I've been running Android custom ROMs since Gingerbread days, on HTC HD2. At that time, I'd be flashing nightlies, switching between CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android, kernels, getting bootloops.
Setting up the phone was no big deal - most apps could be backed up with Titanium Backup, few that couldn't (e.g. banking) would just get redownloaded and I'd log in immediately. I was also still a student back then and had more time to tinker, but if it was anything like it is now, I would've given up much quicker.
In the last year I had to do few clean flashes with changing my phone, then updating LineageOS, and once the phone just wiped itself for no reason. Backups don't work for most apps - even if you can get one, they'll crash without a specific reason. 2FA everywhere is mostly security theater, with apps that have no business keeping my data but insisting on it, using SMS, email, authenticators, selfies. Banking apps needing two layers of root detection circumvention (because a custom ROM is already problematic, so you need root to stop them from detecting an unlocked bootloader, and then again not to detect root). Google insisting on sending a security check notification to a phone that's just been wiped with no ability to confirm that it's really you from your PC (but if you give it few minutes, it will give in and let you verify with SMS), always feels like hacking yourself.
It's a massive pain already on a clean, bloatware-free custom ROM, with a truly minimum app list. Once you need to start debloating the official OS, it's another hour or three, depending if they're nice and let you uninstall things or if you need adb access to disable offending packages.
I found that TiBackup was both the secret sauce that allowed for playing with ROMs with impunity, and also my primary reason for rooting phones back in the day even when I was just using phones in stock form.
It was the first app I ever spent money on, and I did so without any hesitation at all.
It was just genuinely useful to be able to back up and restore my own data on my own devices, and to do so on my own accord. It was a process that I owned, and controlled, and if it went wrong somehow then I was able to troubleshoot it and make sensible decisions.
I haven't had a rooted phone in a decade or so now. These days, backups allegedly happen -- somehow -- and the entire process seems to be both deliberately and inscrutably shrouded in mystery.
When I switch devices or reset to factory to try to fix an eSIM issue (or whatever I do that makes restoration a useful path today), then it's never clear before I start whether the backup/restore will magically work or if it will simply fail without recourse. The uncertainty demonstrates a reprehensibly terrible way to deal with backups.
“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece.
I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.
> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.
While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel.
Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
I tried it, Graphene isn't really a good alternative because the built in apps are so bad that you end up needing to install the Pixel/Google versions anyway.
If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?
If I have to turn Graphene into a Pixel to make it usable, and I did, there’s not much point. And the apps are 90% of the time very noticeably better on iOS, so overall turns into a very bad trade.
You still get much better privacy with GrapheneOS even if you install Google apps since they are sandboxed; they don't have access to unique device identifiers and you can control what Google can access by adjusting its permissions, as opposed to having full reign to do whatever it wants. Also you don't have to use all the Google apps, plenty of open source and/or privacy respecting alternatives out there.
Pixel Camera only needs Google Photos for the photo previewer, everything else works without it or you can install gcam services provider to use any gallery you want
> If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?
I am not sure why would you have to install messages has nobody uses RCS these days.
As for calendars and contacts, I am struggling to see the added value over the fossify alternatives, hence I don't have them anymore on my smartphones.
Pixel camera and google photos are nice to get the most out of tye pixel camera but thanksfully grapheneOS lets you use them without access to network. Stock Pixel rom doesn't allow you to do that. That is a major difference imho.
> Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality)
I disabled Google Photos but I didn't notice any issues with Camera except for not being able to open the photo just taken from the camera interface. Am I missing something else?
Which one if I may ask? I'm looking for one to get out of RCS reminders and also to avoid receiving emergency messages which come through even if I turn them off in Google messages. The local authorities overuse it, I get several per month now.
I think it's because they got blamed for not warning everyone with the Valencia floods last year but it's really ridiculous now. Now they blow up everyone's phone just when there's going to be a bit of wind.
and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. But other than that, android is not opensource anymore.
I mean, it never was because you had hundreds (no exaggeration [1]) closed-binary blobs running (not to mention a whole OS on things like radio and camera, running on their own SoC), but now you cannot get even close to a proper of the userspace since google already anounced they will not be mainlining anything back to AOSP
> and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes.
You get improved privacy and security, at least on some fronts. By default, GrapheneOS does not provide root access and recommends against rooting the device. Is there a trade-off? Certainly. Security and privacy are always at conflict with what a completely open platform can provide. Given the amount of access to personal information that goes through our devices and the number of bad actors out there (both behaving legally and illicitly), some people believe
it is worth the price. At least GrapheneOS offers more transparency than Android or iOS.
The bit about clamping down on open source, that is very much disappointing. I doubt that it is going to go away entirely in Android. On the other hand, hopefully it will provide incentives for companies to explore developing more open alternatives and consumers to explore buying more open alternatives. It won't be a huge market, but many of us have avoided growing so dependent upon the current platforms that we couldn't simply walk away.
You can actually use most Apple devices without signing in. There are obviously a lot of benefits to the ecosystem but you can enjoy the hardware etc. without signing especially on Mac. For iPhone you'd need to learn to side load apps but it's doable.
You don't need an Apple account to back up an entire iPhone and restore it onto a new one, keeping almost all settings. They've kept the local iTunes method working from day 1. Idk how you do this in Android, sounds like most people sync everything to Google.
Getting downvoted for speaking the truth. HN loves to twist its nose every time someone praises a closed-source solution but falls head over heels for anyone claiming to work for a FAANG. Hypocrisy thy name is HN.
I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.
That sounds like Linux users complaining about Windows Server or vice versa. iPad is trivial to get running but it is not the same as an Android tablet, and if you try to use your Android experience you will have issues.
Not so trivial that I didn't struggle with it for an hour. I'm not an Android power user. (I think?) I'm not even particularly a fan of Android. It's just the (hot take) least bad option I've tried.
More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".
Believe me, I wish I had documented it. I didn't realize that this would be surprising or controversial until I described the experience later to others. Some people basically didn't believe me.
The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.
I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.
If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.
To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.
Keep in mind apple famously never fixes these bugs that let the phone be rooted via a 0click attack starting from imessage, which inexplicably runs with elevated privileges.
I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.
Interesting reasoning that I never thought of, though it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of stuff deters my non-technical family members from updating
Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.
actually you can skip most of these, but get reduced functionality in return. You can skip faceID/touchID, unlock code, appleID. You can’t skip terms, some customization options and, data collection and privacy settings.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts.
Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.
Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.
Just back it up once a week on the computer, that's what I do.
I don't even use a Google account on my phone. Most apps don't need it! There's only a handful that do, in particular ChatGPT that really insists you have a Google account logged in (why they force you to make an account with their direct competitor is beyond me but they do)
But perplexity is much better anyway so I use that.
iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services.
Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'd argue that installing and setting up GrapheneOS on a Pixel is as-much or less effort compared to setting up an iPhone. And it gives you full freedom and the best possible security while doing so. You can have everything at once.
What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this? I run close to exclusively free software and have done so for decades and have yet to feel the need to change this. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. I need to run proprietary applications for banking and electronic ID but those are the exceptions to the rule. My server runs only free software, on desktop I sometimes run an older version of Sketchup to start modelling things but that's the only non-free package I use there. We have children, a cat, a dog, 4 horses, a farm, a large forest, the works. We have multi-device backup and restore as well. Things work fine, using free software, not using 'the cloud'. Where are the sticking points for you and what would it take to take those away?
For me, “impossible” isn’t the case. I’m deeply technical and could 100% run a setup like you’re describing. For me it’s, sadly, convenience and priorities. I oscillate between Linux and OS X for desktop/laptop use, have used Linux for server use for decades, have used both iOS/iPadOS and Android for tablets “in production”, and have only used Android as a secondary phone for doing development, and only iOS for primary phone use.
Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.
Day-to-day:
- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.
- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.
- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!
- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.
- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.
- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.
Hardware compatibility:
- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.
- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.
OS Updates:
- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.
- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.
- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.
Occasional new device setup:
- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
> My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state.
This has always been my core Linux desktop woe--there's always, no matter what CPU GPU (including (and most often), no dGPU at all) combo/distro I've used, been sleep wake issues of some variety.
I've had AMD CPUs with both fedora and Ubuntu that would never sleep if they weren't woken to desktop (i.e if not logged in, then allowed to automatically turn off the display) they'd never sleep. On those and any of the machines since, I never get more than a month of uptime without it being unresponsive when trying to wake it or similar, regardless of if Kernel updates have been installed etc.
I rarely use sleep on my Linux laptop (which I really had to fiddle with to get working) but never use it on desktop. With niri and startup apps going into default locations I don’t feel like I need it at all now.
I find it hard to believe that almost 20 years after copying iPhone, Google still hasn’t figured out how to do backups properly for simple phone migration. What happens if your Android phone is stolen or destroyed?
(It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)
95% of what was written in this article isn't required to set up an Android phone. You can literally log into your Google account on first boot and everything is done for you, automatically.
Maybe Samsung has changed how the first boot works compared to stock Android, but this definitely has not been my experience across several Samsung devices. Also many apps store their data in different ways which doesn't always survive a device migration/backup. Only cloud-only apps have a good experience, wheras anything that stores data on device can be hit and miss depending on how easy individual apps manage its backup.
At least Samsung doesn't sync folders.
Meaning: if they were organized before by topic they aren't there after syncing via their "Samsung Smart Switch Mobile" to a new Samsung phone.
A lot gets synced, but it's not like an image with full DSC (desired state configuration) afterwards.
Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
Apple products are atrocious to setup too. I've wanted to film just how bad the experience is but I'd need a 3rd phone since I have to use the 2nd phone to setup the new 1st phone.
a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it.
this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?
*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.
Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup:
Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.
So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.
Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.
So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.
While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.
You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.
I tried the exact same thing a few weeks ago with a de-googled phone and it did not work. I had to transfer the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder as well via root access, then it restored the chats (the display of the old phone was dead and hence I couldn't initiate any kind of account transfer to a new phone).
Weird, for me it worked fine. I didn't need to transfer the root parts. Nor did I do anything else on the old phone. I just signed in on the new one with the backups in place.
I don't use Google services or an account either, though I do have Google play installed.
The server, and plausibly at least one secret service. Telegram datacenters are located in Florida, Amsterdam and Singapure.. guess local jurisdiction applies.
I am an iPhone user myself, but the number of "this is an android problem" and "just use iPhone" in response to the author's complaints surprises me. I thought HN was more anti apple in the past? Maybe we are all old now and tinkering with our devices is out of fashion, but this doesn't make the author's complaints illegitimate.
And if we zoom out a bit, iPhones are only 20% of the global phone market. The overwhelming majority of the world uses android because, well, iPhones are expensive. There are plenty of places where an iPhone is still a status symbol. Even you think the author should have bought his parents iPhones instead, there is still a whole world of people out there who would benefit from improvements in the android ecosystem.
I don't use Android because iPhones are more expensive. In fact you can get Android phones that are as expensive and sometimes more expensive than iPhones. I use Android phones because it is a much more flexible ecosystem, where I can choose my browser, for example.
I don't mean to dismiss your opinion but I doubt this is the reason android has such a huge market share. I doubt the average person even knows that apple forces every app to use apple's own browser. The countries where android dominate are also the ones where you can get phone plans with free data for WhatsApp and Facebook. There is an entire world outside our techie circles where price and UX trumps having principles about user control and freedom.
By law third party engines are allowed since like 2024, geoblocked to the EU, but I haven't seen any news of browsers actually doing that. I think a number of other countries are starting to enforce that, like South Korea or Japan.
I’m very much the inverse of you. I don’t use Android because I don’t want to have to worry about all the fiddly stuff that is involved with Android. I like that it’s not a big deal to migrate to a new phone, that I don’t have to worry about whether I’ll be able to get security updates in a year, or have to spend time disabling telemetry.
If I did want to do a lot of fiddling with the phone then sure, Android would be a better choice, but like I had said back in 2004, what I wanted more than anything else was a phone that would sync its contacts with my Mac.
...and then you look into what devices they are using and what they are ignoring that could have been resolved by tinkering.
My father-in-law has just had an issue where Xiaomi's camera app took up 95GB of space on his phone. Not the photos - just the camera app. Uninstalling updates for the app resolved the issue, all the space was magically back.
Obviously that's a ton more work, and not something most people have any desire to do. They just want to upgrade their phone and have all their data and apps migrate seamlessly.
