the Apple ecosystem (and paying their tax on hardware) is actually benefiting the users.
The Android audio latency issues were solved long ago with Pro Audio. Whether Android audio apps chose to use it is on them and the significance of latency on their audio app.
Cubasis and Blackmagic Camera are cross platform, not that "most people" would use these over whatever was preinstalled or the camera interface in their social app.
That made me realize how little I go to the Play store these days to just browse compared to the early days of Android.
I personally can't stand Apple products ... dbut with Google doing their crap and Samsung acting like Microsoft with all the crap they load in I have to disable just to make the phone usable; I've seriously thought about moving to iPhone the past couple of years.
For one, I can actually use gesture controls without constantly triggering backswipes. Even something as droll and first party as Google Photos suffers this problem, where, say, cropping a photo and pulling too close from the screen edge will result in a backswipe detection instead.
Another example is Sonos, where the iOS app contains TruePlay to tune your speakers. They can do this because there is relatively few iPhone models (microphones). But this is a general, noticeable trend, where developers will add more / better / polished features to the iOS app.
>I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps?
I researched iOS vs Android last year so some of my info may be out of date but this is what I collected.
Apple iOS exclusives (or earlier app versions because devs prioritized iOS):
ChatGPT iOS app -2 months before Android
Sora -2 months before 2025-11 Android
Bluesky iOS app -2 months before Android (February 2023 iOS invitation-only beta; April 2023, it was released for Android)
Blackmagic Design camera 2023-09-15 -9 months before Android 2024-06-24
Halide camera app https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/17klq40/what_are_some_good_examples_of_iphoneexclusive/k7efznt/
Zoom F6 https://zoomcorp.com/en/us/software-product-page/software-sub-cat/F6-control-app/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/f6-control/id1464118916
Godox Light https://www.diyphotography.net/godox-finally-launches-android-app-for-the-a1-but-only-for-some-phones/
ForeFlight Mobile https://support.foreflight.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004919307-Does-ForeFlight-Mobile-work-on-Android-devices https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1883eya/the_authoritative_answer_to_why_isnt_foreflight/
Adobe Fresco
Procreate
FlexRadio SmartSDR SSDR 2023-10-27T13:15:09+00:00 https://community.flexradio.com/discussion/8029186/smartsdr-for-android-device
Google Android app exclusives
TouchDRO for milling
Kodi media player
There really aren't many popular/prominent Android-only apps that's intended for direct consumer download from the Google Play Store. Instead, Android dominates in OEM use as "turnkey" and "embedded" base os as the GUI for their customized hardware devices:
Amazon Fire Stick, car infotainment, music workstations, sewing machine GUI, geology soil tester, etc
If it's a typical mainstream user (browser + Youtube/Tiktok + WhatsApp etc), they won't see any iOS ecosystem advantages over Android.
>Also Android has a bigger market share in the world than iOS, by a lot.
The tone of that seems like you thought I was taking the discussion into fanboy evangelism and therefore Android needed to be defended. That wasn't the intent and I already tried to downplay my comment by stating the iOS ecosystem specifics do not matter to 99% of mainstream users. Yes, everybody on HN already knows Android has a much bigger market share.
The point was simply to inform the gp asking the question about iOS that there are apps and niches he may not be aware of. Nobody's trying to convince any reader of switching to iOS or that "iOS is superior" ... or vice versa!
Wow I don't get all the downvotes I'm getting for that.
You answered to:
>> I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore.
With a list of apps, some of which only listed because they got Android support a few months later. And some of which I have never heard of (SmartSDR?).
I get why those apps matter to you, but it feels a bit arbitrary. While the quote refers to something that was more general (which suggests that "at a point, iOS had a lot more quality apps"). I am just saying that the answer "no but I checked the app I like on iOS and a handful of them don't exist on Android" was kind of one anecdotal data point in the discussion.
And my point about Android having a bigger market share was that my intuition is that probably popular apps end up on Android eventually, or alternatives exist.
I honestly really don't care if people prefer iOS, Android, GrapheneOS, or a Linux for mobile distro.
>I get why those apps matter to you, [...] I am just saying that the answer "no but I checked the app I like on iOS and a handful of them don't exist on Android" was kind of one anecdotal data point in the discussion.
No, you don't get why it matters to me. You assuming my comment was just a personal list of my favorite apps is way off base. To be clear, I have never installed nor used any of those apps on either iOS nor Android.
So if I don't have any personal connection to those apps, why do I have that list handy?!? Because I was researching possible coding strategies for a new smartphone app:
- have 2 separate native mobile codebases (Swift AND Kotlin) from the start and therefore can release at the same time on both Apple App Store and Google Play. Difficult and expensive. Finite time and funds means both native apps suffer from less features and polish.
- or start with deliberate handicap of just 1 native codebase (e.g. iOS-only for initial launch) and see if it can attract revenue/funding to pay for the other native codebase (e.g. then Android). Or do the reverse of Android-first-then-iOS. Focusing on just 1 native platform means the app is higher quality. However, the risk is a clone app could quickly show up on the other platform I didn't code for.
- or 1 cross-platform toolkit with something like React Native which is what Meta and Microsoft Office apps like Outlook did.
That was why and how that list was created. The purpose was to get enough industry examples to form a generalization of what others did. I often do software research and my notes let me make lists about it. (Another one of my comments listing software I don't personally use but I do know the monthly costs : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331312)
I thought the iOS apps list was a neutral comment full of factual information and also counterbalanced with the areas where Android has an enormous influence. Yet somehow, my comment is still interpreted as some type of smear on Android. If you're confused about downvotes, I am too!
If you go back to the gp's comment I replied to, he literally asked: >"What else is there, where is the advantage?"
This thread is full of people replying with examples of the "what else". How could any of us seriously answer that question without the answers being criticized as "arbitrary" ?
iOS has less device models to target for. This makes it easier to support and deliver a more consistent experience, especially for gaming. I have also heard a few other points back in the day, but I am not sure how true they are now. One is that some social media apps might offer better quality in app camera experience. Another is that iOS userbase is more willing to spend money so devs are more likely to target iOS.
For this particular exploit, it's not really because "iOS apps are truly sandboxed", it's because iOS is more restrictive with background activity, so you you can't keep a server running in the background. If your app is in the foreground it can create a listen socket just like in android.
I switched from Android to iPhone last year, and this just isn’t true. There’s so many tiny issues with android apps that just don’t exist on iPhone, because the android apps have to work on all these different devices. You don’t even have to look for the kinds of apps you’re talking about because things like Safari and Apple Podcasts work really well. I know people have a lot of complaints, but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.
Are we living in the same universe? We manage a fleet of tablets (both Apple and Android) for a healthcare company whose EMR is web-based. And because of that Sarafi has made our lives miserable. So much so that we're migrating to Chromebooks.
I've been developing for the web for 15 years. The first half was spent battling Internet Explorer. Now it's Safari.
There are some proprietary Chrome APIs but if you’re not using those it’s been pretty rare to have major problems in recent years. I open a couple of bug reports a year against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—mostly accessibility related—but most of the time it’s been a problem with code written specifically against Chrome rather than code which couldn’t work in the other browsers.
I’m a developer too, but the developer experience doesn’t matter to users. As a user of the app, it’s fast enough, cleanly designed, seems to be reasonably private and secure, and I haven’t hit any website with it where I’ve had to download chrome to view it or something.
You're a developer but you can't connect the dots between features being hard to build and the inconsistencies between other browsers vs Safari to how that might effect the user?
I can be a user separate from being a developer. The user experience of Safari is basically perfect for a browser. The development experience is completely irrelevant from that perspective.
I mean… what do you want me to do, list problems I don’t have with it? As a user of the app, Safari fades completely into the background for me, I don’t know what else I could ask for from a browser.
The people complaining about Safari often are running enterprise crapware that requires some esoteric Chrome API or bug to operate correctly and should actually be an app on iOS but cannot be funded as such because its creators don’t care about its users.
Then again, if a company can't polish a web browser app, then the native app they'd produce will be even worse.
Now you have a crappy app that only works on some devices, and now with no tabs, no links, text you cannot select anymore because they used the wrong component, etc.
Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction.
I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click.
Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via WebUSB to make gaining certain permissions very easy for the layman. I imagine it's gonna get more and more user in enterprise too.
Firefox is seriously behind by refusing to implement it.
WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless.
Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be a browser and bypass your 2FA on third party domains.
I'm conflicted on WebUSB because it's convenient but on the balance I think it's too dangerous to expose to the general public. I don't know how it could be made safer without sacrificing its utility and convenience.
Make a picture, connect with a Windows PC, iOS needs a password, then the picture is not visible to the PC, disconnect, go with Apple photos to look at the picture, repeat connecting, with password, now it is visible.
Try to set up a hotspot, there is no button to turn the hotspot on/off.
You can find your hotspot button in the control center. Swipe down from the top right of the screen. It’s in the same section as airplane mode / WiFi / cellular data, and takes another tap to access.
You actually don't even need to set up hotspot more than once if the phone and the computer are both yours (and apple-brand). You can just connect to the iPhone with the Mac (if they're on the same iCloud account) and it works without entering a password.
> Try to set up a hotspot, there is no button to turn the hotspot on/off.
There is. You can even put it on the settings drawer. Look for "personal hotspot".
I don't have a mac anymore, but IIRC you could even turn it on from the paired mac. This definitely still works between iphones. When I take out my old iphone from the drawer to use as a GPS on my bike, with no sim card, it will connect to my regular iphone's hotspot automatically.
If you’d like an example, every single person who flies has an iPad to use an app called FOREFLIGHT. It doesn’t exist in android. Other EFBs exist on android but they are not as good. To a point that among things a new pilot student has to buy, like headsets and such, is an iPad.
There is not a single android app that is ever better than its iOS counterpart. At the very top margin, the android app is equivalent to its iOS counterpart. But there’s really only Gmail, photos, and Google Maps, and the big tech co apps that this small exception covers. Android apps don’t have to be worse from a technical standpoint, but in reality they are always worse than the equivalent iOS app.
I don't understand how, almost 20 years after the release of these platforms, there are fully grown adult mobile OS fanboys still out there that either consciously or unconsciously spread lies about the difference between the platforms. Not just the parent comment, but this entire comment tree. For both iOS and Android. It's an almost religious cult-like type of behavior that reminds me of teenagers back in the early 2010s engaging in flamewars in YouTube comments arguing in favor of whichever gaming console they happen to own.
In that context, it made sense because they were kids, but also, these platforms were new with not much information out there, and the users were basically forced to pick one platform or the other because of the diminishing returns from owning both. 15 years ago, a PS3 or an Xbox 360 cost around $500, which adjusted for inflation is around $800 today. Not worth dropping an extra $800 for a few exclusive titles.
In the context of Android and iOS, you can gain access to both of these platforms quite easily... I mean, presumably, you already own an Android or iOS device already. For $150 you can get a decent device on the used market. Not state-of-the-art, but pretty good, all things considered. And with that you can gain a holistic perspective.
I seriously just don't get how you can stay faithful to either Android or iOS. They both are awful. I sort of see it as a necessary evil, pick your poison sort of thing. But some people get Stockholm Syndrome and never bother to try the alternatives I guess? I find that really odd.
This is a really ideology driven push. I don't think you really think the iOS browsers are worse, there's just less choice, because they all fundamentally use WebKit. Having to use Chromium is a worse experience, and not being able to use Gecko under Firefox is not a clear upgrade - particularly as WebKit is so tightly integrated with the hardware, leading to less battery use. If you really don't like WebKit for whatever reason, I get it. But that's not worse.
Whenever there is an app with full feature parity (WhatsApp) you assume at best it can be equal, based on nothing. You have specific apps that work for you, and that's great, but my practical experience is much different: whenever I haven't had a choice in an app (think banking apps, carrier apps, local library apps, the Covid apps) the experience has been much better on Apple. Whenever there is a choice in apps, they're often cross-written in something that allows easy porting, and very similar, or the native Apple solution is much smoother. It's rare that an app just feels better on Android, and usually limited to cases where a specific app is only available on Android or, you know, Google.
iOS isn't particularly open source friendly, but mostly people don't do it because of personal incentives, not because it can't be done.
It's subjective, and I get that, but what you miss is that features are subjective too. Missing parity apps are only relevant when you care about that feature; at no point in my life have I ever thought my life would be better or more convenient if I could only torrent on my phone.
But having an app that is responsive and works well has made my life better. Standing outside a bar in the rain trying to get a stupid Covid app to work, not work well, just work, on Android has made my life worse.
(Ironically, I've kind of noticed this is part of the Unix ethos writ small: do one thing and do it well. It's not exact, and iOS for sure has tons of crud everything apps. And they sure don't work together! I just think it's amusing.)
You say that they are ideologically driven when they say browsers are better on Android, and then go on to defend that having LESS features is not necessarily bad. Honestly, you are the one sounding ideologically driven. Having more options is good, specially if there are better options out there (which is the case). Firefox on Android is a better browser than Chrome or whatever, and having the option to use it IS better than not having. You have the right to say that Safari is great, but you cannot say that Gecko on iOS would be worse because, well, you don't have that option.
Synctrain is an open source (MPL2.0) iOS Syncthing client (which I made) with full native mobile-first UI and tight iOS integration (shortcuts, background processing, etc).
As an Android power user (I’ve ran Lineage, Graphene, rooted with Magisk and passed safetynet) that’s moved to IOS this last month. My subjective opinion: app quality is the same.
It very much depends. These days most apps are developed so that they’re equally trash on both.
The apps that are more specialized to reach OS tend to prioritize iOS because if you look at app revenue, iOS users wildly outspend Android users. At least this was true when i was doing mobile shit a couple years ago
That doesn’t mean the android app sucks, but it’s usually given lower priority. New features and updates will usually hit iOS version sooner and things like that
Honestly, you’re so wrong about the app situation that it’s almost staggering. iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished, have better integration with system features (like the Dynamic Island), and even often have more features. This isn’t even an unfounded opinion, it’s a material problem for Google and led them to vastly investing in automated testing and quality efforts
App addressable user base is another problem for Google, one that they have mentioned in developer conferences. It’s a big part of why they’ve been trying to ship a tablet and unify android and Chromebook. If Google isn’t careful they could find themselves in a downward spiral situation, stuck between apple on one side, and android forks on the other.
And the last answer is, as always, money
- browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less
- iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation
- on average iOS has significantly wealthier users who tend to be higher return or paying customers (seriously, look it up). This in turn leads companies to invest more heavily in iOS.
- easier integration due to a narrow system services ecosystem (no Google vs Samsung slapfights)
- unified platform advantage (apps written for iOS easily port to the watch and tablet, unlocking larger markets, and justifying greater spend in developing apps)
- apples review process is significantly stricter (for better or for worse)
Yes, Apple doesn’t have something like fdroid, and that’s really disappointing and honestly a legitimate dealbreaker for a lot of people
> iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished
It's been a while since I was last using Android, but first-party Apple apps no longer meet my standards for "polished".
e.g. type this sequence into the calculator:
[2] [-] [4] [=] [x²] [=]
The answer should not be negative, but the app says "-4".
The desktop Contacts app has been putting invisible LTR and RTL codes around phone numbers for years now, breaking web forms when auto-entered. The mobile version refreshes specific contacts several times in a row to add no new content, preventing copy from working while it does so.
The MacOS Safari translation button appears on the left of the omni-bar, until you click it, at which point it instantly moves to the right and your click turns out to have been on the button that the left-side translation button had hidden. Deleting a selection of items from browsing history is limited to about 5 items per second, as it deletes one then rebuilds the entire list before deleting the next.
If I'm listening to a podcast on headpones and an alarm goes off, it doesn't play the alarm through my headphones, it plays on device speakers only.
Podcast app's "Up Next" is a magical mystery list that can't be disabled or guided.
The "Do Not Disturb" mode can be activated unexpectedly, leading to missed calls, and cannot be deleted.
Localisation is inconsistent at every level, including system share sheet and behaviour of decimal separators.
I could go on, but you get the point. Apple's quality control just isn't visible in the software at this point.
-4 makes sense if you understand that the input -2 is a unary minus operation. So typing -2 then hitting square only squares 2, not (-2). This is the same in eg Python so I'm not sure it's very controversial. I agree it's unexpected, though.
At no point in the current expression you wrote "-", though. It may make sense that if you type [-] [2] [x^2] [=] then you get -(2²) = -4, but if your current answer is already -2, then tapping x² should result in (ans)^2 = (-2)^2 = 4. Splitting your current answer into a separate unary [-] as in - (2²) makes absolutely no sense.
Most calculators, even CAS ones, simply get this always right. But sadly this is not the first "desktop" calculator that I see getting this completely wrong. And it makes some results outright wrong!
"-4 makes sense if you consider that the calculator is so damn stupid it ignores every convention every single calculator has made in the past hundred years and instead copies behavior of a dumbass language" isn't exactly the praise you think it is.
> browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less
That's precisely the OP's point. They gimped their browser so there's bigger incentive to use their proprietary system frameworks.
> iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation
That's nonsense. What year are you from? I've heard this like 10 years ago when there only 1 or 2 current iPhone models in circulation.
> on average iOS has significantly wealthier users who tend to be higher return or paying customers (seriously, look it up). This in turn leads companies to invest more heavily in iOS.
If you offer subscription service, like Netflix/HBO/Nest or whatever, your main goal is volume, not how wealthy your demographic is.
> easier integration due to a narrow system services ecosystem (no Google vs Samsung slapfights)
Easier integration with what?
> unified platform advantage (apps written for iOS easily port to the watch and tablet, unlocking larger markets, and justifying greater spend in developing apps)
That's like Android's moat from the start, not bolted on during some 10+ major versions like on iOS. And it works much better, Android apps are truly the same apps. Not gimped, cut off things like Instagram on iOS (is it even fixed now?).
> apples review process is significantly stricter (for better or for worse)
Both are shit these days due to volume of shovelware produced.
Re: iOS apps being easier to develop: device sizes are the minuscule of the problem.
The real problem is that Android vendors mess up with the OS in weird ways by adding custom ultra battery savers, removing APIs etc. which is much less predictable than dealing with a few Apple devices, that are more homogenous.
Then many vendors ship their own apps which are buggy and you need to know that vendor's Z Calendar app has a weird bug to account for.
Really almost every rebuttal you offer is factually incorrect while demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the modern developer experience.
For example
> That's nonsense. What year are you from? I've heard this like 10 years ago when there only 1 or 2 current iPhone models in circulation.
What? Models? Is that how you think? Screen sizes? Resolution? That’s so… 2015.
Apple has kept consistent scaling factors across their phones, laptops, and tablets. That alone counts for a ton of saved data effort. Device ratios are also generally consistent.
Android… well, not much needs to be said. It impacts the developer experience in a substantial way.
> If you offer subscription service, like Netflix/HBO/Nest or whatever, your main goal is volume, not how wealthy your demographic is.
Ironically making my point for me without realizing it (wealthier users sub more) AND dismissing the massive market that smaller services exist in. Incredible two for one miss.
> That's like Android's moat from the start, not bolted on during some 10+ major versions like on iOS.
A moat they squandered. Look at platform tablet adoption. It’s dire for Google now.
As for “bolted on”? lol.
I know the mobile os holy wars always activate posts like this, but for some people it’s simply impossible that despite some visible missteps, Apple has been out executing Google for quite some time now.
FWIW, starting a sentence with "Honestly ..." always makes me think the rest of what this person has to say is dishonest.
Your BIO on HN is:
> I HAVEN'T SHOWERED AT ALL! THAT'S WHY I REEK! WORKING IN FINTECH! AIN'T SHAVED IN WEEKS! POUR CRUMBS FROM MY KEYBOARD! THAT'S WHAT I EAT! WROTE A CURRENCY LIBRARY! 3RD TIME THIS WEEK! LURKING HN! I PREFER /b/! IN MOM'S BASEMENT! I'M THIRTY THREE! IT'S 3'O'CLOCK AM! THAT'S WHEN I SLEEP! AH!!!! COME ON FUCK A GUY!!!!
"Honestly" is a colloquialism used to indicate disbelief with the previous statement or to preface candidness. Choosing to interpret the colloquial use of "honestly" as an indication that everything else that person says is dishonest is a very weird trait I've only seen show up in grammarian literalists and pedants that only makes yourself seem like a disingenuous person.
For context, I'm a long-time iPhone user, who switched to a Pixel 8a about 18 months ago.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.
I can't say I noticed a difference in quality when switching. Maybe some people can, but for me it was just a different, but still well-made phone.
> Apple has higher consumer trust.
I can't speak for consumers in general, but this is certainly no longer the case for me.
I also used MacOS for 20 years, and switched to Linux about a year ago because I didn't like the direction Apple was headed. It may be my choice of reading material (HN), but I receive almost daily confirmation that this was a sound decision.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Not selection, necessarily, but certainly quality.
As a side note, my iPad (my sole remaining Apple device) quietly updated to iOS 26 a few days ago. Despite having spent months reading about how bad it is, I was still genuinely shocked.
Again, I can't speak for "consumers", but for me Apple now has a far worse user experience.
I’ve been an iPhone owner for a while, but recently was required to get an Android phone to be a secondary work device. I got a Pixel 10 Pro—- brand-new, Google’s flagship device—- and within about a week there was a rattling noise from the camera module any time the phone moved.
The consensus online appears to be “oh, yeah, that’s the OIS module, you have to expect it, they all do that”. Well, iPhones also have OIS and they don’t do this.
Android might be “good enough” in hardware now but it’s definitely still behind.
Realistically a 200 euros Xiaomi phone, to most users, is as good as they need it for seeing videos online and chatting.
If you want to spend more, at each price tier you have plenty of choice including: better hardware, better cameras, more memory, etc.
E.g. I do need dual (physical) sim phones. So I ain't buying iPhones ever for this very need.
Consumer trust is very debatable: I have been locked out of my apple id for 2 months in 2021, and that was a work machine I was locked out from. Tragic. Apparently it's not my hardware if Apple decides it's not.
Nowadays I only own an M3 Max because my employer gave it to me. But I don't even use it unless on the move, as I have a way more powerful desktop computer.
Price hasn't been a particularly compelling difference between iOS and Android for a while. Here in the states, you can get a new iPhone 13 for $200 USD, which is 170 euros at today's exchange rate.
That's a prepaid cell phone company (no contracts); not sure how many months (if any) you have to pay for to unlock the phone. Renewed and unlocked ones are about $270 on amazon.
Why would you buy a 5-year-old iPhone for the same price you can get a new Android with comparable specs though? If I'm gonna spend 2-3 hundred on a phone, I'd like it to last at least a couple more years. Regardless of OS, you're more likely to get that on a new phone vs any phone 5+ years old.
If Apple's still selling it, they'll almost certainly support it at least as long as an above-average Android manufacturer.
The current iOS supports things back to iPhone 11 and the SE2, so you can expect the SE3 and iPhone 13 to get at least two more years of support (no real guarantees, but they're still selling new stock of both, and they have a reputation to protect).
It's true, but the main reason I haven't just switched to an iPhone is the ecosystem that lets me write apps without having to pay Apple money or use their computers.
If Google is narrowing their moat on this, there are a lot fewer reasons for me, personally, to stay on the platform.
"Google's long term strategy with Android is baffling to me. "
How does one know there is a long-term strategy
History has shown that so-called "tech" companies often act in a reactionary manner^1
1. Often, the act is of one of copying what someone else has done. Other times it might be response to regulation
One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS
This is one example of the reactionary copying phenomenon but HN replies may choose to focus only on this one example and not on the overall "tech" company phenomenon of reactionism as exhibited through endless copying
> One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS
It quite literally was a reaction to iOS considering it was originally a copy of the BlackBerry OS (the older one in their keyboard phones) until the iPhone came out and they pivoted to copying iOS instead.
EDIT: to get ahead of any negative replies about them copying iOS, I’m fully aware that they work quite differently under the hood and Android has had various features before iOS, etc. I mean they were creating from a UI/UX standpoint a copy of the BlackBerry when Google bought them, and then when the iPhone came out they completely changed the UI/UX paradigm to match.
IDK what you could possibly mean by saying it was "a copy of the BlackBerry" and further I don't see how that validates the claim that "Android itself was a reaction to iOS".
The actual truth seems to be that "Android's introduction of touchscreens was a reaction to iOS", which is WAY different than saying that the entire operating system was spun up just to compete with iOS.
Android was in development well before iOS was released, really the only big change was the touchscreen, which is obviously revolutionary, but that's a long-way from "Android is a reaction to iOS".
Android has a reputation for being unsafe precisely because of sideloading (as well as low Google Play fees, looser app review, accessibility services and remote access).
This policy is bad for us HNers, but objectively good for the 95+% of people who will never sideload a legitimate Android app, but are extremely likely to get caught by scammers.
The heavy US skew of HN really distorts the arguments here, as Android-based scams aren't as common in AMerica due to the prevalence of iOS in that region.
The Play Store was riddled with scam apps last time I used it. Be it fake apps that pretend to do something while doing at best nothing ("system optimizers", "antivirus" apps) over user data mining apps (often targeted at children or young people) to hundreds of clones of commercial or open source apps - you do not have to search very long to find the real scams.
Making sideloading harder has only one goal - growing the wall around the garden a bit higher, piece by piece, layer by layer, while everything within slowly grows more toxic.
Which is why I said sideloading is only a part of the problem, I expilicitly pointed out insufficient Play Store verification and insufficient app sandboxing in my original comment.
If they actually cared about scams on Android, when I explicitly searched for <App I'm going to pay for anyway> in the Play Store, they wouldn't put <Some other random app that pays money to appear above the app I searched for> at the top instead lol
To resolve the problem, scammers would deceive the victims into downloading a malicious app, in an Android Package Kit (APK) file format, sent through WhatsApp.
There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Google is doing this to protect users from scams. It is purely driven by their desire to control the platform and eliminate things like ad-blocking youtube apps. You're far too credulous of evil corporations' stated motives.
If there's a reputation, that means it's reasonably widespread. 5% doesn't seem like much.
Does this mean there are so many advanced users sideloading apps to compromise them?
Except users aren't so advanced that they are getting scammed because of side loading?
Or might it be the cascading delays in security updates that don't seem to reach devices between Google, manufacturers, and telcos? This is a much more massive (the 95%) of security hole and backdoors for scams to enter.
These arguments don't really seem to fit together or make sense.
Happy to get some links to read more about all of the statements.
Scams are the justification, F-Droid hasn't had any scam apps throughout it's existence, and it's not clear every functionality it currently has will be preserved with this change like auto-updating apps and easy installation of the store itself.
Google could let users add their own signing keys (like browsers allow), and it might be they will let students or power users do this, or they could do what F-Droid does in packaging FOSS apps without developers having to provide extra PII information. If they do neither of these things, it de facto means they're only after control at the expense of normal users.
On the topic of looser app reviews on the Play store vs the App store. I can give you a long list of fake iOS apps where you enter a 4 digit code to watch free movies. People who think Apple is manually reviewing apps are delusional.
Why the surprise, they do the same with search, they do the same with their Google workspace (the degree to which they are pushing AI is really hurting the product).
Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago, they are so arrogant they think the audience is now fully captive.
Which is still a valid argument, the number is just lower. And the UX on these sub 600 devices have definitely gotten worse over the last 5 years too... Likely because Google isn't really targeting that price point anymore, so Android isn't getting enough optimization to be viable on underpowered devices.
This market still exists and is pretty strong, especially outside of US. It's all on Android so Google doesn't need to try to compete here.
This is why with Pixel they're focusing on competing with the iPhone, they want people to use Android so there is no point in competing with other Android manufacturer.
The chinese are mostly adding skins on top, not developing the core of the operating system.
There is however a chinese fork of android (state sponsored), but it has not gotten wide market adoption in china either to my knowledge, but i dont live in china so i'm open to be corrected.
Finally, even if that OS has gotten widely adopted in china - it IS a fork. the changes are not being upstreamed to android, hence irrelevant to the discussion on this forum.
I'm talking about the Google services which is where Google profits. Chinese phones ship without them. When I said "Google's Android", I meant Android+Google Services. The people buying cheap Android phones are most likely not buying Pixels. Even Samsungs aren't exactly cheap anymore. I'm not talking about Android forks. I'm talking about customized Android without Google services.
The biggest Android market (internationally) are Chinese phones. If Google suddenly decided Play Store should be the only way to install apps, that doesn't affect Huawei and Xiaomi phones at all, they don't ship with Play Store and Play Services in the first place.
That's false. The ones you can get here in Slovenia don't have them. I've personally helped quite a few friends sideload them. I also remember how shocked people were to find out there's no YouTube or Play Store after buying a Huawei or Xiaomi phone when that first came into effect.
I don't think that picture indicates in any way that there are no Google Services on those phones. I've had multiple Chinese phones, and all of them had both their in-house app store (every brand seems to have their own) and also the Google Play Store. And obviously things like Google Play Services and Google Maps are installed too, way too many Android apps wouldn't work without them
This isn't even a China-exclusive strategy, Samsung does the same with their Galaxy Store.
Aurora Store is not a separate app store but is an alternative front-end to the Google Play Store. Combined with microG it should be possible to get all the Google apps.
There must be a reason why Aurora Store is being advertised, though. Why would they do that if they could just pre-install Google Play Store and standard Google applications.
Update: End of 2018, I bought a Huawei phone with GApps. I remember that two or three generations later, Huawei was not allowed to include GApps anymore.
So the national carrier importing them and selling them in their brick-and-mortar stores is "bootleg imports"? Not to mention that the EU is, legally speaking, a single market so the same rules should apply everywhere.
The reason they probably have them preinstalled over there is because they don't care about licensing so they can freely preload whatever they want. At least that's how it was with netbooks in the early 2000s that they were selling loaded with MS Office, Windows, even Adobe, of course with no COA stickers.
the audience is captive. Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device? Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own). Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Google behave in ways that they think makes them more profit. When users cannot migrate (nor even threaten to), then it simply means they can do this.
I'd agree if you picked Google Docs or something like that, but Gmail? Chrome?? Come on! Edge is just Chrome with extra features, plenty of people use Bing without even noticing and many even non-techy people are fine with DuckDuckGo, good free email providers are everywhere (yahoo, hotmail, proton...).
> Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device?
Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.
> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own)
My wife uses ddg and outlook, she's non-technical. I convinced her to use ddg but she's always used outlook/hotmail.
> Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.
As a general statement, sure. But if we are talking about mobile phones this is a very privileged and unrealistic point of view.
According to chatgpt, 70-80% of mobile phone sold worldwide every year cost less than the cheaper iPhone.
Some people could probably stretch their budget and get the cheapest iPhone, but otherwise it seems safe to conclude that more than 50% of people simply have no choice.
I see poor looking people with iPhones all the time.
People do stretch their budget when they really feel the need for it (and the poorest you are the more you'll want to prove you're not poor by buying a status symbol), also the second hand market is an easy way to get a cheap iPhone. Sure, it won't be the latest model...
In the US it's very common to get your phone financed via your carrier, too. It's so common that most people probably don't even think of it as financing, it's just an extra monthly charge they pay on their bill which lets them upgrade to the latest iPhone or Android model every two years.
Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on.
The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.
Google's search engine domination is nearly over, they are constantly making it worse to the point using ai is preferable and literally anyone can spin up an ai
There are non-google android OS's you can install (it's easy these days). Kagi is nice for search. Fastmail is nice for mail. Brave is a fine browser (though I'm aware that it's a chrome derivative). It just takes a bit of determination.
