Android sucks. It feels like a budget, second-rate product. It’s not polished. It’s for nerds who like to customize everything. You open the web browser and it just seems janky. That’s my experience.
Recently I got an iPhone 15 pro max. I lasted 2 days and returned it. The hardware is cool but the software is still an unusable trash
Apple is a cult
Kids need to be reminded that being a hacker is super fucking cool, and you aren’t doing cool hackery shit on iOS.
I’m an iPhone user. But I’m also an old school hacker guy. I really want kids to learn more about this stuff.
Computing and the internet being a little bit difficult used to be a feature, not a bug. You had to learn a baseline to get involved. It wasn’t accessible, but it was effective. We need more of that.
I’m really tired of helping a Gen Z person troubleshoot a problem on their PC and them struggling to understand what a path is or how to navigate a Windows filesystem to find what they need. You know? We’re failing these kids and young adults. We’re failing them so badly. We need to make this stuff cool again.
i have someone with android on my phone plan and every time he asks me for help with his phone it’s always something dumb like some app takes control of sms or whatever. i got tired of wasting my time and just tell him to buy an iphone if he doesn’t like it
Read the whole thing.
The writer still misses one huge point. When you are talking about Android, you are going to have to talk about what that means.
Because Android as it stands right now, has no consistent experience. Different manufacturer slaps different skins on their devices and some goes all the way to slapping ads built into the system now.
That shenanigans shunted Android into places where you don’t want your brand to go.
Here’s the thing about Android, there’s too many types of android phones and I’m unsure whether which one is better. Compared to Apple, it’s simple.
Apple has definitely won the branding wars in tv/movies. You can easily compile references to their tech like facetime, screen sharing/imessage (a couple of movies and an full episode of modern family used it as the main vehicle to tell the story), or even Live Photos (which seems like a big reach, but a whole episode of The Other Two was based on it). I wonder if things like that have an effect on teens’ view of apple v. every other tech company
Apple has definitely won the branding wars in tv/movies.
They also continue to reinforce this on the apple tv shows/movies. You constantly see the people using Apple products in them, and now that the service is a few years old and actually has some banger shows (looking at you Severance, my favorite show), that’s just going to continue
Android is primarily an advertising platform for Google it’s almost as if everything else comes second, maybe because it does.
I don’t see how Android can really change its brand identity for the better when it has very little brand identity to speak of.
I move from an Android phone to a different Android phone, and I will lose quality of life features because the Android skin is different.
Which probably also makes it harder to lock users in because unless you always stick with the same brand, you would be fairly used to adjusting to feature loss.
Android is “customizable” but you can’t even get your phone to reach feature parity with the last phone you were using.
Without exception, the only people I see EXCITED about $1000 Android flagship phones are the 30-50 year old geeky men I work alongside in IT/development.
Virtually everyone else: they either LOVE their iPhone… OR more commonly: they don’t give a crap about phones at all… and thus bought a dirt cheap Android or a very old iPhone model, because “low cost” was their number one concern.
Why is it a problem? Is this really something anyone needs to worry about?
Why does a phone have to be cool though?
I think a big part of the issue is google just isn’t a competent company. Messaging and video calling apps are a surprisingly big deal for people and they’ve failed spectacularly to make a decent competitor to FaceTime/iMessage. Also basic things like having the camera work well for 3rd party apps, I’m sure there’s a way to do it they’ve just failed to. Honestly android would probably be much better if it was proprietary but that’s not changing, but even thing they can control they do a bad job at. I miss android but I just don’t trust google as a company
What does iMessage have that Google messages doesn’t have?
FaceTime is also higher with kids these days, they literally hang out on FT for hours.