Memes

Please, I’m iOS user but I enjoy reading advances of android because both systems push each other to be better. We don’t need toxic BS here too.

Interesting, so windows vs mac os didn't cause a flame war but Android vs IOS does.

Not sure if it's changed since I had an iPhone, but the camera settings are located in the system settings app.

You have to exit the camera app, open system settings, find camera, just to change basic things.

On Android you just.. change the settings in the damn camera app..

Unless of course, you pay $100 and call yourself a developer

iOS devs on the other hand often only support the newest version of iOS, so if your device doesn’t get new OS updates any more, you can toss it.

And the newest versions of iOS only run smoothly on the newest iPhone hardware, so if you want your phone to keep running quickly and smoothly you have to keep updating to the newest hardware. Planned obsolescence in action.

For most apps, this doesn't matter at all. The vast majority of Android apps are fully Java/Kotlin, which is architecture-agnostic.

It's only when you need to use C libraries where architecture matters, and most things using C libraries are games, which already target 64-bit.

Yeah, that's the Play Store though, not Android itself.

I made some Android apps back in the day, so I know what's happening behind the scenes. Mostly it's that Google updates requirements for the apps. Every once in a while, the requirements go up (e.g. "must be targeted for at least Android Version/API Level X", or "Must follow design guideline Y"). The main point for this is that they don't want abandoned apps cluttering the Play Store.

Old apps tend to not support newer features, e.g. the user being able to allow/deny single permissions. On older Android versions you could either allow all permissions or not use the app, while nowadays you can just pick and choose which permissions to allow.

If you install an older app, it won't support this pick and chose system. Stuff like that.

But all that is just Google/Play Store. If you download the APK from somewhere else (e.g. F-Droid) you can totally run apps from 2010 on a modern phone.

That's probably because the Play Store has policies on what apps need to do to keep being downloadable - if you acquire an APK, there's a really good chance that it might still be installable.

If it wasn't for locked devices and proprietary drivers, it would be a nice experience, very close to linux.

Works on my phone.

You just need Universal SafetyNet Fix and all is fine.

Android updates have become both less exciting and less meaningful because so many of the core apps are updated through the Play Store, and features just come out when they are ready. If Google held off updating their apps for a year everytime, each update would feel like a much bigger deal

Oh, Project Treble is in full swing, which is one of the main reasons you now frequently see Android phones with 3+ years of software support, often even with multiple Android OS version updates.

Project Mainline is the other thing that caused OS updates to be rather lame. Since increasingly many former Android components are now just apps updated over the Play Store, there are less features in each Android update. For example, back in the day, even the Android browser was part of the OS and would only be updated when the OS was updated.

Now Google is even throwing apps like the dialer and the messages SMS app out of AOSP.

With so little of what used to be Android remaining inside Android and these outsourced components following a different release schedule, Android OS updates are mostly limited to UI refreshes or under-the-hood improvements.

But while this makes OS updates less exciting, it also means that you get improvements faster (because components don't have to wait for the next OS update) and longer (because you get component updates when your device manufacturer dropped support for your phone).

Regarding the share menu:

There is actually only one OS share menu, but different apps sometimes implement their own share menus, which is dumb, but not really Android's fault. But yeah, the product managers at Firefox for Android are peculiar, to say the least.

depends on the app

you have something to access some cloud-api-stuff? yeah, probably all calls fail

some game that uses hardware-specific things? might break too

your average clock app or document viewer? that got a decent chance it'll still run.

It's a question of how fast your OS changes and how mature APIs have gotten. Android is a lot more stable now, than it was 12 years ago.

And if you look at truly mature OSes, like Linux or Windows, you probably can still run most apps that are multiple decades old. (For Win that means pretty much anything that was written for Win32(s) and newer - so even stuff that was around on Win 3.11)

I once bought a load of Lego games on my iPhone 3GS, mostly for my kid to play, but with a mind to play them myself when I got a chance.

Then iPhone switched over to 64 bit, and those games didn't. Then the games got re-released in 64 bit, as a free download for the first level, with an in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the game. A game I'd already paid for on that platform, that I could no longer play.

That still pisses me off.