Maps is the last hold they have on me. I haven't yet bothered to find an alternative.
the move don't have to be permanent, there are alternatives and as we increase our usage and give active feedback and commit to invest even little money in them, they will improve too. I've seen this pattern a thousand times the monopoly gets worst and worst until a revolutionary new tech will rise it applies to social concepts, business sectors, companies, mother-in-laws, etc.
In Chrome on Android (and yeah, on desktop too) you just go into "Settings" and change your default search engine. I can choose between Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex, or DuckDuckGo.
There are also custom searches through Wikipedia and other resources. You can use little shortcuts to get to almost any custom search you set up in advance.
This has been configurable by the user for a long, long, long time. This is not a surprise or a concession. This is built-in stuff by Google for Chrome. (Edge too, of course.)
Changing your browser, you can do, but it won't be comfortable. I have Edge installed on my Android, but it is not possible to run natively on Chromebook and the Android emulation is bad. I will not set Edge to my Default Browser because it messes things up. It is not a great experience to change your Default Browser on Android. I just go with Chrome and use Edge for specific tasks and topics.
You can set up all kinds of email services in the Gmail app, or you can install a native app. I use Outlook in both of those ways, and it's fine.
There are lots of non-technical users who navigate purely by doing a "google search" on whatever domain they're aiming for, too. Nobody said they were efficient about it.
> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google?
I've been on Kimi now for 3 months. I rarely used Google in that time. Kimi is largely free though sometimes when I run of the free quota I fallback to DeepSeek/Perplexity. I have no idea where they are getting their index from though.
> Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).
There is microsoft/apple/yahoo mailboxes. However, I think most people should pay for their email especially that it's cheap and also critical (2FA).
> Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Firefox is a solid fallback and also webkit (Apple) is now basically a different browser (ported to Linux on GNOME Web). Not the best situation though it could be worse (given Firefox situation).
For me personally, the only two things I still use Google for are chromium and maps. I am unlikely to move from Chromium anytime soon but might consider alternative for maps (though might still need maps for reviews/photos/street view).
I am the most bullish I've ever been on Google losing its monopoly especially after they botched AI and hyper-scaling.
Once an alternative to one of their things, like immich, becomes viable, people run as fast as they can.
The strategy of doing everything you can to make sure your customers truly and utterly despise you and want to spit in your face is probably not productive.
Google's AI in their docs suite is so bafflingly bad. I wanted their AI to automate a sheet for me and it just choked. I switched to Claude for making a sheet that I ended up hosting in my local NAS using Microsoft Excel format.
Embedded AIs always suck. It's a dead end, long-term. By its nature, AI subsumed software products, reducing them to tool calls for general-purpose AI runtime.
> Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago
Google's customers are advertisers. They cater to that segment very well. They only need to attract users with "free" and cheap services so that advertisers think their campaigns are reaching enough eyeballs. Whether or not that's the case, and whether or not the end user has a good experience, is hardly relevant.
""Apple has better app selection (for most people). Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS.""
You mean Apple has been forced by regulators to implement core features like USB-C and RCS?
Sure, but uninformed consumers won't see it that way. Maybe in their circles it just sounds like a great idea and they thank Apple for implementing it.
Saying they were forced to implement USB-C is really overstating things. Apple loooved USB-C - so much so that their ill-fated butterfly switch laptops went all-in on it. They also helped design it. It's highly likely they were planning a move to USB-C anyway and the EU just pushed it forward a year.
This is untrue. Apple was fighting EU the entire time trying to avoid a switch to USB-C on iPhones. EU representatives were publicly critical of Apple, eventually Apple was forced to give in.
I realize a conspiracy narrative gets more clicks but … you know Apple started the development of USB-C and shipped some of the first devices in 2015, right? People whined about the MacBooks requiring new hubs, etc. for a couple of years and got over it. The same thing happened with the iPad in 2018, AirPods, etc.
When they introduced Lightning in 2012, they made a commitment to all of the third-party hardware developers that iPhones would support it for a decade. I’m sure the EU pressure helped but USB-C iPhones shipping in 2023 is right on that original timing.
But why would Apple, the company that famously hates backwards compatibility, make things easier for third-party accessory manufacturers, instead of making things easier for users bought into the ecosystem who had USB-C on their iPads and Macs?
Sure, I’m not saying they’re altruists. I just think the most likely explanation is that they promised compatibility under the “Made For iPhone” program and kept that promise because they’ve been in business long enough to know that screwing people who supported your last product is a great way to ensure they don’t support your next one.
I’m not: each thing I wrote is common knowledge—read the Wikipedia pages for the Lightning and USB-C pages if you don’t believe me—and it’s a little silly to spin this as something other than large companies not making massive supply chain changes quickly. I’m glad USB-C has won but you don’t change things deployed in the hundreds of millions in a year–I saw an original iPhone connector in the wild as recently as last year!
Truth is, apple didn't want to migrate their phones due to some internal decision not relevant for us, and the fact some other devices were on it doesn't change this. Users comfort was never part of the equation, its politics, sales projection, stabs at competition and similar.
Truth is, apple fought EU hard, we saw it from inside quite well. Backstabs, some cheap tricks trying to delay and evade this, even when it was clear how things will be. Not their best days to be polite.
Why giving some heartless mega corporation free moral credits if they are not well deserved?
People can and do fight things they agree with on the principle of not wanting to do something because they were told to. You fight it just to say “you can’t tell me what to do” (for precedent) not just to actually defend a position you believe in. Even if the other side wins, they had to pay a cost that may discourage or at least raise the floor for future regulatory efforts.
Apple only implemented USB-C due to pressure from the EU.
One area Android has a clear advantage is Android TV devices verified by Google, because there is a much wider array of streaming apps of all kinds available. However google doesn’t seem to focus on this very much, and if you look for forum recommendations for google android streaming devices it’s very often the NVIDIA shield pro from 2019. Hopefully that device will I’ll be supported for a few more years because there seems to not be good easily available alternatives.
> Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
If the rumors are true that the whole anti-sideloading thing is mostly because some governments complained, it might not have to do with a business strategy at all.
Why not limit these restrictions to these specific locations? Surely there's already lots of location-specific and carrier-specific customizations like shutter sound in Japan, different radio frequencies and many more. It still sucks for those who live in these countries, but at least they know who to point their finger at.
Cost? Apple stuff is expensive and unaffordable or inaccessible to a lot of the world. Google'd Android is the only option if you can't shell out for an iPhone (assuming you don't want to buy an unsupported 5+ year old device second/third-hand).
Because antitrust laws are strong in a few countries. While most of the 2nd or 3rd world antitrust laws are non existent. Google's strategy is to squeeze those markets. They have higher population too and hence many more advertising to sell and much more control of the "online experience" in those countries.
The biggest differentiator is price. An entry level Android phone is about $300 while an iPhone is in the $1000 range. And to be honest, anything more than an entry level Android is luxury these days. I say that because that's what I have and I have never felt held down, except maybe for pictures, but it is good enough for my (lack of) skills as a photographer.
So, Android may actually benefit from a lack of differentiation: like iOS, for a third of the price seems like a good value proposition.
I'm similarly baffled for the reasons you state but your breakdown of the market differentiations is a little hyperbolic.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years
Apple has never had better hardware (on mobile). Apple has had better software support & integration for their hardware that has lead to e.g. strong camera quality advantages (iOS camera app has been able to use the hardware better to produce photos people want despite some Android OEMs having objectively better camera modules since those OEMs have to work through a lot of Google contracts & software extraction).
The hardware has never been better - their holistic ecosystem has just made integrations with it smoother.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people)
This has been true but it's always been marginal, & the "for most people" qualifier has contracted significantly in recent years. Both Google's & Apple's 1P offerings have declined in quality & popularity, but Google have increased lock-in & reliance on theirs in ways Apple can't, while the 3P offerings on Android have improved significantly relative to iOS. Gone are the days of companies releasing exclusively on iOS, or the Android version being an afterthought with missing features - if anything it's swung in the other direction.
To be clear, I think your points still stand: Google's recent strategy doesn't make sense for Google. I just don't think it's as glaringly clear cut as you make out.
One aspect that's worth keeping in mind is the non-US market. Apple has a 58% market share in the US but it's 28% worldwide. Outside of the US market the impact of that "every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share" is significantly diluted (tbh I'm not sure it's even increasing outside of the US at all) & emerging markets are growth areas.
This is just straight up false. Qualcomm's current top of the line processors are about 3 years behind what you can get in Apple's cheapest product (that being the 16e), and the budget phones (and by "budget" I mean "the 600 dollar ones") are another 3 years behind that.
iPhones don't generally become too slow to realistically use until their support lifetime expires. Androids are like that out of the box unless you spend over a thousand dollars, and those only last for about half the time (a combination of inferior hardware and inferior software). It doesn't matter if you have a 120Hz screen if the UI only updates at 20.
This is why the only killer feature for Android (outside the cameras) is adblocking- which, of course, is what Google wants to prevent. They don't want you to run real Firefox (with the only effective adblock remaining), and they want you to pay for YouTube Premium rather than using NewPipe (or some other ReVanced successor) so you can't get out of paying 10 bucks to listen to a video with the screen off.
The lock in with Safari is horrifc though, the browser on a $20 prepaid android phone is better than the browser on your most expensive ios device. Apple says well you need to write a native app, stop using the web and PWA's. Allow Apple to mediate absolutely everything.
While I agree with the principle, and we as tech professionals and enthusiasts should be lobbying hard for law makers and regulators to open iOS up to allow for different browsers, there’s a couple flaws here without these precedents or activism.
The alternative here is not Firefox gaining more market share, it’s further encroachment of Chrome and derivatives. You’re not getting this big win for browser diversity. I’m not sure what you really gain here as Safari works fine for near most everything most people do.
Also I don’t think PWA’s have proliferated on desktop or Android despite Google’s efforts in raising awareness for them. It seems to me like consumers largely aren’t into web app shells. They either visit a web app in their browsers or use the App Store apps, by a large margin
I have a feeling, despite Google's communications, this is all an attempt to thwart the numerous ad-free YouTube apps.
Another reason it should have been broken apart years ago. It's laughable that the biggest ad company in the world owns the largest video site in the world, largest browser in the world, largest search engine in the world, and largest mobile OS in the world.
NewPipe (FOSS available on F-Droid) is nice alternative to ads-infested YouTube. I disabled YouTube and YouTube Music apps on my mobile, and I use NewPipe instead. You can even download YT videos or audio from YT videos using it.
Pipepipe stopped downloading audio or video when I was using it a couple of years back.
I switched over to NewPipe as it was better maintained and worked well.
Since past few months, NewPipe is not automatically showing latest YT videos, but it opens the video if I type in the video's source url. Downloads are working fine though, which is what I mainly use it for.
Will try Pipepipe again next weekend if it fares better.
Google is trying to suppress all these FOSS alternatives to its ads-overloaded apps.
What's going on with NewPipe? Their F-droid repository is down. Their domain is down. Their github repository is up, but it links to their domain, which isn't. Are they dying?
I will be downvoted, but I'm not fooling myself. I don't care. As long as uBlock and yt-dlp still work, I'll use them. If Google breaks them, I'll resort to some automated screengrabbing + maybe some AI automation to click "skip" in a virtual machine or something.
People will use all sorts of excuses, like the ads are about gambling, or contain viruses, or are detrimental to mental health, or whatever. No, don't use these excuses. You just don't want ads, and it is still possible to not see them. That's respectable.
I'm not sure how those are "excuses". They are reasons to not want ads. Ads are fundamentally malicious, so you should remove them from your life. I don't view attempting to "influence" me as a valid way to make a living, and am unconcerned with those who want to do it in the same way that I'm unconcerned about what would happen if someone tried to scam people with early wins in a shell game, but people just took the early win and walked instead of placing a big bet. That's just comeuppance.
Google pays content creators so little they have all started including ads in their videos. Si technically as long as you are counted they get paid. Meanwhile, Google is more and more aggressive with their own ads interrupting videos and pushing you to subscribe to their expensive offer.
Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.
It's the usual tug of war between revenues and UX but I don't think consumers have to feel bad about not playing by Google's rules.
That website will have an IP address and a registered owner. Taking down piracy websites is routine for governments, server providers, and domain registrars now, and they don't care whether the site is actually illegal. You can only get away with this long-term if the site is hosted in Russia, but Russia is sanctioned so how will you pay them?
Eh, somehow The Pirate Bay, Fitgirl Repacks, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub etc seem to manage it.
The real challenge is delivering good enough performance that your site is better than waiting through 30 seconds of ads; and making it worth your time to run the site: there's hassle, legal risk, and it's not like you can run ads to make some cash.
> Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
Or you could analyze this at the actual face value: the damage to Google’s brand caused by malware campaigns, especially faux-banking apps robbing people in some regions, is greater than the damage from making sideloading harder for some edge case users.
Not everything is a giant conspiracy; this move has always looked pretty clear cut to me from Google’s standpoint and I’ve never really seen any evidence to the contrary.
Well you misunderstand enshittification. It will never get better again. Both Google and Apple have enshittified their phones. You can verify this on the App Store, on the Play Store, both of which have now more than 50% of search result screen space dedicated to ads, more when it comes to scams [1]. AND you can verify this in the financial statements of Apple and Google, where you see what we've always seen in Google: steadily increasing at a fixed rate profits from ads on the play store in Google's case, and steadily increasing at a fixed rate profits from "Services", which is App Store ads.
In Apple's case this has been the only Apple business to grow at all in several of the recent years. In fact there's quite a few Apple businesses that look like they are "revenue neutral", most famously iPads. Google is better, but not by much. Cloud is growing fast ("but why?" is a question that's unanswered. I mean, "because of AI", of course, but ... seriously?)
So not only are they enshittified, and you see them getting worse and worse over time, but the financial statements show: if you're expecting this to get any better either in the Apple or Google case, you're insane. Because clearly ads for scams are worth it for advertisers, and most other types of ads are not worth it. The situation evolves more and more towards the cable channel situation of 20 years back.
You could also reverse the view. The simple question: "are people willing to compromise on hardware quality to get less ads?" has a very clear NO answer. "Are governments/institutions that are totally dependent on these systems willing to pay to either improve phones or make an alternative available?", again has boatloads of evidence that the answer is NO, in all caps.
[1] Search for "credit card" or "lose weight" and judge for yourself. Top results are promoting Apple or Google themselves, everything else are ads, and very bad deals that trivially will neither accomplish the promised financial independence nor weight loss. Or should I put it like this: the credit card deals advertised are so bad they might achieve weight loss. By the way ads designed to mislead, which the top ads for either search obviously are, are what both Google and Apple promised time and again never to do.
I think what is happening here is the moat is breaking. With llms getting good enough to make a program, how long until it is a whole OS...? And then how long until regulars figure out play store and play appa not needed???
AnkiDroid, a fully self-contained version of Anki for Android, not requiring pairing with a desktop app and completely free, does not exist or iOS. Or did not, last time I checked. So that would be a deal breaker.
Maybe by now there is some Android emulation for iOS that can do it?
It’s incredibly sad to watch Google abandon the values that inspired so much trust and belief that there is a better way to build a company.
Long time Pixel user here who has always believed the story that Apple has the closed, but refined, higher quality experience and Google has the slightly freer, but coarser UX.
I was convinced to make the switch this year and the Apple iPhone 17 Pro + whatever iOS version is, by far the worst phone I’ve ever owned.
Photos are worse, low light is worse, macros are worse, the UI is laggy, buggy and crashes.
The keyboard and autosuggest is shockingly bad.
Incredibly popular apps on iOS (YT, X, etc) are just as bad and often worse.
iMessage is a psyop. The absolute worst messaging app in history with zero desktop access for non-Mac users?!
If you’re on Android, and especially pixel, please know that Apple has completely given up and no longer executes at the level you remember from 10-15 years ago.
The whole software world is shit now. The foundations were stable decades ago. Like Windows kernel, WinAPI, .NET, WPF, Linux kernel. But end user software is so terrible. Windows 11 with ads and unhelpful AI. macOS which is a bit less terrible, but still too bloated. Linux with its eternal changes between X, Wayland, Alsa, Pipewire, Pulseaudio, sysvinit, systemd, and endless choices. Both iOS and Android are terrible. iOS was perfect 10 years ago, it's absolute clownfest now. I would blame AI vibe coders, but it started before. I don't know who to blame. Why can't we just build solid minimal non-bloated OS that will last for decades without major rewrites. We've got so good foundations but so terrible end product.
Their strategy is growing markets, especially in india, and africa, and of course China. It's where the chinese oem dominate. Beside chinese OEM, i think the only other player is Samsung. So google strategy seems to be to circumvent people from misusing their OS by blocking certain services (mainly ads). This is done via apps from fdroid, and rooting and what not. If google can control how people uses their devices (block vpn based adblocking, or rooting all together), they have better grip on the market. At the end of the day, Android is front for an ad platform.
> [Google's] strategy is growing markets, especially in india, and africa, and of course China.
Really? China? Where Google services are banned and Android phones come with local OS versions that cut them out? "High-friction sideloading" won't affect anyone in China. It won't be part of their experience at all.
I think OP is suggesting that the ability to sideload is what is preventing their phones being distributed in China.
If you can present a "locked down" phone to regulators, you might be more likely to get permission to sell large volumes of them - like iPhones in China.
But there still won't be Google Services so what extra money is Google to make there? The markup on hardware. But they have to compete with local manufacturers with the very same OS. At least Apple is the only manufacturer selling phones with iOS.
> I think OP is suggesting that the ability to sideload is what is preventing their phones being distributed in China.
This comment is insane in several different ways.
There's nothing preventing Google's phones from being distributed in China. They already are distributed in China.
Those phones won't come with the vendor OS installed; they'll come with an OS that works without a hitch in China.
One of the modifications to the local OS will be to make sideloading trivial, since that's how you're expected to install apps.
If you did start selling phones with a stock Android OS in China, those phones wouldn't work because their connections to Google services would all be blocked.† The reason for that block has nothing to do with sideloading or even with phones. It's going to stay in place.
† In my experience, it's still possible to receive pushes from Google while you're in China. For example, you can't connect to the Play Store, but if you visit the Play Store in a browser on a different device that can dodge the Great Firewall, and tell it that you want to install something to your phone, Google will reach out and make the install to your phone even if your phone isn't dodging the firewall.
Agreed. The only thing they have going for them is that you can degoogle your android device, but you can't deapple your iphone, and here they are making moves that suggest they may back off from that position.
Not from me and my peers. All nerds/devs/sysadmins.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Again, based on what?
> Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS.
Only when forced.
> Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
What are you even talking about?
Don't get me wrong, iPhones are great devices, but I prefer the Android ecosystem time and time again.
Except only a few countries in the world have wages where their citizens can afford Apple.
While I can afford Apple, out of principle I am not buying anything above 300 euros, that requires me to also buy another computer for hobby coding, and a dev license.
All my use of Apple hardware is via projects where pool devices are assigned to the delivery team.
Mobile providers usually offer loans ("service contracts") where people get phones outside their financial standing (I regularly see high end iPhones and foldable phones of €1-2k run by people in a country where average monthly salary is less than €1k): if a highly visible device like your phone can be had for 10% of your monthly salary, people will, unfortunately, opt for it.
I tend to not use Apple not due to cost (I honestly believe it's OK to pay a premium for quality; I might disagree they offer it today though, as I do use a couple of their devices at work), but because of how closed their ecosystem is (and yes, all my personal devices are running some sort of Linux, and Android phones are rooted and with bootloader unlocked).
In my country, for example, buying phones from carriers as part of your plan just isn't a thing. As in, you couldn't do it even if you wanted to. Same for postpaid plans and contracts.
As a result, quite a lot of people use the "I can't believe they could make and sell an entire phone at this price" Xiaomi and similar phones.
I've only seen the carrier locked phones and long-term contracts in a handful of countries. I've lived in a lot of countries on three continents.
In many places the default is prepaid SIMs with separately purchased phones. Sometimes the prepaying can be automated (e.g. in Russia), sometimes it involves you physically going to a shop once a month or so (e.g. in Egypt).
Apple's certainly been working to destroy their consumer trust though!
At least on my end the political knee bending by Tim Cook and their recent iOS and MacOS updates have me firmly on the side of not giving any more money to Apple. (Sadly, I still pay for Apple One for hy family, so I'm not perfect. But... hey, it's a start. Speak with your wallets).
And I will be considering alternatives when my machines which I will be running to their end stop working.
It's really such a shame cause I really liked their privacy stances, accessibility work, and focus on user experience.
Now I say, screw Apple, and encourage people to boycott and be wary of upgrades.
Android gets a bad rap because of security and Apple has exploited this in their marketing campaigns to the max. So the moment Google does something to address this glaring hole in their security model the 1% vocal minority throws a fit. You’ll still be able to side load, but because it has extra friction they’ll threaten to switch to iOS. To which I say - go for it. Google doesn’t care about people who side load apps like an automatic reloading the chamber. You’re an insignificant percentage of their base.
Personally, I would rather see Android only run signed and sanctioned apps to prevent the technologically illiterate from getting pwned. If you want to be able to side load then sign up to be a developer and go to town on your device.
I don't know how it works at Google, but unless they're giving away Pixel phones for free to their employees (or at a very, very strong discount), they have no business forcing their employees to use their products.
Here is how a job works: worker works, company gives money. Workers do whatever the fuck they want with the money they earn.
You're typically issued a corporate phone, it's the only phone that can open work email. You have a choice between an Android (something like a Pixel and a Samsung) and an iPhone, with some companies incentivising Androids with things like a faster upgrade cycle or more premium trims. The culture is split between having just the one free corporate phone and having two phones - one personal, one corporate.
There are lots of examples of Android team employees who are proud of using only Apple phones.
Check the "socially inept tech roast show" - where people from those teams demonstrate their ignorance and hatered towards own products and users.
Since they dont use them, they dont see nor care about bugs.
Meanwhile if you work for a cola company and they catch you drinking competing product you will get fired (your contract bans you fron that). Same for many other products.
I understand using an Apple phone to learn what it does / its featurs, but those Android employees dont use Android at all. And it shows
I gave an iPhone a shot fof like a week but had to return it because it didn't have alternatives to the apps I was using on Android. Apps like BitCalculator, Convertbee, Aegis, a decent calculator with sin/cos/log and the ability to write expressions like the default on Android, Wireguard and a decent browser with an ad blocker. No Safari doesn't qualify.
Better mobile hardware is highly specific. Crappy batteries worse than literally all competition? Check for first what, 5 or 6 generations? For many people, battery life is single most important attribute of their phone.
Also USB-C ain't some differentiating feature of android, rather rest of the world and electronics. Fully apple's fault here, it could have been their standard as the one, but greed is greed.
Screens were always better on Samsungs flagships (apple buys screens there too) - mildly higher resolution, refresh rate and contrasts but these are rather unimportant. As an non-apple tech user, apple phone hardware has very few things that interest me or put them above the others.
Its better integration with software that did put them above, since it was optimized for a very narrow band of hardware so could get far even with subpar hardware (till M chips came but these days they are almost on par with Snapdragons). But that software has a list of issues much bigger than hardware above so no, thank you.
> core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS
It's obvious you've never used Android if you think these are core features LMAO. No one cares that much about connector type, more the fact it's using an industry standard versus proprietary. No one cares about RCS, everyone uses WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Line, etc...
Core features are stuff like being able to search for a business through the phone app, Maps telling you where you parked your car, unprompted, compatibility with the casting protocol, the ability to make ANY app the default for a particular task, the ability to sideload, the fact you can switch phone brands and get whatever hardware you want but your core OS with all your accounts stays the same. Basically the ability to do what you want win your OS and no one restricting your phone's features.
As for Google's strategy, it's the same as Valve's. Having a platform they can't be locked out of since both MS and Apple have shown they'll abuse their market power.
Well no, Chinese phones are above Apple material-wise (better battery, better cameras, better cooling) and on par SoC-wise since last year. That's what makes Google's strategy so baffling.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
It's entirely the same. I have gone back and forth regularly for the past 10 years. Android is completely on par app-wise. Apple has the iMessage lock-in in the US obviously but not in the rest of the world. Apple might have a slight advantage on the pro segment with the iPad but I don't think it has a huge impact on phones.
The really baffling thing to me is that while they lock down Android, they pay to put Gemini on iOS. Google has a real competitive advantage with IA and they just gave it to Apple.
It's clear to me that they are two companies fighting each other inside Google: the ex-Motorola who wants to be Apple and the service side who wants to be Microsoft.
I personally fear that they are making the bed of the regulators who will probably come for Play Protect at some point to open the door for alternative OS providers at least in Europe. But maybe they think it's coming anyway and are strengthening their position and trying to milk what they can in the meantime.
Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have caught up on the phone SoC market.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has a slightly better CPU than the A19 Pro but a slightly worse GPU. Apple has a very slight advantage in watt usage but that's more than offset by the battery gap. Same thing with the Dimensity 9500.
One, you are entirely moving the goal post. Nothing was said of winning. The discussion was about catching up and catching up they did. As I said, the market is competitive.
Two, because the actual power consumption is not 65% higher - that's peak - and high end Chinese phones have batteries significantly bigger than the iPhone so you still get better screen time between charges in the end.
I think it’s fair to say that a SoC should perform better at higher wattages, so my comment is definitely relevant.
Regardless, I don’t understand how you can say that I’m moving goalposts when I mention performance per watt, which is absolutely relevant when talking about smartphone SoC performance, and then you bring up battery capacity, which is not.
>Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.
Classic Apple glazer take. This is why I still made another 100% with Apple stock over past 5 years because stupid people got gaslight into buying their overpriced stuff that is marginally better if at all.
Yeah, at no point has Apple ever had meaningfully better hardware than the competition. They have always been a more expensive version of the same hardware you can get from their competitors, just this one has an apple logo. But a lot of people, even smart people, are fooled by the marketing.
"Slow phone with slow animations" is a crazy assessment, I switched from Galaxy S7 to iPhone XR in 2018 because the Galaxy was (like every other Android I had) slow to do everything, applications would crash randomly and my phone would just give up and reboot without warning. Not to mention all of the killer Android features that Google had gotten rid of up to that point (RIP notification ticker, I miss you so much). What's the point of being able to sideload and customize when none of it works on a day to day basis? And when Google/other Android phone manufacturers insist on their phones being more and more similar to iPhone/iOS, the reasons to stay on Android go away too.
> No Aux port, no usb. Slow phone with slow animations. But maybe this is fixed, its been 10 years.
It has been 10 years and none of this is true today, also the average person doesn’t care about an aux port.
> Solid no here. Being able to install stuff from fdroid is amazing.
Not sure if you’re serious here, the app selection is far better on the App Store (and also Google Play Store) due to the nature of not being restricted to purely FOSS apps.
> You forgot to mention how poor iPhone security is.
Citation needed, iOS has the second best mobile security and is at worst equivalent to stock Android. The only OS that surpasses iOS by a large amount is GrapheneOS.
> People have died due to Apple's poor security.
This could also be said for any other OS/maker? Nothing is 100% secure/private.
Thinking Apple hardware is better is utterly laughable when you look at non-US Android devices.
Much better camera sensors, much better silicon carbon batteries etc in Oppo, Vivo, Honor and Xiaomi devices than anything Apple produces. Form factors Apple still hasn't figured out, such as 7th gen Foldables, Flip foldable phones etc, Camera zoom lenses that can be attached...
Oh come on fanboy, Apple doesn't have meaningfully better hardware, consumer trust, or app selection (for most people the opposite is true!)
Oof, Apple adopting core 'Android' features... Yea, finally? Increasing iOS market share? Where? Not most places
I think it's weird you come at this from an antitrust angle when I would totally make the argument the other way.
If there's pressure to remove this feature, then it's from companies that make apps that anyone can pull up in Revanced and they can patch it and can be running a version of a piece of software that shouldn't exist with "premium" features enabled. I don't think there's an argument against it really besides that. At least not an honest, intelligent argument....
Ultimately, I doubt many would jump to Apple. Inertia would insist: People just won't upgrade. Which is already occurring, people are keeping their devices longer, especially Apple users. And they wonder why their battery stops working... Oy vey!
Are you joking? Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now. From batteries to cameras and screens, apple is way behind on hardware tech. Yeah they are better than Samsung - but Samsung has also massively fallen behind what's the state of the art.
>>is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year? And it will be even more now that Apple announced they are going to use Gemini as their AI base model.
> Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year?
You checked wrong. Google pays Apple on the order of $20 billion to be the default search on iOS - this is so significant it accounts for ~5% of Apple's annual revenue
> Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.
If any of these manufacturers decide to include an EMR pen in the body of the phone, like Samsung's S-Pen, they'll have me as a customer. The S-Pen so completely changes the experience that I am unwilling to go back.
> Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.
This is true, but their phones don't ship with Google services out of box (at least the last time I checked). So in reality, "Google's Android" is really mostly Samsungs and Pixels.
They don't in the EU. Not in Slovenia, so not the entire EU. I've seen it first hand. It's also not some special law that we'd have invented here so I'm pretty sure there are other EU countries where it's the same.
I think what is missing here is the growing trend of scammers convincing people they are their bank (or whatever) and walking them through enabling side-loading and then installing malware (sometimes to address some urgent security issues with their account).
This is meant to counter an actual issues that is affecting many many users.
If you can convince the user your are their bank, can convince them to install software and walk them through how to do it and enable side loading, you can also convince them to input their logging into any webpage.
If that was the only reason, they would proactively cooperate with alternative app-stores like F-Droid to allow them to provide a lesser friction flow for open source releases. My question would be why I they see themselves as the only possible trust anchor here. A high friction method to install a different app store, once, IMHO would be OK.
This is not simply an excuse. Android phones are prevalent in countries where smartphones offer the only realistic access to banking and cashless payments to the majority of the population. Scamming schemes targeting those users are also very frequent in many, if not most of these countries, and educating people about them is hard. Like it or not, this change is likely going to be a net positive for many people.
In the impacted nations people only use phones, and the local banking ecosystem is really focused on apps. I think most people would never think to use their bank website.
I have no trust in a solution that mostly benefits the proposer.
By all means let people curate and use safe lists of software, but let's not pretend that making the life harder for the few registries containing solely open source and vetted software is in any way about making people safer.
This solution clearly mostly benefits the ignorant phone users of the world who are susceptible to scams. There is a minuscule number of people sideloading Android apps on their phones compared to the greater population.
Like I strongly believe that sideloading should be possible on phones, I don't even do it myself anymore but it can be very helpful and is part of what makes the Android platform fundamentally more open than iOS. I was VERY opposed to their original idea of closing off sideloading altogether, but having to mark it in your settings manually seems like a very good compromise.
And many things have been done, including Windows telling you in bold red letters that this software is dangerous if it wasn't signed by a trusted signer with lots of installs.
Yes, but governments are getting involved because governments always like increasing control and reducing freedom; the "major problem" is merely a pretext.
Is the solution to make it harder? Or is the threat of scammers and the insecurity of the OS used as false flag to make installing software outside of the profitable walled garden much much harder?
I doubt that side-loading impacts revenue all that much. Alternate stores are the real, potential, risk to $.
I think the solution is to come up with a balance between the needs of different groups of users. People here see the phone as a general purpose computer they should be able to modify and use for all kinds of novel tasks. This is great, and should be fully supported.
But there are also many, many more people who see the phone as an important way to enable a higher standard of living. Giving them access to information, government services and banking for the first time. They are not technically sophisticated, and don't need or want a general purpose computer.
