I want as little to do with Google’s services as possible in my life, but they really deserve credits for making a modern usable smartphone that is reasonably open. There is just one single feature I will be buying this for - the 5 years of software updates. While good image processing is definitely a pro, all of these software you’re presenting features I really don’t give a damn about. Just give me a phone that is meant to last a little while - and allow me to run what I damn please. This looks to be like a continuation of the Pixel 5, which allows you run your own software like /e/OS and CalyxOS aside to just being a lot less of a walled garden on the stock ROM.
The Android market is completely dire, and no vendor can be trusted to provide openness, reasonable taste or security updates. They sell you a phone, and once you’ve clicked buy they’ve already stopped caring. So last year I switched to an iPhone 12. I needed to vote with my wallet to get a phone that lasts. But although I get what’s appealing about iPhones and the walled garden, I started feeling claustrophobic. Feeling claustrophobic about what I can tailor about my browser, how easily I can run Game Boy games, what ads I can block, and Apple’s stated intents to actively incriminate you by scanning your photos on a personal device. I will continue to recommend those phones for most people (pending what they’re going to do with trying to incriminate you), but it’s not for me.
Finally here’s a seemingly good Android phone with 5 years of support - from the only phone vendor outside of Apple who appears to give a damn about that aspect. Don’t get me wrong: 5 years is still too short in my view, and not as long as Apple provides support for on their stuff [1]. But the market needs change, and I’ll put money towards that.
[1]: The iPhone 5S has just hit 8 years of _kernel_ security updates last month with iOS 12.5.5. One can dream on the Android side, but I’ll take 5 years in the current market.
> Finally here’s a seemingly good Android phone with 5 years of support - from the only phone vendor outside of Apple who appears to give a damn about that aspect.
FairPhone 4 not only promises 5 years of android software updates but also has 5 years of warranty, There are more reasons to trust their words than any of the other phone manufacturers.
• They are not profit focused but rather towards sustainability, They have been delivering their promises consistently for 8 years and so it's not an idealistic vaporware.
• They produce the most repairable smartphone using components sourced from conflict free areas. Parts for repair are available directly on their site, Parts for FairPhone 1 are still available.
• Their factory workers get living wage bonus, Of course do not employ child labor while preaching humanity.
• They have first class support for alternate operating systems i.e. We are the owners of what we buy; So support from alternate OS like Linux, Sailfish or even android ROMs like LineageOS could exceed even the official 5 years support.
FairPhone4 hardware is competent enough for average daily use, Only drawback I see is that the phone is available only in Europe. Then again Google Pixel phones have been notorious for being available in only couple of countries.
Tangential, but the first thing I noticed is that this site itself greets me in my preferred language, and allows setting my region separately, at the top of the page.
The Pixel site sets the language based on geography and does not allow changing it without changing the region, which comes with a warning about delivery and currency conversion.
One of these makes me feel understood and accounted for as a potential customer, the other makes me want to CTRL+W and move on.
I am aware that this doesn't affect the majority of people. That doesn't make it less frustrating that Google keeps doubling down on this with many of the things they do.
I pay for a bunch of google services (Google One, YouTube premium) and for the life of me, have not been able to get my country changed. After some time with tech support (was shocked I was able to get someone), the conclusion was to use the play store ON AN ANDROID DEVICE to try to change my country. Quite strange if you use google services without an android device. It doesn't matter if I'm an edge case. They need to support their customer.
I love Fairphone’s promise, but execution is another thing. Fair warning here is that I’ve seen the experience with a Fairphone 3 up close, and it wasn’t up to my standards in terms of camera and software bugs (caller ID has not worked for months), let alone the barebones hardware they ship. I hope they get there, but the Fairphone 3 certainly wasn’t it for me.
What I don’t understand about Fairphone is how they will deliver these updates. Fairphone, like others, uses Qualcomm chips. Qualcomm supports their chips only for three years (four years for recent ones, but not the ones FP is using). This is what held Google back to ship reasonable security updates on Pixel devices so far. How can a small company like Fairphone convince Qualcomm to make more updates if Google couldn’t? Or will they just end up shipping incomplete security updates, like a community project?
Google had announced that all phones shipping with Android 11 with snapdragon chipset will be eligible for up to 4 Android OS versions (launch release + 3 OS updates) and 4 years of security updates as the result of project treble and getting Qualcomm on line.
Which is more or less is inline with 5 years software support guarantee of FP.
