Android Vs iOS The Truth about Apple and Google's OS

[wellofsouls]

Personally I dislike Apple as a company so I don't buy any of their products, and I have owned quite some Android devices, from Motorola Milestone 2, to Samsung Galaxy R, to Sony Xperia S, and recently an Asus Transformer Pad TF300T. Also my work phones from my company have been Xiaomi MiOne and Huawei C8812. And the only one that can be said as relatively problem-free is the Xperia (albeit I love the Transformer Pad as an Android device most).

Currently I also own an iPhone 3GS, a 1st gen iPad, and have used an iPhone 4S for some time, albeit I didn't spent a cent on them, Have to say compared to those Android devices, these iOS devices does fit the "it just works" line much better (not including the Apple Maps, of course, haven't upgraded any of those to iOS6). Granted it may not be the fault of Android, but the sucky OEM softwares (and sometimes sucky hardwares too), but as a user, I find Android devices usually require a lot of efforts to tweak the system and/or even flash custom ROMs before they can achieve the same usability as their iOS counterparts.

So despite I find the current Android's UI and functionality more advanced than the somewhat outdated iOS ones, I still cannot recommend Android devices to non-enthusiast people around me who do not want to spend a lot of time and effort to hack into their devices' systems.

The so-called freedom (or more like confusion) offered by the Android Market/Google Play doesn't help neither. For example, my mom like to use the iPad to read newspaper, and in the App Store you will only get one app for a certain newspaper, which will work, and work nicely too. Recent I got my Transformer Pad, and since sometimes my mom and dad want to use the iPad at the same time and argue on who get to use it first, I try to install the same newspaper apps from the Android Market, and lo and behold, each of those newspaper has at least half a dozen different apps, each boasting to be the best of the bunch. Yay freedom of choice, but in reality it's more confusing than useful. Some of them don't work, some of them full of crappy porn ads, some of them just have weird layout, and it's quite annoying having to spend a couple hours trying to decide which one is the "right one", and even now a lot of the apps have strange compatibility issues with the official Jellybean system of the Transformer Pad, and in the end none of them have the same quality as their iOS equivalents.

Same can be said about the Android hardware too, when there are a dozen or so possible devices for you to choose from, all of them seemingly the same, the freedom of choice becomes more like annoying confusion. Say you are on a budget, do you want a Samsung Galaxy S Plus, S Advance, Ace 2, HTC Desire S, Desire V, Incredible, One V, Sensation, Motorola Defy+ or LG Optimus? Basically they look roughly the same, the specs are similar, and the main differences the screen types and the CPU models and little numbers here and there which few non-enthusiast people can understand a letter. And in the end, whatever they choose, they'll more than likely experience some little annoyances to serious issues here and there in daily usage.

[Anibal P]

Only an Apple user would think that choice is a bad thing, choice in OS or hardware, you people must have been dropped a lot as kids

[bjoswald]

I love Android but my next phone will be an iPhone 5. I'm getting older, so I want things to "just work" without installing a bunch of 3rd-party ****.

[Growled Member]

Personally I dislike Apple as a company so I don't buy any of their products,....

Me too. I can't get pass that. I feel they are very greedy. I know all companies are but Apple seems a head above everyone else to me. That's probably the main thing that stops me from purchasing an iPhone.

[techbeck]

I love Android but my next phone will be an iPhone 5. I'm getting older, so I want things to "just work" without installing a bunch of 3rd-party ****.

Hope you dont plan on taking pictures...unless you like the color purple.

Apples saying "it just works" doesnt really apply anymore these days. Their R&D and QC has gone down a lot over the years as they have gotten bigger.

[wellofsouls]

Only an Apple user would think that choice is a bad thing, choice in OS or hardware, you people must have been dropped a lot as kids

Choice itself is not good nor bad, choice among tons of the same mediocre stuff that offers no variety nor diversity is just confusing and annoying.

It's like some merchants get a big shipment of the same oranges, and then stick tons of different labels onto them randomly and tell you "hey look they all have different stickers on them so you have a wide selection of choices", if you think that "choice" is a good thing, you must have been dropped a lot as kids.

[UKDarkJedi]

So you're saying that choice is not a good thing when you want to purchase a product or service?

Apply that same rhetoric with the computers you own, or cars, motorcycles or any other manufactured product in the world practically.

Choice is what drives markets, and gives consumers the option of buying something they want based on their budget.

If you went shopping for food and got told you could only purchase one type, how would you feel being forced into eating something you didn't like? I myself couldn't eat Ramen all my life and on the same token wouldn't want to eat Veal every day either. I always have, and always will prefer choice.

[margrave]

I love android. The way I see it, Apple is for people who don't want to have to think. Apple will make all the decisions for you, they know better anyway. Android requires thought, and choices to be made. Oh the horror.

[wellofsouls]

So you're saying that choice is not a good thing when you want to purchase a product or service?

Apply that same rhetoric with the computers you own, or cars, motorcycles or any other manufactured product in the world practically.

Choice is what drives markets, and gives consumers the option of buying something they want based on their budget.

If you went shopping for food and got told you could only purchase one type, how would you feel being forced into eating something you didn't like? I myself couldn't eat Ramen all my life and on the same token wouldn't want to eat Veal every day either. I always have, and always will prefer choice.

Choice are only good if you actually have good variety and diversity. When I purchase different types of food, they are actually different. For example, ramen and tempura are different, heck chicken tempura and seafood tempura are different, and that kind of choice is nice. But if they serve you one set of ramen with a red bowl, another set of ramen with pink bowl, with exactly the same ramen in those two bowls, and tell you that you have a choice in eating different food, that'd be ridiculous.