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't use iPhone because, well, it's iPhone. And until, like, this year, it was strictly more prohibitive than Android. Also, it was honestly just worse of a device than some Android flagships, and the tradeoff is only worth it if you are a lazy USA-ian, who doesn't use any "sketchier" non-mainstream apps, has an Apple account and owns a bunch of Apple devices anyway. Oh, and all your friends use iPhone Messages app. Then iPhone is the default. But outside of USA it was always more of a gimmick than a natural choice.
That being said, even if you wouldn't have said it before me, I probably shouldn't have said it too anyway, because I suspect that globally speaking the GP is right. Most people don't buy flagships, yet everybody has a phone. And Apple doesn't even try to compete in "non-premium" market, it's strictly impossible to buy a new iPhone for the price of some Redmi or whatever, which isn't even noticeably worse than an iPhone, practically speaking.
I have 5 years old iPhone SE2020 that is relatively cheap having in mind that is 5 years old. None of Androids served me that long. Only Motorola tried, but water killed it. Water has not killed iPhone when my son threw it into pond. Which Android is that good, practically speaking?
relative to an iPhone Pro, yes. Relative to many other phones, No. It shipped at $399. You can buy 4 to 12 android phones for that price. I'm an iPhone user but my sister and her family are Android.
I doubt I would get the same quality and reliability. Good Android phones are equally expensive and it is very hard to know which are actually good without doing research. As well I had bad experience with some Google Pixel model.
That is always the excuse people bring up to ignore the point. You can spend $1000 on a fancy chefs knife, or you can spend $30 on an Ikea chefs knife. Sure, the $1000 knife is higher quality. Yet, millions of people are still doing just find with the Ikea knife.
A cheap car will still get you to/from work over an expensive "higher quality" car.
Lots of families don't have money to buy an iPhone for every member of the family but do have enough to buy an Android for every member of the family.
I am typing this on a 9 year old iPhone 8 Plus. Battery was replaced once after 6 years, replacement battery is still lasting more than a day. Apps are slowly losing support for it, but other than that it mostly does what I want, and still gets security updates for really bad stuff.
I still have one of those lying around in the draw. It's the backup phone and every time I or my partner needs to use it I am surprised at how well it still works.
I have a S21 which was released in early 2022. Bought it new in late 2023 for 430€. I don't see any reason to get a new one currently. Had to service it twice for water damage to be honest but service was free
HN is mostly US and apparently in US even geeks have given up on Android.
Anyway, here is my experience when I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to Pixel 10 Pro: login to my Google account, let the backup restore happen then my new phone was identical to the old one.
I only had to do the login process to a few messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, and my home settings on Smart Launcher had to be manually imported but that's pretty much it.
Basically, a lot of what OP lists as "bare minimum requirements" are just preferences. If he used his Android phone like an iPhone, and like most people use it (with minimal tinkering) then the migration would have been just as smooth.
Yeah, and it's been like that for years - the past decade, at least.
I've had a couple of Nexuses, a few of the Pixels, with a Nokia in the mix too. Never any problem - just log in, wait a few mins for the apps to automatically install and the data to backup/restore (which, iirc, happens over local wifi rather than going through the cloud). The last upgrade included a separate work profile managed by MS Intune, and that was also smoothly handled by the upgrade process.
Yes, Whatsapp chat history has to be handled separately (as others have mentioned) because of the e2e encryption. The only other thing that needs doing is confirming that I want Firefox as my default browser when I first run it. Otherwise, it's all completely hands-off.
iPhones are only 20% but in USA they are much popular, and most people here will be from USA and will have disposable income working as software developers.
The worst part is that it keeps getting harder, not easier. Every new phone setup asks you to connect more accounts, enable more permissions, and configure more services.
I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours. Between 2FA migrations, app re-authentication, and trying to figure out which backup actually had their data, it was miserable.
Phone manufacturers have zero incentive to make cross-platform migration easy. Apple wants you to stay on iPhone. Google wants you to stay on Android. The user suffers.
Giving an Android phone to elderly/non-technical people is asking for trouble imho. They will eventually tap their way into installing suspicious apps, adware or even straight up malware. It's inevitable, they are not aware of what they do and how to avoid the many risks of the digital world.
I remember having the same struggles of OP when setting up a cheap android phone for my grandma, the amount of bloat, adware and misleading content I had to remove was incredible (and some couldn't even be removed). The irony was that after a few months of light usage, the phone was in a state even worse, full of downloaded apps and opened suspicious websites in the browser. She would swear she never even noticed any of those.
This is one of the cases in which giving them an iPhone with its walled garden has great benefits. You can also setup parental control on top of that already locked down ecosystem.
> Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams
How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.
My mother can no longer do the stuff she used to on her iOS phone because it is so complicated compared to the iPhone 4 I gave her a long time ago.
I screen her emails with her consent, very easy to do with Fastmail that imports her Yahoo mail into a folder she doesn't see and then I move okay emails to her inbox.
If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.
If you do go for a smartphone, my experience tells me that there's no difference between Android and iOS. The biggest sources for shady apps are the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shady stuff on the web can be easily defeated using an adblocking browser, which is essential for older relatives.
> If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.
You know, they are adults and have free will and do want a smartphone like everyone else to use Whatsapp, read the news, search things on Google, etc.
Hell, my 95 year old grandma convinced a nurse to install TikTok on her phone because she saw her using it and also wanted to try it. It's not like we can isolate them from the world
Sir no sir. I believe entirely the opposite. If they're tech illiterate then they don't have the entrenched knowledge that is the only thing keeping most people within the Windows ecosystem.
A Linux install that meets the basic needs of the user is perfecto!
Less so recently just due to time constraints, but I'm generally the technical person in my family group, and I've lost enough touch with Windows that troubleshooting it is increasingly difficult. If they need me to 'format and reinstall' they're getting Linux unless they have a very specific need that only Windows can cater to.
It's getting less silly every month! So many people in that boat only use the web browser anyway.
With a well-supported hardware configuration and a working web browser, even a non-techie may have a more stable experience than they would with Windows.
That has as much to do with the decline of Windows as with the ascent of desktop Linux, but still.
FYI: you can also set up parental controls on Android.
Parental control is a also a hot buggy mess on iOS currently. Our daughter has an iPhone with parental control set up and a bunch of apps that are whitelisted regularly refuse to start at random moments (blocked by parental controls). We hoped that iOS 26 would finally fix it, but nope.
It doesn't really matter, both phone ecosystems are a mess, but in different ways.
It's always crazy to me to see this kind of smug takes defending huge corporations as if they're your friends.
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
It's less about defending and more about being annoyed with all the over-confident, uninformed opinions people frequently post in reaction to any news article on the subject.
Funny, as someone that uses Android, sideloads apps, and is the "tech guy" for some older people, I went "yep, Google's own Play Store is full of shitty apps".
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
Upgraded to one of the latest iPhone recently. First time I clicked on “transfer data from old phone”. I’m used to reinstalling the operating system every couple of months from when I used Windows. It took maybe 15 minutes with close to 0 interactions. Everything was transferred. I was already authenticated in apps. What took manual steps was eSIM transfers.
I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
Google has APIs to do the same. In fact, it works on most apps. The biggest exceptions are security sensitive apps (2FA, password managers) and WhatsApp for some stupid reason. If you're a HN Android user who turns off any form of data sharing like me, you wouldn't notice, though, as this requires the "back up my data" checkbox during setup of the old and new phone to work conpletely.
Another issue on Android is that iOS allows for syncing data through the user's iCloud, which can be gigabytes in size, but Google has you use the Google Drive API which sucks and involves handing over credit card info.
The Android file transfer has another trick that Apple doesn't seem to do, which is fully offline local sync rather than going through the cloud. This has reliability issues and requires both devices to stay on and nearby while the transfer is in progress, but on slower internet connections the process can be a heck of a lot faster thanks to modern wifi speeds.
For some reason, iMessage always ends up in a very weird state when I transfer to a new iPhone. Also, some apps don't get restored settings, but I think they opt out (usually banking, credit card, insurance apps, etc.).
i typically don't want to re-enter credentials etc, so I always do encrypted backup via itunes.. took 6-7hrs just transferring photos quite hands off most of the time but still painful, can't imagine what android guys go through
Transferring eSIM from one iPhone to another can be restricted by the carrier. Here in India, the second largest carrier (Airtel), does not support the native iOS eSIM transfer process. It’s a separate set of steps (the ones published on Airtel’s website won’t work, despite customer care claiming that it does). What works is almost like applying for a new or replacement eSIM.
Same here, KPN, NL. You have to install the KPN app on the new phone and log in. Then you request an eSIM on the new phone. You get an SMS auth code on the old phone. You fill the auth code on the new phone. Then you have to remove the eSIM from the old phone (with the new one not provisioned yet). Then confirm on the new phone and cross your fingers that provisioning works. Presumably (according to the docs) when it fails, you can reprovision the old phone again.
The process made me so anxious the last few times, that I went to the carrier shop and asked for a nano SIM. Now life is bliss again.
It seems that eSIM is primarily an advantage when you need to get a new SIM, but other than that I don't really see much of an advantage for me as a customer.
I had to _call_ my German provider to get a new eSIM.
Meanwhile, my carrier in Japan not only migrates eSIMs between phones with no issues; it even offered to migrate my wife's physical SIM to an eSIM when setting up a new phone; and it worked flawlessly.
The way my original eSIM here was provisioned was also surprising to me, in a "I didn't even know this is possible" way.
When signing up for a contract, I just put in my eSIM EID, and then a couple of hours later an eSIM was _pushed to my phone by the carrier_; without me having to do anything (other than confirming that I do want to install it). Lots of customer-facing telecom infra here is pretty bad; but the eSIM experience was as good as it gets.
What I hate the most about setting up new devices up is apple MDM on our company-managed devices combined with data transfer via iTunes backup. Here’s why:
1. The devices will offer to transfer data wirelessly, but won’t tell you that some data isn’t transferred. Instead using iTunes is a must as (in our case) more data is copied. This excludes data from managed apps - understandable.
2. When updating and recovering the backup on the new device is done, the regular setup experience starts. But, as your WiFi is also copied over, the device starts trying to update and install apps in the background, even before you logged into your Apple ID. So you’re constantly annoyed by popups asking for the ID. If you try to enter it, another pop up will interrupt amd stop you from entering the credentials. It even aborts touch/face ID setup and makes you start over again. I’ve had some colleagues starting over on Touch ID for like 5 times before they were faster than the popups. That mixes with popups for company accounts like mail credentials. And even a required change of the unlock password. Sometimes up to 10 different popups spawn in a few seconds…
Seriously, why? Is it that hard to stop these prompts till the setup is done and then prompt the user for everything needed once?
We’ve had decades during which we could have educated more and more people on how use tech. Instead, the industry embraced dumbing everything down and claiming that everything needs to target technically illiterate people, while insisting that educating everyone was a bad idea.
This is what we end up with: people who don’t understand enough to configure their own phones, and phones full of spyware under the control of consumer-hostile actors.
The most worrying this is that this doesn’t just apply to the elder: it also applies to the newer generation.
The best phone experience, by far, if you hate bloat and spyware is GrapheneOS on a Pixel. No accounts, no logins, no restrictions on side loading, and most Android apps that aren't affected by the Play Integrity cancer just work. You can even install Google apps if you want, but my preference is to use FOSS apps only.
Surely, it depends on your particular vendors, but don't you have any problems with banking apps and such? I honestly just don't know, didn't try messing with firmware in a while. Do you use Revolut or something similar?
The GrapheneOS community maintains a list of banking apps compatibility. In a nutshell, most banking apps that haven't been infected by Play Integrity work just fine.I have yet to find a US app that does not work, but some European banking apps no longer do. If switching banks isn't an option, my suggestion is to keep an old or cheap "certified" phone for that purpose. Most of us have old hardware lying around so that is a fairly natural solution. Note that flashing the OS on a Pixel is reversible, so one option is to go back to the stock OS after upgrading to a newer model.
Wow, thanks, didn't know about that. I am actually surprised how broad the list is. I was even about to say that it appears to cover everything I care about right now, but then it occurred to me, that Revolut (unlike some other banking apps) doesn't have its own NFC interface implementation and relies on Google Pay for that anyway, so it's a huge "fuck you". Because it's pretty much the primary reason to have a banking app installed at all for me.
In my country, we do. For starters, we use apps for authentication and notifications. We can debate whether web push is viable, but most banking apps simply do not rely on it. As for older people, I would rather they use an app than a website because it is far too easy to fall victim to phishing attacks, no matter how much we educate them.
OK continuing to play Devil's advocate: In my country my mom fell to a sophisticated spear phishing attack and whilst on the phone with the scammer and he leveraged her app's login to make it easier and more convenient to attempt to send her money via Zelle.