That’s a lot of handwaving you need to do to get a tiny company to support phones beyond their suppliers intents - especially the SD660 equipped Fairphone 3. This is stuff given as the reason that Google moved away from Qualcomm for.
Given the rest of their software, I don’t really trust them to deliver. I’ll happily be convinced otherwise though.
I bought a Fairphone 3+ 10 weeks ago, and just got a refund because they cannot build any units. I really wanted this, I guess I will continue to wait for the librem5
I wonder if that is because they are about to release the Fairphone 4 and sold out of the last. You'd think they'd shut off the orders though if that were the case.
I ordered before v4 was released, and I also contacted them about a month ago to ask for a refund but was told I could not do so until the mandatory 8 week estimated delivery window had passed.
I'm not mad, but it is obvious to me that they had no capability or intention to fulfil my order and were just hanging onto the €. They also sent me an email (before I cancelled) saying I could turn my current order into credit for a v4 preorder.
It's not just a phone. It's a full desktop Linux computer with lifetime updates, which you can connect to a screen and keyboard and which runs a desktop OS.
Yup, I love the concept of FairPhone but it lacks US availability and compatibility.
The camera is also a big draw of the Pixel phones. I think it might be a long while for open source and commodity hardware to match top smartphone cameras.
5 years of security updates, 3 years of feature updates.
On the page it says on the 12th footnote, "Feature drops for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US. Your Pixel will receive feature drops during the applicable Android update and support periods for the phone. See g.co/pixel/updates for details."
On https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705 it says, "Guaranteed Android version updates until at least: October 2024" and "Guaranteed security updates until at least: October 2026" for Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro
So they hypothetically could extend it to more than 3 years of feature updates and 5 years of security updates with the nebulous "at least" wording.
Historically, they have. Older pixels all had 2 year feature 3 year security, but ended up getting 3 year feature+security.
Although, after 1-2 year, the features get a bit thinner because a lot of the newer features rely on new hardware that the older phones don't fully have. Sometimes they try to make it work, like how Astrophotography was available on older pixels but didn't work quite as well as on Pixel 4. But in general, they probably put the "at least" because it's hard to guarantee that a feature in 5 years will be backportable to Pixel 6.
GrapheneOS is pretty clear about not supporting devices longer than the OEM.
From their FAQ:
Why are older devices no longer supported?
GrapheneOS aims to provide reasonably private and secure devices. It cannot do that once device support code like firmware, kernel and vendor code is no longer actively maintained. Even if the community was prepared to take over maintenance of the open source code and to replace the rest, firmware would present a major issue
Graphene has a specific sandbox for google play services, so you can continue to run the google pixel camera app (which can presumably run the same way as under the official OS)
But also, it has a good hardware ISP that will also improve image quality by itself.
It's funny that when discussing the topic of "updates" and obsolescence, users focus on the vendor as if they have exclusive control over the situation. Authors of applications may also play a role. For example, when they "update" their applications to only work with newer versions of Android. Depending on the user's application needs, that can shorten the life of a an Android device. Some applications will continue to work with both older and newer Android versions, some will not. For example, F-Droid has numerous programs that will work on older, "obsolete" Android versions. This allows older hardware to be re-purposed and to continue to be useful for some uses. Not sure that Apple has anything like this; consider how many programs in the Apple App Store work with older iOS versions.
Both Android vendor and Apple hardware continue to work long after the software has become "outdated". That hardware does not die when the software becomes "obsolete". The vendor may choose to ignore this fact in the interest of sales but it does not mean that authors of applications must ignore it as well.
The third factor besides the vendor and the authors of applications are the operating system authors. With older PC-like hardware, I can run the latest versions of NetBSD. Forever. I update when and if I decide it is time. x86 has its benefits. It is sad that these pocket-sized computers called "smartphones" are so inflexible.
A non-HN reader recently told me that the "tech" industry has turned us all into "beta testers". The entire "updates" concept needs a serious examination. Updates are not a substitute for quality control.
I'm not sure how app authors shorten the life. If the app author only targets a new version of the os, then if the phone gets the new OS then all I good. So it is up too the vendor providing the new os, but the app provider.
Now, the app provider can do supporting old OSes but that won't shorten the time past what the vendor sets
With open source software for PC, in many cases we (users of open source OS) have the choice to install any version we want. Sometimes I need to I run older Linux programs with older versions of system libraries. We can download these older versions of libraries and programs from an FTP sites or websites that provide a simple directory listing, an "Index of" page.
