IOS 18 is available

@NerdyPotato Yes you could always do that but items always snapped to a pre set grid. Now you can go in a free form cluster.
Big deal for some people, not so much for others.

It’s never bothered me in the past. I preferred a tidy desktop.

@justanothername oh wow, Apple came up with something before Android did? 😱 That's a first!

@NerdyPotato Ae came up with a whole phone and OS before Android.
I know,
shocking huh.

@NerdyPotato The only reason Android exists is because Google felt the need to copy iOS.

@justanothername their edge didn't last long though. I often hear developers complaining about iOS not supporting very useful features on other platforms. They want to offer them to users and can do that easily on more advanced operating systems and browsers, but if they want the experience to be the same for everyone, they then have to spend days working around limitations of iOS.

@justanothername copy and improve. Now most features appear on Android and don't follow to iOS until years later.

@NerdyPotato List those features.

Apple whips androids ass on speed and security.

Android/Samsung phones will always be cheaper than iPhone. That’s because Apple has no intention of racing to the bottom of the price war.

@justanothername Speed mostly in the past, when every Android app used to be some conglomerate of unoptimized Java bytecode. That's not really the case anymore, I use the same toolchain to develop apps that run both on iOS and Android and the performances are consistent on both.

Security derives from the fact that Apple is a walled garden and only approved apps can be installed. Calling that a security feature is no better and no worse than if I told you can make your phone more secure by turning it off.

@justanothername I mostly hear from web developers. Allowing websites to send push notifications came to iOS two years after it was available on Android, adding a link to a website to the home screen took a lot longer, the Apple store is much more restrictive than the Play store (hence why there isn't an iOS app for SW yet). Apple was the first to remove the audio jack though, to much hate from users.

@NerdyPotato @NerdyPotato I e used both. Android, unless a non bloated version or a custom ROM is a shite user experience compared to Apple. Bloated, unoptimized, and if you half of the apps on Google Play, it's full of adware.

@basilfawlty89 I've never had any performance issues on Android... A lot of apps do contain a lot of ads indeed, but that's a choice of developers, not the operating system. And if an app developer gets greedy, it shows in the reviews and there are usually alternatives available with fewer ads too.

@NerdyPotato Apple usually takes its time doing stuff because it’s working out its own way of doing something. It’s also very secretive so they won’t tell you what they are working on.

@justanothername reinventing the wheel takes a lot of time indeed. It depends on the reason whether that's a good approach.

@basilfawlty89 It does.Prior to Android Google was a search engine company.

Samsung built a phone for Android after Google discovered it needed a hardware partner.

Prior to iPhone there were multiple hardware product lines including the iPod and an OS that ran on them.

IOS was specifically written to run on a mobile device.

@basilfawlty89 You can install Lineage, Pixel Experience or any other custom ROM on an Android that is EOL, with an iPhone/iPad/iAnything once it's out of support you have a brick in your hands.

I have a Pixel (6) and ads are on 3rd party apps only that I know of; I mostly use open source stuff (from F-Droid, not the Play Store) in addition to the built-in ones, that have none. Combined with Firefox, that on Android can run its own engine (whereas on Apple it's yet another wrapper of WebKit, because otherwise it would get booted from the AppStore 😒) and uBlock Origin (same extension that I have on desktop) I've yet to see a single ad on this screen.

Samsung, Huawei and the alike are cràp, software wise, if that's what one thinks of when they compare Apple to Android then yeah, I totally get the hate. But anything with a vanilla or quasi-vanilla Android experience (Pixel, OnePlus, etc) is hella solid and has absolutely nothing to envy to the iPhones.

Let alone the development experience, there's a level of bureaucracy just to get the simple most app to market that in comparison the Italian government is efficient and straightforward.

@basilfawlty89
True. But I hate them because it required me €300, plus €1000+ for a Mac that I use basically only for compiling and codesogning and two days to install a *development* certificate just to *debug* my own app on my own device.

It's definitely more straightforward now than it was then (2017), but still, I hold grudges 😌

@Elessar
Yes, but I addressed that earlier. Sure you can put on a custom ROM, that's literally what I did with my phone. Here's the thing though, your resale value on Android is crap. With Apple, I could still trade-in.