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Comment by bruceb | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what the point of this article is. There are plenty of Quad core, 2gb ram, 16gb phones for under $100 already available in the US. Of course some are initially locked but they are locked to MVNO that have relatively cheap plans $20-$40 a month.

This configuration (Quad,2gb,16gb) seems like a good minimum that you can use most apps without major problems and have enough space to not uninstall stuff all the time.

Plus now the used market has many high quality phones that are available. A used Samsung S5 should meet most people's basic needs. The difference between a 2018 phone and a 2015 phone is much smaller than 2015 and a 2012 phone.

As for place like India, there are plenty of phones in the $80-$99 range that meet these specs. And many that are at the $40-50 price points that have worse specs but still usable.

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The difference isn't just the price. It's that all of these phones are also running an optimized version of Android that is going to run on the lower specs better than anything else. It doesn't matter if the specs seem the same between devices, if the vendor adds a bunch of crap or just drops aosp without optimizing for the hardware, the phone is going to run terribly. This is the current state of most low end android phone's which they appear to be addressing with Android Go phones.

I'm pretty much through buying "flagship" devices due to the pathetically short software support lifetime they have, I bought a second hand Xperia Z5 Compact for £150 about 6 months ago and loaded Lineage OS onto it.

Even my old Xperia Z3 has a port of Oreo available, and its perfectly functional.

Flagship is just companies trying to emulate Apple to fleece unsuspecting price-taking fools.

I'm not buying any phones anymore unless they come from Google or Apple. Even manufacturers that do update their phones can be very slow getting security fixes out.

The Pixel devices don't really last that long either, and there isn't much progress on custom ROMs due to the weird partition layout.

They are the best of all the Android devices though. Of all phones Apple probably do the best job of supporting their phones. If Google Fi doesn't work well, I'm going to order an iPhone because I know I'll be happy with that. All I really want are security fixes for 2-3 years and a very good and fast camera.

The iPhone is a flagship with excellent software support, it just so happens it’s also Apple's only phone line

I can't put up with iOS, it feels like I'm using a crippled feature phone rather than a pocket computer.

Coming to Android from WebOS with Preware (where you could install an LDXE chroot in one click) felt the same way.

But my tastes have changed over the years, now if I want a pocket computer I’ll just get a pocket computer. My phone needs to make phone calls and not annoy me. The same freedom that makes Android not an iOS clone can be (and is often) abused, and now Google is cracking down on said freedom try and save us all from apps abusing the features that let Android apps do amazing things (like background processing and hidden APIs).

I’m an Android Developer but I use an iPhone because at the end of the day it does what it needs to and no app will ever be able to show ads on my lockscreen.

I know what you mean, sadly users sometimes don't have the awareness to take care of themselves properly, and will be taken advantage of by malicious software.

Even though I know Androids rather flexible API's and Intents system are all exploitable, I really appreciate the freedom they give me.

While I find Apple's approach to functionality and UX condescending, there is a large swath of users who either want somebody else to take all the effort away from them, or need it.

I guess its nice that both kinds of users have something to cater to their needs, but I wish the mobile OS space wasn't a duopoly.

>sadly users sometimes don't have the awareness to take care of themselves properly, and will be taken advantage of by malicious software

Or they have better things to do.

One of the top 3 non-AD listings for a file manager on Android is an app that takes over your lockscreen, integrates performance killing, crash inducing “memory optimizes”, and (my favorite) takes over system wide touch events to implement a (vey easy to accidentally trigger) gesture to open a full screen menu that draws over all your current apps.

On my PCs I’m able to stay safe and those aren’t nearly as locked down as either, but I have better things to do than start figuring out which apps I’m downloading from a walled garden are malware... that kind of defeats the purpose of a walled garden.

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