[pooper]

Metro by T-Mobile has some strange bloatware that I was able to disable with adb. I can't imagine living with this garbage day in and day out. Makes me wonder if this is why some people in the US believe iPhone is better than android — they've only experienced carrier bloatware infested android devices.

[hackernewds]

this is why you get stock Android with a Pixel and Fi; although this shouldn't be necessary :(

[cwbriscoe]

Yeah, this is what I have had for my past 3 phones. No bloatware issues at all.

Not to mention FI is cheap as hell if you use internet mostly over wifi.

[pooper]

Interestingly enough, it has gotten better in the sense that I used the phone for a couple of weeks before I put in the carrier sim and the bloat wasn't there (besides some OnePlus apps but those don't pollute my notifications).

Edit: bloat, not boost

[add-sub-mul-div]

> I can't imagine living with this garbage day in and day out.

What tangible harm is it doing that makes you think you can't live with it? If there's a Facebook binary on my phone that I've never logged into, is it doing anything? Is Candy Crush playing itself in the background if I never launch it?

[autoexec]

> If there's a Facebook binary on my phone that I've never logged into, is it doing anything?

Couldn't it? Apps can start without ever being launched by the user, or continue running in the background after they are "closed", and that means that they can collect data then send it home or to third parties. There's a ton of things an app can do without any permissions or indicating to the user that anything is happening. It's been used for things like listening for audio beacons and reporting them when overheard.

I wouldn't want to trust a company like facebook to not abuse every option available to them to collect data. There's also a problem with vulnerabilities. That "unused" facebook binary might contain a flaw that could be exploited. Getting rid of installed applications you don't need/want is a good way to reduce your attack surface.

[pooper]

Full screen ads out of nowhere in the middle of you using other apps, Click bait "news". I don't think you could imagine half of what I saw.

[graphe]

Nope, it is just worst. Want a smart-phone? Get an iPhone. Want a mobile Linux computer you can make calls from? Android.

Android does not do the 'phone' part right. I constantly complain of a friend with his new expensive s23 or whatever that acts like a cheap phone whenever he gets in a group call and my whole group complains of the ear shattering noise and artifacts from his side immediately (nothing at all wrong with all of our iphones). It was bad enough we couldn't do higher quality facetime audio together, but the expensive phone's hardware on wasn't even good for various apps we tried to talk through.

From another thread they aren't even good at web browsing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729397 the entire ecosystem of Android is a mostly poorly cobbled together mobile Linux computer aiming to lower costs as much as possible to sell you ads. Notice how older iphones with worst specs are still working fine?

Still my Samsung S3 with it's forward thinking 2gb of ram in 2012 (4x the 512 in the iPhone 4s) is still sometimes being used as a Linux computer for me in 2024. Awful mic on it then as well.

[realusername]

I have the opposite opinion. If we want to talk about bugs, I literally left the iPhone world just because of the bugs and the poor quality of the software in general. I had error loops when installing apps and the one of my wife has keyboard freeze for 4 seconds at a time. The internet is full of threads of people with this exact problem but there's never any documented way to fix anything in an iPhone, it either fully works or good luck.

Sure the hardware might be better but the software though... Anything related to icloud, the appstore and the accounts themselves looks like it's holding up together with duck tape.

[graphe]

Never heard of it or seen it documented anywhere. What is an "error loop installing apps" and where did you see that documented?

> The internet is full of threads of people with this exact problem but there's never any documented way to fix anything in an iPhone, it either fully works or good luck.

Is that hyperbole? There's a video of a guy putting a headphone jack in an iphone 7.

[realusername]

> What is an "error loop installing apps" and where did you see that documented?

I can't remember the exact error text but any attempt to install or update an app said something about an error setting up payments (even a free app) and the only way to stop this modal loop was to reboot the device. It's just in a drawer now.

That kind of sums up the general experience I had with the device.

For my wife's keyboard issue it's pretty random, you are typing and then the whole screen freezes for 4 seconds, when whatever you typed while frozen unbuffers all at once. I guess it's some bug in the Vietnamese IME since the keyboard needs to buffer diacritics (I'm just guessing)

> Is that hyperbole? There's a video of a guy putting a headphone jack in an iphone 7.

No it's just how it works in iPhone, full of random suggestions in case anything sticks because nobody has an idea on how it works and there's never any debug info.

Another example, I had another error setting up the dev account, nobody knew what to do, even their own support at Apple!

[graphe]

I've never heard of it, but it sounds like a very easy fix.

You can get debug info. I have copied my crash logs.

If your wife's using a 3rd party keyboard they are treated worst and may crash. Android has always gotten better with their interface but they are locking more and more stuff. I would use Android if i didn't always get audio issues, I would rather use a computer with a phone, but not if the phone makes me unlistenable. Hope your Android issues are nonexistent or manageable.

[realusername]

> You can get debug info. I have copied my crash logs.

Maybe you can, it just seems harder than adb since I only have Linux machines now.

> If your wife's using a 3rd party keyboard they are treated worst and may crash

No this is the standard iphone keyboard which is freezing the screen, I didn't even know you could have third party ones on iphones, I thought they were not allowed by Apple. I guess that changed.

> I've never heard of it, but it sounds like a very easy fix.

Yeah sure it can be done technically, I would have to factory reset the iPhone again and it might fix it but I really didn't want to fiddle with it anymore to make it work though, I was already tired of it.

> Android has always gotten better with their interface but they are locking more and more stuff. I would use Android if i didn't always get audio issues, I would rather use a computer with a phone, but not if the phone makes me unlistenable.

Personally I never encountered audio issues on Android. Except if we're talking about Bluetooth but I'm convinced it's impossible to make a Bluetooth device that works, I had Bluetooth bugs on Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.