I wonder if there's really evidence to support that the app's protect you from phishing attacks.
I personally think notifications suck and are spam and not needed, and that we could make something new and better we don't have that today though. What do you use the bank authentication for in your country if you don't mind my asking?
I’m not sure about the formal evidence, but to me it’s quite straightforward. I installed the official banking apps on my parents’ phones and told them to use only those apps for banking. Nothing else.
If they use a website, they might mistype the URL or click on a fake link. They don’t really use bookmarks either. Even if they manage to reach the correct site or add it to their home screen, they still have to log in again each time they use it. The app removes all of that—they just tap one icon. Passkeys may improve web security, but they still have a long way to go for non-technical users.
Notification sucks, but overall I’m still in favor of it until we have something better. I’ve had to replace my credit card a few times due to fraud cases, and the same happened to my parents. Because we get instant notifications for every transaction or authentication attempt, we know immediately if something suspicious happens. That’s not really possible with web push, especially since our banks don’t support it.
Authentication is much better in the app as well. In the past, banks would ask lots of personal questions over the phone, which I’m no longer comfortable answering unless I made the call myself. With the app, the account is tied to one device, and biometric login makes it easy and secure. Any approval happens inside the app, which feels safer.
App is definitely not perfect, but for the majority of people (non-tech), it's just a lot easier and (unfortunately) safer for them.
It's an android (11) flip phone but without Google store and without touchscreen, so almost nothing works on it
There's no setup, besides disabling the PTT button and making it open the application of your choice (as long as your choice is Clock, Voice Memo, or Music/FM Radio)
The ability to slam the phone shut to hang up, and call via speed dial without opening the "phone" app more than makes up for the lack of Instagram.
If you want a chatbot put 1800CHATGPT on your speed dial
Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean <checks notes…> a billion or so people don’t want an iPhone. Or rather, a phone they don’t have to dick with straight out of the box.
OTOH, I don’t really even know what you’re on about. Android is a nightmare because…it’s like iOS, which is “take phone out of box, restore from backup, sorted”? That doesn’t even make any sense, especially in light of what TFA describes.
For many people around my area, iPhones are a status symbol choice.
People in your area are very forthcoming. Not once have I ever heard someone vocalize that they bought an iPhone as a status symbol. “Easy to use”, “it’s what my friends use, and they like it”, but never “it makes me appear higher in the social strata”. They might think it, and I’m sure some do, but it’s not said out loud. Or maybe that’s not why the majority buy iPhones, dunno.
My area is eastern europe. Where an iphone is like 3-4 minimum wage salaries or so. People take loans to buy iphones! And you could probably also correlate them with luxury item buyers, around here.
Good thing the US message color thing is isolated over there and the peer pressure on Gen Alpha hasn't reached us.
But yes, I stick to my claim. You don't have to hard press those people to tell you that they don't use phones "for poor people" . The idiom is local and used both ironically and literraly.
It's just a "high-end" good here in the States. Elsewhere it's a luxury good, on par with a Rolex. I use an iPhone because of the smooth UI, the integration with my Mac, and the less-evil company that spies on me less. But let's not kid ourselves, these things are spendy, and conspicuous consumption is still a thing.
>Not once have I ever heard someone vocalize that they bought an iPhone as a status symbol.
This might come as a shock to you, but people don't vocalize and share their desires and impulses on why they buy or do certain things, why they dress a certain way, why they sleep with certain people, etc. Apple's entire brand was built on being different and desirable at the lizard brain level.
In many parts of the world, people even take bank loans to buy iPhones simply because it's the device that all rich people, politicians, athletes, celebrities, influencers use. They don't buy based on the specs and reviews, they buy on what their lizard brain tells them, and no tech company does that better than Apple.
Paying 2000 USD for a phone absolutely is a status symbol. And nobody actually says a status symbol is one - like nobody says look at my Rolex watch, I paid 50000 USD for it. Nobody needs a 2000 USD phone and nobody needs a 50000 USD watch.
The problem with buying a $2000 iPhone as a status symbol is that no one knows whether you bought the $1100 256GB model or the $2000 1TB model unless you tell them.
But someone that cares about watches knows whether you paid $5000 or $50000 for your Rolex just by looking.
iPhone is a status symbol is more places than it is “normal” to pay $1k+ for a phone (this is yearly or less salary in most of the world). gotta come down from the ivory tower
> Android is becoming more and more like iOS: anything that the user used to be able to do... they can no longer do
The article shows this is not true, if you know the similar process for iOS.
The article could be compared to the iPhone setup process. There are some preferences to uncheck, but there is no third party spying software on an iPhone when it arrives. Contrast to Samsung.
That type of rhetoric won’t get you what you want. Don’t dismiss something just because you don’t like it.
iOS devices are not toys, and even if they were there is value in toys, and even if there weren’t it is provably false that “nobody wants those”.
Furthermore, if Google dropped Android it is misguided to believe “the FOSS community” would handle it and everything would be roses. What you’d have then are a couple of hardware vendors (like Samsung) publishing their own forks and dozens of different incompatible open-source versions that would get no traction.
iOS devices are. My iPad is the most useless piece of technology I own, calling it a "computer" is an insult to the actual computers I own. It's a toy, and not even a fun toy compared to my Nintendo Switch.
Android handles serious workloads fine, macOS takes software seriously. iOS is the only operating system that treats gatchapon as the pinnacle of high-performance workloads.
Hell, I'll double-down if you really disagree with me. ChromeOS, the operating system/spyware installed on e-waste like Chromebooks, has a more serious OS than iOS. It is more functional and capable, and undeniably the better professional OS. I say that with no love for ChromeOS.
iOS exists in a class of it's own, functionality-wise. A class much closer to game consoles than anything resembling a computer.
> Hell, I'll double-down if you really disagree with me.
No wonder the world is in its current state, if when faced with disagreement the reaction is “I’ll plug my ears and dig my heels in deeper” instead of “I wonder if I’m missing something”.
> ChromeOS (…) has a more serious OS than iOS. It is (…) the better professional OS.
For starters, there are professionals (as in, people who get paid to do a job) who do their work on iOS. Not programmers, but writers, illustrators, animators, video editors, photographers, film makers… Maybe you can’t (or refuse to even try?) doing your work on an iOS device—I certainly choose not to—but that in no way means no one does.
But all of that is irrelevant when you consider the very true fact of life that not everything is about work. Many people want something else, and not making all one’s computing decisions around work is healthy.
> there are professionals (as in, people who get paid to do a job) who do their work on iOS
I don't doubt it. There are people who get paid to do their work on a web browser, if iOS wasn't capable of that it would be a travesty. The flexibility of iOS pales in comparison to the absolute worst desktop OSes, like Windows and ChromeOS. The DAW, IDE and NLE software on iOS outright cannot compete with the offerings on Windows, macOS and Linux.
> Many people want something else, and not making all one’s computing decisions around work is healthy.
You've conceded the original point, then. I can do "real work" with an Xbox, toy shovel or Lego bricks, but it's still a toy at the end of the day. The real tragedy is that iPad and iPhone hardware doesn't have to be limited by toyetic software. It's entirely Apple's choice to restrict my iPad from supporting WINE, having Linux containers and running actual IDEs that aren't arbitrarily gimped by distribution terms.
I don't think my comment is controversial among most iPhone owners, it's only the hardcore ecosystem enthusiasts that debate it. Most people really do treat their iPhone and iPad like a set-top box or games console; it's the minority who rely on it for work. A passionate minority, certainly, but nowhere near the market share Windows and ChromeOS carved out. iOS and iPadOS compete from the sidelines, still struggling to displace (or match) Windows.
You have been refuted. Repeatedly. But as you yourself have said, you double down on disagreements. So I understand why you have been called a troll.
> it's only the hardcore ecosystem enthusiasts that debate it.
That’s not true at all. Case in point, I don’t care for phones. What I did care for was your exaggerated rhetoric. As someone who is critical of Tim Cook and modern-day Apple (especially around the state of their software), I’d rather criticisms remain grounded in things the people at Apple can understand and fix, not made up ramblings that make them dismiss critics as lunatics to ignore.
Your tone changed drastically from the original post. You went from derogatory terms and claiming “nobody wants” iOS devices to them having a “passionate” user base and recognising they can be used for work.
My tone has been consistent the entire time; people want iOS devices because they're toys.
In the overwhelming majority of all professional niches that exists, iOS does not compete for any market share. It is not obsoleting anything, anecdotally and statistically.
Any questions? Or do you have proof that macOS and Windows are genuinely threatened by iOS?
My personal experience is that the setup procedure wildly depends on the phone's vendor.
The biggest difference between setting up a Pixel and an iPhone I experienced was that Google asked for certain settings beforehand that I had to turn off in the settings after setup on iOS. Both would've been a lot faster if I hadn't tried to disable optional account stuff.
Contrast that to Samsung, especially their non-flagship models, where the setup wizard took forever because of the crap Samsung added to the process.
That said, I do appreciate some "tutorial" parts of the setup process on Android. When I first set up an iPhone, I got the distinct impression that Apple assumed I already knew how to do everything. Their interface isn't exactly intuitive if you haven't used iOS before, no matter what online forums may claim. It took me several tries and a Google search to figure out how to remove apps, for instance. Perhaps one might find it an annoying extra step you're going to skip as a power user who's used to the platform, but it felt strange to be dropped into a strange, new operating environment with no instructions.
Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of.
There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.
On Samsung phones you can skip making a Samsung account. All the Google bits still work and it's basically the same as having a Pixel, except you'll have a few unused apps, a different camera and phone app and a very slightly different UI.
I had to guess arcane adb permission commands to stop a 2025 Samsung tablet from nagging the user about creating a Samsung account. It just kept showing up multiple times a day. But nice enough hardware with the promise of long updates at a reasonable price.
Heck, I own a zflip 6 right now and the ONLY hard requirement out of everything in the article I gone through was the google account. And I know of a way to get rid of it too, it would just break a couple of things.
I had mi phones before and they had only one hard requirement of needed a xiaomi account for developer mode. I circumvented it.
The article isn't just a pathetic piece of writting in general, it's also operating on tip top tier redditor-brained US-defaultism where "Android = Pixel/Samsung". I have no idea why the crowd here is letting it stick around.
To be fair, they are doing with a Samsung phone, and Samsung is the Apple of Android (Big marketing budget, mid quality if we are being generous).
Samsung as a company is a universal No Buy. The fact OP bought Samsung makes me raise an eyebrow.
Credit to Apple where credit is due. When I unboxed my first iphone, I was happy to give Apple all my personal information, birthday, emails, ssn.... It was bizarre, I'm usually apprehensive to give this stuff away, but Apple made it fun. Within a few days, I was disappointed by a lack of widgets, slow transitions between screens, and a buggy podcast app. But the damage was done, my company was out $600 and Apple had my contact info.
Samsung's UI and software behaviour may be shitty in general, but they're one of the few manufacturers reliably offering timely long-term security updates. When you go beyond Samsung, you quickly end up with brands promising "quarterly updates" or having months-long delays fixing CVEs.
Plus, when they do something novel, they do it quite well. Their flagship phones have great price/performance if you buy them a month or two after launch (often for three quarters of the launch price + free earbuds/smartwatch + cashback), their software suite is quite complete and generally well-localised, and they have support channels non-English support channels available.
I do wish they'd fix some of their terrible software design crimes and stop the endless race to the bottom shoving product placement into their apps, but it's hardly a no-buy to me.
Pixel is much cleaner and ships security updates monthly like clockwork. Plus you can install GrapheneOS and you get security updates multiple times per month, no AI nonsense and sandboxed Google Play Services if you need it.
It's pick-your-poison. iPhone setup is eight hundred screens, half of which are upsells for Apple services, but at least it's only Apple services. Android setup, if you're not on a Pixel, is an invitation for the vendor's dozens of "partners" to all get your money and all your data.
For those on iPhones or respectable mobile network operators, not everyone has as good of an experience as you do.
For people who buy subsidized Android-based phones from some carriers such as Metro by T-Mobile USA, they either come with bloatware baked in or they download the bloatware when you first activate the device or something like that.
These things are fairly easy to disable if you know what you are doing but if you don't know what you are doing, I can imagine people will simply put up with ads showing up every time you pick up the phone. It can get annoying VERY quickly.
Years ago i bought a Device because i wanted to use it. It had cool features or provided a benefit to me. Today if i buy a device (just any device) i decide which Device will be the lease anoying one. Often this ends in not buying a device and use a old but reliant way of doing things.