That's what I see with a lot of the so-called "choices" in the Android apps, like my previous newspaper app example, for one certain newspaper, there are a whopping nine apps, all deliver the same content, the only differences are that some of them look rubbish on a pad, some of them don't even work on a pad, and some of them have crappy ads in certain places, some of them have crappy ads in other places.

I'd say it's good choices if they offer distinct features, functionality, or advantages, not when they offer basically the same stuff with different shortcomings. It's like giving you a bunch of oranges from the same shipment with different degree of rottenness and different stickers on them, and tell you that you may have your choices. Freedom of choice does not mean lack of good quality control and proper regulation, else the choices are only confusing you and wasting your time trying to pick the least bad one. When shop A give you only one brand of good oranges, shop B give you a dozen different brands of rotten oranges, I'd rather go to shop A instead of picking from the different choices in shop B.

It's kinda the same on the hardware side too, when the only notable difference for non-enthusiast users between the choices are just one crapware or another crapware, one bizarre issue or another bizarre issue. Granted brand computers also come with crapwares, but removing crapwares from computers or reinstalling systems usually don't have the risk of bricking your computer, nor voiding the warranty. It's just like what one friend of mine said after both her HTC phone and her colleague's Samsung phone freeze up one day, "buying an Android phone is just asking for problems, whether it's HTC, Samsung, or Motorola". :|

[UKDarkJedi]

That just all sounds like you've got a very biased view. I could list almost a dozen of my friends with Iphone 4 and 4S's that have all had dozens of crashes, freezes and other problems as well (how about the phone itself wiping all user files, like music and photographs when it froze and rebooted?). However I still now Apple made very good quality hardware for those devices, and like ALL electronics they have problems.

However, it's clear you've got your view on Android hardware carved in stone so I fail to see the point in arguing anymore.

[Astra.Xtreme]

I just bought a Galaxy S3 to play with (and then give to my gf), and I'd have to say it's a pretty disappointing phone. The enclosure really is the cheapo plastic that everybody has been harping on. It's really really light, which makes it seem even more cheap. The biggest disappointment was the screen. The screen is big and really not too big (in my opinion), but the quality was pretty bad. The pixels were very easy to see, which made the icons noticeably jagged. At arms length it wasn't too bad, but at a foot or so from your face, it was very easy to realize the lack of clarity. The colors were okay, but it still suffers from the over-saturation problem that the S2 had. I have a 4S and comparing the 2 side-by-side was a night-and-day difference. The 4S has a better display in terms of clarity and color, and it really wasn't a close comparison. A lot of people probably don't care, but I'd personally prefer quality over size.

What I was pleasantly surprised by was the improvement of Android. The S3 was running the latest version of ICS, and it ran pretty well. I wasn't able to make it lag as much as some of the older Android phones I've played with. And I'm sure JB or a 3rd party rom would make it mostly flawless. So in that regards, I commend Google for cleaning up Android a bit. In terms of hardware, it's clear they have a long ways to go. Just my 2 cents.

[wellofsouls]

That just all sounds like you've got a very biased view. I could list almost a dozen of my friends with Iphone 4 and 4S's that have all had dozens of crashes, freezes and other problems as well (how about the phone itself wiping all user files, like music and photographs when it froze and rebooted?). However I still now Apple made very good quality hardware for those devices, and like ALL electronics they have problems.

However, it's clear you've got your view on Android hardware carved in stone so I fail to see the point in arguing anymore.

I'm not sure how many crashes your friends experience, but from my experience with the iPhone 3GS (which my cousin gave to my dad after she upgraded to 4S), it freezes about twice in a whole year, and never had any issue in taking calls. Compared to, say, my Milestone 2, which freezes about twice a week at least, periodically not able to move the unlocker to receive calls, and at times just dropping off in the middle of calls for no reason. The Galaxy R is even worse. I'd not say it's all about the hardware itself, but more because crapwares like TouchWiz, Sense, BLUR, or whatever they use. I find flashing a custom ROM is almost required for good usability of Android devices. The Xperia S I currently use suffer less problems as I flashed it with MIUI just days after getting it. Still about one freeze-ups per month or so, and sometimes difficulties in taking calls, but much better and smoother operations overall.

And the Transformer Pad I just got and really love, again shows strange charging problems after it upgrades to the official Jellybean 4.1.1 ROM, it can charge alright from the keyboard dock, and the keyboard dock can charge okay from the charger, but direct connection from the charger to the pad itself gives some unpredictable results, sometimes it charges normally, sometimes it doesn't charge but the battery doesn't drain during use neither, and sometimes it just doesn't act like connected. There are also strange performance hiccups despite it scores very well in benchmarks like AnTuTu and Quadrant. Since there are no stable custom Jellybean ROM for the Transformer Pad, I'll have to bear with it for now.

Maybe it's also because of difference in software quality. For example, Fruit Ninja runs super smooth on the 1st gen iPad, but it always jerks and unresponsive at times on Android, even on the quad-core Transformer Pad with Jellybean. Where's My Water on Android always tries to run some background process that crashes constantly on Jellybean. And the recently released Bad Piggies, frequently slowdowns and sometimes crashes during gameplay, where the iPad version has no such issue. All of those are directly from the Android Market, no third-party downloads.

Yes I do have my deep impressions on Android devices, but after my experiences with all of those Android devices I have owned, it's kinda hard to recommend it to non-enthusiasts who do not wish to hack into their systems and flash custom ROMs.