my partner uses an iPhone, and i'll never understand how. there's so many hoops you have to jump through to find or do anything on there... the UI is a complete shitshow. it's the least intuitive interface i have ever had the misfortune to use. Macs are somehow even worse. if you love someone, find them an Android replacement and set it on baby/elderly mode with all the buttons huge and in one spot. a fucking Jitterbug would be an upgrade.
I love it. I made an Android app in 2011 and I still sometimes load up the .apk for nostalgia.
It was the first app I ever made and although some functions no longer work (due to 3rd party SDKs and APIs that no longer exist), it's mostly still pretty flawless.
According to my Google Play dashboard, there are even some people that still use it!
This is funny considering Android 14 may be sunsetting support for 32-bit apps in favor of exclusive 64-bit apps, which will likely break a lot of backward compatability. Whoopsie doodles.
Seriously, can we just stop the brand warefare? Just buy what you want. I’ve plenty of old apps that just work. The only real barrier was moving from 32 bits to 64, and that was like what…iOS 6 or 7?
If the devs update the app, then there’s no company issues. If they abandon it, that’s on them. Not sure what it is you’re actually arguing for.
Backwards compatibility is a double-edged sword. It's cool that you can run an apk from 10 years ago but there should be a point where you say that's enough and drop support from them. Looking at Windows.
And than there is netflix, which refuses to run on android phones with an unlocked bootloader, not even using a custom ROM, just an unlocked bootloader
What ever happened to initiatives such as project Treble? Do you guys think updates have gotten better on Android?
I remember when I used to be excited about Android OS updates and kept watching videos about new features (that I was not gonna get anytime soon because I was stuck in an old version of Android)... It's been years since I've been excited about an Android update.
Little side note rant:
My biggest annoyance with Android is the share menu. I hate how it's different for different apps (Firefox is vastly different from other apps for instance). I can notice at least 3 different sharing menus with the apps I frequently use. Makes it hard to build muscle memory.... And I cannot pin the apps I actually use frequently for sharing stuff. Also the direct share thing never worked for me. I think it's only for sharing via SMS or Email neither of which I use for sharing content, so it ended up being just a waste of space for me.
Hope they fix the share menu one day..... But then I'd have to wait to change my phone to get the updates.
Fake News, actually. Too many times werethere apps that failed to install because they were too old, even though there were some that worked. There's the opposite problem though, with some old phones that have old android versions, some apps are too new to install. iOS gets frequent updates so this isn't much of an issue, except if your device is way, way too old. I'm an avid android supporter, and I've never had an iOS device myself cause I detest it for other reasons, but I've gotta say both platforms are equally problematic on this regard. iOS has no backwards compatibility, android has no forwards compatibility.
I have an app that was made like 11 years ago that hasn't been updated once that I still use daily lol. It's a time clock with postal time on it. We go by clicks instead of minutes on a 24 hour clock. So 7:49 pm would be 19:82, hundredths. It's a pain to convert sometimes. We use scanners to clock in/out and move functions and the scanners are in minutes... it's fuxking dumb but...
Yeah Android CAN run the app if you have the APK. But also the play store won't let you if the dev hasn't updated the app in a couple of years. Older games are especially bad.
I recently decided to jailbreak my ipod touch. The options are so fucking sketch it felt extremely gross. And thats coming from an android user. You know you are in best hands if the jailbreaking software link their mixtape.
I used an apple phone for the first time at work, they gave us apple phones.
I was blown away when I realized you can't just dump any old file on it, because I'm used to plugging in my android phone and throwing on some files like it's any other removable storage. Not so with apple phones, incredibly limited.
See, I used to flash firmware for copy machines from my phone. Like if I went out to a site and didn't prepare firmware before going I could just download it on my phone and flash from that.
The apple phone couldn't do a bunch of stuff that I always thought was standard smartphone things. Also couldn't display cell and wifi reception in decibels, and I used to do informal site surveys with my phone. Nope, apple can't do that either, "bars" aren't a good metric to wrote down.
That thing was about damn useless except to be used as a phone and an mp3 player.
some apps do actually break with newer android versions though. It's gotten a little better and happened less often after the big step to Android 4 (okay… that is itself more than 10 years ago)