So, we need platform providers to come up with ways to work out who is who, and give each side what they need.
It seems you think what is missing here is some FUD, which is what I believe you are feeding us with here.
If there's anyone people need to be protected against, it's Alphabet and Apple and the entities they let in intentionally, rather than specter of "growing trend of scammers".
>Sideloading is a neologism to scare users and lawmakers, it just means "Installing software" and should be a basic right.
No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source. You might not agree the restriction should exist, or that even the concept of first party source at all, but for communication purposes it's worth having a simple word to describe that concept, rather than something like "installing from a non-first party app store".
>No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source
It's amazing how many confidently wrong people are springing up out of the wordwork to present revisionist history about the meaning of "install" like it's ancient wisdom. Pre-mobile computing treated "install" as neutral and primary and had no built in relation to centralized distribution. Sideloading as a term of art originally, in practice came into usage for transferring media to devices, and some cloud file hosts briefly used it to mean load a file to an online drive without downloading it to computer. It's usage was varied, irregular, and not at any threshold of popular acceptance for one meaning or another.
Windows, Dos, Linux, and online self-hosted services had no notion of "sideloading", or at least no usage of that vocabulary and did not use this notion of "install" that is now being retrospectively declared a longstanding historical norm. Even now, that's not a term used in Windows or Linux. Even Apple, who very much in practice utilize this controlled distribution model but even they don't use this sideloading/installing verbal distinction. In Apple's lexicon installing is neutral with respect to where an app comes from.
So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
>So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
None of that refutes anything I said. You're basically arguing "back in the good old days, all installs were not from first party source and there was no distinction", but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now. Otherwise it's like arguing "immigration" is some "neologism" because back before the advent of the nation state, people just moved wherever, there wasn't random lines that turned "moving" to "immigration", and the word "immigration" is coined by statists that want to impose their worldview on the populace.
>but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now
A distinction only exists if people parrot the verbiage coined by corporations with a business interest in creating artificial moats. They have no obligation to, especially media outlets who have the right (and IMO responsibility) to use accurate vocabulary.
>How is that different from "installing software"?
It's easy to see this play out if try to replace "sideloading" with "installing software". If you apply it to OP's headline of
>Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
You get
>Google confirms 'high-friction' installing software flow is coming to Android
which isn't at all accurate. You still need the distinct concept of "installing software not from first party sources", otherwise it sounds like google is making it a pain to install all apps, which isn't the case.
Sure, you could argue it helps to express a distinction but that doesn't mean it has to live inside the verb install. Historically installing software was the general act and provenance was handled with qualifiers eg installing from "third-party sources", "manual install" etc. Android is alone among computing platforms in collapsing that qualifier into a new term that implicitly recenters the Play Store as the default meaning of "install."
In other ecosystems the store path is described as "store install" not the other way around. Android chose the inverse framing and that choice isn't neutral.
>Sure, you could argue it helps to express a distinction but that doesn't mean it has to live inside the verb install.
Right, which is why they used "sideload".
>In other ecosystems the store path is described as "store install" not the other way around. Android chose the inverse framing and that choice isn't neutral.
No, this is just being non-neutral in the opposite direction. Given the fact that installing from the play store is the default experience for the overwhelming majority of the user, calling it "store install" is even more obtuse.
"That’s why they used sideload" is exactly the point being contested. Historically, install was the unmarked, neutral verb for adding software, regardless of source. The distinction, when needed, lived in qualifiers about provenance. Introducing a new verb for non-store installs does more than merely describe a difference, it reassigns conceptual ownership of "install" to the store path.
And neutrality here isn't about mirroring current usage frequency (which is unique to Android and recent relative to the history of computing), it's about continuity with prior computing norms. Even when one distribution path dominated in practice, it didn't get to redefine the base verb.
> Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source
What "first-party" source? Apple invented out of thin air the notion of a "first-party" software source or that computer users can only install software approved by a central authority.
The idea the manufacturer of a product is a "first party" is BS.
You are the first party. If I own the device, I am the first party.
The manufacturer is now a second or third party after you own the device, and for most ideas, a third party, especially if they don't truly offer real support of the device.
I take the opportunity to let people know that there are alternatives to Google/Apple duopoly on mobile. Link: https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
Sure, GrapheneOS is often suggested but Ubuntu Touch is a really interesting alternative, their own store and ecosystem.
The community is amazing and welcoming. If there are Android apps which you can't do without, they can be emulated and used anyway. Imagine switching to Linux and then using Wine for the apps you really still need.
Yes, it's not perfect but Linux isn't either. If you think you're sufficiently tech savvy and want to make a change, give Ubuntu Touch a try. Find a cheap second hand supported device and play around, make some fun apps. (devices currently supported: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ )
To me it's like being back when there was only Windows and Macs as viable home computer OS, and people were getting their feet wet with Linux and all its flavours. Now, it's the same but for mobile.
Ubuntu Touch has amazing UX, IMO. Sadly it's been non-viable for practically forever, and is non-viable today unless you want to use a 7-year-old out-of-production device. It's practically abandonware with a few hobby maintainers at this point, as much as it had potential compared to other alternatives.
I was under the impression that Ubuntu Touch worked just fine with the Fairphone 5 which is very much not a "7-year-old out-of-production device". I'm currently writing this from a Fairphone 4 (with CalyxOS, not Ubuntu Touch though).
I have struggled with getting anything functional on a Fairphone running Ubuntu Touch. The problem is you can't really run any Linux app, it has to be written to support their specific display manager. Running regular Linux apps is possible but not properly documented and I haven't gotten it to work. Android apps through Waydroid sort of works, but is unstable and not suitable for daily use.
I really want Linux on mobile to be a thing, but I haven't found it yet. PinePhone is abandoned, Purism just isn't a finished product, Planet Computers doesn't even build a phone with Linux support anymore.
The only thing that's current and active I've seen is a Hong Kong startup https://furilabs.com/. I've got one on my desk to try, hoping it will be something usable as a daily driver.
It's never going to work. Any competitor that isn't Android won't have app support (e.g. you won't even be able to message people in 90% of the world where WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, etc. are the de facto communication method for almost the entire population).
So you need some way to run Android apps... which is totally possible, but at that point why not just use Android?
PostmarketOS doesn't use the Android codebase, they work on upstreaming devices with a standard Linux kernel, so the opposite. They act mostly the same way as a desktop distribution. They do use the downstream image but mostly as a reference to remove it.
Ubuntu Touch does use the Android vendor images though through the libhybris compatibility layer, that's why they have some good compatibility, if the phone has a lineageos image, there's a good chance that it'll work with Ubuntu Touch.
The downside of that is the same as Lineageos, they are stuck on whatever kernel the device shipped with and it can be ancient.
> I take the opportunity to let people know that there are alternatives to Google/Apple duopoly on mobile.
In my country (which will AFAIK be one of the first ones to get the new app install restrictions), so far I haven't found any.
You're not allowed to import phones which are not certified by ANATEL, and AFAIK all currently sold certified phones are either Android (from several hardware brands), Apple, and feature phones.
> To me it's like being back when there was only Windows and Macs as viable home computer OS, and people were getting their feet wet with Linux and all its flavours. Now, it's the same but for mobile.
There's one VERY IMPORTANT distinction: back then, you could easily take a Windows or Mac computer and install Linux in it. For mobile, it's never been that easy; strong cryptographic signing of the operating system, combined with endless churn of the hardware design (there's no "PC compatible" equivalent for phones), and there being no way to keep the data partition intact when installing a custom ROM, make it much harder for people to "get their feet wet" with alternative operating systems.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose emulating Android apps on a non-Android system will have the same problem as trying to run them in an Android without Google Services or in a rooted phone, i.e., banking (and similar) apps detecting it and refusing to run?
Were it not for that, I would never have stopped using Huawei, IMO the best phone brand by a mile. But I'm too busy a person to depend on hacks and having to regularly find new workarounds to access my banks.
I think you're right about certain apps refusing to run in an emulated environment.
I'm beginning to think we need to consider such apps, and the hardware they run on, as the outsiders. Keep a cheap "normal" Android phone for those apps, and those apps alone. Then keep a "real" second device for everything else. Up to you which one gets the SIM card and provides connectivity for the other (and ordinary phone services).
I'd rather go back to old-fashioned hardware dongles from banks – but hey, lacking that, maybe I'll just think of the first of those two devices as a clunky, overly expensive one of those.
This is the best solution. Actually, if you have money, in my experience, the best is to have an iPhone dedicated to that. Sometimes even on stock Android (Pixel 10 Pro) you get weird incompatibilities. E.g. trying to connect to a DJI drone, paying with Google Wallet, getting a train transit card in Japan… An iPhone supports all daily life use cases with predictability. So my solution right now is to have one iPhone where I keep things clean, and one Android where I do whatever I want. :)
(I do get the odd look when I take out my second phone to do something else in public and questions about it :))
I see an announcement from 2016 saying they're adding React Native support. Does it actually work? That'd allow low-effort ports onto their platform, and I'd much rather see them succeed than be stuck with the current duopoly.
Unfortunately, apps have always been the barrier to entry for competing options.
If your platform doesn't have apps, then your platform won't have users, which won't attract developers and BigCo's to write apps for your platform. Rinse and repeat.
This is how Windows Phone was wiped out, despite them spending *a lot* of money trying to attract companies and developers to write stuff for their OS.
Windows Phone was fantastic because it had no apps. Wish it managed to stake out and maintain a decent portion of the phone market. If 30% of the population could say "Oh sorry TicketMaster, I can't install your app, please just email me a pdf or text me a link to your tickets that I can just open in a web browser" the that would benefit everyone, even non-WP users.
Ubuntu Touch so far has the best hardware compatibility for things like camera and battery life. But it also insists on doing a lot of its own thing like using Mir instead of X and click packages. Running programs inside Libertine often crashes for me and is cumbersome. It makes developing for it harder. clickable needs Docker installed just so you can build and run your own apps on the device! Instead of letting you launch things quickly from terminal.
It make some things that should be easy on Linux harder. I.e., there's no Firefox + mobile tweaks like other linux mobile OSes, in part because it wants you to use Morphic.
But other linux mobile OSes dropped support for Halium/libhybris and even the very few that still have it don't seem to match Ubuntu Touch's level of hardware support.
The issue with buying phones like that, is they are just insanely expensive.
Without shipping/tax, that phone is CAD$1500, whereas I can buy a refurbished Samsung S22 for CAD$350 (all in), that has roughly the same specs, but for 1/5 the price.
I understand small companies can't use economies of scale like Samsung/Apple, but it's still really bad, and the majority of consumers wouldn't even take a second glance at it from the price.
Notice that, per
https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/devices-specification , the newest OS they ship is Android 11. I owned a Gemini and I liked the hardware, but they don't update software and I consider that a deal breaker.
This is far from the only alternative. There are also Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS and more. Unlike Ubuntu Touch, they allow you to run ordinary Linux desktop apps. Also there is hardware not tied to an ancient Android kernel, designed to run desktop GNU/Linux: Pinephone and Librem 5. The latter is my daily driver.
Thank you for the much needed hopeful note. Maybe I'll try doing exactly that, sounds like a fun hobby. My biggest worry about Linux on mobile is that banking apps will stubbornly refuse to offer support to these platforms, basically forever.
I would like to see a high friction flow for installing all the crap from the Play Store to "protect and educate users". "Are you sure you want to install this app? It's only got a score of 2.8 and only 7 reviews, and will ask for all of these permissions?"
Even if it has 4.8 and 7000 reviews it's often fake 4.8 because the reviews are botted / paid / dark patterned (e.g. when you pop up star rating on your users and beg them "rate the app plz" and when the users tap anything but 5 stars you say "k, ty" and keep those "bad" reviews for yourself)
That was just an example to communicate my idea: a better way to validate authenticity of the app could and should be used.
But to your point specifically, Play store and App Store have APIs to rate from within the app: when the pop up shows, app author does not have an option to avoid getting a 1-star rating (they are also time-restricted, eg. at most once every 180 days for Apple IIRC).
What devs do though, is to preempt it with "Are you enjoying our app?", and only giving you a formal rating pop-up if you answer "Yes".
I want even worse restrictions on my parent phone so they dont install spyware. I want "install ONLY from fdroid". I trust their one server in a basement more than Google at this point.
The hilarious part in all of this is watching Epic Games sue Google over how bad the "high friction" flow was for them to sideload their hefty bundle of Google Play violations and win the rights to be back in the Play Store.
It's OK now that Epic can have a one-click download for Fortnite to shove all the friction back into the sideloading experience.
If the make sideloading high-friction, either via account-bound or apk upload or permissions from MNO/ISP, I will leave android. I have a bunch of my own apps that only I use, not released to the public, if I cannot use them, I have zero reason to stay on android.
I think one of the reasons they want to lockdown the system is to prevent guys like me from locking THEM out of my home/ecosystems, as and example, I build my own launchers, specifically for TCL TV's, which runs Android TV and has Developer Mode + adb. Which means I remove all the bloat & ad garbage, which they want to prevent.
We will get to the point where google will remove your ability to set custom dns servers and only use theirs.. just wait & see friends.
Anywhoo, when this side loading fence materializes, I will jump ship to apple.
Why jump to another abuser when you could seriously start looking into alternatives? Ubuntu Touch has a really active community and it's very stable, you can even emulate android apps which you might absolutely need.
I don't see Apple as the obvious next step; the obvious step, when one is pissed off with abuse of power is open source, not Apple.
Saying 'don't use those things' is not a viable solution. It's like when I was trying to move to linux a couple years ago I asked for help getting HiDPI/scaling to work and there were many responses saying 'who needs that?'
There are five options in my country, 3 of which require app push based 2FA to log into the web interface and 2 of which only have an app interfere.
Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.
> It's called a debit/credit card
Since about two years ago, activating a card requires the app.
> Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.
I do not doubt this is happening, but it is forbidden under SEPA. All IBANs, no matter from which member country, must be treated equally. Unfortunately, "IBAN discrimination" happens quite frequently still. The European commission recommends filing a complaint with your national governing body.
It's not just tax obligations, no? Employers in many countries have an obligation to ensure that your salary reflects on the X day of the month (or whatever frequency you're paid). Banks in my country have a payroll payment system for this reason, where funds will clear on the day they're made despite the destination bank (in the same country).
If my employer has to use SWIFT to pay me, on whom does this obligation to ensure I'm paid on time fall? I've had a salary payment from a foreign employer fail to be delivered for 2 weeks a few times. We'd have to go back and forth with my bank, their bank, their payroll vendor. That's an exception because they hired me as a foreign employee. Despite paying their local employees on time, I always received my salary at least 4 days 'late', as long as their payroll system reflected that I was paid on the X day, it wasn't their problem.
so Eire has 5 significant banks, and 15 'less significant'. There are also 276 Credit Unions, I don't know if they are useful. (I had a Credit Union account in the past, could send/receive online but no payment card)
(I don't know their suitability, but there are more than 5 options in your country)
Of the "significant banks" listed, only AIB and Bank of Ireland do consumer bank accounts. I suspect the presence of the others is more to do with wanting an EU entity for targeting larger EU markets than the Irish domestic market. For example, Citibank only expanded from "large tech multinationals" to also "mid sized businesses that are planning to scale internationally" in 2023 [1]
Also on that Wikipedia page are Dell's private bank, Danske Bank (closed their Irish retail business in 2013), Klarna (sort of banking-adjacent, but they're not giving you a current account), etc.
The 5 banks offering retail consumer accounts nationwide are AIB, permanent TSB, Bank of Ireland, Revolut and N26. The first 3 are the surviving brick and mortar banks and the latter 2 are recent-ish neobank entries.
Credit unions are limited to serving customers in their local area. The one credit union who's catchment area I'm in also requires app based 2FA.
(Side note: The name of the country in English is Ireland, the name in Irish is Éire - using the accent-less Irish name in English was promoted by the UK government and BBC because they didn't want to recognise the name of the country prior to the GFA in 1998. Most people will also accept Republic of Ireland if you need to distinguish from Northern Ireland, even though that's technically not the name)
The point isn't that things are better on this axis on iOS, but that things are better on numerous other axes, to the point where many people are only using Android at all because it feels slightly more open and free than iOS... if Google wants to play Apple's game, then the only reasons to bother with the mess that is Android are gone, and so you'll see people switch to iOS.
Eventually the only reason people will use Android is the same reason people are using Windows now -- mandated by their employer or by being forced into the bottom cost-tier of products.
And the experience will be just as user-hostile with no end in sight.
Seems like you'll still be able to use your own apps just fine under this scheme.
It also seems pretty obvious that the ignorant phone-users of the world who get scammed are the reason for this change. The revenue lost from people like you is really not worth any amount of engineering effort.
So I was actually planning on upgrading from a Pixel 7 Pro to a Pixel 10 around the time this announcement came out last year, but have put it on hold as I wait to see what form these changes take.
Like if it was "you need to do the developer 7-tap of the version label in settings", it'd be like "whatever". But given how long this process has taken, I suspect that is not what they've planned - it wouldn't take this long to develop, it certainly wouldn't take this long to explain.
So I suspect that we're actually in the "Maybe Later" phase of "Google wants to control which apps you install: [ ] Yes [ ] Maybe Later". And I mean, if their proposed solution turns out to be "Me and 25 of my closest friends can install apps I make by phoning home to Google servers", then like, I can do that on iOS too. And if I'm not going to have meaningfully more control of my Android device, I may as well just go to iOS where Apple at least have a better privacy record and don't seem to have have an all-encompassing goal of "where can we put AI features to drive AI usage metrics up the most?"
Honestly just install grapheneos on your Pixel, that is what I did and bought a Pixel for that reason alone. I use all Google play services and it works great, only payment with phone doesn't work.
Yes I agree: if you already have a Pixel, try GrapheneOS on it. Then if it can wait (Pixel 7 is still supported for a while, isn't it?), GrapheneOS may support a non-Google phone in 2026, so it may be worth waiting.
> Matthew Forsyth, Director of Product Management, Google Play Developer Experience & Chief Product Explainer, said the system isn’t a sideloading restriction, but an “Accountability Layer.”
And... What about accountability for hosting distributing spyware, malware loaded apps from Google Playstore and hundreds of copy cat, misleading apps?
Why can't they pose a question when the phone is setup?
- Yes, I want to sideload
- No I dont want
If the user says NO then to later enable it to allow sideload Yes, the user needs to factory reset phone. Done.
>And... What about accountability for hosting distributing spyware, malware loaded apps from Google Playstore and hundreds of copy cat, misleading apps?
The rules don't apply to billion dollar corporations. Meta is showing 15 billion scam ads per day.
A somewhat unrelated thing, is I got bombarded with ads for a 'mental health mindfulness' service on one of the major international news websites.
I decided to Google the company after a few days. I was immediately confronted by thousands of reports by angry users, complaining about how after they tried the app, they got locked into a yearly subscription at exorbitant prices and it was impossible to cancel. The company itself is registered in some offshore tax haven.
They used to scare us, that if we went to those shady pirate websites, somebody would steal our credit cards and steal our money. Well...
This right here exposes the bullshittery about the reasons behind preventing sideloading on Android phones.
For Google everything is about protecting revenue, even when doing so exposes their users to real harm, and that's why they will not address the issue of copycat apps, poor practices on play store security or anything else that lowers the number of downloads on apps on play store. But, heaven forbid, I want to download an app that doesn't create revenue for them onto a phone I OWN, Google spends money lavishly.
The Internet cranks are right. Google is run by bean counters and all the invective the cranks heap on the Google leadership is entirely earned.
I'm with Google on this one. Idiots and old people (the public) use these devices daily. These are the very same people that send money to Nigerian royalty and expect to hear back about a great reward. This is mostly a CYA move with hard data behind it. If they completely removed side load, that would be a different story.
Yeah in fact I don't really see what's new in this article except that it hints that it will allow install of software from unverified developers via big scary warnings. Which seems like an improvement from what has been announced previously that only software from verified developers would be allowed.
I already have to configure apps to allow them to install apps on my Pixel... it's like "okay yeah I want to allow F-Droid and Obtainium to install apps" done. Maybe that's not the default or something? Who on earth wants popup ads in Chrome installing shit? And why would anyone want any random app to be able to install additional apps?
Wait a second... making a product that is safe and easy to use requires removing or mitigating potential hazards involving product. Building safeguards around a feature that can be used to hurt people in significant ways is exactly that, isn't it?
Are you responding to me? I think we agree. I'm saying that calling scam victims "stupid" and then not trying to change the product to protect them is bad.
Not at all. There are a lot of people in the world. Many of them are not nearly as interested in tech as you, or have simply not have the reason or access to learn more. That does not make them stupid.
My grandmother was tricked into buying cryptocurrency for a scam. All the apps that they used on her Android and iPhone were in the respective app stores.
Removing side loading has little to nothing to do with it from my point of view because the app stores are not doing a good job of verifying apps.
You pay a cost either way: live in a world with better funded and incentivized scammers and in a community less wealthy by a corresponding amount, or have a slightly less convenient sideloading experience.
I guess if you take the old saying extremely literally, you could conclude that every fool is guaranteed to be parted with 100% of their lifetime available money regardless of what anyone else tries to do to stop that, but that’s not true – and why old sayings (with a respectable 75% of the words right) taken literally aren’t a good basis for decision-making.
These scammers are parasites on society, they add nothing while draining resources away from honest people.
If you participate in society, that net drag will affect you in subtle ways. Like if you have money invested in something, that thing doesn’t go up in value as much as it would have if x% of society isn’t simply parasitic.
Exactly. I'm sick and tired of all the apps/websites that mandate 2fa. All of that adds friction when I'm a big boy who knows how to choose secure passwords. For that matter, why even invest resources into fraud detection or law enforcement? All of that money is coming out of somewhere, and why should my tax dollars go toward catching fake nigerian princes when it's just helping idiots anyways?
I'm sympathetic to that argument, but to invoke it you have to argue why the anti-fraud measures outweigh the benefits, not just drop a link to it. Moreover that's giving too much credit to the OP, who doesn't even recognize there's some sort of a trade-off, only that "fool and their money is soon departed".
This bit of article is what I'm hopeful will happen:
> That explanation broadly matches what we’re seeing in recent versions of Google Play, where new warning messages emphasize developer verification, internet requirements, and potential risks, while still allowing users to proceed.
When this whole thing got announced, I purchased a new Pixel 9 and flashed it with GrapheneOS.
I am hoping that in about 6-8 years (when I realistically need to update) the landscape might be a bit better. Or who knows, maybe I'll just continue using GrapheneOS.
So far I have not had a single issues with it. Apps the rely on attestation do not work, but honestly it's only two applications out of hundreds so I can live with it.
I also financially support GrapheneOS on a monthly basis (15$). This is just too important of an project not to.
Ironically, I've found that blocking the attestation API for some apps that supposedly require it (such as the latest versions of Waymo) might make them work anyway. lol
GrapheneOS can choose to simply not apply the same restrictions but now that they're partnering with another vendor to get security updates earlier, I'm not sure what the future holds in this aspect.
This is only an issue for Google compliant Android so projects like LineageOS will be fine. Depending on their implementation, this may even just be restricted to AOSP with Samsung and others just ignoring the extra restrictions.
But, if they make compliance a requirement for being part of their parent programme, GrapheneOS will be in a tough spot.
Graphene OS spends its social capital on hallucinating attacks from other projects and bullying other projects by sending their followers against them, based on those hallucinated attacks. It also has a completely intransparent project structure based around a supposedly retired mean developer, who then just did not (and still does almost all commits). That's not a project where the EU can invest money in, and the confidence users on HN tend to put into that project is baffling.
These weird anti-Graphene posts confuse me. I use GrapheneOS, fwiw, and I believe some things the project does (like its attacks on F-Droid) are misguided for orthogonal reasons.
However, it all makes sense from the perspective of Graphene not attempting to be a general purpose OS like Lineage, but explicitly a security focused OS. Security is often in conflict with what the average consumer wants, and they can go use Lineage or whatever.
It's like writing lots of comments complaining about OpenBSD devs coming across as grumpy and refusing to support Bluetooth. That is part of their value proposition! You're just not the target audience and that is okay.
Most if not all of their attacks are inexcusable. Calling a competing OS, CalyxOS, nazi sympathizers is unacceptable and when I first read that I started seeing the red flags.
Nothing is open about GrapheneOS aside from the source code. We officially know nothing about the leadership, their current plans, what their finances look like or even who this new mysterious OEM is.
not much in the parent comment is anti-graphene. it's probably the best available option for a mobile OS right now.
the sentiment is that the dev team - specifically one zealot - does not engage politely/rationally/transparently in any public forum, which undermines the image of the OS as a whole.
The EU should pile money into /e/OS. It's maintained by an EU company (Murena) and has European hardware options - Fairphone (NL), SHIFTphone (Germany), and Volla (Germany). Yes, I know some of them use US Qualcomm chips, but you have to start somewhere.
Europe is a continent, with many disparate nations and cultures. This continent is not hostile towards Graphene users.
In Europe there is the European Union (EU), which also is comprised of many disparate nations and cultures but a subset of those comprising Europe.
I say the following as a staunch supporter of European integration and cooperation:
The EU is actively hostile towards any software with the stated goal of safeguarding users right to privacy and security. That means GrapheneOS but also Signal, Matrix and more.
I would love to run GrapheneOS if it didn't involve giving any money to Google to get up-to-date hardware, brand new. (Yes, I know I can buy and run it on a used Pixel.)
My next phone will be on GrapheneOS or EOS as well, the last straw was Samsung removing the bootloader unlock with an update (not even sure what they've done is legal)
As TFA does not mention it, and I don't see any top-level comments discussing it, this is a continued rollout of a "feature" first piloted in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. See:
Of course, HN reaction has always been skeptical about this including in earlier news. But the reporting on it, and the countries in which it is piloted in, seems to me to involve government/banking industry cooperation with or pressure on Google to combat cyber fraud. These polities are prime targets for Android cyber fraud of this sort due to Android penetration, and seemingly (to me) also cultural proximity to scam operators, and tech-illiteracy among the vulnerable demographic. (And anticipating a reply I got from a previous article on my comment on this feature---no, it's just not feasible to comprehensively educate retirees against evolving tactics by scam operators and expect that to be a sufficient sole countermeasure.)
There is no doubt that sideloading by uninformed users can be used as a backdoor.
It's also not a surprise that banks/industry that's accountable to recover the losses for tricked customers is looking to someone else to solve it for them.
However, if this was "piloted", do we have the numbers of how much has it decreased the number of scams or their impact?
I wouldn't go as far as to say that it is impossible to "educate the public", but it is indeed extremely hard. But click-through pop-ups have succeeded when?
I know in some people's eyes saying this will make me a Google shill but this reminds me of the manifest v3 thing. What makes it to the top of HN is mostly clickbait a las "Google is cracking down on ad blockers" or in this case "Google is preventing side loading". These articles don't link to primary sources (Google) and they (intentionally?) miss all nuance.
These measures are indeed the result of governments blaming their citizens getting scammed on phone manufacturers. There's not a lot Google can do here.
However, Google is choosing to extend these changes worldwide. That's where the problem really starts. People in Asia and Brazil may vote for idiots who will shift the blame for their citizens' lack of basic digital education onto others, but that doesn't mean that countries where this type of fraud barely exists should also be subject to these extreme measures.
Yeah for every HN user complaining about it there are hundreds of people sideloading apps (not realizing what they're doing - under promise of loans or other advantages) and then getting their phone ransomed
And for every person getting scammed by an app from any source, there are a thousand people getting scammed just through phonecalls. Scam apps isn't a real problem at scale, it's a bunch of fear mongering.
The image at the top of the article is actually what already happens in Android and has done for years. At first, I thought that this meant that the article was very outdated, but no, this is from January 2026.
I imagine the text of the article is fine, but I'm a little bit disappointed that Android Authority chose to lead with that image and caption and make it seem that this is what the future flow would look like. You'd think they'd know better.
The frog had to be pretty well lobotomized to keep it from jumping out. One can recreate the ”experiment” with a lobotomized frog and mostly get the result described though
The highest risk is the play store itself. Gambling and addiction.
So, when does Google add "high friction" there, instead of encouraging it?
Ah, well, it's the money! Than stop bending the truth.
Wait so did this rollback? Initially they were about to forbid any install from non verified accounts, then allow them but just a limited number, this article seems to suggest there will just be extra steps?
Friction hopefully means "you have to plug in a USB cable" and not "you have to associate your phone with a particular Google account, then go through a process with Google's customer service to approve your phone for sideloading" etc.
There is nothing sleazy happening "on the side", I am simply installing an application of my choosing on some hardware that I purchased.
As long as it remains possible (without extra developer verification, etc, etc), a bit of extra friction is probably OK, as is assigning accountability to the person who chose to install an app outside of the "official" store.
But it has to remain possible. Otherwise can someone name any advantage that Android has over iOS?
When Google inquired in court how that could be if Apple doesn't even allow any form of side-loading, including other app stores (which Google does allow)
The judge said, I shit you not, Apple doesn't have any competitors on their platform, therefore they can't be anti-competitive.
Probably one of the worst most off the rails rulings ever. Google took notes and is now following Apple. You can thank the courts
Semi-related question: how invasive is the Temu App on Google Play Store nowadays. Last time I read about it, it posed a bigger threat to users than the average side-loaded app.
I was never an iOS user, or developer - exactly because Android was more "open", exerted less control over a user of the device.
The same reason I use Linux for 25 years (not ideological, but it just makes most sense by far). In time where this view (win11 vs. Linux) is starting to make sense to more and more people, few rare config nuances are getting easier to solve due to LLM-s, going into the opposite direction with a mobile OS calls for users to also start seriously considering more open alternatives and making a path for users of our app to do the same.
Is the solution for sideloading to also have the same APK in the Play Store? That way, Google would have received the AAB and generated a signed APK that is used from the Play Store and also offered via sideloading.
At least they aren't removing it like originally planned. A warning from `adb sideload` or `adb install` that can be bypassed with an environment variable is reasonable IMO.
I'd really like to see details before drawing conclusions. If it really is just an extra up-front warning screen or something then yes that's reasonable. If it's something that unfairly disadvantages F-Droid compared to the much less safe Google Play store, then it's unreasonable.
Would switch to PostmarketOS tomorrow if there was any fully supported hardware (camera, 4G calling, etc.). All programs/apps I use are FOSS and standardized anyway.
Articles like this where we lament being trapped in an ecosystem duopoly are contemporary with articles saying that software engineering is over and LLMs can just vibe code anything you imagine. What's keeping the duopoly in charge?. Code signing?
You think a local model will get to that point? Some AGI revolution like your describing is impossible for humanity as a whole even if LLMs get that smart. The same companies control the supercomputers and your access to them.
I wish the EU would step up and bring sideloading on iOS. iPhone hardware is great but the software is severely lackluster. I know a few developers there and they are not exceptional by any means. Chiefly because Apple pays much less than their competition so they do not attract the best talent
iOS has fallen behind, I am struggling to use apps and even type on new liquid glass. My 2TB photo library is useless with the current photos app. I am trying out Pixel 10 on the side and I HIGHLY recommend it! Android does not suck anymore. I am in process of migrating stuff over slowly.
Those of us who use Android phones now - and install FOSS apps form F-Droid or just any apps from elsewhere other than the church of Google - might be thinking: "Oh, I need to work out how I'll have decent app access after this happens."
