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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious? iOS upgrades give you the entire OS experience and upgraded app support with a few flashy features missing.

Compare that to Android where the best case is invisible security updates and guess which causes upgrade anxiety?

I'm an Android developer for a living but I use iPhones because the Android ecosystem is currently optimized for generating e-waste.

SoC manufacturers generally don't make enough money to want to do more than the bare minimum, so unless you're Google making billions off a hundred other angles you don't do OS updates for more than a few years and maybe pay lip service with security upgrades.

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>iOS upgrades give you the entire OS experience and upgraded app support with a few flashy features missing.

As you know, Google updates apps and cloud features on a continuous basis while Apple holds back most new features until they release a new OS version. If you look through the list of iPad OS 16 features for instance, you'll see that almost all of them are in fact new apps, app features and sharing/cloud features that Android users would be getting anyway [1].

Of the very few actual OS features, the most substantial one by far is Stage Manager, which is only supported on M1 iPads as esteth has said. This isn't just "a few flashy features".

I'm a bit unlucky with my iPad purchases because this is the second time I'm missing out on the most important new OS features on a new-ish iPad. Granted, nothing of the sort ever happened to me on iPhone. I'm rather happy with Apple's iOS update policy.

[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/ipados/ipados-16-preview/

Stage Manager will straight up not work on non-M1 iPads.

You cannot keep 4 major apps in memory without seeing an eviction.

Also your comparison doesn't make sense, you're comparing iOS built-in apps to Android 3rd party apps by Google... AOSP's built-in photos and emails apps have barely been updated in the last decade.

All in all if you think iPadOS is letting you down, Android upgrades are a circus that Google refuses to rein in.

>you're comparing iOS built-in apps to Android 3rd party apps by Google

I'm not comparing them, I'm putting them aside for this comparison, because Apple links a lot of regular apps to the release cycle of the OS while Google doesn't do that. That's a separate issue that isn't relevant for the point I was making.

I'm only talking about features that would have to be part of the OS on iOS as well as on Android. There are very few new features of that sort in iPad OS 16. I'm not getting most of them.

I understand that this may be down to hardware capabilities. But Apple does have some wiggle room when it comes to deciding how to implement any new features and how much work to put into making them less resource intensive.

I honestly don't know what point you're making.

You realize the Gmail app is not the equivalent of the iOS Mail app right? That would be the AOSP email app which only gets updates when Android OS gets updates...

>I honestly don't know what point you're making.

My point is that I didn't get the most important new iPad OS features on my new-ish iPad. Apple simply didn't implement those features in a way that makes them work on relatively recent devices.

>You realize the Gmail app is not the equivalent of the iOS Mail app right?

Yes, but the differences are not relevant to the debate. I'm talking about OS features only, and I'm disregarding regular apps that just happen to get distributed along with the OS for business reasons.

> My point is that I didn't get the most important new iPad OS features on my new-ish iPad. Apple simply didn't implement those features in a way that makes them work on relatively recent devices

Like I said already:

- there was no magical way to make this feature work on your "newish iPad".

- You can even test it yourself: open Safari, open a few productivity apps, and watch the cold starts come flying.

- Stage Manager is not the most important feature, being on the newest development target is since if you're not most updated apps will not support your device in 12 months

> I'm talking about OS features only, and I'm disregarding regular apps that just happen to get distributed along with the OS for business reasons.

So you're arbitrarily deciding which OS features count, cool... you're free to do that... but that's the definition of a strawman.

Apple's approach to an OS places more value on built in apps, so you see a ton of app based features, that use OS level APIs that don't exist until a new OS upgrade.

You're trying to say Apple could just ship them as app updates, but no, they can't. The APIs they're built on don't exist until a new OS version comes out.

>there was no magical way to make this feature work on your "newish iPad"

I don't know how difficult it would have been to support a broader range of devices. There are always trade-offs involved, engineering trade-offs as well as economic ones. Neither of us is familiar with the technical details or with the options they discussed.

Fact is, this major new feature (and others) is not supported on very recent hardware they sold to me. That's disappointing irrespective of the reasons. And it raises the question how meaningful those X years of OS updates really are.

>So you're arbitrarily deciding which OS features count

I'm counting all OS features but not apps that are only linked to OS releases as a sales strategy. Of course they want to show off new OS APIs in their apps when the OS gets an update. That doesn't require syncronising release cycles the way they do. Many if not most new app features do not depend on new OS APIs at all.

He's serious. The new multitasking workflow which is the major feature of iPadOS 16 is not available on non-M1 iPads, for example

You mean Stage Manager???

That's a truly terrible example...

First off it's not "the major feature of iPadOS 16, it's one call out of many _many_ features: https://www.apple.com/ipados/ipados-16-preview/

Second, _massively increasing multitasking capabilities_ is being given to the models that have _a massively upgraded SoC_ there's nothing artificial about that limitation.

Older iPads cannot not hold 4 arbitrary apps in memory, try it yourself if you want. For anything but the most basic set of apps you'll find something evicted by the time you loop back...

Third, "the" major point of an OS upgrade if any is being on the latest development target. Ask Android devs still targeting versions of Android from 2015 about that...

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