I'm in the UK. I use a pixel, but also have iPhones and iPads for work reasons. My wife has a Samsung, my mother a Motorola etc.
I set up phones several times a year. What the author describes is not a problem if you go "all in" on your manufacturer. iOS or Android.
If you tick the cloud sync functions you can restore apps and copy data with a two or three step wizard. If you pay for the cloud storage level, you will have enough space for your photos etc. it's really a non event.
But if you don't go all in with your manufacturer. E.g you consider Google an untrustworthy custodian of your photos, or decide you'll stick with the free iCloud account etc. You're in for a world of tiny pains.
Honestly, I would say that even in the latter case the painfulness of the process is a bit overstated. Sure, it's not great. But if you treat it just as a new device and don't expect to just continue from where you've left it on the previous phone, you'll make it under 30 minutes anyway. Half of it is playing with the UI of the new version of the OS and getting annoyed at the fact that the apps are not the same anyway, because on the previous device you refused to update an app after they fucked up it's UI, and now you must to get an old apk which won't even work anyway on the brand new Androip v99 or whatever.
Sounds like setting up Windows. The amount of explaining of “why you don't want or need that” was insane. I got Ubuntu down to 10 min or so. Including my fav apps. (I won’t make the comparison to setting up NicOS with a ready to go config ;))
I'm dreading having to buy a new rugged Android phone. I have one where all the stuff I don't want is turned off. F-Droid, Firefox, FairEmail, DuckDuckGo, no Google account. Getting a new phone into that configuration may not be possible.
The major brands are more and more locked down, and the minor brands can't be trusted.
I have a Cat phone now. The actual manufacturer, Bullett, went bankrupt. Can't get the small rubber parts needed to maintain the waterproofing.
I personally call this process of setting up a new device, whether for me or for someone else, "shit shoveling". It is something of a ritual.
In the former case the thing that needs to be removed is the entirety of the OS (and if that proves to be impossible, the device is returned or discarded), and in the latter it's a scan of all apps and removal of all unnecessary apps, my grandma does not need Samsung Galaxy Games, thank you very much.
I've been happy enough with my Ubuntu phone. Music works, I can send SMS messages and use the phone, timers and alarms work, and it takes pictures well enough. There's even a LibreWolf clone so I can see when my bus/train arrives.
I do SIP and Asterisk. I read the title and was like I know right! Oh smartphones. Setting it up is the tip of an iceberg whereas consumers and society as a whole are pay huge prices in several currencies for phones which are tremendously over engineered for and not fit for, purpose. The entire stack from Von Veumann to 5G has to go.
How do you back up and restore things without root? I've found that even with root, these days many backups are useless thanks to using hardware-backed encryption...
There are various options, but if you use syncthing, it is as easy as creating a share on your PC or backup machine and on the phone. Everything gets synced automatically.
Well everything you chose to sync gets synced. Like photos, documents etc. You can also set up apps in such a way where they make automatic local backups on your phone in the folder that gets synced. There are multiple android apps for syncthing
Transferring to a new Android phone without depending on Google cloud is a total nightmare. It doesn't help that there's a ton of outdated information in the net on how to do that. You can see it in this very thread: lots of people saying "do a local Whatsapp backup, transfer the backup manually": this USED to work but does NOT anymore. There is a decryption key in /data/data/com.whatsapp, which of course you can only access on rooted phones (maybe there's a way to approve the transfer when the old phone is still working, not sure).
To the best of my knowledge, it is basically impossible to fully transfer applications locally to new phones without root access.
- do a FULL backup of the apps you want to transfer, that means it must also include "device protected data"
- restore apps on your new phone
If you'd like regular backups of apps: create scheduled backup with NeoBackup to a local folder and sync them with whatever tool you want to external storage. Good luck with that, you'll need it.
Another thing that annoys me on Android is the setup experience itself. All my recent device presentcthe same behaviour: login with a Google account, transfer data, setup voice assistant and some other defaults,done.
Then after the first app updates is done, a notification comes with "let's finish setting up your phone" and again asks to setup voice assistant, check defaults and whatever else is in the flow.
Has no one noticed that the setup flow seems to run twice?
And it's not one specific device. I do it with eight to ten devices a year, from different OEM, writing reviews and testing. They all have the same behaviour.
Another annoying thing: very few apps are copied from old device to new devices and bring their settings and most importantly login. Of about 80 apps on my device, only five or so are ready to use after a migration.
Going through dozens of apps, doing logins, 2FAcand changing settings is a PITA.
Just like always, average Android phone users get the worst of both worlds. Android is supposed to be the freer option, but in reality only very tech savvy users are enjoying the freedom (and they install custom ROMs anyway).
Setting up enshittified devices is the nightmare. Don't curse out on all phones because they made a poor purchase decision. You're literally buying it wrong. Next time go with a slightly used device that's fully supported by GrapheneOS and marvel at the frictionless setup.
I fear every single time I have to switch phones. Being degoogled means I first have to choose hardware based on custom ROMs compatibility, and fight the thing to just install the ROM. Then the fun begins, for every single stupid feature I have to install and setup a solution (app) optionally restoring a backup individually. Contacts, calendar, files, maps, passwords, airtag protection, email, IM, keyboard, weather, notes, smart garbage:tm:, alternative YouTube client...The state of current tech is pityful, if it wasn't what I was doing to put food on the table I wouldn't want any of this garbage 10 meters near me.
Edit: Before any of the geniuses here says "at least you can use alternatives" I don't want to hear your copium, it's obvious this won't last.
If you use android and don't choose GrapheneOS then idk what to tell you, its been an awesome experience with no issues for the last ~5ish years I've used it.
iPhones are nice but all that iCloud data is a privacy nightmare especially without Advanced Data Protection, which the UK Gov caused Apple to stop offering in the UK (and I can see that extending to the E U).
Friction can be good in life. Good food takes effort etc. When it comes to phones, there is the issue of privacy, security and phone addiction.
When the mobile is hard to use (eg Grapheneos - no offence), it can force you to use a real computing device for most of your needs
If you think this setup process is a drag, imagine what a pain in the neck it is to try to use your phone after your paranoid son has fucked it all up like this.
You bought the wrong phone and/or put the wrong distribution on it. Having said this it does take more than 30 seconds to get a new device up to your personal specs unless you're fine with whatever vendor distribution runs on it - which can work if you choose the right vendor but mostly ends up with your device serving someone else. I'd say it takes closer to 30 minutes than 30 seconds but I'm fine with taking this time given that my average Android phone lifetime is a bit over 8 years. I'm currently using a Redmi Note 5 Pro from 2018 which I'll soon relegate to second device status once I have a replacement, probably a Motorola G75 or something similar. That device should also last me around 8 years. Before the Redmi I'm using now I used a Motorola Defy from 2010 which, incidentally, is still in use as a trailer camera. Android devices can last a very long time because the firmware is open. Eventually they'll be too slow or lack the memory to support more recent Android distributions - which is what made me replace the Defy with the Redmi - but that does not mean they end up taking space in a drawer somewhere. They're in use here as trailer camera, media player, 3D printer controller and more.
It used to be better.
I've been running Android custom ROMs since Gingerbread days, on HTC HD2. At that time, I'd be flashing nightlies, switching between CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android, kernels, getting bootloops.
Setting up the phone was no big deal - most apps could be backed up with Titanium Backup, few that couldn't (e.g. banking) would just get redownloaded and I'd log in immediately. I was also still a student back then and had more time to tinker, but if it was anything like it is now, I would've given up much quicker.
In the last year I had to do few clean flashes with changing my phone, then updating LineageOS, and once the phone just wiped itself for no reason. Backups don't work for most apps - even if you can get one, they'll crash without a specific reason. 2FA everywhere is mostly security theater, with apps that have no business keeping my data but insisting on it, using SMS, email, authenticators, selfies. Banking apps needing two layers of root detection circumvention (because a custom ROM is already problematic, so you need root to stop them from detecting an unlocked bootloader, and then again not to detect root). Google insisting on sending a security check notification to a phone that's just been wiped with no ability to confirm that it's really you from your PC (but if you give it few minutes, it will give in and let you verify with SMS), always feels like hacking yourself.
It's a massive pain already on a clean, bloatware-free custom ROM, with a truly minimum app list. Once you need to start debloating the official OS, it's another hour or three, depending if they're nice and let you uninstall things or if you need adb access to disable offending packages.
I found that TiBackup was both the secret sauce that allowed for playing with ROMs with impunity, and also my primary reason for rooting phones back in the day even when I was just using phones in stock form.
It was the first app I ever spent money on, and I did so without any hesitation at all.
It was just genuinely useful to be able to back up and restore my own data on my own devices, and to do so on my own accord. It was a process that I owned, and controlled, and if it went wrong somehow then I was able to troubleshoot it and make sensible decisions.
I haven't had a rooted phone in a decade or so now. These days, backups allegedly happen -- somehow -- and the entire process seems to be both deliberately and inscrutably shrouded in mystery.
When I switch devices or reset to factory to try to fix an eSIM issue (or whatever I do that makes restoration a useful path today), then it's never clear before I start whether the backup/restore will magically work or if it will simply fail without recourse. The uncertainty demonstrates a reprehensibly terrible way to deal with backups.
“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece.
I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.
> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.
While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel.
Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
I tried it, Graphene isn't really a good alternative because the built in apps are so bad that you end up needing to install the Pixel/Google versions anyway.
If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?
If I have to turn Graphene into a Pixel to make it usable, and I did, there’s not much point. And the apps are 90% of the time very noticeably better on iOS, so overall turns into a very bad trade.
You still get much better privacy with GrapheneOS even if you install Google apps since they are sandboxed; they don't have access to unique device identifiers and you can control what Google can access by adjusting its permissions, as opposed to having full reign to do whatever it wants. Also you don't have to use all the Google apps, plenty of open source and/or privacy respecting alternatives out there. Pixel Camera only needs Google Photos for the photo previewer, everything else works without it or you can install gcam services provider to use any gallery you want
> If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?
I am not sure why would you have to install messages has nobody uses RCS these days.
As for calendars and contacts, I am struggling to see the added value over the fossify alternatives, hence I don't have them anymore on my smartphones.
Pixel camera and google photos are nice to get the most out of tye pixel camera but thanksfully grapheneOS lets you use them without access to network. Stock Pixel rom doesn't allow you to do that. That is a major difference imho.
> Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality)
I disabled Google Photos but I didn't notice any issues with Camera except for not being able to open the photo just taken from the camera interface. Am I missing something else?
You can install this to fix it, btw
https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider
That's basic functionality?
I replace Google Messages with a FOSS version precisely because it doesn't bug me about RCS.
Which one if I may ask? I'm looking for one to get out of RCS reminders and also to avoid receiving emergency messages which come through even if I turn them off in Google messages. The local authorities overuse it, I get several per month now.
I think it's because they got blamed for not warning everyone with the Valencia floods last year but it's really ridiculous now. Now they blow up everyone's phone just when there's going to be a bit of wind.
I like org.fossify.messages from F-Droid, but there are other good SMS apps over there.
Benefit is in sandboxing gapps. Less data to collect and more battery to save.
JFYI, Pixel Camera works without a Google Account. Contacts and Calendar work fine through CalDav and Fossify Calendar.
I avoid RCS like a plague, so I can't comment about that.
Unless you live in a place where your phone needs to be a regional variant and there are no custom roms that support it.
> Installation of GrapheneOS
and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. But other than that, android is not opensource anymore.
I mean, it never was because you had hundreds (no exaggeration [1]) closed-binary blobs running (not to mention a whole OS on things like radio and camera, running on their own SoC), but now you cannot get even close to a proper of the userspace since google already anounced they will not be mainlining anything back to AOSP
[1] zero source for kernel pieces, even for pixel https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_laguna-kernels_6...
> and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes.
You get improved privacy and security, at least on some fronts. By default, GrapheneOS does not provide root access and recommends against rooting the device. Is there a trade-off? Certainly. Security and privacy are always at conflict with what a completely open platform can provide. Given the amount of access to personal information that goes through our devices and the number of bad actors out there (both behaving legally and illicitly), some people believe it is worth the price. At least GrapheneOS offers more transparency than Android or iOS.
The bit about clamping down on open source, that is very much disappointing. I doubt that it is going to go away entirely in Android. On the other hand, hopefully it will provide incentives for companies to explore developing more open alternatives and consumers to explore buying more open alternatives. It won't be a huge market, but many of us have avoided growing so dependent upon the current platforms that we couldn't simply walk away.
