Comment by array_key_first

2 months ago

Android phones do phone things. They work perfectly fine - in many ways better than iPhones, and in others not as well.

I switched to an iPhone more in an act to protest Google and I regret my decision. Things didn't get easier, they got harder.

I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...

Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.

  • I switched from iPhone to Android and I was fully expecting a world of pain but I was (am?) pleasantly surprised.

    The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.

    And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.

    • I'm not too big of a fan of KDE content but totally get why people use it.

      I do want to suggest you install termux, and do it from fdroid rather than the play store.

      I'm guessing you're on Wayland, so check out ydotool. (If still on x s/x/y) there's a lot of cool things to do with tools like that. Basic one is use your phone as a keyboard (like KDE connect can do, but I found it more reliable and KDEC doesn't play well with VPNs)

      I wrote a similar script in Apple Shortcuts and... wtf is this bullshit. My files backup Shortcut is even uglier. I'm incredibly impressed at the hacky shit I was forced to do just to backup photos... I almost would rather pay for an app that does it. I almost would rather learn how to write an iOS app. Just to... replace a 10 line bash script -__-

      Since I'm still not a big fan of Google my next phone is going to be a Pixel and I'll install Graphene on day 1. That is, unless something better comes out :)

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  • Swipe up from the bottom (which goes to the app switcher), and then swipe up any app you want to force-quit.

    • Sorry, I definitely was unclear when angry writing this

        > Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app?
      

      I end up doing that a lot but it's honestly a bad solution that shouldn't have to be used

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