I'm still against AMP on a conceptual ground, but it is so much faster and more reliable than traditional page loading on my phone. Pages can't have megabytes of JavaScript and huge images. It's served by Google's fast CDN instead of some far-away server.
Use firefox or brave. I solved this problem. I'm only waiting for a proper alternative to Android, I'm so tired of google and its swallow way of doing things...
I just switched to Android because iOS is so incredibly buggy. Android is pretty buggy too, but not nearly as bad. I'm afraid we're currently living in dark times for software :(
As someone who switched from Android to iOS and even dual carried for a period of time, I found Android light years more buggy AND janky than iOS. Google still remains years behind there, and I don't see that changing.
Interesting. I wonder if usage patterns are a factor here. I also dual carried android/iphone (actually, I still do). I honestly consider the iOS of today the buggiest software I've ever used.
I find that MobileMail is horribly buggy, but there are rarely any bugs in my usage path (Gmail and other Google apps, Safari, Messages, Notes, Camera and Photos, Snapchat, Apollo, GitHub, Apple Music, my bank app, and a few others). What apps do you use most and what's so buggy?
I don't really use too many apps overall. Most of my bugs are in the core OS itself and Safari.
For example, I get hit with this one pretty often (blank page in Safari): https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250740002,
Going to reader view and back sometimes fixes it. Force quitting Safari always fixes it.
Fairly often Safari will stop accepting input. Force quitting fixes it. Also often after a pinch zoom, it snaps right back to 100%. This happens on Reddit and HN very often.
Airdrop works maybe ... 5% of the time? Just now I tried to airdrop an image to my wife. My phone said "waiting...", and nothing happened on her phone at all. Tried several times. Nothing. Airdropping to a Mac I think I've gotten to work once or twice.
I email myself URLs from Safari. But about half the time I have to email myself, wait a few seconds, go into Mail's outbox, and then send the email from there. Otherwise it will just sit in the outbox indefinitely. This is actually true of all emails, but I use the Gmail app now for normal emailing. Added fun, sometimes the outbox doesn't show up until you force quit Mail.
Lots of annoying lack of polish issues. For example, expand an image in messages to be full screen, then return to the thread. Often you get a blank screen, because it has scrolled itself down beyond the messages by about a screen's worth. Sure, just scroll back up to fix it, but I expect a better experience from such an expensive phone.
My previous address (I just moved a week ago) has not been added to Apple maps despite the complex existing for about 2 years now. When you enter the address you get a different address about 10 miles away. Sure, not a bug but a data issue, but all the same from the user's perspective. This caused all kinds of pain. So many people use Apple Maps because they just use the maps app that came with their phone. I got situations like this, https://i.imgur.com/v13VYZM.png, all the time. Package deliveries, appointments at my house, you name it, it was such a mess. I contacted Apple support, they assigned me a support representative. Over Facetime I showed him my address not being in Apple maps and how it is in Google maps. After 2 phone calls with him and many emails, I finally just gave up and accepted it.
These are the ones I can think of quickly. I've also had tons of issues with carplay and many, many third party apps. But it's hard to know who is to blame for these issues.
Over on Android, the only real issue I've encountered is part of the phone understands I have work and personal profiles, and other parts think I don't have a work profile and want me to set one up. Admittedly, this is a pretty annoying bug that does cause some headaches, but it's really the only thing I've hit. Chrome, Gmail, pretty much everything else has been just fine for me.
I just had a discussion with someone on Lobsters about the actual cost of a lower-end iPhone versus a similarly-priced Android phone and the iPhone appeared cheaper:
> The Pixel 4 is $799 and the Pixel 3a is
$399 (although it may be on sale right now depending on your region).
The iPhone 11 is $699 and the iPhone SE (2nd generation) is $399. Both
provide additional discounts if you trade in your current phone (and
since iPhones have a lot more resale value, you can get much more for
your trade-in). Google provides three years of security updates,
starting from the time that the phone is released. Apple provides four
or five years of security (and feature!) updates. You can get the same
amount of usable life out of a brand-new Pixel as a one- or two-year-old
iPhone, which puts the per-year price strongly in Apple's favor. Other
Android devices, like those made by Samsung, are usually even more
expensive and have fewer years of guaranteed security updates. Apple
even backports extremely high-severity security patches and major bug
fixes (like the GPS rollover patch) to devices that would be considered
"obsolete" by Android manufacturers.