You can actually use most Apple devices without signing in. There are obviously a lot of benefits to the ecosystem but you can enjoy the hardware etc. without signing especially on Mac. For iPhone you'd need to learn to side load apps but it's doable.
You don't need an Apple account to back up an entire iPhone and restore it onto a new one, keeping almost all settings. They've kept the local iTunes method working from day 1. Idk how you do this in Android, sounds like most people sync everything to Google.
At least Apple's ecosystem is genuinely better in certain ways. Everyone else wants a piece of the pie that they didn't deserve.
Getting downvoted for speaking the truth. HN loves to twist its nose every time someone praises a closed-source solution but falls head over heels for anyone claiming to work for a FAANG. Hypocrisy thy name is HN.
I got downvoted one single time. Ow owie ouch my fake internet points.
It was probably for saying everyone else doesn't deserve the piece of the pie. That's incredibly subjective on my part.
Ah, well, with that attitude it was well deserved then. Don’t mind me.
How ironic...
I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.
That sounds like Linux users complaining about Windows Server or vice versa. iPad is trivial to get running but it is not the same as an Android tablet, and if you try to use your Android experience you will have issues.
Not so trivial that I didn't struggle with it for an hour. I'm not an Android power user. (I think?) I'm not even particularly a fan of Android. It's just the (hot take) least bad option I've tried.
More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".
You should do a blog write-up on that, many would find it fascinating.
Believe me, I wish I had documented it. I didn't realize that this would be surprising or controversial until I described the experience later to others. Some people basically didn't believe me.
The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.
I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.
If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.
To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.
All of those security related screens you listed is why I like Apple: security related things are local to secure enclave, not in cloud.
Keep in mind apple famously never fixes these bugs that let the phone be rooted via a 0click attack starting from imessage, which inexplicably runs with elevated privileges.
I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.
And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.
This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.
Interesting reasoning that I never thought of, though it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of stuff deters my non-technical family members from updating
Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.
actually you can skip most of these, but get reduced functionality in return. You can skip faceID/touchID, unlock code, appleID. You can’t skip terms, some customization options and, data collection and privacy settings.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
I think the point is that you can skip all those, but it's still 50 screens. There's no "skip all and go directly to my home screen" button.
A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts.
Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
I think they also provide backups
Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore
> “Android phones” is the key missing piece.
iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.
Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.
All the companies want to hold your data hostage.
who do you think gets in trouble if her phone dies and all her stuff is gone
storing things in the cloud is responsible
Just back it up once a week on the computer, that's what I do.
I don't even use a Google account on my phone. Most apps don't need it! There's only a handful that do, in particular ChatGPT that really insists you have a Google account logged in (why they force you to make an account with their direct competitor is beyond me but they do)
But perplexity is much better anyway so I use that.
And who gets in trouble when her iCloud account glitches itself and loses everything? Or when the network is dead and nothing works?
Local copies should always be primary and cloud copies secondary.
But you don't get to extract rent in that case which is why none of the big companies want to do things that way.
local backups is responsible
yeah you might do that, but how many non-technical people can be bothered to do so?
iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services.
Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.
When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.
It took a good while for me to figure out that a family member had inadvertently signed up for an Apple Music account that they were not using.
Apple going from being "the new microsoft" to being "the new AOL"
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'd argue that installing and setting up GrapheneOS on a Pixel is as-much or less effort compared to setting up an iPhone. And it gives you full freedom and the best possible security while doing so. You can have everything at once.
What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this? I run close to exclusively free software and have done so for decades and have yet to feel the need to change this. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. I need to run proprietary applications for banking and electronic ID but those are the exceptions to the rule. My server runs only free software, on desktop I sometimes run an older version of Sketchup to start modelling things but that's the only non-free package I use there. We have children, a cat, a dog, 4 horses, a farm, a large forest, the works. We have multi-device backup and restore as well. Things work fine, using free software, not using 'the cloud'. Where are the sticking points for you and what would it take to take those away?
The author is technical, but apparently the parents are not. “It works for me” turns into “just spy on my family members”.
>What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this?
Play Integrity and Google's monopoly on providing "hardware attestation".
For me, “impossible” isn’t the case. I’m deeply technical and could 100% run a setup like you’re describing. For me it’s, sadly, convenience and priorities. I oscillate between Linux and OS X for desktop/laptop use, have used Linux for server use for decades, have used both iOS/iPadOS and Android for tablets “in production”, and have only used Android as a secondary phone for doing development, and only iOS for primary phone use.
Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.
Day-to-day:
- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.
- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.
- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!
- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.
- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.
- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.
Hardware compatibility:
- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.
- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.
OS Updates:
- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.
- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.
- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.
Occasional new device setup:
- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
> My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state.
This has always been my core Linux desktop woe--there's always, no matter what CPU GPU (including (and most often), no dGPU at all) combo/distro I've used, been sleep wake issues of some variety.
I've had AMD CPUs with both fedora and Ubuntu that would never sleep if they weren't woken to desktop (i.e if not logged in, then allowed to automatically turn off the display) they'd never sleep. On those and any of the machines since, I never get more than a month of uptime without it being unresponsive when trying to wake it or similar, regardless of if Kernel updates have been installed etc.
I rarely use sleep on my Linux laptop (which I really had to fiddle with to get working) but never use it on desktop. With niri and startup apps going into default locations I don’t feel like I need it at all now.
I find it hard to believe that almost 20 years after copying iPhone, Google still hasn’t figured out how to do backups properly for simple phone migration. What happens if your Android phone is stolen or destroyed?
(It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)
Setting up a new Samsung device is just as easy. Everything transfers over in a few minutes.
95% of what was written in this article isn't required to set up an Android phone. You can literally log into your Google account on first boot and everything is done for you, automatically.
The point is that you have to turn off preferences and uninstall apps that come with the phone. (Samsung apps and OneDrive are mentioned.)
So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.
Maybe Samsung has changed how the first boot works compared to stock Android, but this definitely has not been my experience across several Samsung devices. Also many apps store their data in different ways which doesn't always survive a device migration/backup. Only cloud-only apps have a good experience, wheras anything that stores data on device can be hit and miss depending on how easy individual apps manage its backup.
At least Samsung doesn't sync folders. Meaning: if they were organized before by topic they aren't there after syncing via their "Samsung Smart Switch Mobile" to a new Samsung phone. A lot gets synced, but it's not like an image with full DSC (desired state configuration) afterwards.
Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
Apple products are atrocious to setup too. I've wanted to film just how bad the experience is but I'd need a 3rd phone since I have to use the 2nd phone to setup the new 1st phone.
I was about to say the same.
I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.
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a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it. this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?
*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.
Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup:
Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.
So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.
Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.
So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.
WhatsApp can do a local backup to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp
I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server
Yes, but WhatsApp is very finiky about restoring that backup when you're setting up a new device.
Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means.
It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices
As usual, root and sshfs make this all a lot more bearable. Alas, no online-banking or digital health insurance services, lol.
While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.
the WhatsApp chat transfer feature has worked for me many times https://faq.whatsapp.com/209942271778103/
for Viber I've only tried it via the backup on old phone and then restore that backup on the new phone
You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.
> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.
I did it only a few weeks ago. They are indeed encrypted but it seems to retrieve the key from WhatsApp itself.
They wouldn't be much good as a backup if there was no way to read them of course.
I tried the exact same thing a few weeks ago with a de-googled phone and it did not work. I had to transfer the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder as well via root access, then it restored the chats (the display of the old phone was dead and hence I couldn't initiate any kind of account transfer to a new phone).
Weird, for me it worked fine. I didn't need to transfer the root parts. Nor did I do anything else on the old phone. I just signed in on the new one with the backups in place.
I don't use Google services or an account either, though I do have Google play installed.
> Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber.
Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.
Yes but that's because the server has access to all your messages, they are not end to end encrypted.
It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.
The server, and plausibly at least one secret service. Telegram datacenters are located in Florida, Amsterdam and Singapure.. guess local jurisdiction applies.
I am 100% convinced that whatsapp has backdoors and so I might as well just use the convenient one.
I am an iPhone user myself, but the number of "this is an android problem" and "just use iPhone" in response to the author's complaints surprises me. I thought HN was more anti apple in the past? Maybe we are all old now and tinkering with our devices is out of fashion, but this doesn't make the author's complaints illegitimate.
And if we zoom out a bit, iPhones are only 20% of the global phone market. The overwhelming majority of the world uses android because, well, iPhones are expensive. There are plenty of places where an iPhone is still a status symbol. Even you think the author should have bought his parents iPhones instead, there is still a whole world of people out there who would benefit from improvements in the android ecosystem.
I don't use Android because iPhones are more expensive. In fact you can get Android phones that are as expensive and sometimes more expensive than iPhones. I use Android phones because it is a much more flexible ecosystem, where I can choose my browser, for example.
I don't mean to dismiss your opinion but I doubt this is the reason android has such a huge market share. I doubt the average person even knows that apple forces every app to use apple's own browser. The countries where android dominate are also the ones where you can get phone plans with free data for WhatsApp and Facebook. There is an entire world outside our techie circles where price and UX trumps having principles about user control and freedom.
lol I even didn't know that I couldn't use Firefox in iPhone. Does this really fly in EU as well? How?
By law third party engines are allowed since like 2024, geoblocked to the EU, but I haven't seen any news of browsers actually doing that. I think a number of other countries are starting to enforce that, like South Korea or Japan.
Oh yeah, now I recall.. Fx in ios is just a shell
I’m very much the inverse of you. I don’t use Android because I don’t want to have to worry about all the fiddly stuff that is involved with Android. I like that it’s not a big deal to migrate to a new phone, that I don’t have to worry about whether I’ll be able to get security updates in a year, or have to spend time disabling telemetry.
If I did want to do a lot of fiddling with the phone then sure, Android would be a better choice, but like I had said back in 2004, what I wanted more than anything else was a phone that would sync its contacts with my Mac.
The idea that Android needs tinkering of fiddling needs to die.
80% of users in the world use Android, and most of them don't do any tinkering or fiddling.
...and then you look into what devices they are using and what they are ignoring that could have been resolved by tinkering.
My father-in-law has just had an issue where Xiaomi's camera app took up 95GB of space on his phone. Not the photos - just the camera app. Uninstalling updates for the app resolved the issue, all the space was magically back.
For me a new phone is a forced cleanup. I don't migrate anything automatically.
Obviously that's a ton more work, and not something most people have any desire to do. They just want to upgrade their phone and have all their data and apps migrate seamlessly.
Especially if someone needs to get and setup a new phone in a hurry for whatever reason.
Yes, it's sometimes good to do a spring cleaning but I'm not always in a position to do so (or have the desire to).
Speaking for myself, I've been auto migrating since I got an iPhone 3GS in 2009. The only thing that needs serious cleanup is my music library.
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't use iPhone because, well, it's iPhone. And until, like, this year, it was strictly more prohibitive than Android. Also, it was honestly just worse of a device than some Android flagships, and the tradeoff is only worth it if you are a lazy USA-ian, who doesn't use any "sketchier" non-mainstream apps, has an Apple account and owns a bunch of Apple devices anyway. Oh, and all your friends use iPhone Messages app. Then iPhone is the default. But outside of USA it was always more of a gimmick than a natural choice.
That being said, even if you wouldn't have said it before me, I probably shouldn't have said it too anyway, because I suspect that globally speaking the GP is right. Most people don't buy flagships, yet everybody has a phone. And Apple doesn't even try to compete in "non-premium" market, it's strictly impossible to buy a new iPhone for the price of some Redmi or whatever, which isn't even noticeably worse than an iPhone, practically speaking.
I have 5 years old iPhone SE2020 that is relatively cheap having in mind that is 5 years old. None of Androids served me that long. Only Motorola tried, but water killed it. Water has not killed iPhone when my son threw it into pond. Which Android is that good, practically speaking?
> relatively cheap
relative to an iPhone Pro, yes. Relative to many other phones, No. It shipped at $399. You can buy 4 to 12 android phones for that price. I'm an iPhone user but my sister and her family are Android.
I doubt I would get the same quality and reliability. Good Android phones are equally expensive and it is very hard to know which are actually good without doing research. As well I had bad experience with some Google Pixel model.
That is always the excuse people bring up to ignore the point. You can spend $1000 on a fancy chefs knife, or you can spend $30 on an Ikea chefs knife. Sure, the $1000 knife is higher quality. Yet, millions of people are still doing just find with the Ikea knife.
A cheap car will still get you to/from work over an expensive "higher quality" car.