But what we should really be thinking is: "Oh, I need to _donate_ to projects which aim to patch Android-based phones to remove these restrictions; or to projects which aim to replace (most/all of) Android completely".
We need to speak with our wallets in addition to just ranting about Google.
Exactly. For most people not having a bank app, probably no digital payments due to that, and no government-issued digital ID is too much friction to even consider any alternative.
Some manufacturers like Xiaomi already have a very annoying flow for enabling developer options and using ADB. You need to have a SIM card inserted, need to create a Xiaomi account and there's several popups with timers you have to wait through.
I'm sure I'm missing something but wasn't this already the case where the first time you try to install an APK, you had to go into Settings and mark the relevant application as a trusted source for installing APKs from?
Some friction is probably wise. I remember them introducing the requirement to individually allow each app you're installing things from. The question is, how much more friction will they add? I suspect they will add prompts per install, too.
Call me what you want but it is my belief that the reason google is locking down and Apple refuses to budge is that in the near term future our mobile devices will become our identity online and in public.
Apple already offers digital ID in some states. They can do this partly because they can guarantee to the gov’t the ID is genuine because the user cannot modify the system.
Google needs to be able to do the same thing.
Age verification laws for online services will actually require something like a digital ID and Apple and Google want to be the providers.
I am not very well educated when it comes to alternative stores landscape.
But I do know that in Russia there's now Rustore: https://www.rustore.ru/en
which functions by automatically downloading and updating APKs for you.
During the APK install, however, you do see the ugly Android prompt about how this app may be dangerous.
Rustore has its own app payment system, which obviously circumvents Google Play fees.
This works on regular Android phones.
Are there other examples of such stores? Perhaps it's Google's answer to that.
I was expecting Google has stopped doing most of the business in Russia due to sanctions. Do you still see Russian-company ads in Google Search results or Youtube? Similarly, I thought they were not selling apps or ads in Google Play store in Russia either (they might be showing ads from non-Russian companies because, well, that just increases the show-count and absolute number of clicks).
I no longer reside in Russia, so I am not being targeted by these.
But I think that it mostly comes down to companies being able to pay for these ads. Mastercard / Visa payments no longer work in Russia. If a company has a way to pay (by having another business entity in another country), then it probably works.
Unfortunately both Russia and Ukraine are slacking in losing the war so it doesn't seem that making payments to Russia will be easy soon. Now of course if they were Uzbeki or Kazakhstani stores it would be completely different.
How does this relate to the announcement from a while back about introducing signatures that tie back to Google? (IE trusted developer program or whatever they're calling that horse shit.)
Eventually my so called smartphone will be a device for authenticating against a few services that require a special application, that I can also tunnel a serious device through for doing the things that I actually want to do.
It would be interesting to know why they're doing this, but it's unlikely it'll ever become public knowledge. I also don't think it is important, the people responsible should be in jail for a lot of other reasons anyway.
I think we should stop calling it "sideloading". I don't think the history of the term matters. By using that term, you imply that running the code you want on the hardware you own is somehow a secondary or second-class activity.
Call it "installing" or "jumping the garden wall".
Apparently this "high friction" is a term entirely invented by Android Authority based on finding a few new generic warning messages about sideloading in the Android source?? I guess if there's no news, you have to play word games to make some.
If auto-updating apps stops working on fdroid, I'll be installing Graphene, Lineage or taking a shot at something like postmarket/ubuntu touch/plasma mobile. I've used Lineage as a daily driver before for a while, so I'll probably just go back to that and tell developers to support the platform I'm using. It doesn't rent seek on developers or users.
I agree with high friction sideloading. it is the best of both worlds. no friction sideloading is too easily exploited by scammers. having a member of my family exposed to this kind of thing in the past taught me some things.
"Installing" has the connotation of doing it directly from the Play Store. This is also known as "Downloading" (because the data is on a server, in the cloud, and you're fetching it "downstream" to a local device.)
"Sideloading" doesn't refer to the installation process, but to the file transfer process. You're sideloading when you transfer, e.g. APKs from your notebook to your Android. Or, from a USB stick into your phone or something.
In general, though, "sideloading" also refers to any "non-app-store" installation. It's a kind of colloquial shorthand. It's not really a technical term. But it's adequate for getting the point across.
If you just called it "installing" without qualifying it, how would anyone know that it's a different process, or that it's accomplished not by navigating to the app store? It seems that you would invite ambiguity here!
The point is that before walled-garden app stores, that was how pretty much every normal person installed software on their PC's. Using the term "sideloading" for that is a clever invention to try and retroactively rebrand what is actually super-normal as something scary.
"Sideloading" refers to data transfer between two local, peer devices. Really, that is it. It is not "something scary" or something forbidden. It is not even really installing. It's data transfer.
So "before walled-gardens" people would install software in many many ways. I originally typed it in from scratch, or from a magazine. I loaded it from tape. Or diskette. That's not really "sideloading" if you think about it, because it's just "loading" from peripheral storage.
Later, when people dialed up on a PC, they could "download" software and then install it or do whatever with other data or media. They could also upload it. They could transfer it among devices locally. This was not, at the time, called "sideloading" but just transfer, or "null modem", or "sneakernet", or "a station wagon full of backup tapes".
If we're going to use "sideloading" in the strictest sense, then we cannot actually refer to the process of downloading APK files separately and then installing them, because that's literally downloading. But that is the colloquial meaning now.
Hey, if you want to coin a new term or neologism for it, by all means do so. But it seems absurd to downplay "sideloading" as having "scary" or "negative" connotations, when it really doesn't. You've got to look past the hype and F.U.D.
Remember, there was a time when people considered FTP and torrenting to be dangerous or subversive. Perhaps they still do.
Given that you've agreed that "sideloading" is not an accurate descriptor of installing apps directly from the web browser, I'd think you could see how using "sideloading" incorrectly like this is a marketing gimmick designed to scare users (and politicians!) into backing the official platform app store monopolies...
As someone from Germany, I don't want Google to nanny family members computing devices. They don't want it either.
It is completely absurd for an ad company in a surveillance state an ocean away to play IT services for everyone. This has already gone to far.
Rather, there should be tools for value-aligned IT services and technically minded family members to help.
Plenty of users will benefit from restricting it or even disabling sideloading entirely. I know my mother in her 70s can't be trusted with downloading random crap from the internet.
I absolutely HATED the first time I had to deal with it... at least now it works a little better.. but the first version didn't actually tell you that you needed to go into security settings right after to enable the install.
Still not a big fan of it... though admittedly mostly just install stuff via brew/cask more than direct downloads as a result.
...which is so much of a complicated nuisance that most people simply give up. If this will go the way I think it will prepare to have to skip 10 things, write 3 ADB commands and submit a video of you spinning around for 30 seconds just to install your pirated game.
Just to install a proper call recorder or a better Work Profile manager.
Turning a possibility to install software outside of the app store should be about as normal as the fact you're using a laptop or desktop to install your pirated games.
Yeah, you.
If someone having access to "side load" an app has it to install a pirated game, then you have your OS, where you are not limited only to Apple/Amazon/Google store, simply for installing pirated software.
You want to talk about confusing Grandma? Why isn't Lastpass the first entry on the App Store when you search for it verbatim? At the going rate, installing signed software is more deceptive than searching for the official installer online.
That's true but does not detract from the GPs main point: if you are curating your app store then you should do a proper job of it or you lose the curation argument.
A single scary warning per source (ie per new certificate that you choose to trust) would be fine. If I had to jump through a few hoops to install f-droid on a stock device that would be fine. But once I've authorized f-droid the OS needs to shut up and stay out of the way for good. No "are you sure you want f-droid installing this other thing" nonsense.
Google's long term strategy with Android is baffling to me. Apple has had better mobile hardware for years. Apple has higher consumer trust. Apple has better app selection (for most people). Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS. Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
And Google's strategy is to continue removing differentiating features from Android that also help them mitigate the threat of antitrust? Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps? Browsers? No, strictly worse. Youtube app? No, worse. Texting? Worse or equal (Whatsapp). Podcast client? I assume worse, since there is no Antenna Pod. Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage?
Also, while the Play store is an equally ad-riddled and unsearchable hellhole, at least Android does have with F-Droid a high quality alternative. iOS has nothing.
But sure, removing the F-Droid advantage can only hurt Android, the direction of your comment still stands.
I don't know about categories overall, but I'm attached to my iPad and won't switch to Android in part because Affinity is not available there, nor is there any near equivalent as far as I can tell.
I still think Overcast is nicer to use than Antenna Pod.
Microsoft Office apps work much better on iDevices, in my experience. (I know they exist for Android, but I've never had much luck editing there, where it actually works pretty nicely on iDevices.)
I don't game much, but my kids like gaming on iDevices much better than Android. (I have an Android tablet that I use for testing things, and they consistently reject it in favor of iPhone or iPad.)
Flowkey (music instruction app) works much better with my MIDI keyboard on iDevices than on Android (where it doesn't work and has to resort to microphone, which is buggy as hell).
I'm sure some of this is just a matter of the platform being more polished in general, but these are some apps that keep people in my house on iDevices despite having plenty of access to Android. The quality of the Youtube app doesn't move anyone, nor do the browsers.
how do you live without ublock on your browser though?
firefox with adblock is the high quality youtube app
ublock has been on safari for the past year! there were others before. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
I use the AdGuard extension just like I do on macOS Safari. It works perfectly fine for removing ads.
Another vote for Adguard. it works perfectly.
I use Wipr 2. You throw $5 at the dev and you never have ads on any iOS device again.
Wipr 2 is in the running for the best $5 I’ve ever spent in my life.
Thirded. I recommend it without hesitation.
Brave on Android has ad blocking built in, I would assume it does in iOS too. No need for ublock in that case.
Correct. Brave on iOS is worse than Brave on Android because Apple forces it to be a Safari skin, but they're still able to achieve some UI improvements over Safari, and achieve their built-in adblocking.
As a mobile Firefox with ublocker user I'm not sure I would call it high quality. I regularly have to force stop it to get pages to load properly. I suspect it might be the hostile google based os at fault but not sure
I use uBlock on mobile safari.
i just use Brave for iOS. I use the setting to block Youtube shorts, default to old.reddit, block ads and annoyances, etc.
Look up Vinegar, Baking Soda, and (by a separate developer) Wipr.
safari has ublock now.
There's a saying in mobile development that in most companies the Android version of the app is a second class citizen. It usually brings substantially less money and so less money are invested in it. As a result the Android team is often understaffed and the app is almost always behind in feature development, less polished and with overall worse UX and more bugs compared to the iOS app.
Also iOS still has a community of iOS only indie devs that publish polished apps for iOS, it's very common to find very popular iOS app with very curated UX that are exclusive to that platform and have a good fanbase.
The indie dev market is a flip flop, I have seen many great apps only available on android as well.
This is more because the barrier to entry is so much lower.
Android: have laptop that can do virtualization (...so basically ever laptop that can also do this:) and have enough ram to do run Android studio. Then you theoretically also need an Android device but even that's just because I assume you want to use the app you're making. That's it.
iOS: $100/yr entry fee, plus you need Apple hardware, plus a "server" mode Apple hardware (Mac mini?) if you want to alt store and I assume your main device is a laptop.
Just the money thing and the hardware thing is a huge stumbling block. I know it's rounding error for any even semi serious business but also let's be real, a ton of very important software is basically run on the budget of "the software devs main job and/or EU welfare state benefits".
The www wins. All you need is something that can run a browser. You edit a line, save, refresh and there it is, the real finished product, not emulation.
Apps have terrible reliability too. I just wanted to order a pizza, the restaurant website offered a button for the play store and app store.
There it said the app was for an outdated version of Android.
Perhaps it had been like that for a long time? But lets imagine it happened today. Where are you to get your orders from? Ahh yes, the website.
If apps didn't get the icon on the home screen 90% wouldn't have a reason to exist.
Bunch of pictures with descriptions and an add to cart button. One shouldn't even need to write code, it should be as simple and obvious as serving a document. In stead you need a full time carpenter to keep the store running. The counter and shelves spontaneously collapse, doors regularly get stuck, light fixtures rain down from the ceiling.
People trying to sell pizza deserve better, we can do better.
The only place where this happens is in the US. In the rest of the world Android rules with 70% or more of the market share.
> In which category are there better iOS apps?
Almost all of the prosumer apps on iOS offer a consistently better experience. This is maybe less relevant on phones than on tablets, but music production, video editing, digital painting and drafting, etc...
That isn't saying much. Even the best possible music editing (etc) app on a tablet is still crappy, by virtue of the form factor. Tablets simply are not suitable for getting actual work done.
This is changing with iPadOS, but the market needs to catch up with that. It supports a mouse and keyboard really really well now
> the market needs to catch up with that
By that token, touchscreen laptops will replace the iPad any day now.
I think the preeminent issue is that touch-native UIs are very imprecise and clunky by nature. The iPad makes a great MIDI controller; it's an awful mixer or plugin host compared to a regular laptop running regular PC plugins. Buying a mouse or keyboard won't port Omnisphere or the U-He plugins to iPad. I doubt the market will ever "catch up" in that regard.
Seems super biased comming by someone called SWIFTcoder.
> Almost all of the prosumer apps on iOS offer a consistently better experience
So for people who don't want to use computers. I cannot work with a tablet or phone. I need a computer.
I mean, as someone who is mainly a programmer, same. But high-end cameras, big touchscreens, and an excellent pencil input is sort of the optimal device for a whole bunch of creative tasks
Are the cameras "high-end"? Good for a phone, certainly. But compared to a real camera with a much bigger lens and sensor?
I make the superior picture with my camera but then it sits there on an SD card in the camera. I have to boot a desktop, hope the USB connection works today, find a folder, create and name a folder in the folder, copy the pictures there, find and open something to view and edit the images with, find and open something to upload the images. OR open the camera, take out th SD card, boot up a computer, plug the card into a reader or a laptop and do the same ritual.
People pretend this is a perfectly acceptable workfow. It is not.
The pictures would have to be dramatically better than those made by phones. They are not.
I shoot, review on the much larger phone screen, click share and chose from countless options to publish immediately. OR edit it a bit and enjoy the same.
I also never consciously bring the phone, it's just there in my pocket. Interesting things happen, you unholster it and start shooting. The real camera is more like guard duty. You sit there waiting for the interesting shot. Sometimes that works out and some of those times the extra quality is actually visible and some of that time it is totally worth it. The rest of the time I wonder what it is I think I'm doing.
> but then it sits there on an SD card in the camera. I have to boot a desktop, hope the USB connection works today [...] OR open the camera, take out th SD card [...]
Or open the app on your smartphone (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.canon.ic...), connect to the camera through WiFi, and copy the photos directly.
I just plug the sd card reader into my phone.
They're good enough to have displaced the vast majority of camera purchases, and be used by professionals (e.g. influencers, photojournalists, pro photographers).
There are benefits to larger sensors, but the best camera is the one you have in-hand.
> Good for a phone, certainly.
The multiple lenses and the processing power make smartphones wildly better than almost any consumer camera, particularly for someone without professional photography skills. A professional camera in the hands of a professional photographer can do better, but that means the market has changed from "consumers buy consumer cameras, professionals buy professional cameras" to "consumers use the camera that's always in their pocket and get surprisingly good results, professionals buy professional cameras".
They can certainly hang with some of the big dogs.
Apple’s camera(s) and color science is fantastic. The black magic app in particular shows off their capability.
I own a galaxy tab s7 fe and I'm quite happy with it to be honest.
Not sure what I'd want more from an iPad.
It is true that it has slightly more apps, but realistically all I need is there.
The iOS prosumer apps are, frankly, pathetic. I produce music and every single DAW/plugin on iPad is very clearly a "lite" version of something that would run better on a full-featured OS. There's really no workflow I can imagine that doesn't entail using a real PC for basic mixing and arrangement.
> I produce music and every single DAW/plugin on iPad is very clearly a "lite" version of something...
I agree in several cases, but the question here wasn't "are they better than PC equivalents", it was "are they better than what's available on Android"
iOS apps consistently get updates a few weeks to months earlier than the Android version. Including some of Google’s own apps, sometimes.
To give examples:
- https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-photos-update-to-reac...
- https://www.t3.com/tech/iphones/google-maps-gets-an-iphone-u...
Both of the above are updates to Google apps that released on iOS but are planned on Android. Haven't seen any examples of the reverse.
Do those updates matter?
Not for me at least usually (exception might be something like an rpg game expanding the world), apps nagging to get updated is annoying in fact.
> apps nagging to get updated is annoying in fact.
There is no nagging. Apps auto-update on iOS, and have for years. I had 15 apps update in the last week. There was no nagging or notifications. It just happens.
My only gripe is that they seem to want to update right after I take it off the charger in the morning, instead of at night. But I only actually notice this once or twice per year, if I go to use an app that’s in the process of installing within the first few minutes of waking up.
Apps also auto update on Android. Frequently though, the updates reduce functionality or make it more annoying (basics like messages, calculator, photos, calendar, etc have been 'done' for a decade+ and can only really be made worse), so personally I've turned that off for most apps (and I suppose the other poster has too). Of course Google being aggressive assholes, they then have some of their apps start showing popups every time you open it telling you to update when the entire point was to have it not change in functionality and not introduce that sort of thing.
Most online RPGs (Genshin for example) check for world updates everytime you log in, it's not tied to app updates.
I was thinking Andor's Trail :)
To add more examples, a game I play on my phone got an update that adds controller support on iOS, with controller support on Android expected 6 months down the line.
There are plenty examples to the contrary. It's almost like one of the platforms has the supermajority of phones in most countries, so there are plenty of apps only targeting a single one.
Do you have any examples handy? It'd strengthen your argument a great deal, even if it wasn't the specific example of controller support.
I've never understood how Google was able to get PR for the most trivial coding stuff any child coder can do.
"...support for a dynamic light mode. Instead of always viewing photos with a black background, Google Photos will use the light mode or dark mode background that you have set for your device's system theme."
This is literally one IF statement. The sentence is longer than the code.
The iOS and Android app teams at Google don’t coordinate their releases. They ship it when it’s ready for publication. Why inconvenience the other base just because the other team has other priorities and schedules. That said, Google apps have always been superior on Android than iOS. Just look at Keep.
> Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage?
This is incorrect. The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
Sure the best way would be for people not to use them, but if you "have" to, then it's better to use those on IOS.
>This is incorrect. The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
Source?
Here’s one example:
> Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235467
That's only one example, and as I explained in a sibling comment[1] doesn't even seem like something iOS designers were specifically defending against. In light of this, I think it's fair to say this example is poor and that another one is warranted. For instance, I'd consider the app tracking transparency changes to be something where iOS was doing better than Android on, but Android has since reached feature parity on that because you can delete your advertising id, which basically does the same thing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46755250
In what manner do they extract less data
Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good. Okay let's be honest it's fairly abysmal at preventing fingerprinting. It could almost be accused of not even bothering to try.
But one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866
Even with graphene I don't believe it mitigates much as far as apps collecting data. The idea for more privacy is you run open source apps instead that just don't collect data.
AFAIK Graphene is oriented towards strong device security with privacy as more of a side effect.
One thing with the sandboxed Play Services being that Google has fewer permissions on the device, so presumably they can collect less data.
Which I believe is GrapheneOS' argument when people praise microG: microG being open source does not fundamentally add privacy: apps using microG will phone to Google's servers (that's the whole point of microG). What microG solves is that it removes the Play Services that are root on your device, and it turns out that sandboxed Play Services do that as well.
> The idea for more privacy is you run open source apps instead that just don't collect data.
Yep exactly, I just wanted to add about the sandboxed Play Services, because it was not obvious to me at first :)
> Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good. Okay let's be honest it's fairly abysmal at preventing fingerprinting.
Hmm... the sandboxing is a security feature, it's not there to prevent tracking (not sure what "fingerprinting" includes here). The sandboxing of Android is actually pretty good (a lot better than, say, desktop OSes).
There is pretty much nothing you can do against an app requesting e.g. your location data and sending it to their servers. Fundamentally, the whole goal of apps is that they can technically do that. Then you have to choose apps you trust, and it's easier to trust open source apps.
What GrapheneOS brings in terms of sandboxing is that the Play Services run sandboxed like normal apps. Whereas on Android, the Play Services run with system permissions.
The mobile operating system developed by the enormous ad tech company doesn't try to prevent fingerprinting?! :O
>Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good
Grapheneos doesn't prevent the installed apps fingerprinting you linked either.
Color me surprised. But if you run the app using the sandboxing feature that it provides surely it will only be able to see other apps installed within that same sandbox?
What is "the sandboxing feature" you're talking about? The standard app sandbox built into android allows apps to discover each other for various purposes, and grapheneos doesn't do anything to attempt to plug this.
Apologies. I was thinking of Android user profiles which are available from mainline and (AFAIK) prevent the linked workaround from revealing any apps not installed in the same profile. So it's an example of an unfixed leak in Android but not (as I had previously implied) something that Graphene corrects.
Honestly the state of anti-fingerprinting (app, browser, and otherwise) is fairly abysmal but that's hardly limited to android or even mobile as a whole.
>Apologies. I was thinking of Android user profiles which are available from mainline and (AFAIK) prevent the linked workaround from revealing any apps not installed in the same profile.
But there's no evidence that stock android leaks apps installed across profiles? The link you provided doesn't discuss profiles at all, and stock android also has private space and work profile just like grapheneos.
... yes? That's what I said? Feature available in mainline, motivating leak unfixed, graphene doesn't correct.
I agree with the thrust of the GP comment but:
> The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
I seriously doubt this. I agree that this is the perception but anyone working in the mobile space on both platforms for the past ~2 years will know Google is a lot more hard nosed in reviewing apps for privacy concerns than Apple these days (I say this negatively, there is a middle ground and Apple is much closer to it - Google is just friction seemingly in an attempt to lose their bad reputation).
Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
In contrast, on iOS I get prompted to allow or deny access to my information when the app tries calling Apple’s API to fetch that information.
For example, if an app wants access to my contacts to find other people using the app. On iOS I can simply say “no” when it prompts me to allow it to read my contacts. I lose out on that feature to find other people using the app, which I don’t care about, but I can still use the rest of the app. On Android it seemed like by installing the app, I had already agreed to give up my contacts… it was all or nothing. If I don’t like one privacy compromising feature, I couldn’t use the app at all.
Android may have improved this in the last few years, but I found it to be a dealbreaker for the entire platform.
> Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
Sounds like it was years ago... I remember that it was being introduced like... more than a decade ago? Of course maybe it took longer than iOS because of how Android works. iOS can just force everybody to use liquid glass with one update, Android has to think more about backward compatibility.
You still have the same things on android. If an android app requests eg exact location it can refuse to run and there’s nothing you can do. That sort of behaviour is prohibited on iOS and an app won’t be approved if it does that sort of thing. They have to allow declining location permission or at least approximate location
Not sure I understand. So you're saying that a bad app on Android can request all permissions and tell you that it will refuse to run unless you give them, and the same app would be declined on iOS?
I could agree with that, Apple is more picky. Now personally, if an app does that, I uninstall it.
But technically, the Android rules are that you shouldn't do that, and when you request a permission you need to explain to the user why you request it.
It would be nice if the app stores offered different levels of requirements. Let the market decide how much it cares about privacy (and security, and ...), reduce the friction for developers who want to do a particular thing, and give end users more confidence in the entire system.
You'd think this would be more known! I feel like general sentiment says the opposite is the case.. What can one point to in the future to show what you are saying here?
Camera apps.
Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.
To be fair to Android, iOS isn't offering "good device independent camera apps" either, you only have ~one choice of device with iOS.
Probably the use of "device independent" had other meaning than the usual.
first time hear this, any more specifics? i used android to develop video conference software and don't recall camera limits
I'm only familiar with this as a user and not a developer, but I've had multiple Android phone where not all camera features available in the Camera app were available to other apps via the APIs:
* not all cameras being available
* stabilisation not working
* 60 FPS unavailable
The iOS version of most social media apps is better. IOS simply has better API integration to it's hardware, where with android, many OEMs (hell this was even the case to a certain extent with older pixel phones), do a number of things that make the hardware not as easily accessible as quickly from the OS API for said feature.
This is especially relevant for the camera, but also various other sensors and hardware modules that exist inside these phones.
That said, in recent years there are just a number of other areas that android is much better at such as deeper AI integration, which goes back to even prior to the current LLM craze.
What are those things?
The iOS YouTube app is not worse than the one in Android. Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least, there is one more app to choose (Messages). And I’m curious to know what makes Antenna Pod so much better than the thousands of other podcast apps out there.
Social media apps have historically been worse in Android, because of lax app and privacy controls.
> What else is there, where is the advantage?
Personally, I’d rather not have Google buried deep inside all aspects of my phone.
>at the very least, there is one more app to choose (Messages).
How's that different than Google Messages being exclusive to Android?
RCS is not exclusive to Android, the point is moot.
Everyone I know on iOS just uses Messages, they don’t feel a need for other apps.
People on Android I’ve run into seem to have a half dozen apps and use anything but the built in messaging.
A few months ago while on a trip I ran into an older couple that wanted some picture I took in a place they weren’t physically up to going. They were not tech savvy at all. Had they been on iOS, they would have just been using Messages and it would have been easy. They had Android, and the guy opened about 5 or 6 different messaging apps, not really knowing what any of them were, it seemed like a real mess. I sent them using Messages over RCS, assuming they’d go to Google Messages, or whatever the default equivalent standard app is for Google (they seem to have changed it a dozen times). It could be that the pictures were taking a while to send, my phone showed they sent, but he had no idea where to look or where they might have went, despite having so many messaging apps. I hope he is able to find them or they came through with a notification once he had a better single.
Having one good app that everyone uses is better than the default app being sub-par, or so constantly in flux that the users and smattered about to dozens of different apps that can’t talk to each other.
> Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least
Since some updates ago, my keyboard is still broken if I type too fast, and autocorrect been essentially broken for the same amount of time. Must be happening for ~years now, still waiting for a new update to finally fix it.
At least on Android you can change the keyboard to something else if you'd like, instead of being stuck with what your OS developer forces on you. Wish I had that option now.
I have been using SwiftKey keyboard on iOS exclusively since 2018 and have had very few issues compared to Android where it regularly crashed
A lot of the apps, not just the banking apps, but food delivery etc, restrict using alternative keyboards, leaving you with a default one, which is especially jarring for a multi-lingual countries where you typically need keyboards for English + language 2 and 3.
I had to give ap on a swiftkey iOS for that reason
iOS keyboards are hardly different from one another
Hasn’t happened to me, but I guess that you could always install a third party keyboard. Both Microsoft and Google have offerings in the App Store.
The keyboard can be changed in iOS.
> Personally, I’d rather not have Google buried deep inside all aspects of my phone.
I mean, one could say the exact same thing but swapping Google with Apple.
That's where GrapheneOS comes in. You can go fully Google-free or use their "sandboxed Google libraries" to run the Google apps as a normal user.
Google core business is ads. It is not the same.
Apple's core business is trapping users into their walled garden so they can rent seek.
Whichever one you think is worse is really just a reflection of your own personal values. I value computing freedom above all.
> Apple's core business is trapping users into their walled garden so they can rent seek.
Apple’s core business is selling hardware. Their services revenue is not even close to their hardware revenue.
Yes, trapping users into their walled hardware garden so they can rent seek.
You buy a phone, and you're forever forced into buying only their peripherals.
That’s demonstrably untrue.
You could say that there are Apple devices that do not work well or don’t work at all without another Apple device, and off the top of my head I would say the only ones are the Watch and the HomePod, but most alternative devices work fine with Apple ones, e.g Chromecast, Garmin watches, Google Home hubs, etc.
And even so, the same could be said about Android only features and devices, e.g. Samsung Watch doesn’t work without an Android phone, Google Earbuds are feature capped on iPhone, etc.
IMO, if we are looking at rent seeking behaviors, Google shoving Gemini down the throats of Google Home users, with no chance of rolling back if they don’t like it, is way worse.
Demonstrably not true? What did you do with the 200+ Apple-only charging cables?
> I value computing freedom above all.
So perhaps you should consider switching to GNU/Linux phones.
One should read, carefully, the Apple EULA and TOS.
Is it worse than Google?
The difference between Apple vs Google is that with Apple you ARE the ad. They don't need advertising when they know people will adopt them and then be forced into their ecosystem.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Even if that was true, my point was that an ad driven business like Google, would be incentivized to monetize all the aspects of my life they could have access to. If that’s not what Apple is doing, compared to Google, then that’s a win I guess?
> would be incentivized to monetize all the aspects of my life they could have access to
You're literally describing Apple's business model.
That’s false.
Google most profitable business line is ads. They profit from literally knowing everything about you, then selling access to that to ad bidders. Apple makes the most money from devices. It is not the same.
> They don't need advertising
Then why is it that they advertise? We just last week had a thread about how the Apple app store is making ads blend in more with organic results. So not only are they advertising to users (which admittedly was news to me), they are engaging in dark patterns to make those ads more enticing. It doesn't seem like being locked into the Apple ecosystem (and paying their tax on hardware) is actually benefiting the users.
> In which category are there better iOS apps?
Audio, and it's not even close. On iPadOS you get full-fledged DAWs like Cubasis and Logic.
The Android audio latency issues were solved long ago with Pro Audio. Whether Android audio apps chose to use it is on them and the significance of latency on their audio app.
Cubasis and Blackmagic Camera are cross platform, not that "most people" would use these over whatever was preinstalled or the camera interface in their social app.
> while the Play store is an equally ad-riddled
That made me realize how little I go to the Play store these days to just browse compared to the early days of Android.
I personally can't stand Apple products ... dbut with Google doing their crap and Samsung acting like Microsoft with all the crap they load in I have to disable just to make the phone usable; I've seriously thought about moving to iPhone the past couple of years.
For one, I can actually use gesture controls without constantly triggering backswipes. Even something as droll and first party as Google Photos suffers this problem, where, say, cropping a photo and pulling too close from the screen edge will result in a backswipe detection instead.
Another example is Sonos, where the iOS app contains TruePlay to tune your speakers. They can do this because there is relatively few iPhone models (microphones). But this is a general, noticeable trend, where developers will add more / better / polished features to the iOS app.
>I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps?
I researched iOS vs Android last year so some of my info may be out of date but this is what I collected.
Apple iOS exclusives (or earlier app versions because devs prioritized iOS):
Google Android app exclusives There really aren't many popular/prominent Android-only apps that's intended for direct consumer download from the Google Play Store. Instead, Android dominates in OEM use as "turnkey" and "embedded" base os as the GUI for their customized hardware devices: If it's a typical mainstream user (browser + Youtube/Tiktok + WhatsApp etc), they won't see any iOS ecosystem advantages over Android.It seems like a pretty arbitrary list to me...
Also Android has a bigger market share in the world than iOS, by a lot.
>Also Android has a bigger market share in the world than iOS, by a lot.
The tone of that seems like you thought I was taking the discussion into fanboy evangelism and therefore Android needed to be defended. That wasn't the intent and I already tried to downplay my comment by stating the iOS ecosystem specifics do not matter to 99% of mainstream users. Yes, everybody on HN already knows Android has a much bigger market share.
The point was simply to inform the gp asking the question about iOS that there are apps and niches he may not be aware of. Nobody's trying to convince any reader of switching to iOS or that "iOS is superior" ... or vice versa!
Wow I don't get all the downvotes I'm getting for that.
You answered to:
>> I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore.
