Thinking about totally ditching Android, please provide your input!

[lopri]

What apologies? I enjoyed reading every paragraph of your experience. Thank you for sharing. I also think there is nothing that can challenge ipad Air at the moment. (except for those tablets with digitizers and who need them) It's a beautifully engineered machine.

Totally agree about iTunes as well. I said "enough is enough" to myself and since I left it for Android I have never looked back.

Honestly if you're a really discerning person you're going to find things you don't like about iOS. I've tried iOS, android and WP and there are things I hate about each platform. People like to act like android has more problems but honestly once I stopped worrying about trying to make everything perfect I've enjoyed using my N4. The only advantage to iOS in my mind is you can't tweak as much so you just resign to living with the things that annoy you.

I share the thrust of argument. The psychological impact - both consciously and unconsciously - is huge on expectation and if you know you can do about something that you don't like, you are more likely to actually get involved.

 

[antef]

To those saying you need to look outside Nexus: I see pros and cons there. I owned a non-Nexus previously (HTC) and hated all the software issues I had due purely to changes HTC made. Bugs, crappy apps, missing features that are in AOSP, just a number of problems I knew there was no good reason for having to deal with. Of course this was back in the Froyo days, but I had to flash Cyanogen to get the device to behave the way I wanted. When it came time to shop again, I could tell both Sense and TouchWiz still had a number of issues I didn't want to deal with. The idea of buying a new phone and having to put a ROM on it immediately really didn't appeal to me, so I switched to Nexus.

I am now moving away from that hard-line stance a bit due to Google's handling of things. AOSP still has so many issues, and Google is cutting features for only one-year-old devices, so I'm kind of accepting that customizing/trying a ROM is going to be part of the game no matter which way I go. In that case, Nexus still has the benefit of easier and broader development support. Its hardware can sometimes be lacking, but it is usually on par with the best of the best either at the time or just six months earlier. For $300 less it can still make sense.

I could completely buy in to the whole experience offered by Samsung or HTC, use and deal with their firmware, but chances are that experiment wouldn't last long. I know the bugs, the lag, the carrier bloat, and delayed updates that it usually includes, and it sucks. A ROM on a carrier-branded device (Galaxy, One, G2) can be great or go very wrong - just depends.

 

[cronos]

I could completely buy in to the whole experience offered by Samsung or HTC, use and deal with their firmware, but chances are that experiment wouldn't last long. I know the bugs, the lag, the carrier bloat, and delayed updates that it usually includes, and it sucks. A ROM on a carrier-branded device (Galaxy, One, G2) can be great or go very wrong - just depends.

Or you can simply flash a GPE ROM (stock or custom, there are tons) and get a clean, Nexus-like feel of the phones. No problem.

And did you mention delayed update? 4.4 update for One GPE was out barely a week after Nexus 4 got updated, and the Sense version was out a couple of days ago (maybe a couple of weeks later). The annoyance you felt back then is ancient history.

Think about this for a minute: I got my AT&T One with 4.1.2, it has gotten three version updates to 4.2.2 (from international version), 4.3, and now 4.4.

 

[zerogear]

Nexus 5 Stock/root + Xposed-Framework Mod = minimal effort modding

 

[poofyhairguy]

Nexus 5 Stock/root + Xposed-Framework Mod = minimal effort modding

I do love Xposed. Went from crazy custom ROMs to stock AOSP ROMs for my S4 and N7 and used Xposed to fix the issues I have with stock. It is much more stable.

 

[antef]

Or you can simply flash a GPE ROM (stock or custom, there are tons) and get a clean, Nexus-like feel of the phones. No problem.

And did you mention delayed update? 4.4 update for One GPE was out barely a week after Nexus 4 got updated, and the Sense version was out a couple of days ago (maybe a couple of weeks later). The annoyance you felt back then is ancient history.

Think about this for a minute: I got my AT&T One with 4.1.2, it has gotten three version updates to 4.2.2 (from international version), 4.3, and now 4.4.

If you can unlock the bootloader. That's becoming increasingly difficult (see Note 3).

The update situation is improving, and I think Google will stay with KitKat for a long time so all devices can be running it, but it's still far from perfect. AT&T mucking with the software, and having any say at all when an update comes to me, just isn't right and isn't something I want to support. I also still don't trust I'll get any meaningful updates beyond the first year. It's immensely better than it used to be, but buying a carrier-branded device can still have its problems.

I do love Xposed. Went from crazy custom ROMs to stock AOSP ROMs for my S4 and N7 and used Xposed to fix the issues I have with stock. It is much more stable.

So I've been wanting to do this exact thing, since I prefer to be running latest stable software instead of alpha or beta ROMs and wiping data, etc. But it's too bad Xposed doesn't work with ART. Not the biggest deal to do without ATM, but I wonder how something like Xposed can ever work with compiled code, and we know ART will be the default eventually.

 

[cronos]

If you can unlock the bootloader. That's becoming increasingly difficult (see Note 3).

I still think that rooting and modding in general is relatively easier now than say a few years ago. While I know that Samsung is trendy, you're going to need to look away from them if customizability is what you desire.

Look at HTC, LG, Sony, and Motorola. Every single one of the latest flagship devices* from these manufacturers are making it easier for us to unlock their devices bootloaders (and root the device), not to mention some are actually selling the developer's edition of their phones that are already bootloader unlocked.

*well maybe not the G2, but it still got rooted in less than a week.

 

[zerogear]

I do love Xposed. Went from crazy custom ROMs to stock AOSP ROMs for my S4 and N7 and used Xposed to fix the issues I have with stock. It is much more stable.

Definitely, especially with GravityBox -- motherlode of all Tweaks, with that you can pretty much customize every part of AOSP. (And it's compatible with 4.4 for the most part).


Also, for those people who really like Halo or MultiWindow for Samsung -- Xposed can replicate Halo in ASOP for the most part. FYI. (Called XHalo Floating Window)

 

[sm625]

They're both pretty bad. They're all bad, I should say. I cant even use an app on my ipoop because even though I paid for it, they want me to frickin pay for it again and even when I was willing to go and do that the stupid thing is asking me security questions for which I have no idea what I wrote. And the apple website is so bad that you cannot even change your security questions, even though there are articles describing a button you can click to change your security questions. So I schedule a call to apple support and they say they will call in two minutes... and of course they dont frickin call. The whole experience is just terrible. All because they want me to pay twice for an app because they forced an update. Why would apple even let companies do that? If you buy an app the damn thing should work in 2013 the same way it worked in 2011 when you first bought it.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I also still don't trust I'll get any meaningful updates beyond the first year. It's immensely better than it used to be, but buying a carrier-branded device can still have its problems.

True, it is a pick your poison deal.

 

[Megatomic]

Why would apple even let companies do that? If you buy an app the damn thing should work in 2013 the same way it worked in 2011 when you first bought it.

While I agree with you, what I read in explanation was that the cost to developers to basically redesign their apps to work with iOS7 (some apps needed to be completely redone) needed to be recouped in some cases or they might not rewrite their apps to be iOS7 compliant.

I haven't had to repurchase any apps, yet. And I don't know if I will or not when I'm forced to face that decision myself.

 

[alangrift]

Well if you like playing apps I would switch to apple because most of the fun to play apps are made for apple first and then converted to the android market. Now that google owns pretty much everything android its either you are choosing apple or google. Since, there are more android phone choices I would go with apple since I hate picking out from so many choices. So it up to you what company you support.