The fact that I’m fine with iOS? I actually like the “closed” ecosystem; I’m glad we can now have different browsers (instead of using the WebKit engine) and the only think I feel is lacking, right now, is the possibility to open local HTML files.
I use a phone just to chat, a bit of instagram, sometime writing and browsing internet, nothing too fancy… why would I want to mess that up?
US still gets webkit only 😭
- Cross-device integration/the Apple ecosystem. I use a Mac for my userland computing, and the ease with which it works together with my phone is a killer feature. Also in this category is integration with my family’s Apple devices.
- The software ecosystem. Apple’s first party apps and services are really nice across the board, and once again the ecosystem integration is the single biggest reason I use an iPhone. (the user facing apps, at least–Xcode and everything related to it are hot trash).
- Purely subjective, but Android is ugly to me. The hardware, the OS(es), and the apps just look bad to my eye. The iPhone looks and feels nice in a way that I haven’t experienced in an Android product.
- I don’t trust Google and I can’t be bothered to spend any time configuring my phone. I spend too much of my life installing shit and tinkering with config already; I want a phone that just works out of the box.
Pretty much the same for me. I try to do zero business with Google. I tried android several times and it just felt like a rough draft of a real product.
Never trust Google. But do you trust Apple?
More than Google tbh
Yes. For sure. People downvote you, but you are correct.
I switched from Google after talking to a data engineer who was lamenting how little data he could get from iPhone users compared to Google. Google gave him everything. I work for a company that buys advertising data from Google. We don’t from Apple.
Maybe they are both bad, but it’s not nearly equivalent.
That’s my take. I really dislike Google. I avoid using anything Google. I am not saying apple is perfect but they are not Google
ITT people who seemingly haven’t used an Android phone in ~10 years
ITT people who seemingly haven’t used an Android phone in ~10 years
Well yeah, no shit. When was the last time the average Android user used an iPhone as their daily driver? Same is gonna be true in the other direction.
That said, as I scroll through I’ve seen a post from someone who still uses Android and a post from someone who switched in 2020.
I myself switched in 2022.
I used an iPhone for a while cause my phone broke and I got it for free. Used it until it died and then went back to android
- Live Photos. I love having a little video attached to every photo. I wish high end mirrorless cameras would do this.
- I can use my phone without and Google products. Apple Maps is especially useful. YouTube and Google Voice are my last two I haven’t ditched. yt-dlp and PeerTube with help, and I’m looking into VOIP providers.
- Android has motion photos, which i think is on by default and is more or less the same as live photos.
- This is just a coincidence, I know Apple maps is good these days, but just the other day my friend was using Apple maps to guide us and it hallucinated a restaurant wholesale. Like, this location for this restaurant has never existed as far as we can tell.
Apple Maps and Google maps seem about the same to me. But I can use Apple Maps without Google. I installed but haven’t given Organic Maps a fair shot yet.
I did recently discover you can turn off “Web and App Activity” for your Google account, which seems to disable Google saving most of your data (searches, viewed places, etc), for what that’s worth. It definitely cripples Google maps even more than I think it should, since now I can’t even search for labels I’ve added to Google maps myself.
I’ve been meaning to try Organic Maps as well, but haven’t even gotten around to installing it yet.
Live Photos! They’re like the portraits in Harry Potter
As an Android user, I’m considering switching to iPhone due to how much worse the Android experience is becoming without Google Play Services. I’m using a custom ROM with microG, which potentially means no RCS since it is only available through Google Messages which doesn’t work with microG.
As much as it would suck jumping ship, at the very least, Apple is still a consumer hardware company first & foremost while Google will always be an ads company. Android exists to that end & that end alone.
I’m using a custom ROM with microG, which potentially means no RCS since it is only available through Google Messages which doesn’t work with microG.
This is a common misconception. Android just doesn’t let you access the necessary low level stuff to talk to carrier RCS services. If you’re already using a custom ROM that may not be a problem. Here’s a third party RCS demo app: https://github.com/Hirohumi/RustyRcs
I don’t know how actually usable this is though, or if there’s anything else that’s usable that’s not Google Messages.
