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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Well… to establish my bonafides I’m a Linux user personally and professionally, but there are some very obvious reasons to use iPhone over Android. One is quality. There’s simply no comparison in build quality from basically any android phone to an iPhone. Second is updates. My iPhone will get quick software updates years and years past the end of (slow and unpredictable) support for most android phones. Third is usability. iPhones are much more usable than any Android I’ve had out of the box. Apple Pay is great. iMessage is great, the camera is great.

I understand the desire to tinker on your devices, I truly do, but the iPhone is superior on basically every metric except tinkering, which means it’s better for almost everyone.

I suspect you're probably only ever seeing cheapest Chinese android phones because in the US Apple has a lock on the market. Comparing between the Motorolas and Iphones my parents use, there's no noticeable difference in build quality.
The only difference is that the Iphone has far, far fewer features, although that might be due to the model perhaps ?

I mean I've owned many Androids over the years... HTC Magic, Samsung Galaxy, Droids, OnePluses... None of them really had the build quality of an iPhone.

What features is the iPhone missing, other than the ability to install software outside of the app store?

What features is the iPhone missing, other than the ability to install software outside of the app store?

It's like Android but worse and crippled in odd ways.

For example, recently saw someone bitch about how hard it is to get a ringtone into it.](https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1683202524789239808) and list some familiar software relatedsounding BS.

  1. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1684272662485295104

  2. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1684273095169789953

As a mature human male, this seems like a trivial complaint.

Trivial or not, it's worse re: apps and it's more expensive and the money goes to people who hate me.

Staying with Android is really a no brainer.

Also a linux user. Samsung's Galaxy S series is generally the same or even better build quality than an IPhone and these days gets functionality updates for at least 4 years plus security updates for a few years after that point, and they come out pretty quickly too once the Android version is officially released.

Maybe Samsung has actually figured out the software updates, but a few years ago they had not.

Samsung is probably closest to Apple in terms of build quality.

But they’re very expensive even compared to iPhones, or at least the flip versions are.

My other concern is privacy, or such remnants of it that remain. As far as I’m aware Apple is (mostly) content to make money from the hardware and the App Store and actually implemented pretty good privacy features, whereas android is riddled with Google spyware. Or is that not the case anymore?