With pocket-sized computers called "smartphones", instead we (users of open source OS) have to contend with "app stores". The author publishes a new version and all older versisons "disappear". This lack of choice may be suitable for some users, but may not be suitable for every user, i.e., "one size fits all".
- Aptoide (requires app store download, stick with "trusted apps" for security): https://aptoide.com
Also, Aurora Store lets you download older versions from the Play Store through the "Manual download" menu option. You'll need the "version code" (different from version number) of the app version you want to download.
This is whats wrong with my iPad. I don't care that it doesn't get updates from Apple, but the web has moved on and it will fail to open a lot of web pages.
Failed to load the deno.land standard library docs just last night while I was watching TV.
Unlike iOS where basic features like the web browser require system updates, Android is modular and updates get pushed through other channels independently of the OS itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by not worrying about iOS needing OS updates for browser upgrades as the Safari engine is the only web browser engine allowed on iOS and third party browsers like Chrome are just skins on top of Safari and not real counterparts to their desktop cousins. Upgrading the OS is the only way to get new web functionality and bug fixes.
Web browsers have to use the Safari engine but that doesn't mean they don't also separately update the browsers and add functionality. I.e. you mostly get modularity by not using Safari even if you have to rely on the underlying Safari engine being updated. Most of the features users notice are updated by the app provider anyway.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here--all iOS browsers are custom skins on top of Safari.
Yes I'm aware of WKWebView and how it's not the same as Safari. I'm using the classic meaning of browser skins, dating back to browsers like Maxthon which were wrappers over Trident in exactly the same way.
No I'm not being sarcastic - I think calling the apps a skin on top of Safari is a bit of an over-simplification. Most features that users notice happen at this skin layer, not the rendering layer. It's peak HN to really be caring about this especially as Apple offers (as far as I know) no performance difference across browsers using Webkit or w/e. You could actually just say that Safari itself is a skin too, just the default one that comes with iOS.
It's similar to complaining about other basic features of iOS IMO (like complaining there's a default settings app or that iOS just works a certain way).
What about security updates or new HTML features? Chrome or Firefox on Android get security updates for many years after official system updates end. The same is not true for Apple.
Don't think most users know or care about security or HTML features so while certainly it's a difference it's unlikely to be important for most users.
Think of Safari as a skin that's unbundled from the engine. While Chrome or Firefox are reliant on Apple to update the engine, so is Safari, but neither are reliant on Apple for other functionality that they want to implement that users can take advantage of.
> 5 years of security updates, 3 years of feature updates.
It would be nice to have 8 years of security updates and 0 years of feature updates, instead. I always dreamed of having the option to only have security updates on my OSes...
They could easily do it if they wanted to, now that they have more control over the SoC. With Chrome OS they already do it. Most devices that are released now will get 8 years of security updates, which are supplied by Google.
As a former Pixel user that switched because I broke the phone and had an extra iPhone in the family, there are a number of reasons I'm heavily considering switching back (had been an Android user since 2009).
1. Spam call screening is nonexistent on the iPhone, and T-Mobile's blocker still lets a ton of them through. In my prior experience Google did a much better job in this department. It would be nice to pick up the phone without a 90% chance of an annoying spam call.
2. Speech to text on iPhone makes a lot of mistakes and Google's latest update looks like they've widened the gap even more. I don't want to handle my phone to text while driving, and when the interpretation is wrong it requires extra keystrokes to try again, correct it, or type the message if urgent. This is unsafe.
3. I find FaceID annoying, and after replacing the iPhone screen because I cracked it, FaceID got noticeably worse. With a fingerprint I can have the phone unlocked before I even pull it out of my pocket, especially these days when we have masks on.
Plenty of other sexy features like camera and the customer service line feature are very nice to have, but in my opinion these are major benefits in terms of everyday usability. The overall integration across services is just smoother too, in terms of flows like email -> calendar -> google maps live traffic, or email -> boarding pass QR code. I am and will always be a PC user so I don't benefit from those integrations with Apple products.
Making the switch will require ditching Airpods and the Apple Watch, but I think it might be worth it for me.
I think it's not appreciated enough how much they got right by putting the fingerprint sensor on the back in a natural position to touch and hold the phone. You are correct, it is unlocked usually before the screen is visible.