With a list of apps, some of which only listed because they got Android support a few months later. And some of which I have never heard of (SmartSDR?).
I get why those apps matter to you, but it feels a bit arbitrary. While the quote refers to something that was more general (which suggests that "at a point, iOS had a lot more quality apps"). I am just saying that the answer "no but I checked the app I like on iOS and a handful of them don't exist on Android" was kind of one anecdotal data point in the discussion.
And my point about Android having a bigger market share was that my intuition is that probably popular apps end up on Android eventually, or alternatives exist.
I honestly really don't care if people prefer iOS, Android, GrapheneOS, or a Linux for mobile distro.
>I get why those apps matter to you, [...] I am just saying that the answer "no but I checked the app I like on iOS and a handful of them don't exist on Android" was kind of one anecdotal data point in the discussion.
No, you don't get why it matters to me. You assuming my comment was just a personal list of my favorite apps is way off base. To be clear, I have never installed nor used any of those apps on either iOS nor Android.
So if I don't have any personal connection to those apps, why do I have that list handy?!? Because I was researching possible coding strategies for a new smartphone app:
- have 2 separate native mobile codebases (Swift AND Kotlin) from the start and therefore can release at the same time on both Apple App Store and Google Play. Difficult and expensive. Finite time and funds means both native apps suffer from less features and polish.
- or start with deliberate handicap of just 1 native codebase (e.g. iOS-only for initial launch) and see if it can attract revenue/funding to pay for the other native codebase (e.g. then Android). Or do the reverse of Android-first-then-iOS. Focusing on just 1 native platform means the app is higher quality. However, the risk is a clone app could quickly show up on the other platform I didn't code for.
- or 1 cross-platform toolkit with something like React Native which is what Meta and Microsoft Office apps like Outlook did.
That was why and how that list was created. The purpose was to get enough industry examples to form a generalization of what others did. I often do software research and my notes let me make lists about it. (Another one of my comments listing software I don't personally use but I do know the monthly costs : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331312)
I thought the iOS apps list was a neutral comment full of factual information and also counterbalanced with the areas where Android has an enormous influence. Yet somehow, my comment is still interpreted as some type of smear on Android. If you're confused about downvotes, I am too!
If you go back to the gp's comment I replied to, he literally asked: >"What else is there, where is the advantage?"
This thread is full of people replying with examples of the "what else". How could any of us seriously answer that question without the answers being criticized as "arbitrary" ?
iOS has less device models to target for. This makes it easier to support and deliver a more consistent experience, especially for gaming. I have also heard a few other points back in the day, but I am not sure how true they are now. One is that some social media apps might offer better quality in app camera experience. Another is that iOS userbase is more willing to spend money so devs are more likely to target iOS.
iOS apps are truly sandboxed, they cannot carry out stunts like this:
https://localmess.github.io/
If iOS apps were “truly” sandboxed, Apple wouldn’t have grounds to invoke security issues with regard to third-party app stores and app reviews.
For this particular exploit, it's not really because "iOS apps are truly sandboxed", it's because iOS is more restrictive with background activity, so you you can't keep a server running in the background. If your app is in the foreground it can create a listen socket just like in android.
I switched from Android to iPhone last year, and this just isn’t true. There’s so many tiny issues with android apps that just don’t exist on iPhone, because the android apps have to work on all these different devices. You don’t even have to look for the kinds of apps you’re talking about because things like Safari and Apple Podcasts work really well. I know people have a lot of complaints, but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.
iOS is great if you only want the parts that "just work", and don't need any of the things Android has that "just don't work" on iOS.
> I know people have a lot of complaints, but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.
Recently on HN: https://www.bugsappleloves.com/
I would love to see a site like that for android, but people don’t have the same expectation of flawlessness with it.
I've tried switching to iPhone and the lack of a consistent back button like Android has always drives me crazy.
> because things like Safari ...work really well
Are we living in the same universe? We manage a fleet of tablets (both Apple and Android) for a healthcare company whose EMR is web-based. And because of that Sarafi has made our lives miserable. So much so that we're migrating to Chromebooks.
I've been developing for the web for 15 years. The first half was spent battling Internet Explorer. Now it's Safari.
There are some proprietary Chrome APIs but if you’re not using those it’s been pretty rare to have major problems in recent years. I open a couple of bug reports a year against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—mostly accessibility related—but most of the time it’s been a problem with code written specifically against Chrome rather than code which couldn’t work in the other browsers.
I’m a developer too, but the developer experience doesn’t matter to users. As a user of the app, it’s fast enough, cleanly designed, seems to be reasonably private and secure, and I haven’t hit any website with it where I’ve had to download chrome to view it or something.
You're a developer but you can't connect the dots between features being hard to build and the inconsistencies between other browsers vs Safari to how that might effect the user?
I can be a user separate from being a developer. The user experience of Safari is basically perfect for a browser. The development experience is completely irrelevant from that perspective.
> The user experience of Safari is basically perfect for a browser.
This is such a wild, absolute statement it's not even worth discussing this with you anymore.
I mean… what do you want me to do, list problems I don’t have with it? As a user of the app, Safari fades completely into the background for me, I don’t know what else I could ask for from a browser.
The people complaining about Safari often are running enterprise crapware that requires some esoteric Chrome API or bug to operate correctly and should actually be an app on iOS but cannot be funded as such because its creators don’t care about its users.
Then again, if a company can't polish a web browser app, then the native app they'd produce will be even worse.
Now you have a crappy app that only works on some devices, and now with no tabs, no links, text you cannot select anymore because they used the wrong component, etc.
Ugh.
Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction.
I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click.
Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via WebUSB to make gaining certain permissions very easy for the layman. I imagine it's gonna get more and more user in enterprise too.
Firefox is seriously behind by refusing to implement it.
WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless.
Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be a browser and bypass your 2FA on third party domains.
I'm conflicted on WebUSB because it's convenient but on the balance I think it's too dangerous to expose to the general public. I don't know how it could be made safer without sacrificing its utility and convenience.
> some esoteric Chrome API or bug
Or simple things like supporting 100vh consistently. Is that estoric?
> but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.
For values of “just work” close to 0.
Make a picture, connect with a Windows PC, iOS needs a password, then the picture is not visible to the PC, disconnect, go with Apple photos to look at the picture, repeat connecting, with password, now it is visible.
Try to set up a hotspot, there is no button to turn the hotspot on/off.
So yes, it “just works"
You can find your hotspot button in the control center. Swipe down from the top right of the screen. It’s in the same section as airplane mode / WiFi / cellular data, and takes another tap to access.
You actually don't even need to set up hotspot more than once if the phone and the computer are both yours (and apple-brand). You can just connect to the iPhone with the Mac (if they're on the same iCloud account) and it works without entering a password.
> Try to set up a hotspot, there is no button to turn the hotspot on/off.
There is. You can even put it on the settings drawer. Look for "personal hotspot".
I don't have a mac anymore, but IIRC you could even turn it on from the paired mac. This definitely still works between iphones. When I take out my old iphone from the drawer to use as a GPS on my bike, with no sim card, it will connect to my regular iphone's hotspot automatically.
> Try to set up a hotspot, there is no button to turn the hotspot on/off.
I’m confused, which button? Do Android phones come with a physical button to enable hotspot?
Just a quick shortcut
It’s not “strictly worse” for browsers unless you care about esoteric web spec features that few sites actually need today.
Safari works fine. 99% of users legitimately do not give a fuck.
Why are you booing them? They're right.
Just wanted to chime in to say Antenna Pod is really good.
The YouTube app on iOS is superior to the Android app for one
A YouTube client that can't AdBlock and SponsorBlock automatically is strictly worse.
Is there clients that block? I just use Brave browser
This used to be true, but really is not anymore.
Also, I wasn't aiming at the official Youtube app, but at PipePipe etc. The great alternative Youtube clients Android has.
If you’d like an example, every single person who flies has an iPad to use an app called FOREFLIGHT. It doesn’t exist in android. Other EFBs exist on android but they are not as good. To a point that among things a new pilot student has to buy, like headsets and such, is an iPad.
> In which category are there better iOS apps?
Just one example, but aviation.
Foreflight is iOS-only. Literally the only reason I have iOS devices is because of app availability in this category.
There is not a single android app that is ever better than its iOS counterpart. At the very top margin, the android app is equivalent to its iOS counterpart. But there’s really only Gmail, photos, and Google Maps, and the big tech co apps that this small exception covers. Android apps don’t have to be worse from a technical standpoint, but in reality they are always worse than the equivalent iOS app.
Foreflight is iOS only. There is nothing even a third as good on Android. I literally have a one app iPad just for this. Sigh.
> I assume worse
You know what they say about assuming.
I don't understand how, almost 20 years after the release of these platforms, there are fully grown adult mobile OS fanboys still out there that either consciously or unconsciously spread lies about the difference between the platforms. Not just the parent comment, but this entire comment tree. For both iOS and Android. It's an almost religious cult-like type of behavior that reminds me of teenagers back in the early 2010s engaging in flamewars in YouTube comments arguing in favor of whichever gaming console they happen to own.
In that context, it made sense because they were kids, but also, these platforms were new with not much information out there, and the users were basically forced to pick one platform or the other because of the diminishing returns from owning both. 15 years ago, a PS3 or an Xbox 360 cost around $500, which adjusted for inflation is around $800 today. Not worth dropping an extra $800 for a few exclusive titles.
In the context of Android and iOS, you can gain access to both of these platforms quite easily... I mean, presumably, you already own an Android or iOS device already. For $150 you can get a decent device on the used market. Not state-of-the-art, but pretty good, all things considered. And with that you can gain a holistic perspective.
I seriously just don't get how you can stay faithful to either Android or iOS. They both are awful. I sort of see it as a necessary evil, pick your poison sort of thing. But some people get Stockholm Syndrome and never bother to try the alternatives I guess? I find that really odd.
This is a really ideology driven push. I don't think you really think the iOS browsers are worse, there's just less choice, because they all fundamentally use WebKit. Having to use Chromium is a worse experience, and not being able to use Gecko under Firefox is not a clear upgrade - particularly as WebKit is so tightly integrated with the hardware, leading to less battery use. If you really don't like WebKit for whatever reason, I get it. But that's not worse.
Whenever there is an app with full feature parity (WhatsApp) you assume at best it can be equal, based on nothing. You have specific apps that work for you, and that's great, but my practical experience is much different: whenever I haven't had a choice in an app (think banking apps, carrier apps, local library apps, the Covid apps) the experience has been much better on Apple. Whenever there is a choice in apps, they're often cross-written in something that allows easy porting, and very similar, or the native Apple solution is much smoother. It's rare that an app just feels better on Android, and usually limited to cases where a specific app is only available on Android or, you know, Google.
no ublock
How can whatsapp be better? Android at least has features like scoped storage.
Where is the ios equivalent of newpipe? Where is the iOS equivalent of pojavlauncher? where is the iOS equivalent of libretorrent or syncthing?
Open source is essentially banned on iOS.
What is the advantage of iOS? "Feels smoother"? Totally subjective.
Safari just got uBlock back!
iOS isn't particularly open source friendly, but mostly people don't do it because of personal incentives, not because it can't be done.
It's subjective, and I get that, but what you miss is that features are subjective too. Missing parity apps are only relevant when you care about that feature; at no point in my life have I ever thought my life would be better or more convenient if I could only torrent on my phone.
But having an app that is responsive and works well has made my life better. Standing outside a bar in the rain trying to get a stupid Covid app to work, not work well, just work, on Android has made my life worse.
(Ironically, I've kind of noticed this is part of the Unix ethos writ small: do one thing and do it well. It's not exact, and iOS for sure has tons of crud everything apps. And they sure don't work together! I just think it's amusing.)
You say that they are ideologically driven when they say browsers are better on Android, and then go on to defend that having LESS features is not necessarily bad. Honestly, you are the one sounding ideologically driven. Having more options is good, specially if there are better options out there (which is the case). Firefox on Android is a better browser than Chrome or whatever, and having the option to use it IS better than not having. You have the right to say that Safari is great, but you cannot say that Gecko on iOS would be worse because, well, you don't have that option.
Synctrain is an open source (MPL2.0) iOS Syncthing client (which I made) with full native mobile-first UI and tight iOS integration (shortcuts, background processing, etc).
sorry this is not correct. (do you consistently use both?) iOS apps are consistently better, because people prefer using swift
As an Android power user (I’ve ran Lineage, Graphene, rooted with Magisk and passed safetynet) that’s moved to IOS this last month. My subjective opinion: app quality is the same.
I have both an iPhone and an Android phone and I agree. The largest chunk of apps are the same anyway, using something like React Native or Ionic.
It very much depends. These days most apps are developed so that they’re equally trash on both.
The apps that are more specialized to reach OS tend to prioritize iOS because if you look at app revenue, iOS users wildly outspend Android users. At least this was true when i was doing mobile shit a couple years ago
That doesn’t mean the android app sucks, but it’s usually given lower priority. New features and updates will usually hit iOS version sooner and things like that
Honestly, you’re so wrong about the app situation that it’s almost staggering. iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished, have better integration with system features (like the Dynamic Island), and even often have more features. This isn’t even an unfounded opinion, it’s a material problem for Google and led them to vastly investing in automated testing and quality efforts
App addressable user base is another problem for Google, one that they have mentioned in developer conferences. It’s a big part of why they’ve been trying to ship a tablet and unify android and Chromebook. If Google isn’t careful they could find themselves in a downward spiral situation, stuck between apple on one side, and android forks on the other.
And the last answer is, as always, money
- browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less
- iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation
- on average iOS has significantly wealthier users who tend to be higher return or paying customers (seriously, look it up). This in turn leads companies to invest more heavily in iOS.
- easier integration due to a narrow system services ecosystem (no Google vs Samsung slapfights)
- unified platform advantage (apps written for iOS easily port to the watch and tablet, unlocking larger markets, and justifying greater spend in developing apps)
- apples review process is significantly stricter (for better or for worse)
Yes, Apple doesn’t have something like fdroid, and that’s really disappointing and honestly a legitimate dealbreaker for a lot of people
> iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished
It's been a while since I was last using Android, but first-party Apple apps no longer meet my standards for "polished".
e.g. type this sequence into the calculator:
The answer should not be negative, but the app says "-4".The desktop Contacts app has been putting invisible LTR and RTL codes around phone numbers for years now, breaking web forms when auto-entered. The mobile version refreshes specific contacts several times in a row to add no new content, preventing copy from working while it does so.
The MacOS Safari translation button appears on the left of the omni-bar, until you click it, at which point it instantly moves to the right and your click turns out to have been on the button that the left-side translation button had hidden. Deleting a selection of items from browsing history is limited to about 5 items per second, as it deletes one then rebuilds the entire list before deleting the next.
If I'm listening to a podcast on headpones and an alarm goes off, it doesn't play the alarm through my headphones, it plays on device speakers only.
Podcast app's "Up Next" is a magical mystery list that can't be disabled or guided.
The "Do Not Disturb" mode can be activated unexpectedly, leading to missed calls, and cannot be deleted.
Localisation is inconsistent at every level, including system share sheet and behaviour of decimal separators.
I could go on, but you get the point. Apple's quality control just isn't visible in the software at this point.
> The answer should not be negative, but the app says "-4".
When I do those exact keypresses I get the correct answer.
When I do those exact keypresses I also get "-4".
https://vimeo.com/1158134310?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
Can you show what you’re seeing?
I get the same, fwiw
thats what I see too
Good for you? The fact this happens on my versions of both MacOS and iOS means they didn't have automated tests covering this from day one.
Famously, "it works for me" is not how high quality software happens.
Good for me too? I get the correct answer when I type the keys, exactly as you specified. On both macOS and iOS
It seems basically impossible that math works differently on your calculator app than somebody else’s.
Can you post a recording of what you’re seeing?
https://vimeo.com/1158174682?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
What iOS version is that? It seems odd that the UI does not match what I see.
Whoa! What calculator is that?
Some googling shows hits from iOS 18 betas, where folks reported this bug, that seem to have the same UI.
-4 makes sense if you understand that the input -2 is a unary minus operation. So typing -2 then hitting square only squares 2, not (-2). This is the same in eg Python so I'm not sure it's very controversial. I agree it's unexpected, though.
At no point in the current expression you wrote "-", though. It may make sense that if you type [-] [2] [x^2] [=] then you get -(2²) = -4, but if your current answer is already -2, then tapping x² should result in (ans)^2 = (-2)^2 = 4. Splitting your current answer into a separate unary [-] as in - (2²) makes absolutely no sense.
Most calculators, even CAS ones, simply get this always right. But sadly this is not the first "desktop" calculator that I see getting this completely wrong. And it makes some results outright wrong!
"-4 makes sense if you consider that the calculator is so damn stupid it ignores every convention every single calculator has made in the past hundred years and instead copies behavior of a dumbass language" isn't exactly the praise you think it is.
I didn't enter -2, I calculated -2. The x² should have been taking x = (-2).
Python gets it right:
What? The person you're replying to isn't typing -2. He said explicitly what he is typing, and the result is unambiguously incorrect.
> e.g. type this sequence into the calculator
Works perfectly for me.
> browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less
That's precisely the OP's point. They gimped their browser so there's bigger incentive to use their proprietary system frameworks.
> iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation
That's nonsense. What year are you from? I've heard this like 10 years ago when there only 1 or 2 current iPhone models in circulation.
> on average iOS has significantly wealthier users who tend to be higher return or paying customers (seriously, look it up). This in turn leads companies to invest more heavily in iOS.
If you offer subscription service, like Netflix/HBO/Nest or whatever, your main goal is volume, not how wealthy your demographic is.
> easier integration due to a narrow system services ecosystem (no Google vs Samsung slapfights)
Easier integration with what?
> unified platform advantage (apps written for iOS easily port to the watch and tablet, unlocking larger markets, and justifying greater spend in developing apps)
That's like Android's moat from the start, not bolted on during some 10+ major versions like on iOS. And it works much better, Android apps are truly the same apps. Not gimped, cut off things like Instagram on iOS (is it even fixed now?).
> apples review process is significantly stricter (for better or for worse)
Both are shit these days due to volume of shovelware produced.
Re: iOS apps being easier to develop: device sizes are the minuscule of the problem.
The real problem is that Android vendors mess up with the OS in weird ways by adding custom ultra battery savers, removing APIs etc. which is much less predictable than dealing with a few Apple devices, that are more homogenous.
Then many vendors ship their own apps which are buggy and you need to know that vendor's Z Calendar app has a weird bug to account for.
Really almost every rebuttal you offer is factually incorrect while demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the modern developer experience.
For example
> That's nonsense. What year are you from? I've heard this like 10 years ago when there only 1 or 2 current iPhone models in circulation.
What? Models? Is that how you think? Screen sizes? Resolution? That’s so… 2015.
Apple has kept consistent scaling factors across their phones, laptops, and tablets. That alone counts for a ton of saved data effort. Device ratios are also generally consistent.
Android… well, not much needs to be said. It impacts the developer experience in a substantial way.
> If you offer subscription service, like Netflix/HBO/Nest or whatever, your main goal is volume, not how wealthy your demographic is.
Ironically making my point for me without realizing it (wealthier users sub more) AND dismissing the massive market that smaller services exist in. Incredible two for one miss.
> That's like Android's moat from the start, not bolted on during some 10+ major versions like on iOS.
A moat they squandered. Look at platform tablet adoption. It’s dire for Google now.
As for “bolted on”? lol.
I know the mobile os holy wars always activate posts like this, but for some people it’s simply impossible that despite some visible missteps, Apple has been out executing Google for quite some time now.
The pricing gap also rules Apple out in a lot of markets. Almost nobody has Apple here in Spain, the only people i see are tourists and expats.
While not as popular as Android, last time I checked iOS was at 28% market share. That’s hardly “almost nobody”.
It's not the pricing gap, there's Android phones more expensive than the most expensive iPhone. There's just also tiered alternatives.
It's the fact Euro carriers are less likely to subsidize or finance the phone. And realistically, a $500 phone is pretty good these days.
In Canada (where phones are subsidized and/or financed) there's very few budget Android phones too. Almost all Samsung flagships, Pixels, etc...
FWIW, starting a sentence with "Honestly ..." always makes me think the rest of what this person has to say is dishonest.
Your BIO on HN is:
> I HAVEN'T SHOWERED AT ALL! THAT'S WHY I REEK! WORKING IN FINTECH! AIN'T SHAVED IN WEEKS! POUR CRUMBS FROM MY KEYBOARD! THAT'S WHAT I EAT! WROTE A CURRENCY LIBRARY! 3RD TIME THIS WEEK! LURKING HN! I PREFER /b/! IN MOM'S BASEMENT! I'M THIRTY THREE! IT'S 3'O'CLOCK AM! THAT'S WHEN I SLEEP! AH!!!! COME ON FUCK A GUY!!!!
What level of credibility are you seeking?
> What level of credibility are you seeking?
I didn’t realize I needed to seek credibility. Seems kind of sad to have to read someone’s hn profile to decide if their post has merit or not
So a sentence starting with "frankly" means they aren't a frankfurter?
"Honestly" is a colloquialism used to indicate disbelief with the previous statement or to preface candidness. Choosing to interpret the colloquial use of "honestly" as an indication that everything else that person says is dishonest is a very weird trait I've only seen show up in grammarian literalists and pedants that only makes yourself seem like a disingenuous person.
"Not Gonna Lie": https://youtu.be/_ru0pnAnq7g?si=fKwnDNkRz6XQKDz5
Ngl I think that bio is hilarious.
It’s chuggo lyrics. Ah fuck a guy!
For context, I'm a long-time iPhone user, who switched to a Pixel 8a about 18 months ago.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.
I can't say I noticed a difference in quality when switching. Maybe some people can, but for me it was just a different, but still well-made phone.
> Apple has higher consumer trust.
I can't speak for consumers in general, but this is certainly no longer the case for me.
I also used MacOS for 20 years, and switched to Linux about a year ago because I didn't like the direction Apple was headed. It may be my choice of reading material (HN), but I receive almost daily confirmation that this was a sound decision.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Not selection, necessarily, but certainly quality.
As a side note, my iPad (my sole remaining Apple device) quietly updated to iOS 26 a few days ago. Despite having spent months reading about how bad it is, I was still genuinely shocked.
Again, I can't speak for "consumers", but for me Apple now has a far worse user experience.
Personally I feel that their emphasis on privacy by design was a very winning marketing strategy. Not sure if it played with the general pop.
I’ve been an iPhone owner for a while, but recently was required to get an Android phone to be a secondary work device. I got a Pixel 10 Pro—- brand-new, Google’s flagship device—- and within about a week there was a rattling noise from the camera module any time the phone moved.
The consensus online appears to be “oh, yeah, that’s the OIS module, you have to expect it, they all do that”. Well, iPhones also have OIS and they don’t do this.
Android might be “good enough” in hardware now but it’s definitely still behind.
This can happen with iPhones too: https://www.google.com/search?q=iphone%20camera%20rattling%2...
Not everybody wants/cares for an iPhone.
Realistically a 200 euros Xiaomi phone, to most users, is as good as they need it for seeing videos online and chatting.
If you want to spend more, at each price tier you have plenty of choice including: better hardware, better cameras, more memory, etc.
E.g. I do need dual (physical) sim phones. So I ain't buying iPhones ever for this very need.
Consumer trust is very debatable: I have been locked out of my apple id for 2 months in 2021, and that was a work machine I was locked out from. Tragic. Apparently it's not my hardware if Apple decides it's not.
Nowadays I only own an M3 Max because my employer gave it to me. But I don't even use it unless on the move, as I have a way more powerful desktop computer.
Price hasn't been a particularly compelling difference between iOS and Android for a while. Here in the states, you can get a new iPhone 13 for $200 USD, which is 170 euros at today's exchange rate.
https://www.metrobyt-mobile.com/cell-phone/apple-iphone-13?i...
That's a prepaid cell phone company (no contracts); not sure how many months (if any) you have to pay for to unlock the phone. Renewed and unlocked ones are about $270 on amazon.
Why would you buy a 5-year-old iPhone for the same price you can get a new Android with comparable specs though? If I'm gonna spend 2-3 hundred on a phone, I'd like it to last at least a couple more years. Regardless of OS, you're more likely to get that on a new phone vs any phone 5+ years old.
If Apple's still selling it, they'll almost certainly support it at least as long as an above-average Android manufacturer.
The current iOS supports things back to iPhone 11 and the SE2, so you can expect the SE3 and iPhone 13 to get at least two more years of support (no real guarantees, but they're still selling new stock of both, and they have a reputation to protect).
That's legacy machine, soon out of support. Not a sensible choice imho even if hardware might be still okay.
It's true, but the main reason I haven't just switched to an iPhone is the ecosystem that lets me write apps without having to pay Apple money or use their computers.
If Google is narrowing their moat on this, there are a lot fewer reasons for me, personally, to stay on the platform.
Sure, but the alternative ain't better for it, no?
"Google's long term strategy with Android is baffling to me. "
How does one know there is a long-term strategy
History has shown that so-called "tech" companies often act in a reactionary manner^1
1. Often, the act is of one of copying what someone else has done. Other times it might be response to regulation
One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS
This is one example of the reactionary copying phenomenon but HN replies may choose to focus only on this one example and not on the overall "tech" company phenomenon of reactionism as exhibited through endless copying
> One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS
It quite literally was a reaction to iOS considering it was originally a copy of the BlackBerry OS (the older one in their keyboard phones) until the iPhone came out and they pivoted to copying iOS instead.
EDIT: to get ahead of any negative replies about them copying iOS, I’m fully aware that they work quite differently under the hood and Android has had various features before iOS, etc. I mean they were creating from a UI/UX standpoint a copy of the BlackBerry when Google bought them, and then when the iPhone came out they completely changed the UI/UX paradigm to match.
IDK what you could possibly mean by saying it was "a copy of the BlackBerry" and further I don't see how that validates the claim that "Android itself was a reaction to iOS".
The actual truth seems to be that "Android's introduction of touchscreens was a reaction to iOS", which is WAY different than saying that the entire operating system was spun up just to compete with iOS.
What's the long-term strategy with Android. How does one know it exists
Android was in development well before iOS was released, really the only big change was the touchscreen, which is obviously revolutionary, but that's a long-way from "Android is a reaction to iOS".
> One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS
and it definitely was, to mitigate the risk of losing sight of the web users behaviour
This isn't about pure revenue, it's about scams.
Android has a reputation for being unsafe precisely because of sideloading (as well as low Google Play fees, looser app review, accessibility services and remote access).
This policy is bad for us HNers, but objectively good for the 95+% of people who will never sideload a legitimate Android app, but are extremely likely to get caught by scammers.
The heavy US skew of HN really distorts the arguments here, as Android-based scams aren't as common in AMerica due to the prevalence of iOS in that region.
The Play Store was riddled with scam apps last time I used it. Be it fake apps that pretend to do something while doing at best nothing ("system optimizers", "antivirus" apps) over user data mining apps (often targeted at children or young people) to hundreds of clones of commercial or open source apps - you do not have to search very long to find the real scams.
Making sideloading harder has only one goal - growing the wall around the garden a bit higher, piece by piece, layer by layer, while everything within slowly grows more toxic.
Which is why I said sideloading is only a part of the problem, I expilicitly pointed out insufficient Play Store verification and insufficient app sandboxing in my original comment.
If they actually cared about scams on Android, when I explicitly searched for <App I'm going to pay for anyway> in the Play Store, they wouldn't put <Some other random app that pays money to appear above the app I searched for> at the top instead lol
I can say that my parents have never once complained about a scam on their phone caused by sideloading.
In fact I don’t know anyone among any of my friends or family that have ever had that issue.
Every last one of my non-technical friends and family have been hit by spyware on their windows devices.
To say I’m extremely skeptical that this has anything to do with protecting users is an understatement.
In fact I’m willing to go out on a limb and say it’s a nearly non-existent issue outside of people being targeted by nation states.
Would love to see some numbers backing up the claim that sideloading is resulting in mass exploiting of Android devices because I can’t find them.
Do your parents:
1. Live in a country where Android is much more popular than iOS?
2. Live in an environment where piracy is rampant?
3. Are used to sideloading apps to get free movies / soccer?
Yeah. My dad loves sideloaded Newpipe, and I haven't ever heard of him dealing with scams or viruses.
For example:
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/android-users-lose-2-...There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Google is doing this to protect users from scams. It is purely driven by their desire to control the platform and eliminate things like ad-blocking youtube apps. You're far too credulous of evil corporations' stated motives.
That's a bit of a surprising postulation.
If there's a reputation, that means it's reasonably widespread. 5% doesn't seem like much.
Does this mean there are so many advanced users sideloading apps to compromise them?
Except users aren't so advanced that they are getting scammed because of side loading?
Or might it be the cascading delays in security updates that don't seem to reach devices between Google, manufacturers, and telcos? This is a much more massive (the 95%) of security hole and backdoors for scams to enter.
These arguments don't really seem to fit together or make sense.
Happy to get some links to read more about all of the statements.
Scams are the justification, F-Droid hasn't had any scam apps throughout it's existence, and it's not clear every functionality it currently has will be preserved with this change like auto-updating apps and easy installation of the store itself.
Google could let users add their own signing keys (like browsers allow), and it might be they will let students or power users do this, or they could do what F-Droid does in packaging FOSS apps without developers having to provide extra PII information. If they do neither of these things, it de facto means they're only after control at the expense of normal users.
And yet the times that I have dealt with Android phone issues (2 times in the last year), it has been an app that was popping up full screen ads.
Both phone users have no idea how to sideload, everything was installed from the Play store.
On the topic of looser app reviews on the Play store vs the App store. I can give you a long list of fake iOS apps where you enter a 4 digit code to watch free movies. People who think Apple is manually reviewing apps are delusional.
Why the surprise, they do the same with search, they do the same with their Google workspace (the degree to which they are pushing AI is really hurting the product).
Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago, they are so arrogant they think the audience is now fully captive.
> they think the audience is now fully captive.
It is, for the large sub-$800 segment of the smartphone market.
you mean sub $599, right?
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-16e
Which is still a valid argument, the number is just lower. And the UX on these sub 600 devices have definitely gotten worse over the last 5 years too... Likely because Google isn't really targeting that price point anymore, so Android isn't getting enough optimization to be viable on underpowered devices.
That was different in 2010-2020
This market still exists and is pretty strong, especially outside of US. It's all on Android so Google doesn't need to try to compete here.
This is why with Pixel they're focusing on competing with the iPhone, they want people to use Android so there is no point in competing with other Android manufacturer.
Is it really Google's Android? I have the feeling it's mostly Chinese manufacturers with their own Android versions sans the Google services.
Android is still developed by google, yes.
The chinese are mostly adding skins on top, not developing the core of the operating system.
There is however a chinese fork of android (state sponsored), but it has not gotten wide market adoption in china either to my knowledge, but i dont live in china so i'm open to be corrected.
Finally, even if that OS has gotten widely adopted in china - it IS a fork. the changes are not being upstreamed to android, hence irrelevant to the discussion on this forum.
I'm talking about the Google services which is where Google profits. Chinese phones ship without them. When I said "Google's Android", I meant Android+Google Services. The people buying cheap Android phones are most likely not buying Pixels. Even Samsungs aren't exactly cheap anymore. I'm not talking about Android forks. I'm talking about customized Android without Google services.