Lots of families don't have money to buy an iPhone for every member of the family but do have enough to buy an Android for every member of the family.
Sorry, but it is not fair analogy. It is comparison of ikea knife vs cheap chinese knife that breaks after 10 uses.
I am typing this on a 9 year old iPhone 8 Plus. Battery was replaced once after 6 years, replacement battery is still lasting more than a day. Apps are slowly losing support for it, but other than that it mostly does what I want, and still gets security updates for really bad stuff.
Is there a comparably usable 9 year old android?
My wife uses a OnePlus 8t (about as old as your phone) daily. It's survived drops, tubs, etc.
I still have one of those lying around in the draw. It's the backup phone and every time I or my partner needs to use it I am surprised at how well it still works.
Sad that it is Chinese one.
I have a S21 which was released in early 2022. Bought it new in late 2023 for 430€. I don't see any reason to get a new one currently. Had to service it twice for water damage to be honest but service was free
OK I had Samsung that was OK. Later after upgrades it became unusable, but that's it.
Or sync your contacts to a CardDav server. Or record a phone call. Or develop your own software (for the time being).
HN is mostly US and apparently in US even geeks have given up on Android.
Anyway, here is my experience when I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to Pixel 10 Pro: login to my Google account, let the backup restore happen then my new phone was identical to the old one.
I only had to do the login process to a few messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, and my home settings on Smart Launcher had to be manually imported but that's pretty much it.
Basically, a lot of what OP lists as "bare minimum requirements" are just preferences. If he used his Android phone like an iPhone, and like most people use it (with minimal tinkering) then the migration would have been just as smooth.
Yeah, and it's been like that for years - the past decade, at least.
I've had a couple of Nexuses, a few of the Pixels, with a Nokia in the mix too. Never any problem - just log in, wait a few mins for the apps to automatically install and the data to backup/restore (which, iirc, happens over local wifi rather than going through the cloud). The last upgrade included a separate work profile managed by MS Intune, and that was also smoothly handled by the upgrade process.
Yes, Whatsapp chat history has to be handled separately (as others have mentioned) because of the e2e encryption. The only other thing that needs doing is confirming that I want Firefox as my default browser when I first run it. Otherwise, it's all completely hands-off.
iPhones are only 20% but in USA they are much popular, and most people here will be from USA and will have disposable income working as software developers.
The worst part is that it keeps getting harder, not easier. Every new phone setup asks you to connect more accounts, enable more permissions, and configure more services.
I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours. Between 2FA migrations, app re-authentication, and trying to figure out which backup actually had their data, it was miserable.
Phone manufacturers have zero incentive to make cross-platform migration easy. Apple wants you to stay on iPhone. Google wants you to stay on Android. The user suffers.
> I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours
I give a silent thanks every day that my dad still has a flip phone and no desire to upgrade.
Giving an Android phone to elderly/non-technical people is asking for trouble imho. They will eventually tap their way into installing suspicious apps, adware or even straight up malware. It's inevitable, they are not aware of what they do and how to avoid the many risks of the digital world. I remember having the same struggles of OP when setting up a cheap android phone for my grandma, the amount of bloat, adware and misleading content I had to remove was incredible (and some couldn't even be removed). The irony was that after a few months of light usage, the phone was in a state even worse, full of downloaded apps and opened suspicious websites in the browser. She would swear she never even noticed any of those.
This is one of the cases in which giving them an iPhone with its walled garden has great benefits. You can also setup parental control on top of that already locked down ecosystem.
My mom has had several generations of Galaxy A5x and basic iPads, it makes absolutely no difference. She simply never installs any app.
Some things are actually worse on the iOS side. It took years for Apple to catch up with spam and scam calls/SMS detection.
Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams, I eventually set up NextDNS on her devices.
> Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams
How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.
My mother can no longer do the stuff she used to on her iOS phone because it is so complicated compared to the iPhone 4 I gave her a long time ago.
I screen her emails with her consent, very easy to do with Fastmail that imports her Yahoo mail into a folder she doesn't see and then I move okay emails to her inbox.
Have you tried Assistive Access mode? https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
I have not heard of it before, thank you. I will try it out.
No problem! :)
I tried it on my mom's phone.
It's a good idea, but terrible execution.
Once I set up an Android phone for her, I will publish what I did to help others.
If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.
If you do go for a smartphone, my experience tells me that there's no difference between Android and iOS. The biggest sources for shady apps are the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shady stuff on the web can be easily defeated using an adblocking browser, which is essential for older relatives.
> If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.
You know, they are adults and have free will and do want a smartphone like everyone else to use Whatsapp, read the news, search things on Google, etc.
Hell, my 95 year old grandma convinced a nurse to install TikTok on her phone because she saw her using it and also wanted to try it. It's not like we can isolate them from the world
Sir a Linux desktop recommendation for non-tech-literate elders is just silly
Sir no sir. I believe entirely the opposite. If they're tech illiterate then they don't have the entrenched knowledge that is the only thing keeping most people within the Windows ecosystem.
A Linux install that meets the basic needs of the user is perfecto!
Less so recently just due to time constraints, but I'm generally the technical person in my family group, and I've lost enough touch with Windows that troubleshooting it is increasingly difficult. If they need me to 'format and reinstall' they're getting Linux unless they have a very specific need that only Windows can cater to.
It's getting less silly every month! So many people in that boat only use the web browser anyway.
With a well-supported hardware configuration and a working web browser, even a non-techie may have a more stable experience than they would with Windows.
That has as much to do with the decline of Windows as with the ascent of desktop Linux, but still.
Why? As long as you use a regular desktop distro, it's simple, pleasant and easy to use. This was already true 10+ years ago.
Sir, have you tried doing it? Works great.
It isnt silly. We did this with my 92 yo grandma back in the 2010s. She had a browser, an email client, word processor, printer.
Bulletproof, immune to all the apps and malware. She couldnt break it.
FYI: you can also set up parental controls on Android.
Parental control is a also a hot buggy mess on iOS currently. Our daughter has an iPhone with parental control set up and a bunch of apps that are whitelisted regularly refuse to start at random moments (blocked by parental controls). We hoped that iOS 26 would finally fix it, but nope.
It doesn't really matter, both phone ecosystems are a mess, but in different ways.
But I thought sideloading wasn't a real problem and Google is just locking it down because they're evil :-)
“Sideloading” does not play a role in this. All of the crapware is on Google Play.
Galaxy Store is the clown car version of Google Play-- luckily mostly unnecessary.
It's always crazy to me to see this kind of smug takes defending huge corporations as if they're your friends.
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
It's less about defending and more about being annoyed with all the over-confident, uninformed opinions people frequently post in reaction to any news article on the subject.
You could start by taking a look at your own comment then.
Funny, as someone that uses Android, sideloads apps, and is the "tech guy" for some older people, I went "yep, Google's own Play Store is full of shitty apps".
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
Off-topic, but thanks for hosting all the gcam ports for all these years.
You're welcome! :D
Upgraded to one of the latest iPhone recently. First time I clicked on “transfer data from old phone”. I’m used to reinstalling the operating system every couple of months from when I used Windows. It took maybe 15 minutes with close to 0 interactions. Everything was transferred. I was already authenticated in apps. What took manual steps was eSIM transfers.
I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
Google has APIs to do the same. In fact, it works on most apps. The biggest exceptions are security sensitive apps (2FA, password managers) and WhatsApp for some stupid reason. If you're a HN Android user who turns off any form of data sharing like me, you wouldn't notice, though, as this requires the "back up my data" checkbox during setup of the old and new phone to work conpletely.
Another issue on Android is that iOS allows for syncing data through the user's iCloud, which can be gigabytes in size, but Google has you use the Google Drive API which sucks and involves handing over credit card info.
The Android file transfer has another trick that Apple doesn't seem to do, which is fully offline local sync rather than going through the cloud. This has reliability issues and requires both devices to stay on and nearby while the transfer is in progress, but on slower internet connections the process can be a heck of a lot faster thanks to modern wifi speeds.
For some reason, iMessage always ends up in a very weird state when I transfer to a new iPhone. Also, some apps don't get restored settings, but I think they opt out (usually banking, credit card, insurance apps, etc.).
I had the same experience upgrading my Pixel phone. The only apps that needed new authentication were a few messaging apps like WhatsApp.
i typically don't want to re-enter credentials etc, so I always do encrypted backup via itunes.. took 6-7hrs just transferring photos quite hands off most of the time but still painful, can't imagine what android guys go through
If you are full-on in the Google ecosystem, it takes no time at all. Your photos would be in Google Cloud, so you won't need to wait to download them.
eSIM transfer also typically doesn’t require any intervention, usually it just goes across to the new device
The key word here is “typically”.
Transferring eSIM from one iPhone to another can be restricted by the carrier. Here in India, the second largest carrier (Airtel), does not support the native iOS eSIM transfer process. It’s a separate set of steps (the ones published on Airtel’s website won’t work, despite customer care claiming that it does). What works is almost like applying for a new or replacement eSIM.
Same here, KPN, NL. You have to install the KPN app on the new phone and log in. Then you request an eSIM on the new phone. You get an SMS auth code on the old phone. You fill the auth code on the new phone. Then you have to remove the eSIM from the old phone (with the new one not provisioned yet). Then confirm on the new phone and cross your fingers that provisioning works. Presumably (according to the docs) when it fails, you can reprovision the old phone again.
The process made me so anxious the last few times, that I went to the carrier shop and asked for a nano SIM. Now life is bliss again.
It seems that eSIM is primarily an advantage when you need to get a new SIM, but other than that I don't really see much of an advantage for me as a customer.
I had to _call_ my German provider to get a new eSIM.
Meanwhile, my carrier in Japan not only migrates eSIMs between phones with no issues; it even offered to migrate my wife's physical SIM to an eSIM when setting up a new phone; and it worked flawlessly.
The way my original eSIM here was provisioned was also surprising to me, in a "I didn't even know this is possible" way.
When signing up for a contract, I just put in my eSIM EID, and then a couple of hours later an eSIM was _pushed to my phone by the carrier_; without me having to do anything (other than confirming that I do want to install it). Lots of customer-facing telecom infra here is pretty bad; but the eSIM experience was as good as it gets.
What I hate the most about setting up new devices up is apple MDM on our company-managed devices combined with data transfer via iTunes backup. Here’s why:
1. The devices will offer to transfer data wirelessly, but won’t tell you that some data isn’t transferred. Instead using iTunes is a must as (in our case) more data is copied. This excludes data from managed apps - understandable.
2. When updating and recovering the backup on the new device is done, the regular setup experience starts. But, as your WiFi is also copied over, the device starts trying to update and install apps in the background, even before you logged into your Apple ID. So you’re constantly annoyed by popups asking for the ID. If you try to enter it, another pop up will interrupt amd stop you from entering the credentials. It even aborts touch/face ID setup and makes you start over again. I’ve had some colleagues starting over on Touch ID for like 5 times before they were faster than the popups. That mixes with popups for company accounts like mail credentials. And even a required change of the unlock password. Sometimes up to 10 different popups spawn in a few seconds…
Seriously, why? Is it that hard to stop these prompts till the setup is done and then prompt the user for everything needed once?
We’ve had decades during which we could have educated more and more people on how use tech. Instead, the industry embraced dumbing everything down and claiming that everything needs to target technically illiterate people, while insisting that educating everyone was a bad idea.
This is what we end up with: people who don’t understand enough to configure their own phones, and phones full of spyware under the control of consumer-hostile actors.
The most worrying this is that this doesn’t just apply to the elder: it also applies to the newer generation.
[dead]
The best phone experience, by far, if you hate bloat and spyware is GrapheneOS on a Pixel. No accounts, no logins, no restrictions on side loading, and most Android apps that aren't affected by the Play Integrity cancer just work. You can even install Google apps if you want, but my preference is to use FOSS apps only.
Surely, it depends on your particular vendors, but don't you have any problems with banking apps and such? I honestly just don't know, didn't try messing with firmware in a while. Do you use Revolut or something similar?
The GrapheneOS community maintains a list of banking apps compatibility. In a nutshell, most banking apps that haven't been infected by Play Integrity work just fine.I have yet to find a US app that does not work, but some European banking apps no longer do. If switching banks isn't an option, my suggestion is to keep an old or cheap "certified" phone for that purpose. Most of us have old hardware lying around so that is a fairly natural solution. Note that flashing the OS on a Pixel is reversible, so one option is to go back to the stock OS after upgrading to a newer model.
