Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.
Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.
My last iPhone was a iPhone 5. Or 6, maybe?
Fast forward, and I’ve been on Android until right now, when I got an iPhone 16 in a loss-leader sale.
…And I am astounded by how much worse it is. My old jailbroken iPhone’s UI was both simpler and 100x times more customizable and useful than all these bizzare required gestures; I spent days trying to teach my Mom and grandpa how to use it, to no avail. At the same time, its as uncustomizable as ever.
I had basically every feature the 16 has now, like the action button, and more. And it somehow feels slower in browsing than my SD845 Android 9 phone.
It wasn’t perfect back then, but the App Store is flooded with garbage now.
I literally want my iPhone 5 back. WTF has Apple been doing?
They’ve been busy reading the history books to find out what Android did 4 years ago so that they can start developing those same features today. Any remaining time and effort went into creating vacuous marketing hype.
Irony is Android felt way more intuitive, including to my non techy family, even in the worst case (EG Samsung devices with their spammy UI).