This seems backwards. Only reason to buy Apple phones is the superior hardware. As far as the OS goes, Android (and the google services backing it... especially Google Now) have completely surpassed it and continue to increase the gap every day. Increasingly, Google is treating the mobile devices as just a conduit to access their cloud services (including their far superior machine intelligence backing it). While Apple continues to treat the iPhone as a beautiful device with mediocre cloud services backing the hardware.
Don't believe me? Imagine if you Google stopped creating apps for the iPhone. How big a catastrophe would that be for Apple management? Now imagine Apple ceased to exist. Would the Android ecosystem be affected in any way?
For example, I rooted my phone to find out if any wake locks were draining my battery. It didn't show anything. Looked at the battery usage screen, it didn't show the culprit. Eventually I had to do a science experiment on my phone and disable all background processing and then switch on apps one by one to see the battery life change.
I finally found it was my carrier's generic usage app that was killing my battery. The app was installed from the app store on my unlocked device, so it wasn't carrier pre-installed crapware that caused this.
On iOS, I've never had to do this because app developers are not able to drain your battery like that.
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Camera software speed and quality has never been matched for me on iOS. Maybe motorola gets to iOS's camera speed. The software also makes getting good photos a lot easier with things like detecting your hand shake with the accelerometer and taking the photo when you're still in the moment.
Siri has better locked screen and in car voice interaction for me compared to android when I tried with android OS 5
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If google disappeared, you would basically get china and other companies would fill in the gap.
The series of caveats there tells a tale of it's own. Google Now is so far ahead of Siri, there's simply no comparison... starting with the basic magic of automatic contextual updates and notifications without even asking ("Your flight has been delayed by 30 minutes", "Heavy traffic on 101. Leave in 10 minutes to reach your meeting on time" etc.)
Add to that almost perfect voice recognition with any accents in the world, automatic language recognition etc and all that backed up by Google search engine. Sorry, calling out Siri as a Apple's superior cloud service is simply not credible at this point.
For me, I only use voice in a car and some other basic cases, since it fails on the locked phone case for me, it's not that useful.
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My basic issues with android:
1. A battery monitor that just works(tm) without playing science experiment. An OS that clamps down on apps to prevent it becoming an issue in the first place.
2. Faster & better camera software, quickly accessible from a locked screen, quick to start, helps me take photos without me realizing it.
3. A voice interface that works well when the screen is locked or occupied by another app, where it easily does things like:
a) Send & speak text messages
b) Control my music / podcasts
c) Change my GPS navigation.
4. An OS that really tries in security. Android is not as secure as iOS, as evidenced by the prices of jailbreaks.
5. An OS that will get updates on devices for years to come. Windows has being doing it for decades despite having similar hardware fragmentation, why can't android do it?
https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how-to-see-whats-kil...
The difference is you don't have to play science experiment because you can clearly see what the cause is and how to shut it off. The android battery monitor is ineffective in comparison in my experience.
The incoherence of that response (China is not a company) should be a clue.
In china google play services don't really work due to the GFW, so everything is replaced with some local chinese equivalent. You have android without the google parts for the most part.
While this is a usage pattern familiar to HN'ers the average user doesn't care too much about cloud services.
Average users care more about things like camera, battery, music, playing games and overall ease of use.
The only critical Google service for iPhone users is search (and maybe Youtube). Both are available from the browser.
Umm don't know which world you're living in but Google Now/Search, Photos, Maps/Waze, Youtube, Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive.. etc. Pretty much every smartphone in the world is running one or more of those services on a daily basis.
Care to name one Apple cloud service that's so indispensable to that many users? Or perhaps, even just to iOS users?
I never said they weren't running one or more of those services. Of course they are. I said that aside from Search and Youtube they weren't critical.
But I also wasn't aware we're calling basic web search, email and other web applications that have been around for a decade or more "cloud services". When did that happen? I guess by that definition (everything is a cloud service!) then you're certainly right - cloud services are indeed very popular.
I'm particularly fond of IMAP "Cloud Email" or as it used to be called "email". That's a good one. There's also "Cloud Messaging" (I've been calling it "texting" but I guess I'm pretty old school).
>Care to name one Apple cloud service that's so indispensable to that many users? Or perhaps, even just to iOS users?
I'm not sure why you're trying to make this an Apple vs Google thing. That's not at all what I intended. But re-reading your original comment I see thats exactly the kind of thing you were trying to stir up. I'm not interested in that type of discussion. Not even a little bit. Goodbye.
I don't think the disappearance of Youtube app in it's current form would make any difference.