The biggest Android market (internationally) are Chinese phones. If Google suddenly decided Play Store should be the only way to install apps, that doesn't affect Huawei and Xiaomi phones at all, they don't ship with Play Store and Play Services in the first place.
Chinese phones sold in China ship without Google services. Chinese phones sold outside of China include them.
That's false. The ones you can get here in Slovenia don't have them. I've personally helped quite a few friends sideload them. I also remember how shocked people were to find out there's no YouTube or Play Store after buying a Huawei or Xiaomi phone when that first came into effect.
Correct, same in Germany. Here is a photo I shot last December in an electronics store. Aurora Store is now official, I guess.
https://imgur.com/a/v6zaRYo
I don't think that picture indicates in any way that there are no Google Services on those phones. I've had multiple Chinese phones, and all of them had both their in-house app store (every brand seems to have their own) and also the Google Play Store. And obviously things like Google Play Services and Google Maps are installed too, way too many Android apps wouldn't work without them
This isn't even a China-exclusive strategy, Samsung does the same with their Galaxy Store.
Aurora Store is not a separate app store but is an alternative front-end to the Google Play Store. Combined with microG it should be possible to get all the Google apps.
There must be a reason why Aurora Store is being advertised, though. Why would they do that if they could just pre-install Google Play Store and standard Google applications.
Update: End of 2018, I bought a Huawei phone with GApps. I remember that two or three generations later, Huawei was not allowed to include GApps anymore.
Probably because they are bootleg imports in a very small country.
Chinese telephones legally imported usually have them in most relevant big markets like Indonesia, India, Brazil, etc.
So the national carrier importing them and selling them in their brick-and-mortar stores is "bootleg imports"? Not to mention that the EU is, legally speaking, a single market so the same rules should apply everywhere.
The reason they probably have them preinstalled over there is because they don't care about licensing so they can freely preload whatever they want. At least that's how it was with netbooks in the early 2000s that they were selling loaded with MS Office, Windows, even Adobe, of course with no COA stickers.
When they sell them in China, yes.
But the same manufacturers sell Android phones with Play services in Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia, etc.
> they think the audience is now fully captive.
the audience is captive. Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device? Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own). Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Google behave in ways that they think makes them more profit. When users cannot migrate (nor even threaten to), then it simply means they can do this.
I'd agree if you picked Google Docs or something like that, but Gmail? Chrome?? Come on! Edge is just Chrome with extra features, plenty of people use Bing without even noticing and many even non-techy people are fine with DuckDuckGo, good free email providers are everywhere (yahoo, hotmail, proton...).
> Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Can I run an ad blocker in Android's Chrome? I can in Firefox
> Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device?
Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.
> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own)
My wife uses ddg and outlook, she's non-technical. I convinced her to use ddg but she's always used outlook/hotmail.
> My wife uses ddg and outlook, she's non-technical
My mom too. The difference though is that they have us. Most people don't.
Well yeah, but my wife used Outlook/Hotmail without my convincing. She'd been using it since before we even met 16+ years ago.
> Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.
As a general statement, sure. But if we are talking about mobile phones this is a very privileged and unrealistic point of view.
According to chatgpt, 70-80% of mobile phone sold worldwide every year cost less than the cheaper iPhone.
Some people could probably stretch their budget and get the cheapest iPhone, but otherwise it seems safe to conclude that more than 50% of people simply have no choice.
I see poor looking people with iPhones all the time.
People do stretch their budget when they really feel the need for it (and the poorest you are the more you'll want to prove you're not poor by buying a status symbol), also the second hand market is an easy way to get a cheap iPhone. Sure, it won't be the latest model...
In the US it's very common to get your phone financed via your carrier, too. It's so common that most people probably don't even think of it as financing, it's just an extra monthly charge they pay on their bill which lets them upgrade to the latest iPhone or Android model every two years.
Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on.
The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.
The most compelling argument I've heard is around security, while Firefox does sandboxing, it is not as comprehensive as what went into Chrome.
I'd still choose Firefox over it for the reasons you've mentioned.
Google's search engine domination is nearly over, they are constantly making it worse to the point using ai is preferable and literally anyone can spin up an ai
There are non-google android OS's you can install (it's easy these days). Kagi is nice for search. Fastmail is nice for mail. Brave is a fine browser (though I'm aware that it's a chrome derivative). It just takes a bit of determination.
Maps is the last hold they have on me. I haven't yet bothered to find an alternative.
the move don't have to be permanent, there are alternatives and as we increase our usage and give active feedback and commit to invest even little money in them, they will improve too. I've seen this pattern a thousand times the monopoly gets worst and worst until a revolutionary new tech will rise it applies to social concepts, business sectors, companies, mother-in-laws, etc.
>Do you want to use a different search engine other than google?
Yes, type yahoo.com into your browser, or install an app. Non-technical people love installing apps on their phones.
>Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).
Yes, there are hundreds of good e-mail providers to use instead of Gmail. Easy for the non-technical person to use.
No, that is not how you change search engines.
In Chrome on Android (and yeah, on desktop too) you just go into "Settings" and change your default search engine. I can choose between Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex, or DuckDuckGo.
There are also custom searches through Wikipedia and other resources. You can use little shortcuts to get to almost any custom search you set up in advance.
This has been configurable by the user for a long, long, long time. This is not a surprise or a concession. This is built-in stuff by Google for Chrome. (Edge too, of course.)
Changing your browser, you can do, but it won't be comfortable. I have Edge installed on my Android, but it is not possible to run natively on Chromebook and the Android emulation is bad. I will not set Edge to my Default Browser because it messes things up. It is not a great experience to change your Default Browser on Android. I just go with Chrome and use Edge for specific tasks and topics.
You can set up all kinds of email services in the Gmail app, or you can install a native app. I use Outlook in both of those ways, and it's fine.
I've been using Edge on Android for a while now with 0 issues, switched because chrome was frequently crashing.
I think your issue is trying to switch off of Chrome while using a Chromebook.
> It is not a great experience to change your Default Browser on Android
It actually is, it just sounds more like it's Edge that isn't a great experience.
I've had Vivaldi as default for awhile now and it's great, everything is as seamless as using Chrome.
> No, that is not how you change search engines.
See it from the perspective of a non-technical user:
1. I install the Yahoo Search app
2. When I want to search I poke the Yahoo icon on my home screen.
Or:
1. I open my browser.
2. I poke Yahoo on the grid of suggested sites.
Sure, there's more than one way to skin a cat.
There are lots of non-technical users who navigate purely by doing a "google search" on whatever domain they're aiming for, too. Nobody said they were efficient about it.
> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google?
I've been on Kimi now for 3 months. I rarely used Google in that time. Kimi is largely free though sometimes when I run of the free quota I fallback to DeepSeek/Perplexity. I have no idea where they are getting their index from though.
> Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).
There is microsoft/apple/yahoo mailboxes. However, I think most people should pay for their email especially that it's cheap and also critical (2FA).
> Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Firefox is a solid fallback and also webkit (Apple) is now basically a different browser (ported to Linux on GNOME Web). Not the best situation though it could be worse (given Firefox situation).
For me personally, the only two things I still use Google for are chromium and maps. I am unlikely to move from Chromium anytime soon but might consider alternative for maps (though might still need maps for reviews/photos/street view).
I am the most bullish I've ever been on Google losing its monopoly especially after they botched AI and hyper-scaling.
Once an alternative to one of their things, like immich, becomes viable, people run as fast as they can.
The strategy of doing everything you can to make sure your customers truly and utterly despise you and want to spit in your face is probably not productive.
I can't remember a youtube change that did not degrade my experience on their platform.
Google's AI in their docs suite is so bafflingly bad. I wanted their AI to automate a sheet for me and it just choked. I switched to Claude for making a sheet that I ended up hosting in my local NAS using Microsoft Excel format.
Embedded AIs always suck. It's a dead end, long-term. By its nature, AI subsumed software products, reducing them to tool calls for general-purpose AI runtime.
> Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago
Google's customers are advertisers. They cater to that segment very well. They only need to attract users with "free" and cheap services so that advertisers think their campaigns are reaching enough eyeballs. Whether or not that's the case, and whether or not the end user has a good experience, is hardly relevant.
""Apple has better app selection (for most people). Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS.""
You mean Apple has been forced by regulators to implement core features like USB-C and RCS?
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
Sure, but uninformed consumers won't see it that way. Maybe in their circles it just sounds like a great idea and they thank Apple for implementing it.
Even if you’re an informed consumer, it doesn’t matter.
Whether they did it out of the goodness of their heart or because a regulator forced them, it’s still got usb-c
Saying they were forced to implement USB-C is really overstating things. Apple loooved USB-C - so much so that their ill-fated butterfly switch laptops went all-in on it. They also helped design it. It's highly likely they were planning a move to USB-C anyway and the EU just pushed it forward a year.
This is untrue. Apple was fighting EU the entire time trying to avoid a switch to USB-C on iPhones. EU representatives were publicly critical of Apple, eventually Apple was forced to give in.
I realize a conspiracy narrative gets more clicks but … you know Apple started the development of USB-C and shipped some of the first devices in 2015, right? People whined about the MacBooks requiring new hubs, etc. for a couple of years and got over it. The same thing happened with the iPad in 2018, AirPods, etc.
When they introduced Lightning in 2012, they made a commitment to all of the third-party hardware developers that iPhones would support it for a decade. I’m sure the EU pressure helped but USB-C iPhones shipping in 2023 is right on that original timing.
But why would Apple, the company that famously hates backwards compatibility, make things easier for third-party accessory manufacturers, instead of making things easier for users bought into the ecosystem who had USB-C on their iPads and Macs?
Oh right, because they collected license fees and royalties for Lightning, reportedly $4 per cable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209924
Sure, I’m not saying they’re altruists. I just think the most likely explanation is that they promised compatibility under the “Made For iPhone” program and kept that promise because they’ve been in business long enough to know that screwing people who supported your last product is a great way to ensure they don’t support your next one.
Why are you so motivated to rewrite history to defend a mega corporation?
I’m not: each thing I wrote is common knowledge—read the Wikipedia pages for the Lightning and USB-C pages if you don’t believe me—and it’s a little silly to spin this as something other than large companies not making massive supply chain changes quickly. I’m glad USB-C has won but you don’t change things deployed in the hundreds of millions in a year–I saw an original iPhone connector in the wild as recently as last year!
Why are you so motivated to fight the truth?
Truth is, apple didn't want to migrate their phones due to some internal decision not relevant for us, and the fact some other devices were on it doesn't change this. Users comfort was never part of the equation, its politics, sales projection, stabs at competition and similar.
Truth is, apple fought EU hard, we saw it from inside quite well. Backstabs, some cheap tricks trying to delay and evade this, even when it was clear how things will be. Not their best days to be polite.
Why giving some heartless mega corporation free moral credits if they are not well deserved?
People can and do fight things they agree with on the principle of not wanting to do something because they were told to. You fight it just to say “you can’t tell me what to do” (for precedent) not just to actually defend a position you believe in. Even if the other side wins, they had to pay a cost that may discourage or at least raise the floor for future regulatory efforts.
Apple only implemented USB-C due to pressure from the EU.
One area Android has a clear advantage is Android TV devices verified by Google, because there is a much wider array of streaming apps of all kinds available. However google doesn’t seem to focus on this very much, and if you look for forum recommendations for google android streaming devices it’s very often the NVIDIA shield pro from 2019. Hopefully that device will I’ll be supported for a few more years because there seems to not be good easily available alternatives.
The killer apps that gave Android an advantage on TV are now mostly available on tvOS. To me, these were VLC and RetroArch.
Apple was among the first to implement USB-C in early 2015. A whole year before Samsung and the likes.
But not on mobile. First iPhone with USB-C was iPhone 15 released late 2023. The Google Nexus 6P phone had USB-C in 2015, 8 years earlier.
> Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
If the rumors are true that the whole anti-sideloading thing is mostly because some governments complained, it might not have to do with a business strategy at all.
Why not limit these restrictions to these specific locations? Surely there's already lots of location-specific and carrier-specific customizations like shutter sound in Japan, different radio frequencies and many more. It still sucks for those who live in these countries, but at least they know who to point their finger at.
Cost? Apple stuff is expensive and unaffordable or inaccessible to a lot of the world. Google'd Android is the only option if you can't shell out for an iPhone (assuming you don't want to buy an unsupported 5+ year old device second/third-hand).
Because antitrust laws are strong in a few countries. While most of the 2nd or 3rd world antitrust laws are non existent. Google's strategy is to squeeze those markets. They have higher population too and hence many more advertising to sell and much more control of the "online experience" in those countries.
Realistically, they have nothing to lose. There a duopoly. It’s not like people pissed at this are going to migrate away.
Sure, a small proportion might move to Linux Mobile.
Most of the rest of the population will just stick to Google, because they don’t have a choice.
In many countries, your government or some other essential service demands that you have either an Apple or Google device.
The biggest differentiator is price. An entry level Android phone is about $300 while an iPhone is in the $1000 range. And to be honest, anything more than an entry level Android is luxury these days. I say that because that's what I have and I have never felt held down, except maybe for pictures, but it is good enough for my (lack of) skills as a photographer.
So, Android may actually benefit from a lack of differentiation: like iOS, for a third of the price seems like a good value proposition.
The iPhone 16e (came out less than 6 months ago) starts at $600 without carrier subsidy. That’s about half of what you claimed.
I'm similarly baffled for the reasons you state but your breakdown of the market differentiations is a little hyperbolic.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years
Apple has never had better hardware (on mobile). Apple has had better software support & integration for their hardware that has lead to e.g. strong camera quality advantages (iOS camera app has been able to use the hardware better to produce photos people want despite some Android OEMs having objectively better camera modules since those OEMs have to work through a lot of Google contracts & software extraction).
The hardware has never been better - their holistic ecosystem has just made integrations with it smoother.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people)
This has been true but it's always been marginal, & the "for most people" qualifier has contracted significantly in recent years. Both Google's & Apple's 1P offerings have declined in quality & popularity, but Google have increased lock-in & reliance on theirs in ways Apple can't, while the 3P offerings on Android have improved significantly relative to iOS. Gone are the days of companies releasing exclusively on iOS, or the Android version being an afterthought with missing features - if anything it's swung in the other direction.
To be clear, I think your points still stand: Google's recent strategy doesn't make sense for Google. I just don't think it's as glaringly clear cut as you make out.
One aspect that's worth keeping in mind is the non-US market. Apple has a 58% market share in the US but it's 28% worldwide. Outside of the US market the impact of that "every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share" is significantly diluted (tbh I'm not sure it's even increasing outside of the US at all) & emerging markets are growth areas.
>Apple has never had better hardware (on mobile).
This is just straight up false. Qualcomm's current top of the line processors are about 3 years behind what you can get in Apple's cheapest product (that being the 16e), and the budget phones (and by "budget" I mean "the 600 dollar ones") are another 3 years behind that.
iPhones don't generally become too slow to realistically use until their support lifetime expires. Androids are like that out of the box unless you spend over a thousand dollars, and those only last for about half the time (a combination of inferior hardware and inferior software). It doesn't matter if you have a 120Hz screen if the UI only updates at 20.
This is why the only killer feature for Android (outside the cameras) is adblocking- which, of course, is what Google wants to prevent. They don't want you to run real Firefox (with the only effective adblock remaining), and they want you to pay for YouTube Premium rather than using NewPipe (or some other ReVanced successor) so you can't get out of paying 10 bucks to listen to a video with the screen off.
The lock in with Safari is horrifc though, the browser on a $20 prepaid android phone is better than the browser on your most expensive ios device. Apple says well you need to write a native app, stop using the web and PWA's. Allow Apple to mediate absolutely everything.
While I agree with the principle, and we as tech professionals and enthusiasts should be lobbying hard for law makers and regulators to open iOS up to allow for different browsers, there’s a couple flaws here without these precedents or activism.
The alternative here is not Firefox gaining more market share, it’s further encroachment of Chrome and derivatives. You’re not getting this big win for browser diversity. I’m not sure what you really gain here as Safari works fine for near most everything most people do.
Also I don’t think PWA’s have proliferated on desktop or Android despite Google’s efforts in raising awareness for them. It seems to me like consumers largely aren’t into web app shells. They either visit a web app in their browsers or use the App Store apps, by a large margin
I have a feeling, despite Google's communications, this is all an attempt to thwart the numerous ad-free YouTube apps.
Another reason it should have been broken apart years ago. It's laughable that the biggest ad company in the world owns the largest video site in the world, largest browser in the world, largest search engine in the world, and largest mobile OS in the world.
NewPipe (FOSS available on F-Droid) is nice alternative to ads-infested YouTube. I disabled YouTube and YouTube Music apps on my mobile, and I use NewPipe instead. You can even download YT videos or audio from YT videos using it.
I'm using Pipepipe. I believe it's a fork from NewPipe, and has more features, namely skipping sponsor block, and intros
Pipepipe stopped downloading audio or video when I was using it a couple of years back.
I switched over to NewPipe as it was better maintained and worked well.
Since past few months, NewPipe is not automatically showing latest YT videos, but it opens the video if I type in the video's source url. Downloads are working fine though, which is what I mainly use it for.
Will try Pipepipe again next weekend if it fares better.
Google is trying to suppress all these FOSS alternatives to its ads-overloaded apps.
I'm using Grayjay at the moment. Somehow still available in the play store (though with reduced feature set).
What's going on with NewPipe? Their F-droid repository is down. Their domain is down. Their github repository is up, but it links to their domain, which isn't. Are they dying?
Seems like a DNSSEC screw-up. You can find more details here.
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/website/issues/420#issuecomme...
So entitled. How do you expect Google to pay it's content creators that you watch if they didn't have ads?
I will be downvoted, but I'm not fooling myself. I don't care. As long as uBlock and yt-dlp still work, I'll use them. If Google breaks them, I'll resort to some automated screengrabbing + maybe some AI automation to click "skip" in a virtual machine or something.
People will use all sorts of excuses, like the ads are about gambling, or contain viruses, or are detrimental to mental health, or whatever. No, don't use these excuses. You just don't want ads, and it is still possible to not see them. That's respectable.
I'm not sure how those are "excuses". They are reasons to not want ads. Ads are fundamentally malicious, so you should remove them from your life. I don't view attempting to "influence" me as a valid way to make a living, and am unconcerned with those who want to do it in the same way that I'm unconcerned about what would happen if someone tried to scam people with early wins in a shell game, but people just took the early win and walked instead of placing a big bet. That's just comeuppance.
I will up vote you since you make no pretense about it.
You’re implying that YouTube being limiteZ to creators that don’t care about getting paid would be a bad thing.
When Google's ads do all the following, I'll consider guilt:
a) Don't throw malware in their ads.
b) Don't throw seizure-inducing flashes in their ads.
c) Allow turning off gambling in their ads.
They are the ecosystem shapers, let them figure it out.
The issue is obviously one of trade-off.
Google pays content creators so little they have all started including ads in their videos. Si technically as long as you are counted they get paid. Meanwhile, Google is more and more aggressive with their own ads interrupting videos and pushing you to subscribe to their expensive offer.
Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.
It's the usual tug of war between revenues and UX but I don't think consumers have to feel bad about not playing by Google's rules.
>Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.
Just use viable FOSS alternatives like NewPipe or PipePipe. They are good and clean. They allow to watch or download YT content, without ads.
If google push too hard, someone will make a "youtube mirror" - ie. a complete copy of youtube at a different domain.
The actual data could be hosted p2p across all the users devices, and any missing data retrieved one-time-only from real youtube servers.
Do you have an estimate of how much would be needed to mirror?
BTW PeerTube is a thing.
1GB per video
That website will have an IP address and a registered owner. Taking down piracy websites is routine for governments, server providers, and domain registrars now, and they don't care whether the site is actually illegal. You can only get away with this long-term if the site is hosted in Russia, but Russia is sanctioned so how will you pay them?
Eh, somehow The Pirate Bay, Fitgirl Repacks, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub etc seem to manage it.
The real challenge is delivering good enough performance that your site is better than waiting through 30 seconds of ads; and making it worth your time to run the site: there's hassle, legal risk, and it's not like you can run ads to make some cash.
They're all severely bandwidth limited. Wouldn't work for YouTube. TPB and FGR get around this using torrents.
Has there ever actually been a success story for using end user mobile handsets as servers?
> The actual data could be hosted p2p across all the users devices
Sounds like a Pied Piper app.
I guess you never received a copyright infringement notice from your ISP for seeding a torrent.
personally, it makes me less enthusiastic about android as i don't need another iphone but n=1, so maybe it will work out for them....
> Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
Or you could analyze this at the actual face value: the damage to Google’s brand caused by malware campaigns, especially faux-banking apps robbing people in some regions, is greater than the damage from making sideloading harder for some edge case users.
Not everything is a giant conspiracy; this move has always looked pretty clear cut to me from Google’s standpoint and I’ve never really seen any evidence to the contrary.
What confuses me is that easy "sideloading" has been the main thing that kept down the proliferation of degoogled custom ROMs.
Secure boot prohibits custom ROMs on most android devices
If custom ROMs will be more popular, it probably will push some vendors to unlock their devices. In the end, I don't think most of them really care.
Well you misunderstand enshittification. It will never get better again. Both Google and Apple have enshittified their phones. You can verify this on the App Store, on the Play Store, both of which have now more than 50% of search result screen space dedicated to ads, more when it comes to scams [1]. AND you can verify this in the financial statements of Apple and Google, where you see what we've always seen in Google: steadily increasing at a fixed rate profits from ads on the play store in Google's case, and steadily increasing at a fixed rate profits from "Services", which is App Store ads.
In Apple's case this has been the only Apple business to grow at all in several of the recent years. In fact there's quite a few Apple businesses that look like they are "revenue neutral", most famously iPads. Google is better, but not by much. Cloud is growing fast ("but why?" is a question that's unanswered. I mean, "because of AI", of course, but ... seriously?)
So not only are they enshittified, and you see them getting worse and worse over time, but the financial statements show: if you're expecting this to get any better either in the Apple or Google case, you're insane. Because clearly ads for scams are worth it for advertisers, and most other types of ads are not worth it. The situation evolves more and more towards the cable channel situation of 20 years back.
You could also reverse the view. The simple question: "are people willing to compromise on hardware quality to get less ads?" has a very clear NO answer. "Are governments/institutions that are totally dependent on these systems willing to pay to either improve phones or make an alternative available?", again has boatloads of evidence that the answer is NO, in all caps.
[1] Search for "credit card" or "lose weight" and judge for yourself. Top results are promoting Apple or Google themselves, everything else are ads, and very bad deals that trivially will neither accomplish the promised financial independence nor weight loss. Or should I put it like this: the credit card deals advertised are so bad they might achieve weight loss. By the way ads designed to mislead, which the top ads for either search obviously are, are what both Google and Apple promised time and again never to do.
I think what is happening here is the moat is breaking. With llms getting good enough to make a program, how long until it is a whole OS...? And then how long until regulars figure out play store and play appa not needed???
> Apple has higher consumer trust.
That is quickly eroding and has never been justified other than by marketing.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Android has always had a much better selection of open source software, which, at least to me, is the thing that matters most.
Advertising folks not engineers are now in charge of Google, and they are gaining influence at Apple now as well.
This is the real threat. Brand loyalty is a distraction.
AnkiDroid, a fully self-contained version of Anki for Android, not requiring pairing with a desktop app and completely free, does not exist or iOS. Or did not, last time I checked. So that would be a deal breaker.
Maybe by now there is some Android emulation for iOS that can do it?
Apple has better app selection? Where? Does it have Tasker? Or browsers that aren't reskin of safari?
It’s incredibly sad to watch Google abandon the values that inspired so much trust and belief that there is a better way to build a company.
Long time Pixel user here who has always believed the story that Apple has the closed, but refined, higher quality experience and Google has the slightly freer, but coarser UX.
I was convinced to make the switch this year and the Apple iPhone 17 Pro + whatever iOS version is, by far the worst phone I’ve ever owned.
Photos are worse, low light is worse, macros are worse, the UI is laggy, buggy and crashes.
The keyboard and autosuggest is shockingly bad.
Incredibly popular apps on iOS (YT, X, etc) are just as bad and often worse.
iMessage is a psyop. The absolute worst messaging app in history with zero desktop access for non-Mac users?!
If you’re on Android, and especially pixel, please know that Apple has completely given up and no longer executes at the level you remember from 10-15 years ago.
The whole software world is shit now. The foundations were stable decades ago. Like Windows kernel, WinAPI, .NET, WPF, Linux kernel. But end user software is so terrible. Windows 11 with ads and unhelpful AI. macOS which is a bit less terrible, but still too bloated. Linux with its eternal changes between X, Wayland, Alsa, Pipewire, Pulseaudio, sysvinit, systemd, and endless choices. Both iOS and Android are terrible. iOS was perfect 10 years ago, it's absolute clownfest now. I would blame AI vibe coders, but it started before. I don't know who to blame. Why can't we just build solid minimal non-bloated OS that will last for decades without major rewrites. We've got so good foundations but so terrible end product.
Their strategy is growing markets, especially in india, and africa, and of course China. It's where the chinese oem dominate. Beside chinese OEM, i think the only other player is Samsung. So google strategy seems to be to circumvent people from misusing their OS by blocking certain services (mainly ads). This is done via apps from fdroid, and rooting and what not. If google can control how people uses their devices (block vpn based adblocking, or rooting all together), they have better grip on the market. At the end of the day, Android is front for an ad platform.
> [Google's] strategy is growing markets, especially in india, and africa, and of course China.
Really? China? Where Google services are banned and Android phones come with local OS versions that cut them out? "High-friction sideloading" won't affect anyone in China. It won't be part of their experience at all.
I think OP is suggesting that the ability to sideload is what is preventing their phones being distributed in China.
If you can present a "locked down" phone to regulators, you might be more likely to get permission to sell large volumes of them - like iPhones in China.
But there still won't be Google Services so what extra money is Google to make there? The markup on hardware. But they have to compete with local manufacturers with the very same OS. At least Apple is the only manufacturer selling phones with iOS.
> I think OP is suggesting that the ability to sideload is what is preventing their phones being distributed in China.
This comment is insane in several different ways.
There's nothing preventing Google's phones from being distributed in China. They already are distributed in China.
Those phones won't come with the vendor OS installed; they'll come with an OS that works without a hitch in China.
One of the modifications to the local OS will be to make sideloading trivial, since that's how you're expected to install apps.
If you did start selling phones with a stock Android OS in China, those phones wouldn't work because their connections to Google services would all be blocked.† The reason for that block has nothing to do with sideloading or even with phones. It's going to stay in place.
† In my experience, it's still possible to receive pushes from Google while you're in China. For example, you can't connect to the Play Store, but if you visit the Play Store in a browser on a different device that can dodge the Great Firewall, and tell it that you want to install something to your phone, Google will reach out and make the install to your phone even if your phone isn't dodging the firewall.
Agreed. The only thing they have going for them is that you can degoogle your android device, but you can't deapple your iphone, and here they are making moves that suggest they may back off from that position.
Apple makes a lot more money. Google wants to do what Apple does, to make more money like Apple.
Google might also get paid to enable surveillance.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.
Better on what? Versus what?
> Apple has higher consumer trust.
Not from me and my peers. All nerds/devs/sysadmins.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Again, based on what?
> Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS.
Only when forced.
> Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access. What are you even talking about?
Don't get me wrong, iPhones are great devices, but I prefer the Android ecosystem time and time again.
Except only a few countries in the world have wages where their citizens can afford Apple.
While I can afford Apple, out of principle I am not buying anything above 300 euros, that requires me to also buy another computer for hobby coding, and a dev license.
All my use of Apple hardware is via projects where pool devices are assigned to the delivery team.
Mobile providers usually offer loans ("service contracts") where people get phones outside their financial standing (I regularly see high end iPhones and foldable phones of €1-2k run by people in a country where average monthly salary is less than €1k): if a highly visible device like your phone can be had for 10% of your monthly salary, people will, unfortunately, opt for it.
I tend to not use Apple not due to cost (I honestly believe it's OK to pay a premium for quality; I might disagree they offer it today though, as I do use a couple of their devices at work), but because of how closed their ecosystem is (and yes, all my personal devices are running some sort of Linux, and Android phones are rooted and with bootloader unlocked).
Many countries prefer the freedom of pre-pay/post-pay than being bound by contracts though.
Not everyone has the US culture of running their life on credit.
Because when life changes, it isn't only their phone they lose.
The only single time I had a contract, because it was the only way to get a Nokia N70, I learnt never to do another one ever again.
Are you sure it is your whole country or it's you?
I mostly buy my phones outright too, but I am under no impression that everybody else does it as well.
In my country, for example, buying phones from carriers as part of your plan just isn't a thing. As in, you couldn't do it even if you wanted to. Same for postpaid plans and contracts.
As a result, quite a lot of people use the "I can't believe they could make and sell an entire phone at this price" Xiaomi and similar phones.
Name the country if you want this to be a useful data point.
You could have checked their profile.
I've only seen the carrier locked phones and long-term contracts in a handful of countries. I've lived in a lot of countries on three continents.
In many places the default is prepaid SIMs with separately purchased phones. Sometimes the prepaying can be automated (e.g. in Russia), sometimes it involves you physically going to a shop once a month or so (e.g. in Egypt).
The planet is full of such countries, it isn't only me.
This is one of Apple's marketing strategy.
Faux luxury.
Totally works in the US too on teens, moms, and lower middle class people.
It's getting to French teens unfortunately.
They'll make fun of the kid who has a Galaxy S24 while proudly showing off their aging iPhone 12...
Apple's certainly been working to destroy their consumer trust though!
At least on my end the political knee bending by Tim Cook and their recent iOS and MacOS updates have me firmly on the side of not giving any more money to Apple. (Sadly, I still pay for Apple One for hy family, so I'm not perfect. But... hey, it's a start. Speak with your wallets).
And I will be considering alternatives when my machines which I will be running to their end stop working.
It's really such a shame cause I really liked their privacy stances, accessibility work, and focus on user experience.
Now I say, screw Apple, and encourage people to boycott and be wary of upgrades.
> And Google's strategy is to continue removing differentiating features from Android that also help them mitigate the threat of antitrust
Sigh. When will HN learn that the vast majority of customers dont see those as differentiating features.
One of the key things separating humans from other animals is being able to put yourself in another’s shoes.
>Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
What? Are you referring to the 36% of ad revenue Google pays to Apple? I don't think Google is too concerned about that.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/apple-gets-36percent-of-goog...
Android gets a bad rap because of security and Apple has exploited this in their marketing campaigns to the max. So the moment Google does something to address this glaring hole in their security model the 1% vocal minority throws a fit. You’ll still be able to side load, but because it has extra friction they’ll threaten to switch to iOS. To which I say - go for it. Google doesn’t care about people who side load apps like an automatic reloading the chamber. You’re an insignificant percentage of their base.
Personally, I would rather see Android only run signed and sanctioned apps to prevent the technologically illiterate from getting pwned. If you want to be able to side load then sign up to be a developer and go to town on your device.
People who are reaponsible for Android all use Google phones. They dont care about android. They dont use it. They dont understand their use cases.
If you are hired by a manufacturer of say cola, you cannot drink the competition cola.
Those in google laugh when asked to show their phones - and then show iphones. In any other business they would be terminated.
I don't know how it works at Google, but unless they're giving away Pixel phones for free to their employees (or at a very, very strong discount), they have no business forcing their employees to use their products.
Here is how a job works: worker works, company gives money. Workers do whatever the fuck they want with the money they earn.
