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
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.
While I can't speak to the editing side of things, the live music apps for ios are exceptional. My dad is a musician and I'm a sound engineer. The sheer number and quality of the apps dwarfs the android offerings.
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 [...]
We are apparently very spoiled with how smooth some things work on smart phones.
I want dedicated cameras to offer a superior experience. In stead it is quite bad.
In order to publish one should first disconnect the internet?
I have to put down the camera and pick up the competing device?
My absolute favorite annoyance with my cameras is the lack of charging over USB. After taking a good amount of pictures I have to guess if there is enough battery left to transfer the images to the computer.
Not that PCs or laptops offer very good charging power. This because there is little demand.
It seems in order to make the superior experience the camera maker should also make phones and/or laptops? I have no idea really.
All I know is that my phone has 100W charging. I can almost immediately return to the front. The camera does have swappable batteries going for it but that I have to remove it from the tripod to reload it won't win the war.
I don't know about Canon's offering... but Sony's is lackluster to say the least. On my A6000 (and possibly other older models), you can't import RAWs, only JPEGs. Not to add that manual connection to the camera's wifi is a rather "annoying" process, having to go into the camera settings, manually turning on wifi, going into the phone's settings/quick menu to connect to said hotspot, then open the app, etc...
It's just a plain worse experience to just some extremely good phones like the iPhones with pro camera apps
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"
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.
Since Android has 70% of the world market share, and there are countries where iOS is hardly a presence other than the country's elite population, those are quite a few customers they will be missing on.
Maybe they can keep the lights on with those 30%, I guess.
> 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.
> 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 was there for the launch of the App Store with iOS. They didn’t have to worry about backward compatibility, because they took the time to worry about user privacy and app developer overreach from the very start.
A difference is also that Apple has 100% control over the hardware and can enforce their updates much better than Android.
Android has to deal with tons of devices, and allow developers to update their tooling while supporting older devices. I actually find it quite impressive how they manage to do that. Must be difficult.
All the more reason to get the design right out of the gate, instead of throwing something out there and hoping to fix it later. Especially something so fundamental, like privacy.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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" ?
> You assuming my comment was just a personal list of my favorite apps is way off base
Well I am saying that it is a list of apps I have never used (if I have heard of them at all), so it sounds arbitrary for a comparison between iOS and Android.
> Because I was researching possible coding strategies for a new smartphone app
Sure, yeah, it makes sense there. I just don't feel like "ChatGPT released their Android app 2 months after iOS means that iOS is better in terms of apps".
Ads running on premium devices are worth more to apps (and therefore the platforms). Users on premium devices pay more in subscriptions and in-app purchases.
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.
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.
It really isn't. Chromium (since 67) does USB interface class filtering to prevent access to sensitive devices. Then there is the blacklist you mentioned.
On top of that, straight from Yubico's site:
".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."
This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.
> ".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."
Of course, but a phishing website "fake-bank.com" could collect user's username, password, and then prompt them to touch their yubikey. This wouldn't trigger any alarm bells because it's part of the expected flow.
> This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.
Yes it is. The only reason why Yubikeys are immune to phishing and TOTP codes aren't is because a trusted component (the browser) accurately informs the security key about the website origin. When a phishing website at "fake-bank.com" is allowed to directly communicate with the security key there's nothing stopping it from requesting credentials for "bank.com"
Again, that exploit factor is irrelevant now because WebUSB is blacklisted from accessing, among other things, HID class devices. So no site, even with permission, can access U2F devices over WebUSB. There is no special blacklist needed per vendor or anything.
You are right that it was a security hole in Chrome <67. Which is almost a decade in the past by now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So many amazing open-source developers just don't want to publish their app to app store because of the fees. On android, this is way way easier. If google keeps making this difficult, then i'll just have to switch to linux phone
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.
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 personally wrote an app where the android version was better than the iOS version (because of background tasks and notification limitations on iOS). Your "not a single android app" is an absolute statement and thus absolutely wrong.
There's many iOS only apps that either don't have anything comparable on android or the alternative is just nowhere near as good (a lot of it is more creative-focused stuff)
Would you mind mentioning at least one? Not something niche (as there is lotso of niche apps in Playstore which appstore will never see) but something sizeable userbase would install?
Flightly is really popular on iOS, there's not really a comparable android version. Gentler Streak and a lot of fitness app also don't have comparable android versions - most of the examples I can think of are apps that focus (and charge for) good design
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.
iOS has the advantage of having a more closed app store, google play will shove whatever ad infested slop in your face and show you thousands of generic ad infested solutions to your problem, whereas iOS will usually have an easier to find not as sucky solution
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.
I'm just gonna put it out there, more choice always being good is the ideology, but when you measure user experience, they consistently rate smooth, fast experiences over feature count unless it's a feature that's important to them.
I don't think iOS is less feature rich except in some specific areas, like web browsers, but you can see in the extreme example that if you could use any web browser for 20 minutes before running out of battery vs safari for hours, one is clearly better. Then you're just haggling over scale. Having the choice to use bad options is not really a choice, unless you have to eg for certain functionality.
And like, in other contexts this isn't even a debate. You talk about the useless feature bloat of Microsoft Word and the associated UI crud, and people are like 'yeah'. But in this context people will straight up make an argument that n+1 features better than n features.
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.
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.