Wow, thanks, didn't know about that. I am actually surprised how broad the list is. I was even about to say that it appears to cover everything I care about right now, but then it occurred to me, that Revolut (unlike some other banking apps) doesn't have its own NFC interface implementation and relies on Google Pay for that anyway, so it's a huge "fuck you". Because it's pretty much the primary reason to have a banking app installed at all for me.
I have found websites for accessing my banking to be pretty great. Do we really need banking apps?
In my country, we do. For starters, we use apps for authentication and notifications. We can debate whether web push is viable, but most banking apps simply do not rely on it. As for older people, I would rather they use an app than a website because it is far too easy to fall victim to phishing attacks, no matter how much we educate them.
OK continuing to play Devil's advocate: In my country my mom fell to a sophisticated spear phishing attack and whilst on the phone with the scammer and he leveraged her app's login to make it easier and more convenient to attempt to send her money via Zelle.
I wonder if there's really evidence to support that the app's protect you from phishing attacks.
I personally think notifications suck and are spam and not needed, and that we could make something new and better we don't have that today though. What do you use the bank authentication for in your country if you don't mind my asking?
I’m not sure about the formal evidence, but to me it’s quite straightforward. I installed the official banking apps on my parents’ phones and told them to use only those apps for banking. Nothing else.
If they use a website, they might mistype the URL or click on a fake link. They don’t really use bookmarks either. Even if they manage to reach the correct site or add it to their home screen, they still have to log in again each time they use it. The app removes all of that—they just tap one icon. Passkeys may improve web security, but they still have a long way to go for non-technical users.
Notification sucks, but overall I’m still in favor of it until we have something better. I’ve had to replace my credit card a few times due to fraud cases, and the same happened to my parents. Because we get instant notifications for every transaction or authentication attempt, we know immediately if something suspicious happens. That’s not really possible with web push, especially since our banks don’t support it.
Authentication is much better in the app as well. In the past, banks would ask lots of personal questions over the phone, which I’m no longer comfortable answering unless I made the call myself. With the app, the account is tied to one device, and biometric login makes it easy and secure. Any approval happens inside the app, which feels safer.
App is definitely not perfect, but for the majority of people (non-tech), it's just a lot easier and (unfortunately) safer for them.
This doesn't answer the question though. If someone says "how do I have safe sex" you don't suggest abstinence.
his question was "Dont you have any problems with banking apps?"
and I answered indirectly that I don't use them.
Maybe you just are fixating on only particular answers being acceptable.
Get a Sonim XP3+
It's an android (11) flip phone but without Google store and without touchscreen, so almost nothing works on it
There's no setup, besides disabling the PTT button and making it open the application of your choice (as long as your choice is Clock, Voice Memo, or Music/FM Radio)
The ability to slam the phone shut to hang up, and call via speed dial without opening the "phone" app more than makes up for the lack of Instagram.
If you want a chatbot put 1800CHATGPT on your speed dial
Seems like it will cause me to get stuck at an airport or train station while an employee tells me about the virtues of an app.
This is a possibility, but so far the only public place I've found lacking any paper backup has been ticketmaster music venues
And malls that replaced their maps/hours with QR codes but this seems to be a California thing so can be avoided by not being Californian
The article is about how setting up /Android/ phones is a nightmare.
Contrasting it to my experience setting up iPhones is… dramatic.
Yes, its a nightmare because Android is becoming more and more like iOS: anything that the user used to be able to do... they can no longer do.
Android phone manufacturers want $1200 for something that is a toy, just like the Apple iToys.
Nobody wants those, and nobody wants this. Google needs to get out of the business and let the FOSS community handle it.
Nobody wants those, and nobody wants this.
Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean <checks notes…> a billion or so people don’t want an iPhone. Or rather, a phone they don’t have to dick with straight out of the box.
OTOH, I don’t really even know what you’re on about. Android is a nightmare because…it’s like iOS, which is “take phone out of box, restore from backup, sorted”? That doesn’t even make any sense, especially in light of what TFA describes.
For many people around my area, iPhones are a status symbol choice. Not a coherent or direct software+ecosystem choice.
I've seen arguments around chosing iPhone for their camera. But the vast majority that is tech iliterate stops around that argument.
For many people around my area, iPhones are a status symbol choice.
People in your area are very forthcoming. Not once have I ever heard someone vocalize that they bought an iPhone as a status symbol. “Easy to use”, “it’s what my friends use, and they like it”, but never “it makes me appear higher in the social strata”. They might think it, and I’m sure some do, but it’s not said out loud. Or maybe that’s not why the majority buy iPhones, dunno.
My area is eastern europe. Where an iphone is like 3-4 minimum wage salaries or so. People take loans to buy iphones! And you could probably also correlate them with luxury item buyers, around here.
Good thing the US message color thing is isolated over there and the peer pressure on Gen Alpha hasn't reached us.
But yes, I stick to my claim. You don't have to hard press those people to tell you that they don't use phones "for poor people" . The idiom is local and used both ironically and literraly.
Thanks for the context, I imagine it makes a bit of difference. :-)
It's just a "high-end" good here in the States. Elsewhere it's a luxury good, on par with a Rolex. I use an iPhone because of the smooth UI, the integration with my Mac, and the less-evil company that spies on me less. But let's not kid ourselves, these things are spendy, and conspicuous consumption is still a thing.
>Not once have I ever heard someone vocalize that they bought an iPhone as a status symbol.
This might come as a shock to you, but people don't vocalize and share their desires and impulses on why they buy or do certain things, why they dress a certain way, why they sleep with certain people, etc. Apple's entire brand was built on being different and desirable at the lizard brain level.
In many parts of the world, people even take bank loans to buy iPhones simply because it's the device that all rich people, politicians, athletes, celebrities, influencers use. They don't buy based on the specs and reviews, they buy on what their lizard brain tells them, and no tech company does that better than Apple.
Paying 2000 USD for a phone absolutely is a status symbol. And nobody actually says a status symbol is one - like nobody says look at my Rolex watch, I paid 50000 USD for it. Nobody needs a 2000 USD phone and nobody needs a 50000 USD watch.
The problem with buying a $2000 iPhone as a status symbol is that no one knows whether you bought the $1100 256GB model or the $2000 1TB model unless you tell them.
But someone that cares about watches knows whether you paid $5000 or $50000 for your Rolex just by looking.
iPhone is a status symbol is more places than it is “normal” to pay $1k+ for a phone (this is yearly or less salary in most of the world). gotta come down from the ivory tower
> Android is becoming more and more like iOS: anything that the user used to be able to do... they can no longer do
The article shows this is not true, if you know the similar process for iOS.
The article could be compared to the iPhone setup process. There are some preferences to uncheck, but there is no third party spying software on an iPhone when it arrives. Contrast to Samsung.
That type of rhetoric won’t get you what you want. Don’t dismiss something just because you don’t like it.
iOS devices are not toys, and even if they were there is value in toys, and even if there weren’t it is provably false that “nobody wants those”.
Furthermore, if Google dropped Android it is misguided to believe “the FOSS community” would handle it and everything would be roses. What you’d have then are a couple of hardware vendors (like Samsung) publishing their own forks and dozens of different incompatible open-source versions that would get no traction.
> iOS devices are not toys
iOS devices are. My iPad is the most useless piece of technology I own, calling it a "computer" is an insult to the actual computers I own. It's a toy, and not even a fun toy compared to my Nintendo Switch.
Android handles serious workloads fine, macOS takes software seriously. iOS is the only operating system that treats gatchapon as the pinnacle of high-performance workloads.
Hell, I'll double-down if you really disagree with me. ChromeOS, the operating system/spyware installed on e-waste like Chromebooks, has a more serious OS than iOS. It is more functional and capable, and undeniably the better professional OS. I say that with no love for ChromeOS.
iOS exists in a class of it's own, functionality-wise. A class much closer to game consoles than anything resembling a computer.
> Hell, I'll double-down if you really disagree with me.
No wonder the world is in its current state, if when faced with disagreement the reaction is “I’ll plug my ears and dig my heels in deeper” instead of “I wonder if I’m missing something”.
> ChromeOS (…) has a more serious OS than iOS. It is (…) the better professional OS.
For starters, there are professionals (as in, people who get paid to do a job) who do their work on iOS. Not programmers, but writers, illustrators, animators, video editors, photographers, film makers… Maybe you can’t (or refuse to even try?) doing your work on an iOS device—I certainly choose not to—but that in no way means no one does.
But all of that is irrelevant when you consider the very true fact of life that not everything is about work. Many people want something else, and not making all one’s computing decisions around work is healthy.
> there are professionals (as in, people who get paid to do a job) who do their work on iOS
I don't doubt it. There are people who get paid to do their work on a web browser, if iOS wasn't capable of that it would be a travesty. The flexibility of iOS pales in comparison to the absolute worst desktop OSes, like Windows and ChromeOS. The DAW, IDE and NLE software on iOS outright cannot compete with the offerings on Windows, macOS and Linux.
> Many people want something else, and not making all one’s computing decisions around work is healthy.
You've conceded the original point, then. I can do "real work" with an Xbox, toy shovel or Lego bricks, but it's still a toy at the end of the day. The real tragedy is that iPad and iPhone hardware doesn't have to be limited by toyetic software. It's entirely Apple's choice to restrict my iPad from supporting WINE, having Linux containers and running actual IDEs that aren't arbitrarily gimped by distribution terms.
let's maybe not engage the patently obvious troll?
Only if you can't refute me.
I don't think my comment is controversial among most iPhone owners, it's only the hardcore ecosystem enthusiasts that debate it. Most people really do treat their iPhone and iPad like a set-top box or games console; it's the minority who rely on it for work. A passionate minority, certainly, but nowhere near the market share Windows and ChromeOS carved out. iOS and iPadOS compete from the sidelines, still struggling to displace (or match) Windows.
> Only if you can't refute me.
You have been refuted. Repeatedly. But as you yourself have said, you double down on disagreements. So I understand why you have been called a troll.
> it's only the hardcore ecosystem enthusiasts that debate it.
That’s not true at all. Case in point, I don’t care for phones. What I did care for was your exaggerated rhetoric. As someone who is critical of Tim Cook and modern-day Apple (especially around the state of their software), I’d rather criticisms remain grounded in things the people at Apple can understand and fix, not made up ramblings that make them dismiss critics as lunatics to ignore.
Your tone changed drastically from the original post. You went from derogatory terms and claiming “nobody wants” iOS devices to them having a “passionate” user base and recognising they can be used for work.
My tone has been consistent the entire time; people want iOS devices because they're toys.
In the overwhelming majority of all professional niches that exists, iOS does not compete for any market share. It is not obsoleting anything, anecdotally and statistically.
Any questions? Or do you have proof that macOS and Windows are genuinely threatened by iOS?
My personal experience is that the setup procedure wildly depends on the phone's vendor.
The biggest difference between setting up a Pixel and an iPhone I experienced was that Google asked for certain settings beforehand that I had to turn off in the settings after setup on iOS. Both would've been a lot faster if I hadn't tried to disable optional account stuff.
Contrast that to Samsung, especially their non-flagship models, where the setup wizard took forever because of the crap Samsung added to the process.
That said, I do appreciate some "tutorial" parts of the setup process on Android. When I first set up an iPhone, I got the distinct impression that Apple assumed I already knew how to do everything. Their interface isn't exactly intuitive if you haven't used iOS before, no matter what online forums may claim. It took me several tries and a Google search to figure out how to remove apps, for instance. Perhaps one might find it an annoying extra step you're going to skip as a power user who's used to the platform, but it felt strange to be dropped into a strange, new operating environment with no instructions.
A Samsung phone. I've owned several (not Samsung) Android phones, and have never had to deal with such nonsense.
Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of. There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.
On Samsung phones you can skip making a Samsung account. All the Google bits still work and it's basically the same as having a Pixel, except you'll have a few unused apps, a different camera and phone app and a very slightly different UI.
I had to guess arcane adb permission commands to stop a 2025 Samsung tablet from nagging the user about creating a Samsung account. It just kept showing up multiple times a day. But nice enough hardware with the promise of long updates at a reasonable price.
Heck, I own a zflip 6 right now and the ONLY hard requirement out of everything in the article I gone through was the google account. And I know of a way to get rid of it too, it would just break a couple of things.
I had mi phones before and they had only one hard requirement of needed a xiaomi account for developer mode. I circumvented it.
The article isn't just a pathetic piece of writting in general, it's also operating on tip top tier redditor-brained US-defaultism where "Android = Pixel/Samsung". I have no idea why the crowd here is letting it stick around.
