Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

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When the Android phones came on the market, I was extatic. Linux, in my pocket!

However, Android did not live up to my expectations at all. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but Android was not it.

After a while I came to understand that for me personally Android was a bad fit, and everything I had envisioned about running Linux on my phone was ill-adviced. Linux and FreeBSD are my main two operating systems I run on my own computers and servers, and I would not trade them for anything in the world on my main laptop, main desktop and servers. But on phones neither have anything to offer that is of use to me actually.

I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I use my iPhone for web browsing, watching videos, making music, playing some games, taking photos, 2nd factor auth, sending and receiving money, SSH client in my pocket, GPS with updated maps, listening to music, writing down notes, setting alarms, keeping track of my schedule, keeping in touch with people, creating PDFs that are indistinguishable from the scan a full size flatbed scanner would give me. The list goes on.

Everything I thought I wanted when I imagined having Linux in my pocket turned out to be a distraction. When I need Linux or FreeBSD, I have my laptop, desktop and servers for that.

Anyway, the point is to say that I don’t identify with the two groups of people you said are their target audience, but I find myself a very happy iPhone user.

But I am not married to Apple, and I am a loyal customer only because of 1. their stance on privacy and security and 2. their product fits me so well.

If they mess up with my trust then they will lose me as a customer. If they make changes to iOS that make using it bothersome, they will lose me as a customer.

> I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

Personally I'm still pretty annoyed you can't replace the default url handlers for stuff like Maps and Mail. Every time Apple Maps pops up I curse them.

on the maps front it annoys me they're all silos, and there isn't, at the very least, easy switching between map apps for the same coordinates&zoom. The location api exposes a notion of 'here'/'location', I want a shared notion of 'there'/'destination' (useful not only for mapping, but eg transport apps).

Pipe dream level: Apple Maps gains api-accessible import/export of geodata, (POIs, tracks, layers...?), so opening any compatible map app can both open at the 'there' location and can display the shared geodata.

(typically I use google maps for urban stuff, maps.me for pre-downloaded offline maps and POIs, ordnance survey for uk outdoors, michelin maps for france (the search is terrible, but having roads marked as scenic is fantastic), bikehub for cycle routes... and more. I switch maps a lot...but never to Apple Maps)

> I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I could give you one. An actual user-accessible filesystem instead of having only iCloud plus siloed app-specific storage. (No, Apple's eventual capitulation to include a "Files" app which just aggregates files from different apps doesn't count.)

Seconded. Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing. I hate when people build abstractions that lie to you about the way things work - because lies are always inconsistent, they'll eventually leak and confuse people.

Proficient users aren't born, they're made. Or, increasingly, not made, thanks to contemporary UX trends.

What do you need the filesystem for on your device?

I've had direct access to my filesystem on my iOS devices since 2012 and it is very very rare that I use it. And when I do it is mostly for fun and exploration, nothing a normal user would be doing anyway.

I am not sure that the way files are usually presented is actually that much better.

You and I know that a file is data and a file format is defined by the structure of the data.

Most regular users I have talked to don’t know this. If you ask them what a file format is they will say that the file format is determined by the extension of the file.

Even with a file system presented to the user you still end up with most people not having a real understanding of what files actually are.

Likewise, a lot of users will insist that certain file formats “belong” to some particular program, just because the extension associated with the format is handled by that program on their computer.

Furthermore, most users have no idea what really happens when you open a file in a program.

In fact I would bet that at least some are completely unable to distinguish the data of the file from the interface that they are using to edit the file.

A file system is a powerful abstraction, but I don’t think it teaches the “truth” on its own.

Neither do I think knowing about files is the most important for someone wishing to understand computation.

The most important to understand is what a data format is, and knowing that knowing the details of the byte-level structure of the data is what allows software to be implemented to interact with and optionally transform that data.

Furthermore, I wish more people knew some fundamental things about data like

- the difference between text and an image of text

- the difference between bitmap and vector graphics

- the difference between lossy and lossless compression, and how these work

- why some formats are hard to work with, for example extracting data from PDF files

Etc.

Understanding these things does not require a user visible fs, nor will a user visible fs help most people understand these things for reasons I stated earlier in this comment.

All abstractions eventually leak and confuse people. The file system itself is an imperfect abstraction.

>Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing

That's nonsense. Most users don't care that there's a file system and they surely don't care how it works. They care that, when they open up Microsoft Word, they can find the document they last created or an older document. They care that, when they open an app called Photos, they see their pictures. They don't care how they're stored by the computer or how they're organized, they only care that they can find what they're looking for when they're looking for it.

It may be easier for you to navigate through a file system because that's how you've adapted your workflow but to say that not having one is somehow destroying productivity is crazy nonsense. You're taking your individual experience and extrapolating it on populations that are not similar to you at all.

I mean... do you honestly thing that Donald Trump/your grandmother/a teenager cares that there's a file system on his iPhone?

We must use the phone in very different ways. I spend hours a day in a terminal, so I live by a file system on a computer. Yet I've never felt the need for a filesystem on an iPhone.

When android first came out they were apps like tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....) almost immediately that showcased pretty clearly a lot of things you could do on android but not iOS, a lot of examples are here: http://www.crunchytricks.com/2016/10/tasker-profiles.html

My personal favorites are to turn off wifi if I'm not at home or work, turn off bluetooth if I'm not home, turn down brightness at night and shaking your phone to turn on the flashlight.

I've a fun one: The BlackBerry KEYone and KEY2 have a physical button called the Convenience Key that can be set to any app or shortcut. I set mine to a Tasker shortcut that changes what it does based on the day and time (mostly based around my daily commute, for bus prediction times and an e-reader).

I have had the same experience with iPhones - being unable to figure out how to do things should have been easy. Ended up having to use my Android to look up how to do things.

It's not that things aren't possible (sometimes), it's that they're not discoverable.

I've done extensive user testing with people on both Android and iOS devices (and, comparatively on Windows and MacOS devices) and the common thread that I see is that Android users coming to an iPhone try to use it exactly the same way that they use their Android device and then get frustrated that it doesn't work the same way. Windows users try to use a Mac exactly the same way they use Windows and get frustrated when it doesn't work that way. Inversely, the same is try for iPhone users trying to use Android and Mac users trying to use Windows. They ignore the intuitive features of both sides simply because they're used to working with one or the other.

If you can't figure out how to do things on an iPhone and think it's difficult, I'd wager a argument that it's because you're not just looking at what's there, you're trying to project your existing experience onto a different device and expecting it to work the same way. In other words (and I don't really say this sarcastically), you're using it wrong. If they were meant to be used the same way, they'd be the same products and they're not.

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