I also really appreciate seeing that for some people, there are limits to just how inferior they are willing for those experiences to be.
Very relatable. Thank you.
from my closed-source iPhone 14 Pro
That said, the iPhone 8 is still supported by Apple (probably for the last year), while the Pixel 2, like the Pixels 3, 4, and 5, are no longer supported by Google. This likely doesn't matter to someone not running standard Google-supplied AndroidOS, though!
My use of the closed-source iPhone is not solely based on feature quality, and I've got no illusions that every feature is the best in class.
P.S. Just before clicking the reply button, I decided to do the search myself, curious. The iPhone 8 was a weird model; that was the year they released both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, because (IMO) they lacked the courage to switch things up in their flagship product so much in one year. (Okay, and maybe also supply issues?) Still, when I DDG'd "pixel 2 iphone 8", I got results[0] that seem to not be the same as yours. The first doesn't really make any determination, the second is mealy-mouthed but seems to give an edge to Pixel 2 based primarily on price ("the Pixel 2 is a better value, starting out at about $50 and £70 cheaper than the iPhone 8" vs "you'll actually get more bang for your buck with the iPhone 8"), and the third, well, it's right in the title: "iPhone 8 vs. Pixel 2: Why Apple Beats Google." So I don't know, I bought an iPhone X that year rather than an iPhone 8, and just replaced that with an iPhone 14 Pro this year after five years of faithful service. But choosing a 2017 phone today, either one, while very clearly a step up from Pinephone for all the of the reasons mentioned in the article, maybe still reflects a but of compromise in service of wanting to run LineageOS. In 2017, was photo quality the same when running LineageOS rather than Google's own camera software? Maybe it was after that they started to apply more and more AI to the photo-taking process, I'm not sure.
0. https://www.techradar.com/news/google-pixel-2-vs-iphone-8 https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/iphone-8-vs-pixel-2-phone-c... https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-vs-pixel-2,review-4779...
It does a bit, actually. While we get many updates through generic Android, some are vendor patches which stop after support stops.
At this point I think I qualify as a career Android developer (did other stuff but just a lot of time on Android) and my joking reply to anyone who asks why I use an iPhone is:
> I'll switch back when Android can handle a screen rotation without blanking the screen.
The thing is, the fact there's no smooth rotation isn't literally a blocker, but it's what such a subtle thing represents: Android apps are still living with the complexity of a situation that showed up because of the limitations of the 256 MB of RAM the Android G1 had in 2008.
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They're still doing this messy state restoration stuff where the OS essentially has to kill part of your app to support a basic rotation, they never went back and fixed it as phones matured, bad configuration change handling easily causes hundreds of thousands of crashes a day for end users, constantly throws a wrench in development that Google has had to invent many different catcher's mitts for, drains resources that would be better used on improving the user-facing functionality of these apps.
And this isn't the only feature like that. There are so many basic sharp edges of the OS UX-wise that will just seemingly never get fixed, and even if were fixed tomorrow, it'd be at least 6 years before those improvements represented even 90% of the Android userbase (something iOS tends to achieve within 12 months...)
[and before the nitpickers show up, yes you can override configuration changes and manage that for your own app... no it doesn't scale for any "normal" app]
hm, I don't have this experience, maybe last time you checked in an old android device or something ?
Imagine if every time you resized a window on your PC, the window got killed and restarted, and you see why bugs like that arise.
It'd be one thing if it was when the app is backgrounded, but no, even if you have one app running on your entire device, the UI be torn down.
It's insanity that in 2022 a major operating system is still doing that, and yet here we are with no end in sight.
But you know what? Maybe instead we should discourage people from clumsily trying to push their pet agenda the moment their favorite sports team (erm excuse me, Operating System) is painted in a poor light.
But we can't all get what we want can we?
This is something you learn very quickly once you start building Android applications -- or, at least, I did when I started back in 2011 (I haven't done much Android dev in the past decade since then). While I do think this behavior is a pretty terrible default behavior for the underlying UI framework, it's pretty bad that the AndFTP developers have not fixed this bug in their application -- and yes, it is a bug in their application.
The UI development paradigm has changed quite a bit over the life of Android, making "Fragments" more popular to use in some quarters than "Activities" as the "unit of UI screen" (though Fragments are still underpinned by Activities), but I believe the fundamental issue is still there: if you don't explicitly handle rotation properly, and store state in your Activity, it will get destroyed whenever the screen is rotated.
Android will kill the user-facing portion of the process ("Activity") and recreate it* if you rotate the screen.
Devices have gotten fast enough to hide it with an animation, but it's still "kill UI, draw new UI". (specifically it's usually "render the UI to an image, squish it and rotate it, then show the new UI underneath".
My problem isn't with the literal animation, it's what that mess of rebuilding the entire user facing UI because they rotated their screen represents.
(* apps can opt out of this, but that's reserved for games and apps that render their own custom UI directly to a raw surface)
But this is like ground-truth stuff about Android, about as immutable as it gets: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/runtime...
The best time to fix it was before the G1 launched and the 2nd best would have been right after, but here we are more than a decade later paying for its sins.
12 years ago people were asking for this stuff: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/djp18/i_know_its_s...
Hell, I, who would be considered a power user, spend 99% of the time on my phone browsing the web, Reddit, some Facebook, using a calculator, or taking photos. Most of my computing is done on an actual computer because the form factor of a phone just doesn't satisfy my needs.
I'm just not a cool person flashing expensive iPhone taking Instagram pictures. Drop the camera suite and image processing and you can cut half the cost of a smartphone!