Comment by onli
7 hours ago
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.
> 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...
> 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
> 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.
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).
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.
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
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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?
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.
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.
iOS apps are truly sandboxed, they cannot carry out stunts like this:
https://localmess.github.io/
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
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”.
> I know people have a lot of complaints, but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.
Recently on HN: https://www.bugsappleloves.com/
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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Google core business is ads. It is not the same.
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The YouTube app on iOS is superior to the Android app for one
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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-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.
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> e.g. type this sequence into the calculator
Works perfectly for me.
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”.
> 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.
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?
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.
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Ngl I think that bio is hilarious.
>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!