So the iPhone might be a higher upfront cost, but it's a significantly lower per-year cost, especially if you get last year's model or the SE.
Maybe I've been really unlucky, but I haven't seen an iPhone realistically surviving more than 3 years with real usage. Buttons dying and the battery barely surviving a day was pretty common. I know there will be survivor examples out there, but without knowing the average it's hard to compare them.
> Other Android devices, like those made by Samsung, are usually even more expensive and have fewer years of guaranteed security updates
That doesn't seem accurate. I'm using a Samsung, 3.5 years old, and it works fine; was still getting security updates until April of this year, over 4 years after release.
Apparently they guarantee three years on the flagship Galaxy S/Note models and there’s no similar guarantee on any of the cheaper models. It sounds like they’ve gotten better at it with the flagships than the last time I used a Samsung (back in the S4 days).
Pixel and Samsung were intended to compete with iPhone, so the cost is going to be somewhat similar. Also, these go on huge sales every year, whereas iPhone never does. If you buy these at cost, you're doing it wrong. If you're really concerned about cost, you get a new Motorola for about $200, and there's even cheaper options out there.
Maybe, but I don't spend money on high end phones, I don't really see the point if you are not going to play games. I have an LG G4 and honestly, don't really need more.
Are you running LineageOS on it? How are you getting security patches? I wouldn't be comfortable having the device with my most sensitive information on it running an out-of-date operating system, but maybe that's just me.
I never said I was unable to load it, I said that the AMP site is noticeably faster. The problem is my currently slow network, not the phone. My phone processor gets the same single-core benchmark speeds as my desktop processor, so that's not the bottleneck.
OMG! Why would Mozilla kill extensions on mobile (android)? It would make mobile unusable for me. In fact that's the reason I barely browse the internet on my iPad: Firefox never had add ons on iOS due to Apple restrictions. I hope that's just FUD!
It's more nuanced than that. Iirc they're rewriting the way extensions are handled internally on Firefox for Android, making only certain extensions available initially. Feel free to look more into it for more precise information, this is all public.
This update will initially include support for one of the most popular extensions on Android, uBlock Origin. Additional extensions will be supported in subsequent releases so you can customize and expand your mobile browsing experience even more."
Why has Moz turned in to this almost fascist company all of a sudden. Like, what? Kill all but whitelisted extensions, which users asked for that?
Let me guess, there'll be an accidental reset of people's config to enable them to be auto-updated and then there extensions will stop working ... I wouldn't put it passed then to then have already secured control over uBlock and we'll have unlockable ads before you know it.
IIRC, this is happening because of the complete internal rewrite - the relevant APIs to expose to extensions simply don't exist yet, and they're implementing them to get the most-wanted extensions available first.
They could use better messaging on this so people who are on firefox precisely for this reason don't think that something has fundamentally changed.
A statement along the lines of "We're working with the most popular Extension creators to get up to speed on the mobile extension API" (which could mean anything) would have been better.
Would like to add a little context to this for anyone who isn't familiar-
For all the intelligence and engineering prowess of Germans, their Internet infrastructure is severely lacking. Most places I'm aware of have poor connections to begin with but also still meter every kilobyte that you download, so Germans are really far more conscious of payload sizes than most Westerners are, where internet service is just a flat fee.
It's really strange when so-called "second-world" countries like Bulgaria and Romania have far better Internet than Germany
The AMP site is unusable far more often than not. My phone has had a 100 Mbps connection for years, yet opening webpages is slow because I need to manually mess with the page so that I can get a working webpage.
I'll take +250 ms load time over fiddling with the page for 5 seconds and then having to reload it anyway.
AMP might be faster if you browse the net with javascript enabled by default and with no content blockers enabled. But if you don't do those things, AMP is a clear net-negative.