I think an edit is in order, as your post, in the current form, doesn't make any sense.
He's saying people at Google use iPhones.
I don't know if that's true, but the times I've visited silicon valley I didnt see many android phones.
You're typically issued a corporate phone, it's the only phone that can open work email. You have a choice between an Android (something like a Pixel and a Samsung) and an iPhone, with some companies incentivising Androids with things like a faster upgrade cycle or more premium trims. The culture is split between having just the one free corporate phone and having two phones - one personal, one corporate.
There are lots of examples of Android team employees who are proud of using only Apple phones.
Check the "socially inept tech roast show" - where people from those teams demonstrate their ignorance and hatered towards own products and users.
Since they dont use them, they dont see nor care about bugs.
Meanwhile if you work for a cola company and they catch you drinking competing product you will get fired (your contract bans you fron that). Same for many other products.
I understand using an Apple phone to learn what it does / its featurs, but those Android employees dont use Android at all. And it shows
This is a legitimately crazy take, yes the differentiations are less but how we got there isn’t so altruistic
I’m firmly in the Apple ecosystem and every one of those examples were not Apple’s unilateral decision
I think seeing the noose circling around both Apple and Google’s necks better explains the quagmire that Google is in
Apple was getting ahead of a European consumer protection ruling to switch to a single interoperable cable, USBC was there
Apple and Google worked to make RCS better for years, as Apple was ignoring it and Google was using a non-standard RCS
I gave an iPhone a shot fof like a week but had to return it because it didn't have alternatives to the apps I was using on Android. Apps like BitCalculator, Convertbee, Aegis, a decent calculator with sin/cos/log and the ability to write expressions like the default on Android, Wireguard and a decent browser with an ad blocker. No Safari doesn't qualify.
Apple has a huge hole in their screen that I hate.
Better mobile hardware is highly specific. Crappy batteries worse than literally all competition? Check for first what, 5 or 6 generations? For many people, battery life is single most important attribute of their phone.
Also USB-C ain't some differentiating feature of android, rather rest of the world and electronics. Fully apple's fault here, it could have been their standard as the one, but greed is greed.
Screens were always better on Samsungs flagships (apple buys screens there too) - mildly higher resolution, refresh rate and contrasts but these are rather unimportant. As an non-apple tech user, apple phone hardware has very few things that interest me or put them above the others.
Its better integration with software that did put them above, since it was optimized for a very narrow band of hardware so could get far even with subpar hardware (till M chips came but these days they are almost on par with Snapdragons). But that software has a list of issues much bigger than hardware above so no, thank you.
> core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS
It's obvious you've never used Android if you think these are core features LMAO. No one cares that much about connector type, more the fact it's using an industry standard versus proprietary. No one cares about RCS, everyone uses WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Line, etc...
Core features are stuff like being able to search for a business through the phone app, Maps telling you where you parked your car, unprompted, compatibility with the casting protocol, the ability to make ANY app the default for a particular task, the ability to sideload, the fact you can switch phone brands and get whatever hardware you want but your core OS with all your accounts stays the same. Basically the ability to do what you want win your OS and no one restricting your phone's features.
As for Google's strategy, it's the same as Valve's. Having a platform they can't be locked out of since both MS and Apple have shown they'll abuse their market power.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.
Well no, Chinese phones are above Apple material-wise (better battery, better cameras, better cooling) and on par SoC-wise since last year. That's what makes Google's strategy so baffling.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
It's entirely the same. I have gone back and forth regularly for the past 10 years. Android is completely on par app-wise. Apple has the iMessage lock-in in the US obviously but not in the rest of the world. Apple might have a slight advantage on the pro segment with the iPad but I don't think it has a huge impact on phones.
The really baffling thing to me is that while they lock down Android, they pay to put Gemini on iOS. Google has a real competitive advantage with IA and they just gave it to Apple.
It's clear to me that they are two companies fighting each other inside Google: the ex-Motorola who wants to be Apple and the service side who wants to be Microsoft.
I personally fear that they are making the bed of the regulators who will probably come for Play Protect at some point to open the door for alternative OS providers at least in Europe. But maybe they think it's coming anyway and are strengthening their position and trying to milk what they can in the meantime.
Chinese phones have great hardware at great prices, unfortunately they suck at software.
So unless you want to spend the time and effort to switch to and work with the quirks of LineageOS or similar, you get an overall worse experience.
How are they on par SoC-wise? Last time I checked, Qualcomm was still trying to catch up to Apple.
Well, recheck.
Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have caught up on the phone SoC market.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has a slightly better CPU than the A19 Pro but a slightly worse GPU. Apple has a very slight advantage in watt usage but that's more than offset by the battery gap. Same thing with the Dimensity 9500.
The SoC market is now extremely competitive.
Beats A19 Pro in Geekbench, at 65% higher power consumption.
How is that a win?
One, you are entirely moving the goal post. Nothing was said of winning. The discussion was about catching up and catching up they did. As I said, the market is competitive.
Two, because the actual power consumption is not 65% higher - that's peak - and high end Chinese phones have batteries significantly bigger than the iPhone so you still get better screen time between charges in the end.
I think it’s fair to say that a SoC should perform better at higher wattages, so my comment is definitely relevant.
Regardless, I don’t understand how you can say that I’m moving goalposts when I mention performance per watt, which is absolutely relevant when talking about smartphone SoC performance, and then you bring up battery capacity, which is not.
> they pay to put Gemini on iOS. Google has a real competitive advantage with IA and they just gave it to Apple.
What Google loses by pushing iOS AI customers to ChatGPT outweighs what they gain by trying to convince people to switch phones for access to Gemini.
These "better" claims are simply not true. But it's surely a marketing Koolaid they sell.
That said, Android options are dwindling which is not a good thing. Remember LG? They are gone.
>Apple has had better mobile hardware for years. Classic Apple glazer take. This is why I still made another 100% with Apple stock over past 5 years because stupid people got gaslight into buying their overpriced stuff that is marginally better if at all.
Yeah, at no point has Apple ever had meaningfully better hardware than the competition. They have always been a more expensive version of the same hardware you can get from their competitors, just this one has an apple logo. But a lot of people, even smart people, are fooled by the marketing.
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.
No Aux port, no usb. Slow phone with slow animations. But maybe this is fixed, its been 10 years.
>Apple has higher consumer trust.
lmao, this is just a user error problem. None have trust. If they trust, yikes. Thats a negative that Apple can brainwash people.
>Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Solid no here. Being able to install stuff from fdroid is amazing.
>Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices
As long as you are okay with waiting 4 years. Sure.
You forgot to mention how poor iPhone security is. People have died due to Apple's poor security.
"Slow phone with slow animations" is a crazy assessment, I switched from Galaxy S7 to iPhone XR in 2018 because the Galaxy was (like every other Android I had) slow to do everything, applications would crash randomly and my phone would just give up and reboot without warning. Not to mention all of the killer Android features that Google had gotten rid of up to that point (RIP notification ticker, I miss you so much). What's the point of being able to sideload and customize when none of it works on a day to day basis? And when Google/other Android phone manufacturers insist on their phones being more and more similar to iPhone/iOS, the reasons to stay on Android go away too.
Samsung is the Apple of Android. They are fake luxury and use a big marketing budget.
Not surprised the same kind of person that buys an iphone also fell for samsung.
In early 2016, it was by far the best Android offering available and it was a pitiful display for the operating system.
Most Android devices also don't have aux ports. iPhones have USB now too.
Losing the ability to easily sideload apps is what we're talking about.
How do iPhones have worse security than Android???
> No Aux port, no usb. Slow phone with slow animations. But maybe this is fixed, its been 10 years.
It has been 10 years and none of this is true today, also the average person doesn’t care about an aux port.
> Solid no here. Being able to install stuff from fdroid is amazing.
Not sure if you’re serious here, the app selection is far better on the App Store (and also Google Play Store) due to the nature of not being restricted to purely FOSS apps.
> You forgot to mention how poor iPhone security is.
Citation needed, iOS has the second best mobile security and is at worst equivalent to stock Android. The only OS that surpasses iOS by a large amount is GrapheneOS.
> People have died due to Apple's poor security.
This could also be said for any other OS/maker? Nothing is 100% secure/private.
Thinking Apple hardware is better is utterly laughable when you look at non-US Android devices.
Much better camera sensors, much better silicon carbon batteries etc in Oppo, Vivo, Honor and Xiaomi devices than anything Apple produces. Form factors Apple still hasn't figured out, such as 7th gen Foldables, Flip foldable phones etc, Camera zoom lenses that can be attached...
Oh come on fanboy, Apple doesn't have meaningfully better hardware, consumer trust, or app selection (for most people the opposite is true!)
Oof, Apple adopting core 'Android' features... Yea, finally? Increasing iOS market share? Where? Not most places
I think it's weird you come at this from an antitrust angle when I would totally make the argument the other way.
If there's pressure to remove this feature, then it's from companies that make apps that anyone can pull up in Revanced and they can patch it and can be running a version of a piece of software that shouldn't exist with "premium" features enabled. I don't think there's an argument against it really besides that. At least not an honest, intelligent argument....
Ultimately, I doubt many would jump to Apple. Inertia would insist: People just won't upgrade. Which is already occurring, people are keeping their devices longer, especially Apple users. And they wonder why their battery stops working... Oy vey!
>>Apple has had better mobile hardware for years
Are you joking? Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now. From batteries to cameras and screens, apple is way behind on hardware tech. Yeah they are better than Samsung - but Samsung has also massively fallen behind what's the state of the art.
>>is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year? And it will be even more now that Apple announced they are going to use Gemini as their AI base model.
> Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year?
You checked wrong. Google pays Apple on the order of $20 billion to be the default search on iOS - this is so significant it accounts for ~5% of Apple's annual revenue
> Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.
This is true, but their phones don't ship with Google services out of box (at least the last time I checked). So in reality, "Google's Android" is really mostly Samsungs and Pixels.
They do when purchased outside China (largely EU, UK, also Singapore and others)
They don't in the EU. Not in Slovenia, so not the entire EU. I've seen it first hand. It's also not some special law that we'd have invented here so I'm pretty sure there are other EU countries where it's the same.
>>They don't in the EU. Not in Slovenia, so not the entire EU.
In Poland you can buy Vivo phones with google services out of the box just fine.
>>This is true, but their phones don't ship with Google services out of box (at least the last time I checked)
I have an Oppo Find X9, purchased directly from them in the UK, and it came with all google services the same as my previous samsung.
Sideloading is a neologism to scare users and lawmakers, it just means "Installing software" and should be a basic right.
Also software installation in Android has been high friction for a while. Installing an APK on my phone is at least 10 clicks.
I think what is missing here is the growing trend of scammers convincing people they are their bank (or whatever) and walking them through enabling side-loading and then installing malware (sometimes to address some urgent security issues with their account).
This is meant to counter an actual issues that is affecting many many users.
If you can convince the user your are their bank, can convince them to install software and walk them through how to do it and enable side loading, you can also convince them to input their logging into any webpage.
Somehow that’s not working for them, it would be simpler
If that was the only reason, they would proactively cooperate with alternative app-stores like F-Droid to allow them to provide a lesser friction flow for open source releases. My question would be why I they see themselves as the only possible trust anchor here. A high friction method to install a different app store, once, IMHO would be OK.
> This is meant to counter an actual issues that is affecting many many users.
No, that's an excuse. Google just wants a tighter grip on their software chain, which is understandable if they were Apple but they're not.
This is not simply an excuse. Android phones are prevalent in countries where smartphones offer the only realistic access to banking and cashless payments to the majority of the population. Scamming schemes targeting those users are also very frequent in many, if not most of these countries, and educating people about them is hard. Like it or not, this change is likely going to be a net positive for many people.
And in at lest one case Google is getting direct pressure from the government to do something
Should we whitelist the whole web for this reason too? Why does that trend use apps and not websites?
In the impacted nations people only use phones, and the local banking ecosystem is really focused on apps. I think most people would never think to use their bank website.
I have no trust in a solution that mostly benefits the proposer.
By all means let people curate and use safe lists of software, but let's not pretend that making the life harder for the few registries containing solely open source and vetted software is in any way about making people safer.
This solution clearly mostly benefits the ignorant phone users of the world who are susceptible to scams. There is a minuscule number of people sideloading Android apps on their phones compared to the greater population.
Like I strongly believe that sideloading should be possible on phones, I don't even do it myself anymore but it can be very helpful and is part of what makes the Android platform fundamentally more open than iOS. I was VERY opposed to their original idea of closing off sideloading altogether, but having to mark it in your settings manually seems like a very good compromise.
This has been going on since the Internet became widespread and Windows users started regularly downloading random executables from random websites.
And many things have been done, including Windows telling you in bold red letters that this software is dangerous if it wasn't signed by a trusted signer with lots of installs.
And why are those not sufficient for Android?
This is not a theoretical issue. It’s a major problem is several countries, the governments are getting involved.
Are the governments also coercing Microsoft to restrict Windows users to the Windows app store?
Yes, but governments are getting involved because governments always like increasing control and reducing freedom; the "major problem" is merely a pretext.
People are loosing their life savings
If you need to sacrifice your freedom for a little bit of security, then you deserve neither. It's true with this too.
Most rules/laws don't actually stop problems, they just hide them.
What do they use the app to do?
Steal banking credentials, I think
Is the solution to make it harder? Or is the threat of scammers and the insecurity of the OS used as false flag to make installing software outside of the profitable walled garden much much harder?
I doubt that side-loading impacts revenue all that much. Alternate stores are the real, potential, risk to $.
I think the solution is to come up with a balance between the needs of different groups of users. People here see the phone as a general purpose computer they should be able to modify and use for all kinds of novel tasks. This is great, and should be fully supported.
But there are also many, many more people who see the phone as an important way to enable a higher standard of living. Giving them access to information, government services and banking for the first time. They are not technically sophisticated, and don't need or want a general purpose computer.
So, we need platform providers to come up with ways to work out who is who, and give each side what they need.
It seems you think what is missing here is some FUD, which is what I believe you are feeding us with here.
If there's anyone people need to be protected against, it's Alphabet and Apple and the entities they let in intentionally, rather than specter of "growing trend of scammers".
>Sideloading is a neologism to scare users and lawmakers, it just means "Installing software" and should be a basic right.
No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source. You might not agree the restriction should exist, or that even the concept of first party source at all, but for communication purposes it's worth having a simple word to describe that concept, rather than something like "installing from a non-first party app store".
>No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source
It's amazing how many confidently wrong people are springing up out of the wordwork to present revisionist history about the meaning of "install" like it's ancient wisdom. Pre-mobile computing treated "install" as neutral and primary and had no built in relation to centralized distribution. Sideloading as a term of art originally, in practice came into usage for transferring media to devices, and some cloud file hosts briefly used it to mean load a file to an online drive without downloading it to computer. It's usage was varied, irregular, and not at any threshold of popular acceptance for one meaning or another.
Windows, Dos, Linux, and online self-hosted services had no notion of "sideloading", or at least no usage of that vocabulary and did not use this notion of "install" that is now being retrospectively declared a longstanding historical norm. Even now, that's not a term used in Windows or Linux. Even Apple, who very much in practice utilize this controlled distribution model but even they don't use this sideloading/installing verbal distinction. In Apple's lexicon installing is neutral with respect to where an app comes from.
So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
>Even now, that's not a term used in Windows or Linux.
No, it's existed in windows 10 (and probably windows 8.1) for over a decade.
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/13/how-to-enable-developer-mo... (note the date)
>So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
None of that refutes anything I said. You're basically arguing "back in the good old days, all installs were not from first party source and there was no distinction", but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now. Otherwise it's like arguing "immigration" is some "neologism" because back before the advent of the nation state, people just moved wherever, there wasn't random lines that turned "moving" to "immigration", and the word "immigration" is coined by statists that want to impose their worldview on the populace.
>but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now
A distinction only exists if people parrot the verbiage coined by corporations with a business interest in creating artificial moats. They have no obligation to, especially media outlets who have the right (and IMO responsibility) to use accurate vocabulary.
So... installing software?
>Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source.
Just like 99% of software running on computers in the world today? How is it different from "installing software"?
>How is that different from "installing software"?
It's easy to see this play out if try to replace "sideloading" with "installing software". If you apply it to OP's headline of
>Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
You get
>Google confirms 'high-friction' installing software flow is coming to Android
which isn't at all accurate. You still need the distinct concept of "installing software not from first party sources", otherwise it sounds like google is making it a pain to install all apps, which isn't the case.
Sure, you could argue it helps to express a distinction but that doesn't mean it has to live inside the verb install. Historically installing software was the general act and provenance was handled with qualifiers eg installing from "third-party sources", "manual install" etc. Android is alone among computing platforms in collapsing that qualifier into a new term that implicitly recenters the Play Store as the default meaning of "install."
In other ecosystems the store path is described as "store install" not the other way around. Android chose the inverse framing and that choice isn't neutral.
>Sure, you could argue it helps to express a distinction but that doesn't mean it has to live inside the verb install.
Right, which is why they used "sideload".
>In other ecosystems the store path is described as "store install" not the other way around. Android chose the inverse framing and that choice isn't neutral.
No, this is just being non-neutral in the opposite direction. Given the fact that installing from the play store is the default experience for the overwhelming majority of the user, calling it "store install" is even more obtuse.
"That’s why they used sideload" is exactly the point being contested. Historically, install was the unmarked, neutral verb for adding software, regardless of source. The distinction, when needed, lived in qualifiers about provenance. Introducing a new verb for non-store installs does more than merely describe a difference, it reassigns conceptual ownership of "install" to the store path.
And neutrality here isn't about mirroring current usage frequency (which is unique to Android and recent relative to the history of computing), it's about continuity with prior computing norms. Even when one distribution path dominated in practice, it didn't get to redefine the base verb.
> Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source
What "first-party" source? Apple invented out of thin air the notion of a "first-party" software source or that computer users can only install software approved by a central authority.
The idea the manufacturer of a product is a "first party" is BS.
You are the first party. If I own the device, I am the first party.
The manufacturer is now a second or third party after you own the device, and for most ideas, a third party, especially if they don't truly offer real support of the device.
before phones that was just called installing software
I take the opportunity to let people know that there are alternatives to Google/Apple duopoly on mobile. Link: https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
Sure, GrapheneOS is often suggested but Ubuntu Touch is a really interesting alternative, their own store and ecosystem.
The community is amazing and welcoming. If there are Android apps which you can't do without, they can be emulated and used anyway. Imagine switching to Linux and then using Wine for the apps you really still need.
Yes, it's not perfect but Linux isn't either. If you think you're sufficiently tech savvy and want to make a change, give Ubuntu Touch a try. Find a cheap second hand supported device and play around, make some fun apps. (devices currently supported: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ )
To me it's like being back when there was only Windows and Macs as viable home computer OS, and people were getting their feet wet with Linux and all its flavours. Now, it's the same but for mobile.
Ubuntu Touch has amazing UX, IMO. Sadly it's been non-viable for practically forever, and is non-viable today unless you want to use a 7-year-old out-of-production device. It's practically abandonware with a few hobby maintainers at this point, as much as it had potential compared to other alternatives.
I was under the impression that Ubuntu Touch worked just fine with the Fairphone 5 which is very much not a "7-year-old out-of-production device". I'm currently writing this from a Fairphone 4 (with CalyxOS, not Ubuntu Touch though).
I have struggled with getting anything functional on a Fairphone running Ubuntu Touch. The problem is you can't really run any Linux app, it has to be written to support their specific display manager. Running regular Linux apps is possible but not properly documented and I haven't gotten it to work. Android apps through Waydroid sort of works, but is unstable and not suitable for daily use.
I really want Linux on mobile to be a thing, but I haven't found it yet. PinePhone is abandoned, Purism just isn't a finished product, Planet Computers doesn't even build a phone with Linux support anymore.
The only thing that's current and active I've seen is a Hong Kong startup https://furilabs.com/. I've got one on my desk to try, hoping it will be something usable as a daily driver.
I work at Furi Labs; and am writing this comment from my FLX1 daily driver. Let me know what you think when you give it a shot :)
there is also jolla, their new device is supposed to be shipping this year
It's never going to work. Any competitor that isn't Android won't have app support (e.g. you won't even be able to message people in 90% of the world where WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, etc. are the de facto communication method for almost the entire population).
So you need some way to run Android apps... which is totally possible, but at that point why not just use Android?
If you are willing to have 2 phones... it will/already is needed if you need rooted/unrooted Android phone.
Telegram desktop app works flawlessly on Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS though. Whatsapp web version can be used, too.
> So you need some way to run Android apps... which is totally possible, but at that point why not just use Android?
Perhaps for reasons like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
> Whatsapp web version can be used, too.
Pretty awful UX, and you still need an Android phone to actually run WhatsApp.
> Perhaps for reasons like this
When I say "use Android", I mean the codebase, not necessarily Google's Android. Something like PostmarketOS.
PostmarketOS doesn't use the Android codebase, they work on upstreaming devices with a standard Linux kernel, so the opposite. They act mostly the same way as a desktop distribution. They do use the downstream image but mostly as a reference to remove it.
Ubuntu Touch does use the Android vendor images though through the libhybris compatibility layer, that's why they have some good compatibility, if the phone has a lineageos image, there's a good chance that it'll work with Ubuntu Touch.
The downside of that is the same as Lineageos, they are stuck on whatever kernel the device shipped with and it can be ancient.
Ah yeah I always assumed it was Android based. Graphene then.
At the moment I would recommend FuriLabs solution. https://furilabs.com/
It already has a built in Android VM that allows seamless FDroid and Aurora Store usage.
Since FuriOS is a based Debian distro, it should be reduced friction to use PostmarketOS or UbuntuTouch.
That looks surprisingly good (I see there's a 5G modem).
Does it make phone calls + send texts + manage battery reasonably?
Also, what does "non-rugged" design mean?
(I've had a few pieces of niche phone hardware before, and none of them had good answers to even one of those questions.)
> I take the opportunity to let people know that there are alternatives to Google/Apple duopoly on mobile.
In my country (which will AFAIK be one of the first ones to get the new app install restrictions), so far I haven't found any.
You're not allowed to import phones which are not certified by ANATEL, and AFAIK all currently sold certified phones are either Android (from several hardware brands), Apple, and feature phones.
> To me it's like being back when there was only Windows and Macs as viable home computer OS, and people were getting their feet wet with Linux and all its flavours. Now, it's the same but for mobile.
There's one VERY IMPORTANT distinction: back then, you could easily take a Windows or Mac computer and install Linux in it. For mobile, it's never been that easy; strong cryptographic signing of the operating system, combined with endless churn of the hardware design (there's no "PC compatible" equivalent for phones), and there being no way to keep the data partition intact when installing a custom ROM, make it much harder for people to "get their feet wet" with alternative operating systems.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose emulating Android apps on a non-Android system will have the same problem as trying to run them in an Android without Google Services or in a rooted phone, i.e., banking (and similar) apps detecting it and refusing to run?
Were it not for that, I would never have stopped using Huawei, IMO the best phone brand by a mile. But I'm too busy a person to depend on hacks and having to regularly find new workarounds to access my banks.
I think you're right about certain apps refusing to run in an emulated environment.
I'm beginning to think we need to consider such apps, and the hardware they run on, as the outsiders. Keep a cheap "normal" Android phone for those apps, and those apps alone. Then keep a "real" second device for everything else. Up to you which one gets the SIM card and provides connectivity for the other (and ordinary phone services).
I'd rather go back to old-fashioned hardware dongles from banks – but hey, lacking that, maybe I'll just think of the first of those two devices as a clunky, overly expensive one of those.
This is the best solution. Actually, if you have money, in my experience, the best is to have an iPhone dedicated to that. Sometimes even on stock Android (Pixel 10 Pro) you get weird incompatibilities. E.g. trying to connect to a DJI drone, paying with Google Wallet, getting a train transit card in Japan… An iPhone supports all daily life use cases with predictability. So my solution right now is to have one iPhone where I keep things clean, and one Android where I do whatever I want. :)
(I do get the odd look when I take out my second phone to do something else in public and questions about it :))
I see an announcement from 2016 saying they're adding React Native support. Does it actually work? That'd allow low-effort ports onto their platform, and I'd much rather see them succeed than be stuck with the current duopoly.
(So, I'd probably put in the effort.)
Unfortunately, apps have always been the barrier to entry for competing options.
If your platform doesn't have apps, then your platform won't have users, which won't attract developers and BigCo's to write apps for your platform. Rinse and repeat.
This is how Windows Phone was wiped out, despite them spending *a lot* of money trying to attract companies and developers to write stuff for their OS.
Windows Phone was fantastic because it had no apps. Wish it managed to stake out and maintain a decent portion of the phone market. If 30% of the population could say "Oh sorry TicketMaster, I can't install your app, please just email me a pdf or text me a link to your tickets that I can just open in a web browser" the that would benefit everyone, even non-WP users.
Ubuntu Touch so far has the best hardware compatibility for things like camera and battery life. But it also insists on doing a lot of its own thing like using Mir instead of X and click packages. Running programs inside Libertine often crashes for me and is cumbersome. It makes developing for it harder. clickable needs Docker installed just so you can build and run your own apps on the device! Instead of letting you launch things quickly from terminal.
It make some things that should be easy on Linux harder. I.e., there's no Firefox + mobile tweaks like other linux mobile OSes, in part because it wants you to use Morphic.
But other linux mobile OSes dropped support for Halium/libhybris and even the very few that still have it don't seem to match Ubuntu Touch's level of hardware support.
> like using Mir instead of X
X11 is dead. It's over. At least Mir is now a Wayland client.
Standalone Xorg is on life support, not dead.
XLibre exists - it keeps x11 alive
I was looking into buying one of those: https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/
No experience, but if they lock out Android I probably will.
The issue with buying phones like that, is they are just insanely expensive. Without shipping/tax, that phone is CAD$1500, whereas I can buy a refurbished Samsung S22 for CAD$350 (all in), that has roughly the same specs, but for 1/5 the price. I understand small companies can't use economies of scale like Samsung/Apple, but it's still really bad, and the majority of consumers wouldn't even take a second glance at it from the price.
Notice that, per https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/devices-specification , the newest OS they ship is Android 11. I owned a Gemini and I liked the hardware, but they don't update software and I consider that a deal breaker.
> alternatives to Google/Apple duopoly on mobile. Link: https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
This is far from the only alternative. There are also Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS and more. Unlike Ubuntu Touch, they allow you to run ordinary Linux desktop apps. Also there is hardware not tied to an ancient Android kernel, designed to run desktop GNU/Linux: Pinephone and Librem 5. The latter is my daily driver.
Thank you for the much needed hopeful note. Maybe I'll try doing exactly that, sounds like a fun hobby. My biggest worry about Linux on mobile is that banking apps will stubbornly refuse to offer support to these platforms, basically forever.
I would like to see a high friction flow for installing all the crap from the Play Store to "protect and educate users". "Are you sure you want to install this app? It's only got a score of 2.8 and only 7 reviews, and will ask for all of these permissions?"
Even if it has 4.8 and 7000 reviews it's often fake 4.8 because the reviews are botted / paid / dark patterned (e.g. when you pop up star rating on your users and beg them "rate the app plz" and when the users tap anything but 5 stars you say "k, ty" and keep those "bad" reviews for yourself)
That was just an example to communicate my idea: a better way to validate authenticity of the app could and should be used.
But to your point specifically, Play store and App Store have APIs to rate from within the app: when the pop up shows, app author does not have an option to avoid getting a 1-star rating (they are also time-restricted, eg. at most once every 180 days for Apple IIRC).
What devs do though, is to preempt it with "Are you enjoying our app?", and only giving you a formal rating pop-up if you answer "Yes".
I want even worse restrictions on my parent phone so they dont install spyware. I want "install ONLY from fdroid". I trust their one server in a basement more than Google at this point.
And I want to see transparent price structures. Hey, this app is free. Installed. Only works with subscription. I hate it.
Edit: to clarify, I don't hate subscription, I hate that I cannot search for free apps in the store.
The hilarious part in all of this is watching Epic Games sue Google over how bad the "high friction" flow was for them to sideload their hefty bundle of Google Play violations and win the rights to be back in the Play Store.
It's OK now that Epic can have a one-click download for Fortnite to shove all the friction back into the sideloading experience.
If the make sideloading high-friction, either via account-bound or apk upload or permissions from MNO/ISP, I will leave android. I have a bunch of my own apps that only I use, not released to the public, if I cannot use them, I have zero reason to stay on android.
I think one of the reasons they want to lockdown the system is to prevent guys like me from locking THEM out of my home/ecosystems, as and example, I build my own launchers, specifically for TCL TV's, which runs Android TV and has Developer Mode + adb. Which means I remove all the bloat & ad garbage, which they want to prevent.
We will get to the point where google will remove your ability to set custom dns servers and only use theirs.. just wait & see friends.
Anywhoo, when this side loading fence materializes, I will jump ship to apple.
Why jump to another abuser when you could seriously start looking into alternatives? Ubuntu Touch has a really active community and it's very stable, you can even emulate android apps which you might absolutely need.
I don't see Apple as the obvious next step; the obvious step, when one is pissed off with abuse of power is open source, not Apple.
Can I install my banking apps? Is there a Google pay equivalent?
As much as I want open source, I really don't think it's there yet for most people.
> Can I install my banking apps?
Choose a bank with viable web banking.
> Is there a Google pay equivalent?
It's called a debit/credit card.
Saying 'don't use those things' is not a viable solution. It's like when I was trying to move to linux a couple years ago I asked for help getting HiDPI/scaling to work and there were many responses saying 'who needs that?'
> Choose a bank with viable web banking.
There are five options in my country, 3 of which require app push based 2FA to log into the web interface and 2 of which only have an app interfere.
Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.
> It's called a debit/credit card
Since about two years ago, activating a card requires the app.
> Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.
I do not doubt this is happening, but it is forbidden under SEPA. All IBANs, no matter from which member country, must be treated equally. Unfortunately, "IBAN discrimination" happens quite frequently still. The European commission recommends filing a complaint with your national governing body.
Your employer's tax obligations should depend on where you live and where they live and where the work happens, not where your bank account is.
It's not just tax obligations, no? Employers in many countries have an obligation to ensure that your salary reflects on the X day of the month (or whatever frequency you're paid). Banks in my country have a payroll payment system for this reason, where funds will clear on the day they're made despite the destination bank (in the same country).
If my employer has to use SWIFT to pay me, on whom does this obligation to ensure I'm paid on time fall? I've had a salary payment from a foreign employer fail to be delivered for 2 weeks a few times. We'd have to go back and forth with my bank, their bank, their payroll vendor. That's an exception because they hired me as a foreign employee. Despite paying their local employees on time, I always received my salary at least 4 days 'late', as long as their payroll system reflected that I was paid on the X day, it wasn't their problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_in_the_Republic_...
so Eire has 5 significant banks, and 15 'less significant'. There are also 276 Credit Unions, I don't know if they are useful. (I had a Credit Union account in the past, could send/receive online but no payment card)
(I don't know their suitability, but there are more than 5 options in your country)
Of the "significant banks" listed, only AIB and Bank of Ireland do consumer bank accounts. I suspect the presence of the others is more to do with wanting an EU entity for targeting larger EU markets than the Irish domestic market. For example, Citibank only expanded from "large tech multinationals" to also "mid sized businesses that are planning to scale internationally" in 2023 [1]
Also on that Wikipedia page are Dell's private bank, Danske Bank (closed their Irish retail business in 2013), Klarna (sort of banking-adjacent, but they're not giving you a current account), etc.