Locked down bootloaders. If it’s not my device, I’m going for the prettiest walled garden. I was with Android from Droid X until Galaxy S8; not being able to flash my own ROM on the S8 was the reason I left for an iPhone.
I also don’t want to have to sysadmin my mom’s Android phone that was constantly having bullshit apps installed. Apple’s walled garden makes my life as family sysadmin significantly easier.
It’s troubling seeing the amount of brands moving from freely unlockable, to waiting periods with registration, to all-out blocking unlocking. I am happy I double checked the unlock status before purchases an ASUS Zenfone last year right before they took their unlocking servers offline with just a marketing promise they would be back (they never came back online, & they paid out a lawsuit this years already over it).
As a former sysadmin and MDM specialist I stay(ed) loyal to Apple because MDM quickly makes you realize what a cluster android is. Some phones allow for certain lockdowns in one profile while other Android OS’ wouldn’t be able to recognize it. Knox was attempting to do something akin to iOS for MDM, but even still it was missing a ton of features.
That seems like a concern for the IT department of a large organization, but not something end users should care about.
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I don’t want to.
I do try it from time to time. My last try was with a Pixel 7 and although I loved Material You on it, my main issue was that the quality of apps wasn’t great and most just didn’t feel nice to use (even Google’s own apps feel better to use on iOS).
Didn’t help that the Pixel 7 was way too big and I couldn’t get used to that either, among a few other problems.
I don’t really care about phones and my parents give me their old iPhones for free.
First thing: Privacy. I am aware that iOS is not entirely private too, but I trust Apple Photos much more than Google Photos. You can even enable end-to-end encryption iirc.
Second point is control over my data. I can easily export my photos from Apple Photos as files, whereas Google maliciously separates Photos and Metadata upon export. In my experience this is the same for a lot of other services as well. Being able to easily export my data enables me to escape the walled garden more easily should I get fed up with one system. I also try to use as many open source services as possible for this as well as other reasons.
Apple has a lot of malicious practices too, especially when it comes to EU citizens and third-party app stores, etc. - but in my experience Google is no better.
Lastly, I considered switching to an Android with Graphene OS (privacy focused Android derivate) a couple of times, but the added control over your data comes with a lot of other inconveniences. So for now, I’m just sticking to iOS.
Apple Photos is more private than Google Photos
Sure, but if you care about privacy at all, then surely you wouldn’t use either of them anyway? You’d use Ente Photos (available for both OS), or Immich (available for both OS), or any other private solution? So this shouldn’t really be a factor in choosing between Android and iOS. Same with the export point. Both have good options for photo backup, and neither Apple Photos nor Google Photos are one of them.
I dislike this logic. It’s really a black and white / all or nothing approach. Also, I think the photos app is just a microcosm of a bigger consideration. That being which OS do I trust more overall if I trust some of the built I apps more?
Agree, you should look at the overall picture, not make a decision based on an individual app (which, in case of Google Photos, isn’t even built in unless you buy a Pixel or something, it’s just some app that happens to be available, for both iOS and Android).
Pretty sure on iOS any other gallery app is just a frontend to the photo stock app. Beside, you can encrypt the whole thing on iCloud so it’s safe (which is what I do)
Yeah, all gallery apps show the same on-device photos, the difference is where they backup/upload them, which is the part important to privacy.
Apple iCloud having the E2E encryption feature is definitely an advantage over Google Photos. All I’m saying is that neither really have much to do with the OS. Google Photos isn’t even a preinstalled app on most Android phones, just one of many options you could install, same as on iOS.
Yeah but if you disable the iCloud upload for the photos app they are all on-device
Same goes for any other app, including Google Photos
Except google photos will nag you every few days to enable cloud sync if it’s disabled when you open the app and uses dark patterns to nudge towards accepting. I doubt iOS does that.
So don’t install it, use a better app. It’s just some app, not part of the system like iCloud on iOS.
Yes, but that wasn’t the point was it?
That’s what I’m saying
Not entirely disagreeing with you but, what exactly is “malicious” about separating photo and metadata? It could be just how their servers process and stores those photos, with the added benefit of geotagging videos.
