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Comment by eavc | Hacker News Reader

Is it a Galaxy Nexus? Because if not, you're talking about a pretty old device, and I hear people complain about their two+ year old iPhones all the time.

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The only real complaints people tend to have about their old iPhones is slow performance, and that's pretty normal. IPhones do not have the "apps randomly breaking or giving odd error messages" issue.

There are also complaints about battery life. Lithium batteries have a half-life of about 3 years, so it's not surprising that older iPhones need recharging sooner. A lot of people blame it on an OS upgrade rather than deteriorating batteries, though.

Wasn't there a study done recently where they determined that applications on iPhones actually crash more often than on an average Android, except that no error messages are thrown up at all.. you're just sent back to the home screen so the user thinks "Oh I must've pressed the Home button by accident"

My own anecdotal Nexus experience (I own the Google updated GSM version): no crashes (although there was a brief syncing outage last night), updates are smooth and fast, and the whole "it just works" thing applies.

See my post above. In many ways, I regret buying an iphone4. My wife's experience with nexus s has been much more hassle free than mine. There are definitely things I prefer on iPhone. One case in point is that although I often see crashes on apps, they just shut down quietly and I restart. Android let's my wife know that an app has crashed. I also upgraded my wife's phone to android 4.1. It took 5-10 mins total. I'm dreading my IOS6 update which I am estimating will take me 8h (inc. reinstall of my purchases via cydia - which I am forced to do if I want the functionality that I WANT vs what apple lets me have).

>>I'm dreading my IOS6 update which I am estimating will take me 8h

8 hours? What?

He has to re-jailbreak and re-install all of his jailbroken apps, many of which probably don't work anymore.

It probably goes without saying that iOS isn't for him.

There are certainly lots of iOS apps with stability issues. With iOS 6 even Apple's own apps have started crashing on me (App Store & Game Center).

But you're right about the error messages, when thing go wrong there are very few apps that will tell you about it.

True, but if you look at most crash logs the apps are dying due to memory allocation issues, which a restart of the app clears up instantly. (I mostly see SIGBUS errors from the apps I use)

I don't see a problem with just jumping back to the homescreen, most people will reopen the app right away anyway.

That's because Apple decided that the correct way to handle a crash is to give no error message at all to the user, and just close the app. ;)

No, it's a Nexus 7.

Tablets are another thing. Google hasn't been thinking about it too much (N7 is their first attempt) and the iPad is still king.

There's a lot of work to do in that field, and that's catching-up work more than improvements. It's much like discussing the Nexus One. Let's talk about it again in a year or two.

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