The 5 banks offering retail consumer accounts nationwide are AIB, permanent TSB, Bank of Ireland, Revolut and N26. The first 3 are the surviving brick and mortar banks and the latter 2 are recent-ish neobank entries.
Credit unions are limited to serving customers in their local area. The one credit union who's catchment area I'm in also requires app based 2FA.
[1]: https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/0925/1407279-citi-to-g...
(Side note: The name of the country in English is Ireland, the name in Irish is Éire - using the accent-less Irish name in English was promoted by the UK government and BBC because they didn't want to recognise the name of the country prior to the GFA in 1998. Most people will also accept Republic of Ireland if you need to distinguish from Northern Ireland, even though that's technically not the name)
Most people don’t want to rearrange their life around what their phone can’t do.
they will have to when Android closes down
If you are a normal human being who doesn't enjoy suffering, you'll give up the idea of doing web bank on a mobile phone.
Yeah, as an iOS dev, the grass is not greener on this side of the fence…
The point isn't that things are better on this axis on iOS, but that things are better on numerous other axes, to the point where many people are only using Android at all because it feels slightly more open and free than iOS... if Google wants to play Apple's game, then the only reasons to bother with the mess that is Android are gone, and so you'll see people switch to iOS.
Eventually the only reason people will use Android is the same reason people are using Windows now -- mandated by their employer or by being forced into the bottom cost-tier of products.
And the experience will be just as user-hostile with no end in sight.
From that I can see from the early leaks, it may actually be if you live inside of the EU where alternative app stores are now a requirement.
iOS doesn't have the F-Droid ecosystem equivalent, but she F-Droid dies because of Google, there's a chance AltStore will be able to take its place.
It's not, but at least it will be equally ungreen.
Sideloading is already worse on iOS
Seems like you'll still be able to use your own apps just fine under this scheme.
It also seems pretty obvious that the ignorant phone-users of the world who get scammed are the reason for this change. The revenue lost from people like you is really not worth any amount of engineering effort.
Why to apple?
So I was actually planning on upgrading from a Pixel 7 Pro to a Pixel 10 around the time this announcement came out last year, but have put it on hold as I wait to see what form these changes take.
Like if it was "you need to do the developer 7-tap of the version label in settings", it'd be like "whatever". But given how long this process has taken, I suspect that is not what they've planned - it wouldn't take this long to develop, it certainly wouldn't take this long to explain.
So I suspect that we're actually in the "Maybe Later" phase of "Google wants to control which apps you install: [ ] Yes [ ] Maybe Later". And I mean, if their proposed solution turns out to be "Me and 25 of my closest friends can install apps I make by phoning home to Google servers", then like, I can do that on iOS too. And if I'm not going to have meaningfully more control of my Android device, I may as well just go to iOS where Apple at least have a better privacy record and don't seem to have have an all-encompassing goal of "where can we put AI features to drive AI usage metrics up the most?"
Honestly just install grapheneos on your Pixel, that is what I did and bought a Pixel for that reason alone. I use all Google play services and it works great, only payment with phone doesn't work.
Yes I agree: if you already have a Pixel, try GrapheneOS on it. Then if it can wait (Pixel 7 is still supported for a while, isn't it?), GrapheneOS may support a non-Google phone in 2026, so it may be worth waiting.
> Matthew Forsyth, Director of Product Management, Google Play Developer Experience & Chief Product Explainer, said the system isn’t a sideloading restriction, but an “Accountability Layer.”
And... What about accountability for hosting distributing spyware, malware loaded apps from Google Playstore and hundreds of copy cat, misleading apps?
Why can't they pose a question when the phone is setup?
- Yes, I want to sideload
- No I dont want
If the user says NO then to later enable it to allow sideload Yes, the user needs to factory reset phone. Done.
>And... What about accountability for hosting distributing spyware, malware loaded apps from Google Playstore and hundreds of copy cat, misleading apps?
The rules don't apply to billion dollar corporations. Meta is showing 15 billion scam ads per day.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
> And... What about accountability for hosting distributing spyware, malware loaded apps from Google Playstore
This is no joke. The Playstore is filled with malware that pretend to be a different app. It takes days if not weeks to remove these apps.
I have twice now had to recover the devices of family members when they installed malware on Samsung phones running up to date firmware.
That malware to this level is even possible is another matter.
A somewhat unrelated thing, is I got bombarded with ads for a 'mental health mindfulness' service on one of the major international news websites.
I decided to Google the company after a few days. I was immediately confronted by thousands of reports by angry users, complaining about how after they tried the app, they got locked into a yearly subscription at exorbitant prices and it was impossible to cancel. The company itself is registered in some offshore tax haven.
They used to scare us, that if we went to those shady pirate websites, somebody would steal our credit cards and steal our money. Well...
This problem is significantly worse than the height of Windows XP spyware.
This right here exposes the bullshittery about the reasons behind preventing sideloading on Android phones.
For Google everything is about protecting revenue, even when doing so exposes their users to real harm, and that's why they will not address the issue of copycat apps, poor practices on play store security or anything else that lowers the number of downloads on apps on play store. But, heaven forbid, I want to download an app that doesn't create revenue for them onto a phone I OWN, Google spends money lavishly.
The Internet cranks are right. Google is run by bean counters and all the invective the cranks heap on the Google leadership is entirely earned.
Right. Or, the way I might put it, you could have set up a system that empowers trusted alternative distributors so that you're not killing F-Droid.
I'm with Google on this one. Idiots and old people (the public) use these devices daily. These are the very same people that send money to Nigerian royalty and expect to hear back about a great reward. This is mostly a CYA move with hard data behind it. If they completely removed side load, that would be a different story.
Yeah in fact I don't really see what's new in this article except that it hints that it will allow install of software from unverified developers via big scary warnings. Which seems like an improvement from what has been announced previously that only software from verified developers would be allowed.
I already have to configure apps to allow them to install apps on my Pixel... it's like "okay yeah I want to allow F-Droid and Obtainium to install apps" done. Maybe that's not the default or something? Who on earth wants popup ads in Chrome installing shit? And why would anyone want any random app to be able to install additional apps?
I don’t think calling people who don’t really understand computer security a can be tricked “stupid” is fair or helpful.
Designing a product so that almost all of it’s intended users can operate it safely seems like the right decision.
Wait a second... making a product that is safe and easy to use requires removing or mitigating potential hazards involving product. Building safeguards around a feature that can be used to hurt people in significant ways is exactly that, isn't it?
Are you responding to me? I think we agree. I'm saying that calling scam victims "stupid" and then not trying to change the product to protect them is bad.
How is it unfair? Are you assuming only intelligent people use Android?
Not at all. There are a lot of people in the world. Many of them are not nearly as interested in tech as you, or have simply not have the reason or access to learn more. That does not make them stupid.
My grandmother was tricked into buying cryptocurrency for a scam. All the apps that they used on her Android and iPhone were in the respective app stores. Removing side loading has little to nothing to do with it from my point of view because the app stores are not doing a good job of verifying apps.
The old saying goes a fool and their money is soon departed.
Why should the rest of us be punished?
You pay a cost either way: live in a world with better funded and incentivized scammers and in a community less wealthy by a corresponding amount, or have a slightly less convenient sideloading experience.
I guess if you take the old saying extremely literally, you could conclude that every fool is guaranteed to be parted with 100% of their lifetime available money regardless of what anyone else tries to do to stop that, but that’s not true – and why old sayings (with a respectable 75% of the words right) taken literally aren’t a good basis for decision-making.
You are punished one way or the other.
These scammers are parasites on society, they add nothing while draining resources away from honest people.
If you participate in society, that net drag will affect you in subtle ways. Like if you have money invested in something, that thing doesn’t go up in value as much as it would have if x% of society isn’t simply parasitic.
>Why should the rest of us be punished?
Exactly. I'm sick and tired of all the apps/websites that mandate 2fa. All of that adds friction when I'm a big boy who knows how to choose secure passwords. For that matter, why even invest resources into fraud detection or law enforcement? All of that money is coming out of somewhere, and why should my tax dollars go toward catching fake nigerian princes when it's just helping idiots anyways?
/s
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
I'm sympathetic to that argument, but to invoke it you have to argue why the anti-fraud measures outweigh the benefits, not just drop a link to it. Moreover that's giving too much credit to the OP, who doesn't even recognize there's some sort of a trade-off, only that "fool and their money is soon departed".
It is a very long stretch to compare 2FA with restricting sideloading.
This bit of article is what I'm hopeful will happen:
> That explanation broadly matches what we’re seeing in recent versions of Google Play, where new warning messages emphasize developer verification, internet requirements, and potential risks, while still allowing users to proceed.
If google really cared about security, they would place ad's for shady apps right above the 2fa or banking app I searched for to install.
Why wouldn't they just use websites instead? Imagine if you had to ADB from a PC to enable a website that isn't Google approved.
When this whole thing got announced, I purchased a new Pixel 9 and flashed it with GrapheneOS.
I am hoping that in about 6-8 years (when I realistically need to update) the landscape might be a bit better. Or who knows, maybe I'll just continue using GrapheneOS.
So far I have not had a single issues with it. Apps the rely on attestation do not work, but honestly it's only two applications out of hundreds so I can live with it.
I also financially support GrapheneOS on a monthly basis (15$). This is just too important of an project not to.
Ironically, I've found that blocking the attestation API for some apps that supposedly require it (such as the latest versions of Waymo) might make them work anyway. lol
GrapheneOS can choose to simply not apply the same restrictions but now that they're partnering with another vendor to get security updates earlier, I'm not sure what the future holds in this aspect.
This is only an issue for Google compliant Android so projects like LineageOS will be fine. Depending on their implementation, this may even just be restricted to AOSP with Samsung and others just ignoring the extra restrictions.
But, if they make compliance a requirement for being part of their parent programme, GrapheneOS will be in a tough spot.
I think the EU should pile in as well. It's basically an oven-ready independent mobile OS.
Graphene OS spends its social capital on hallucinating attacks from other projects and bullying other projects by sending their followers against them, based on those hallucinated attacks. It also has a completely intransparent project structure based around a supposedly retired mean developer, who then just did not (and still does almost all commits). That's not a project where the EU can invest money in, and the confidence users on HN tend to put into that project is baffling.
These weird anti-Graphene posts confuse me. I use GrapheneOS, fwiw, and I believe some things the project does (like its attacks on F-Droid) are misguided for orthogonal reasons.
However, it all makes sense from the perspective of Graphene not attempting to be a general purpose OS like Lineage, but explicitly a security focused OS. Security is often in conflict with what the average consumer wants, and they can go use Lineage or whatever.
It's like writing lots of comments complaining about OpenBSD devs coming across as grumpy and refusing to support Bluetooth. That is part of their value proposition! You're just not the target audience and that is okay.
Most if not all of their attacks are inexcusable. Calling a competing OS, CalyxOS, nazi sympathizers is unacceptable and when I first read that I started seeing the red flags.
Nothing is open about GrapheneOS aside from the source code. We officially know nothing about the leadership, their current plans, what their finances look like or even who this new mysterious OEM is.
It's weird.
not much in the parent comment is anti-graphene. it's probably the best available option for a mobile OS right now.
the sentiment is that the dev team - specifically one zealot - does not engage politely/rationally/transparently in any public forum, which undermines the image of the OS as a whole.
And unfortunately that one zealot is the project leader.
Yes that guy is extremely weird, he should delegate operations and community management to someone who isn't weird and stick to development.
The EU hate GrapheneOS. They chased them out to Canada just last year because they didn't want to put in backdoors for law enforcement.
The EU should pile money into /e/OS. It's maintained by an EU company (Murena) and has European hardware options - Fairphone (NL), SHIFTphone (Germany), and Volla (Germany). Yes, I know some of them use US Qualcomm chips, but you have to start somewhere.
Europe is hostile towards Graphene users.
I am sure you know this, but just in case:
Europe is a continent, with many disparate nations and cultures. This continent is not hostile towards Graphene users.
In Europe there is the European Union (EU), which also is comprised of many disparate nations and cultures but a subset of those comprising Europe.
I say the following as a staunch supporter of European integration and cooperation:
The EU is actively hostile towards any software with the stated goal of safeguarding users right to privacy and security. That means GrapheneOS but also Signal, Matrix and more.
edit: spelling & grammar
Source: https://boingboing.net/2025/07/23/your-google-pixel-might-ge...
And with Europe you mean a single country, Spain?
The new phone is a nice reward for Google for this announcement
Nah, rather an upgrade from an ancient device. But good try there.
Which apps require attestation? People always mention banking apps but I'm curious what non-banking apps might pull this crap.
I would love to run GrapheneOS if it didn't involve giving any money to Google to get up-to-date hardware, brand new. (Yes, I know I can buy and run it on a used Pixel.)
My next phone will be on GrapheneOS or EOS as well, the last straw was Samsung removing the bootloader unlock with an update (not even sure what they've done is legal)
As TFA does not mention it, and I don't see any top-level comments discussing it, this is a continued rollout of a "feature" first piloted in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. See:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/google-android-dev...
Of course, HN reaction has always been skeptical about this including in earlier news. But the reporting on it, and the countries in which it is piloted in, seems to me to involve government/banking industry cooperation with or pressure on Google to combat cyber fraud. These polities are prime targets for Android cyber fraud of this sort due to Android penetration, and seemingly (to me) also cultural proximity to scam operators, and tech-illiteracy among the vulnerable demographic. (And anticipating a reply I got from a previous article on my comment on this feature---no, it's just not feasible to comprehensively educate retirees against evolving tactics by scam operators and expect that to be a sufficient sole countermeasure.)
There is no doubt that sideloading by uninformed users can be used as a backdoor.
It's also not a surprise that banks/industry that's accountable to recover the losses for tricked customers is looking to someone else to solve it for them.
However, if this was "piloted", do we have the numbers of how much has it decreased the number of scams or their impact?
I wouldn't go as far as to say that it is impossible to "educate the public", but it is indeed extremely hard. But click-through pop-ups have succeeded when?
I know in some people's eyes saying this will make me a Google shill but this reminds me of the manifest v3 thing. What makes it to the top of HN is mostly clickbait a las "Google is cracking down on ad blockers" or in this case "Google is preventing side loading". These articles don't link to primary sources (Google) and they (intentionally?) miss all nuance.
These measures are indeed the result of governments blaming their citizens getting scammed on phone manufacturers. There's not a lot Google can do here.
However, Google is choosing to extend these changes worldwide. That's where the problem really starts. People in Asia and Brazil may vote for idiots who will shift the blame for their citizens' lack of basic digital education onto others, but that doesn't mean that countries where this type of fraud barely exists should also be subject to these extreme measures.
Yeah for every HN user complaining about it there are hundreds of people sideloading apps (not realizing what they're doing - under promise of loans or other advantages) and then getting their phone ransomed
For every person getting ransomed by a sideloaded app there are ten people getting ransomed by apps they installed from the Play Store.
And for every person getting scammed by an app from any source, there are a thousand people getting scammed just through phonecalls. Scam apps isn't a real problem at scale, it's a bunch of fear mongering.
And two wrongs don't make a right
If we ban sideloaded apps under this reasoning, we have to ban the Play Store as well, ten times more urgently.
The image at the top of the article is actually what already happens in Android and has done for years. At first, I thought that this meant that the article was very outdated, but no, this is from January 2026.
I imagine the text of the article is fine, but I'm a little bit disappointed that Android Authority chose to lead with that image and caption and make it seem that this is what the future flow would look like. You'd think they'd know better.
I heard that the frog boiling is a myth. You can't boil frog alive, it will jump out. As opposed to humans
That's because the frog has low switching costs from the pot to the outside world.
frog is not pot-locked-in
The frog had to be pretty well lobotomized to keep it from jumping out. One can recreate the ”experiment” with a lobotomized frog and mostly get the result described though
The highest risk is the play store itself. Gambling and addiction. So, when does Google add "high friction" there, instead of encouraging it? Ah, well, it's the money! Than stop bending the truth.
Wait so did this rollback? Initially they were about to forbid any install from non verified accounts, then allow them but just a limited number, this article seems to suggest there will just be extra steps?
Friction hopefully means "you have to plug in a USB cable" and not "you have to associate your phone with a particular Google account, then go through a process with Google's customer service to approve your phone for sideloading" etc.
Can we stop calling this "side loading" please.
There is nothing sleazy happening "on the side", I am simply installing an application of my choosing on some hardware that I purchased.
As long as it remains possible (without extra developer verification, etc, etc), a bit of extra friction is probably OK, as is assigning accountability to the person who chose to install an app outside of the "official" store.
But it has to remain possible. Otherwise can someone name any advantage that Android has over iOS?
The Apple app store was ruled to not be monopoly.
When Google inquired in court how that could be if Apple doesn't even allow any form of side-loading, including other app stores (which Google does allow)
The judge said, I shit you not, Apple doesn't have any competitors on their platform, therefore they can't be anti-competitive.
Probably one of the worst most off the rails rulings ever. Google took notes and is now following Apple. You can thank the courts
Semi-related question: how invasive is the Temu App on Google Play Store nowadays. Last time I read about it, it posed a bigger threat to users than the average side-loaded app.
I was never an iOS user, or developer - exactly because Android was more "open", exerted less control over a user of the device.
The same reason I use Linux for 25 years (not ideological, but it just makes most sense by far). In time where this view (win11 vs. Linux) is starting to make sense to more and more people, few rare config nuances are getting easier to solve due to LLM-s, going into the opposite direction with a mobile OS calls for users to also start seriously considering more open alternatives and making a path for users of our app to do the same.
EU said that App Stores must have alternatives.
So F-Droid can just continue with their alternative app store.
If Google makes it harder than it needs to be, then I'm sure they will be fined/sued.
> if Google makes it harder than it needs to be, then I'm sure they will be fined/sued.
Aaaaand, Action! Cue EU hate messages.
Is the solution for sideloading to also have the same APK in the Play Store? That way, Google would have received the AAB and generated a signed APK that is used from the Play Store and also offered via sideloading.
Side loading into a streaming box is an essential feature for me. I depend on a side-loaded app for Japanese TV.
But of course, I have that in a separate Android box, so I'm not forced to update to a new OS when replacing a TV (as I just did this week).
At least they aren't removing it like originally planned. A warning from `adb sideload` or `adb install` that can be bypassed with an environment variable is reasonable IMO.
I'd really like to see details before drawing conclusions. If it really is just an extra up-front warning screen or something then yes that's reasonable. If it's something that unfairly disadvantages F-Droid compared to the much less safe Google Play store, then it's unreasonable.
So, which 3rd mobile vendor and/or OS are you moving to?
Not OP but my GrapheneOS phone is fine with me installing things on it. It just seems like a better Android at this point.
Would switch to PostmarketOS tomorrow if there was any fully supported hardware (camera, 4G calling, etc.). All programs/apps I use are FOSS and standardized anyway.
Articles like this where we lament being trapped in an ecosystem duopoly are contemporary with articles saying that software engineering is over and LLMs can just vibe code anything you imagine. What's keeping the duopoly in charge?. Code signing?
You think a local model will get to that point? Some AGI revolution like your describing is impossible for humanity as a whole even if LLMs get that smart. The same companies control the supercomputers and your access to them.
The current system is already high friction. Enabling "advanced protection" in your google account additionally requires installing apps through adb.
I wish the EU would step up and bring sideloading on iOS. iPhone hardware is great but the software is severely lackluster. I know a few developers there and they are not exceptional by any means. Chiefly because Apple pays much less than their competition so they do not attract the best talent
Can we please stop calling it "sideloading"? It's simply "installing" software on hardware that I own, and that I should have full control over.
If that's your bar - you should ban the whole of Android's ecosystem from your networks.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-and...
iOS has fallen behind, I am struggling to use apps and even type on new liquid glass. My 2TB photo library is useless with the current photos app. I am trying out Pixel 10 on the side and I HIGHLY recommend it! Android does not suck anymore. I am in process of migrating stuff over slowly.
> Google says the added friction is meant to educate users about the risks of sideloading.
Or maybe the risks of monopolies and monocultures in computing.
Those of us who use Android phones now - and install FOSS apps form F-Droid or just any apps from elsewhere other than the church of Google - might be thinking: "Oh, I need to work out how I'll have decent app access after this happens."
But what we should really be thinking is: "Oh, I need to _donate_ to projects which aim to patch Android-based phones to remove these restrictions; or to projects which aim to replace (most/all of) Android completely".
We need to speak with our wallets in addition to just ranting about Google.
Sometimes I wonder I we should instead fund massive marketing campaigns instead, because the vast majority of people have no idea it's even an option.
Don't be evil
In the technofeudal new world order, your smartphone is not just a device, it is your gov issued digital ID/wallet
The Apple/Google OS duopoly exists by design, they view bootloader unlocking and sideloading as threats because they break that control
They want to be able to define and/or revoke your existence in the system
No escape, because no alternative
Exactly. For most people not having a bank app, probably no digital payments due to that, and no government-issued digital ID is too much friction to even consider any alternative.
Some manufacturers like Xiaomi already have a very annoying flow for enabling developer options and using ADB. You need to have a SIM card inserted, need to create a Xiaomi account and there's several popups with timers you have to wait through.
The real question is if you can still sideload:
1) a .apk that was not developer-verified
2) without informing Google of this
I'm sure I'm missing something but wasn't this already the case where the first time you try to install an APK, you had to go into Settings and mark the relevant application as a trusted source for installing APKs from?
Some friction is probably wise. I remember them introducing the requirement to individually allow each app you're installing things from. The question is, how much more friction will they add? I suspect they will add prompts per install, too.
Does high friction involve parties needing to identify themselves?
Call me what you want but it is my belief that the reason google is locking down and Apple refuses to budge is that in the near term future our mobile devices will become our identity online and in public.
Apple already offers digital ID in some states. They can do this partly because they can guarantee to the gov’t the ID is genuine because the user cannot modify the system.
Google needs to be able to do the same thing.
Age verification laws for online services will actually require something like a digital ID and Apple and Google want to be the providers.
I am not very well educated when it comes to alternative stores landscape. But I do know that in Russia there's now Rustore: https://www.rustore.ru/en which functions by automatically downloading and updating APKs for you.
During the APK install, however, you do see the ugly Android prompt about how this app may be dangerous.
Rustore has its own app payment system, which obviously circumvents Google Play fees.
This works on regular Android phones.
Are there other examples of such stores? Perhaps it's Google's answer to that.
F-Droid and derivatives are really popular in the FOSS community.
oh, right! Didn't have my coffee yet :-)
But one difference is Rustore actually has payments and subscriptions, which hurts Google more.
I was expecting Google has stopped doing most of the business in Russia due to sanctions. Do you still see Russian-company ads in Google Search results or Youtube? Similarly, I thought they were not selling apps or ads in Google Play store in Russia either (they might be showing ads from non-Russian companies because, well, that just increases the show-count and absolute number of clicks).
I no longer reside in Russia, so I am not being targeted by these.
But I think that it mostly comes down to companies being able to pay for these ads. Mastercard / Visa payments no longer work in Russia. If a company has a way to pay (by having another business entity in another country), then it probably works.
Unfortunately both Russia and Ukraine are slacking in losing the war so it doesn't seem that making payments to Russia will be easy soon. Now of course if they were Uzbeki or Kazakhstani stores it would be completely different.
How does this relate to the announcement from a while back about introducing signatures that tie back to Google? (IE trusted developer program or whatever they're calling that horse shit.)
This is in response to all the pushback they got from that
Steam phone incoming in 3... 2... 1...
"3? What's that?" - Valve
Can we also get total app isolation sandboxing and location, network, etc. spoofing while we're at it?
The year of linux desktop unironically may be close. What is the situation with mobile?
There are community projects, but no Valve in sight.
Eventually my so called smartphone will be a device for authenticating against a few services that require a special application, that I can also tunnel a serious device through for doing the things that I actually want to do.
It would be interesting to know why they're doing this, but it's unlikely it'll ever become public knowledge. I also don't think it is important, the people responsible should be in jail for a lot of other reasons anyway.
Add high friction to scammy ads on your platform, Google
I think we should stop calling it "sideloading". I don't think the history of the term matters. By using that term, you imply that running the code you want on the hardware you own is somehow a secondary or second-class activity.
Call it "installing" or "jumping the garden wall".
Why not just go full Apple right now and just rebrand iOS? That seems to be the ultimate outcome.
Part of me thinks they wouldn't be doing this if their own ad team wasn't knowingly accepting money from fraudsters.
BOYCOTT.
Apparently this "high friction" is a term entirely invented by Android Authority based on finding a few new generic warning messages about sideloading in the Android source?? I guess if there's no news, you have to play word games to make some.
If auto-updating apps stops working on fdroid, I'll be installing Graphene, Lineage or taking a shot at something like postmarket/ubuntu touch/plasma mobile. I've used Lineage as a daily driver before for a while, so I'll probably just go back to that and tell developers to support the platform I'm using. It doesn't rent seek on developers or users.
Funny way to say 'dark patterns'
Ah yes, such enormous friction, to install F-Droid and install an app via it, instead of Playstore. Argh, sooo much friction, really unbearable. /s
Google is getting more ridiculous by the day.
I agree with high friction sideloading. it is the best of both worlds. no friction sideloading is too easily exploited by scammers. having a member of my family exposed to this kind of thing in the past taught me some things.
I don't agree with the word "sideloading" though. It's just _installing_.
"Installing" has the connotation of doing it directly from the Play Store. This is also known as "Downloading" (because the data is on a server, in the cloud, and you're fetching it "downstream" to a local device.)
"Sideloading" doesn't refer to the installation process, but to the file transfer process. You're sideloading when you transfer, e.g. APKs from your notebook to your Android. Or, from a USB stick into your phone or something.
In general, though, "sideloading" also refers to any "non-app-store" installation. It's a kind of colloquial shorthand. It's not really a technical term. But it's adequate for getting the point across.
If you just called it "installing" without qualifying it, how would anyone know that it's a different process, or that it's accomplished not by navigating to the app store? It seems that you would invite ambiguity here!
The point is that before walled-garden app stores, that was how pretty much every normal person installed software on their PC's. Using the term "sideloading" for that is a clever invention to try and retroactively rebrand what is actually super-normal as something scary.
It is not really though.
"Sideloading" refers to data transfer between two local, peer devices. Really, that is it. It is not "something scary" or something forbidden. It is not even really installing. It's data transfer.
So "before walled-gardens" people would install software in many many ways. I originally typed it in from scratch, or from a magazine. I loaded it from tape. Or diskette. That's not really "sideloading" if you think about it, because it's just "loading" from peripheral storage.
Later, when people dialed up on a PC, they could "download" software and then install it or do whatever with other data or media. They could also upload it. They could transfer it among devices locally. This was not, at the time, called "sideloading" but just transfer, or "null modem", or "sneakernet", or "a station wagon full of backup tapes".
If we're going to use "sideloading" in the strictest sense, then we cannot actually refer to the process of downloading APK files separately and then installing them, because that's literally downloading. But that is the colloquial meaning now.
Hey, if you want to coin a new term or neologism for it, by all means do so. But it seems absurd to downplay "sideloading" as having "scary" or "negative" connotations, when it really doesn't. You've got to look past the hype and F.U.D.
Remember, there was a time when people considered FTP and torrenting to be dangerous or subversive. Perhaps they still do.
Given that you've agreed that "sideloading" is not an accurate descriptor of installing apps directly from the web browser, I'd think you could see how using "sideloading" incorrectly like this is a marketing gimmick designed to scare users (and politicians!) into backing the official platform app store monopolies...
>"Sideloading" refers to data transfer between two local, peer devices.
I don't agree with this definition. "Sideloading" sounds like loading something "on the side", as in secretly, like in the expression "side piece".
Honestly, no. Not for everyone.
As someone from Germany, I don't want Google to nanny family members computing devices. They don't want it either. It is completely absurd for an ad company in a surveillance state an ocean away to play IT services for everyone. This has already gone to far.
Rather, there should be tools for value-aligned IT services and technically minded family members to help.
The vast majority of Android users don't sideload apps. I used Android for years and only did it during dev. I don't know anyone who does it.
No need to restrict it then
Plenty of users will benefit from restricting it or even disabling sideloading entirely. I know my mother in her 70s can't be trusted with downloading random crap from the internet.
> I know my mother in her 70s can't be trusted with downloading random crap from the internet.
There's a very simple fix for that, that doesn't involve her being a benchmark for others.
I had to sideload telegram, the version on Google Play has restrictions (censorship I believe) that the sideloaded version doesn't.
the vast majority != 100%
I think i have an idea that would better protect normal users while not getting in the way for power users and developers:
1. All applications must be signed with a valid store key.
2. Anyone can import a store key after rebooting into the bootloader (similar flow as custom roms)
3. Google can maintain a list of malicious keys and reject them
Why is this better? Because it makes it much harder to trick grandma into installing an APK some site just dropped.
1. google can arbitrarily revoke key. Countries can revoke key.
3. Like the amazing malicious crapware from PlayStore that they allow. They don't reject that.
4. Grandma installs crap mainly from PlayStore
TBH this doesn't seem a particularly high friction change. It seems very like what we have to do already, or like what we do on OSX.
They did not specify what exactly is the new workflow is/what is high friction about it in the post no?
> like what we do on OSX.
You are on macOS. Not others. You are following Apple. We don't.
I absolutely HATED the first time I had to deal with it... at least now it works a little better.. but the first version didn't actually tell you that you needed to go into security settings right after to enable the install.
Still not a big fan of it... though admittedly mostly just install stuff via brew/cask more than direct downloads as a result.
> like what we do on OSX.
...which is so much of a complicated nuisance that most people simply give up. If this will go the way I think it will prepare to have to skip 10 things, write 3 ADB commands and submit a video of you spinning around for 30 seconds just to install your pirated game.
Just to install a proper call recorder or a better Work Profile manager.
Turning a possibility to install software outside of the app store should be about as normal as the fact you're using a laptop or desktop to install your pirated games.
Yeah, you.
If someone having access to "side load" an app has it to install a pirated game, then you have your OS, where you are not limited only to Apple/Amazon/Google store, simply for installing pirated software.
QED :)
> so much of a complicated nuisance that most people simply give up
Most people should give up.
The number of legitimate unsigned apps for MacOS that your grandparents should frictionlessly one-click-to-install is essentially nil.
Meanwhile, they're receiving countless bullying demands a day to install keyloggers and drain their bank accounts.
The threat model tradeoffs are clear.
The threat model doesn't work. It depends on Apple doing their job, and even $99/year doesn't prevent Apple from signing a Trojan horse of your competitor: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
You want to talk about confusing Grandma? Why isn't Lastpass the first entry on the App Store when you search for it verbatim? At the going rate, installing signed software is more deceptive than searching for the official installer online.
Not sure if anyone should be installing Lastpass. It's been massively hacked in 2022 and 2024, and there's currently an ongoing attack (Jan 2026).
That's true but does not detract from the GPs main point: if you are curating your app store then you should do a proper job of it or you lose the curation argument.
A single scary warning per source (ie per new certificate that you choose to trust) would be fine. If I had to jump through a few hoops to install f-droid on a stock device that would be fine. But once I've authorized f-droid the OS needs to shut up and stay out of the way for good. No "are you sure you want f-droid installing this other thing" nonsense.
This is the human death drive externalized into thought. Reject it in all of its instances with extreme prejudice.