To be fair, they are doing with a Samsung phone, and Samsung is the Apple of Android (Big marketing budget, mid quality if we are being generous).
Samsung as a company is a universal No Buy. The fact OP bought Samsung makes me raise an eyebrow.
Credit to Apple where credit is due. When I unboxed my first iphone, I was happy to give Apple all my personal information, birthday, emails, ssn.... It was bizarre, I'm usually apprehensive to give this stuff away, but Apple made it fun. Within a few days, I was disappointed by a lack of widgets, slow transitions between screens, and a buggy podcast app. But the damage was done, my company was out $600 and Apple had my contact info.
Samsung's UI and software behaviour may be shitty in general, but they're one of the few manufacturers reliably offering timely long-term security updates. When you go beyond Samsung, you quickly end up with brands promising "quarterly updates" or having months-long delays fixing CVEs.
Plus, when they do something novel, they do it quite well. Their flagship phones have great price/performance if you buy them a month or two after launch (often for three quarters of the launch price + free earbuds/smartwatch + cashback), their software suite is quite complete and generally well-localised, and they have support channels non-English support channels available.
I do wish they'd fix some of their terrible software design crimes and stop the endless race to the bottom shoving product placement into their apps, but it's hardly a no-buy to me.
Pixel is much cleaner and ships security updates monthly like clockwork. Plus you can install GrapheneOS and you get security updates multiple times per month, no AI nonsense and sandboxed Google Play Services if you need it.
It's pick-your-poison. iPhone setup is eight hundred screens, half of which are upsells for Apple services, but at least it's only Apple services. Android setup, if you're not on a Pixel, is an invitation for the vendor's dozens of "partners" to all get your money and all your data.
This article is a disaster. Beyond logging into your Google account nothing they described in the article is required to set up an Android phone.
For those on iPhones or respectable mobile network operators, not everyone has as good of an experience as you do.
For people who buy subsidized Android-based phones from some carriers such as Metro by T-Mobile USA, they either come with bloatware baked in or they download the bloatware when you first activate the device or something like that.
These things are fairly easy to disable if you know what you are doing but if you don't know what you are doing, I can imagine people will simply put up with ads showing up every time you pick up the phone. It can get annoying VERY quickly.
Years ago i bought a Device because i wanted to use it. It had cool features or provided a benefit to me. Today if i buy a device (just any device) i decide which Device will be the lease anoying one. Often this ends in not buying a device and use a old but reliant way of doing things.
I'm in the UK. I use a pixel, but also have iPhones and iPads for work reasons. My wife has a Samsung, my mother a Motorola etc.
I set up phones several times a year. What the author describes is not a problem if you go "all in" on your manufacturer. iOS or Android.
If you tick the cloud sync functions you can restore apps and copy data with a two or three step wizard. If you pay for the cloud storage level, you will have enough space for your photos etc. it's really a non event.
But if you don't go all in with your manufacturer. E.g you consider Google an untrustworthy custodian of your photos, or decide you'll stick with the free iCloud account etc. You're in for a world of tiny pains.
Honestly, I would say that even in the latter case the painfulness of the process is a bit overstated. Sure, it's not great. But if you treat it just as a new device and don't expect to just continue from where you've left it on the previous phone, you'll make it under 30 minutes anyway. Half of it is playing with the UI of the new version of the OS and getting annoyed at the fact that the apps are not the same anyway, because on the previous device you refused to update an app after they fucked up it's UI, and now you must to get an old apk which won't even work anyway on the brand new Androip v99 or whatever.
Sounds like setting up Windows. The amount of explaining of “why you don't want or need that” was insane. I got Ubuntu down to 10 min or so. Including my fav apps. (I won’t make the comparison to setting up NicOS with a ready to go config ;))
I'm dreading having to buy a new rugged Android phone. I have one where all the stuff I don't want is turned off. F-Droid, Firefox, FairEmail, DuckDuckGo, no Google account. Getting a new phone into that configuration may not be possible. The major brands are more and more locked down, and the minor brands can't be trusted.
I have a Cat phone now. The actual manufacturer, Bullett, went bankrupt. Can't get the small rubber parts needed to maintain the waterproofing.
Suggestions?
You could get a pixel and flash grapheneos. Most stock roms will require google services.
Pixels are far from rugged
I personally call this process of setting up a new device, whether for me or for someone else, "shit shoveling". It is something of a ritual.
In the former case the thing that needs to be removed is the entirety of the OS (and if that proves to be impossible, the device is returned or discarded), and in the latter it's a scan of all apps and removal of all unnecessary apps, my grandma does not need Samsung Galaxy Games, thank you very much.
I've been happy enough with my Ubuntu phone. Music works, I can send SMS messages and use the phone, timers and alarms work, and it takes pictures well enough. There's even a LibreWolf clone so I can see when my bus/train arrives.
I do SIP and Asterisk. I read the title and was like I know right! Oh smartphones. Setting it up is the tip of an iceberg whereas consumers and society as a whole are pay huge prices in several currencies for phones which are tremendously over engineered for and not fit for, purpose. The entire stack from Von Veumann to 5G has to go.
Care to detail (or point to details of) your setup?
None of those problems exist on GrapheneOS. In fact i regularly do a clean wipe and am up and running again in minutes.
How do you back up and restore things without root? I've found that even with root, these days many backups are useless thanks to using hardware-backed encryption...
(not OP but been on Grapheneos for a couple of years).
I don't. I transfer any important data like photos to a real computer weekly
Mail, Calendar and Contacts are handled by IMAP and DavX. Passwords are in 1Password
I have minimal apps so setting up a new device wouldn't be too much trouble
There are various options, but if you use syncthing, it is as easy as creating a share on your PC or backup machine and on the phone. Everything gets synced automatically.
> Everything gets synced automatically
That's not true though, is it? "Everything" kind of implies an iPhone-style backup. You can't do that without root AIUI
Maybe you can give us more details about how you achieve a full up-and-running restore "in minutes"? I run GrapheneOS so very interested.
(Syncthing for Android is deprecated, too)
Well everything you chose to sync gets synced. Like photos, documents etc. You can also set up apps in such a way where they make automatic local backups on your phone in the folder that gets synced. There are multiple android apps for syncthing
https://github.com/mobile-nixos/mobile-nixos
TIL this exists. Here's hoping we see some type of NixOS + Graphene mashup one day.
Somehow, I recently migrated phones, and I don't find it a "nightmare". Was fairly straightforward. Xiaomi Redmi to S25+.
Vivaldi over Firefox. I would love to hear the reasoning.
Same here! I'm assuming it has more to do with the mobile app experience than anything else.
iPhones are basically effort free, it takes a while, but 99% of it is transferred without a hitch, some poorly written apps may need an extra step.
Transferring to a new Android phone without depending on Google cloud is a total nightmare. It doesn't help that there's a ton of outdated information in the net on how to do that. You can see it in this very thread: lots of people saying "do a local Whatsapp backup, transfer the backup manually": this USED to work but does NOT anymore. There is a decryption key in /data/data/com.whatsapp, which of course you can only access on rooted phones (maybe there's a way to approve the transfer when the old phone is still working, not sure).
To the best of my knowledge, it is basically impossible to fully transfer applications locally to new phones without root access.
The ONLY reliable way to transfer to a new phone:
- root your phone
- get NeoBackup (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.backup/) and grant superuser permission to it
- do a FULL backup of the apps you want to transfer, that means it must also include "device protected data"
- restore apps on your new phone
If you'd like regular backups of apps: create scheduled backup with NeoBackup to a local folder and sync them with whatever tool you want to external storage. Good luck with that, you'll need it.
Another thing that annoys me on Android is the setup experience itself. All my recent device presentcthe same behaviour: login with a Google account, transfer data, setup voice assistant and some other defaults,done.
Then after the first app updates is done, a notification comes with "let's finish setting up your phone" and again asks to setup voice assistant, check defaults and whatever else is in the flow.
Has no one noticed that the setup flow seems to run twice?
And it's not one specific device. I do it with eight to ten devices a year, from different OEM, writing reviews and testing. They all have the same behaviour.
Another annoying thing: very few apps are copied from old device to new devices and bring their settings and most importantly login. Of about 80 apps on my device, only five or so are ready to use after a migration.
Going through dozens of apps, doing logins, 2FAcand changing settings is a PITA.
Devs do a poor job on that front.
Developers basically need to opt out not to use that feature. 2FA apps do that for understandable reasons (including on iOS).
In my experience just about everything but WhatsApp and maybe Signal work out of the box for apps downloaded through GPlay.
I noticed that as well, I thought it was just a bug or a conflict because I used Smart Switch instead of a "built-in" Android tool.
Isn't that just Google trying to dark-pattern you into finally clicking that checkboxes you unchecked during setup?
Just like always, average Android phone users get the worst of both worlds. Android is supposed to be the freer option, but in reality only very tech savvy users are enjoying the freedom (and they install custom ROMs anyway).
Why don't use `smartswitch` built-in feature of Samsung phones?
Setting up enshittified devices is the nightmare. Don't curse out on all phones because they made a poor purchase decision. You're literally buying it wrong. Next time go with a slightly used device that's fully supported by GrapheneOS and marvel at the frictionless setup.
I fear every single time I have to switch phones. Being degoogled means I first have to choose hardware based on custom ROMs compatibility, and fight the thing to just install the ROM. Then the fun begins, for every single stupid feature I have to install and setup a solution (app) optionally restoring a backup individually. Contacts, calendar, files, maps, passwords, airtag protection, email, IM, keyboard, weather, notes, smart garbage:tm:, alternative YouTube client...The state of current tech is pityful, if it wasn't what I was doing to put food on the table I wouldn't want any of this garbage 10 meters near me. Edit: Before any of the geniuses here says "at least you can use alternatives" I don't want to hear your copium, it's obvious this won't last.
If you use android and don't choose GrapheneOS then idk what to tell you, its been an awesome experience with no issues for the last ~5ish years I've used it.
Yep, no cloud storage upsells, no pushy AI crap, just a fast barebones smartphone and you can pick what you want on top.
Tell me why they only support Google Pixel phones, v6 through 10.
Those are the only phones that meet their stringent requirements.
They have been talking to a manufacturer with the goal of getting a non-Pixel phone on the market that meets the requirements.
That's Motorola
Can't use my bank.
Hack
iPhones are nice but all that iCloud data is a privacy nightmare especially without Advanced Data Protection, which the UK Gov caused Apple to stop offering in the UK (and I can see that extending to the E U).
Friction can be good in life. Good food takes effort etc. When it comes to phones, there is the issue of privacy, security and phone addiction.
When the mobile is hard to use (eg Grapheneos - no offence), it can force you to use a real computing device for most of your needs
Is it not clear that's it's just the well-known phenomenon, "enshittification" at play?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
If you think this setup process is a drag, imagine what a pain in the neck it is to try to use your phone after your paranoid son has fucked it all up like this.
“I bought terrible Google slopware and struggled with it”
Insightful stuff. Adults buy iPhones.
Adults do not waste their time arguing about the "superiority" of one platform - based on subjective choices - online.
This is literally the midwit meme...
Here's how you actually set up an Android phone:
- log into Google account
- select a few checkboxes (basically just if you want to restore apps or not)
- done, everything else is automatic
All the fuckery they decided to do because they think they're tech savvy wasn't required.
You don’t sound very tech savvy yourself to be honest! Well, certainly not security conscious or in anyway concerned about data privacy.
You thinking anything OP did improves security or data privacy proves the midwit meme...
It is not. Takes like 30 seconds
If you want your brand new phone to be filled with adware apps and obnoxious default settings, sure.
You bought the wrong phone and/or put the wrong distribution on it. Having said this it does take more than 30 seconds to get a new device up to your personal specs unless you're fine with whatever vendor distribution runs on it - which can work if you choose the right vendor but mostly ends up with your device serving someone else. I'd say it takes closer to 30 minutes than 30 seconds but I'm fine with taking this time given that my average Android phone lifetime is a bit over 8 years. I'm currently using a Redmi Note 5 Pro from 2018 which I'll soon relegate to second device status once I have a replacement, probably a Motorola G75 or something similar. That device should also last me around 8 years. Before the Redmi I'm using now I used a Motorola Defy from 2010 which, incidentally, is still in use as a trailer camera. Android devices can last a very long time because the firmware is open. Eventually they'll be too slow or lack the memory to support more recent Android distributions - which is what made me replace the Defy with the Redmi - but that does not mean they end up taking space in a drawer somewhere. They're in use here as trailer camera, media player, 3D printer controller and more.
Customizing it to your liking is different than "setting it up".