I use Google Photos and upload in original quality. When I download from takeout, the metadata is still in the original files. Iirc, only if you select upload in “high quality” where they compress it again, do you lose the metadata in the file stored in the cloud.
When you re-import the images into another program/library, they will not be displayed in the correct order and all other information will be lost as well.
Metadata in general is very useful and contains a lot of valuable information like location data, lens, focal length and device information which you have to manually re-integrate into each and every photo.
I mean yes, I could write a quick and dirty Python script for this, but why should I have to do this in the first place?
In my subjective opinion this is malicious as in it only being this way to make it as hard as possible to migrate away. I highly doubt this is the way their servers store the images as it is very inefficient and the images are likely stored in a database instead. This means in order to retrieve a file they have to process each image anyway, so why not follow the universally accepted and well defined standard and include the metadata in each file?
Fair. I guess I never really needed to deal with that since I upload in original. That and Google Photos Takeout Helper made migrating easy for me.
trying to, still need my old ios device somwtimes
I just switched back to iPhone a couple of months ago, after 10 years on Android.
In short, I trust Apple more than Google. That’s not to say Apple is 100% trustworthy, but I definitely trust them more than Google.
Spent a fortune on apps that are also accessible to my family who also have iPhones, and this gives me good parental controls. Switching would be a massive ball ache for not much reward if any.
I trust Apple more than Google. May be misplaced faith, but that’s the primary reason.
Using Google services is not a strict requirement to run Android. There are whole online communities around unGoogled Android.
I’ve long considered making this switch from iPhone to an ungoogled Android device. What always bothered me is still basically having to install proprietary apps from a Play Store adjacent source. Like the Aurora store is basically just the Play Store logged under someone else’s account. I know you can side load but that’d be a pain to maintain updates. Wish there was like a Flathub-like store on Android I could use instead.
I am not sure why you think this is so bad. You have a way to upload the apps you can’t get on F-Droid (default or by adding repositories (I have microG, DivestOS, Molly, Cheogram repos)). Many apps work fine enough without Play services with microG—except the stupid banking ones that don’t want you to root, run custom OS, unGoogle, or literally do anything with the device you own.
Personally I hope this is all a stop-gap to Linux phones. I tried Ubuntu Phone last year & while parts of it looked great, the rough edges were apparent—especially the chroot environments for applications not in the Ubuntu store.
Its called F-Droid
There’s no proprietary apps on F-Droid. It doesn’t even have Signal which is open source.
I’m not sure what’s your pain point then? With Aurora you can install and automatically update proprietary apps. You can use anonymous accounts so you are not officially logged in (does this still work?). If you want FOSS, then fdroid. There’s more updating tools such as unobtanium, but seems what you want is Aurora.
I’d just like to be completely free of Google’s app distribution infrastructure if possible. I’ll have to look into unobtanium. I haven’t heard of that one previously.
Google s is the largest, but not the only one. Amazon, Samsung and some OEMs have their own app stores too.
There are alson sites that archive and distribute apks, like Apkmirror.
I have a tablet logged to nothing (as in no account, not the OEM) and all my apps come from fdroid, obtanium or apkmirror.
It started as an experiment, and honestly it’s (for me) not a big hurdle, but an app store would make things easier, that’s for sure.
It is
Apple has always at least kept your data semi-private from everyone except them. It’s not perfect and it’s still putting way too much trust in Apple, but it’s preferable to Google selling your data to the highest bidder at will.
Ya, android only makes sense if you degoogle.
Same here, try to de-google my life while sitting comfortably in the Apple ecosystem as the happy hypocrite that I am. But the ecosystem is also the main reason to stay, not that it is hard to get out, but it is just a vastly superior experience if you don’t want to spend unlimited hours to customize every goddamn setting. Also, the ecosystem’s main feature ‘continuity’ is unmatched on other systems.
Google.
This, this, 💯 this. When there’s a sizable push into a Android future that isn’t #GuidedByGoogle in the same way Chromium/Chrome is, I’ll consider it. Until then its just open source paint on a proprietary cow.