There's one thing that's handy about having it on the front, which is that the phone doesn't have to be picked up to unlock it. It's quite nice being able to read a message on my phone without picking it up from my desk.
But on the other hand, it is definitely more comfortable unlocking it from the back while holding it.
Pixel devices (at least previous ones) supported the inverse of this, where you could set the phone to remain unlocked until it was left stationary on a table. The theory is that (for some people) the most common reason to lose a phone is leaving it behind laying on a table, and it can safely stay unlocked as long as it's in your pocket.
Pixel has the feature where it can stay unlocked based on gps location (in your house for example), or wifi connection, or bluetooth connection, or if it thinks it is in your pocket. All these reduce the security overall, but it is convenient.
For 1, and 2 my individual (single data point!) experience through all versions of the Pixel have been great.
I've been saddened that Google keeps the Spam filtration feature locked to the Pixel devices. It is a KILLER FEATURE.
And for STT - that "just works" 95% of my time that I use it with common vocabulary.
The hardware has failed me a couple of times - sudden battery failure, and battery cable tearing with a reasonable, slight fall - though so consider one of the warranty options.
I have the pixel 4 which has face id. I loved it for the 6 months that I had the phone before we all started wearing masks everywhere. Now it's a completely useless feature.
I recently switched from a Pixel 3a to a Samsung phone - I didn't realize at the time that the spam filtering was a uniquely Pixel feature but holy hell do I miss it. I didn't change my number or carrier, but I went from maybe 1 spam call a month to about 3 per day. This feature is slept on in a big way.
For years, I used an iPad and a Pixel, and now - a Surface running Linux and an iPhone.
I always thought iOS had better, higher quality apps, and in some areas, that's true - Procreate for art, first-party games, etc. But I miss powerful, functional apps. I love the way Moon+ Reader tracks every single reading session, time spent and WPM. And nothing on iOS comes close to Smart Audiobook Player, although Bound is decent.
My iPhone is a great phone and a poor computer, whereas Android's MiXplorer and Termux empower me to, in a pinch, do whatever I need to do. iOS's best equivalent apps consistently fail to copy files over SMB or SCP (they get killed in the background or just fail), while Apple's Files app can't even write to my writable SMB share that works everywhere else.
In short, while my iPhone wins on battery life, speed, and support, the Pixel (and by extension Android) beat it in power and freedom. Perhaps this all proves that Android suits the needs of this power-user and tinkerer better.
> Apple’s stated intents to actively incriminate you by scanning your photos on a personal device
More accurately put, their intent is to scan cloud photos for exact matches with known child pornography material (like every other cloud provider, including Google), and then have the case reviewed by a human only after multiple positives, and only then forwarding the case to law enforcement (based on photos you chose to upload to the cloud)
corrected: their intent is to scan all photos in your photo library, on your device, including images automatically pulled in from from various sources such as messages, if you have iCloud Photo enabled.
> images automatically pulled in from from various sources such as messages
As far as I am aware, this is false and there is no mechanism on iOS by which images are "automatically pulled into" the photo library from anywhere, Messages or otherwise. Do you have a source or an example of how that could happen?
(edit: people are mentioning Whatsapp, which I guess has an option to auto-save received photos. Fair enough, but that's a third-party app and requires you to enable photos access anyway, so it's pretty clearly not what the parent meant).
> their intent is to scan all photos in your photo library, on your device ... if you have iCloud photos enabled
Yes, that's what I said. Enabling iCloud photos uploads your photo library to the cloud, so it's scanning your cloud photos.
> As far as I am aware, there is no mechanism on iOS by which images are "automatically pulled into" iCloud photos from anywhere, Messages or otherwise. Do you have a source or an example of how that could happen? When I receive images from my friends, they don't go into my photo library until I explicitly tap "save".
Per Apple [0]
>Shared with You works across the system to find the (...) photos, and more that are shared in Messages conversations, and conveniently surfaces them in apps like Photos (...) making it easy to quickly access the information in context.
---
>Yes, that's what I said. Enabling iCloud photos uploads your photo library to the cloud, so it's scanning your cloud photos.
Being disingenuous about it is still a thing though. You stated
> More accurately put, their intent is to scan cloud photos (...) (like every other cloud provider, including Google)
which makes it appear that the photos are only scanned server side "like every other cloud provider". Client side scanning is something that no other provider does, in contrast to what you stated.
Shared with You does not actually save the images to your photo library. It just surfaces them inside the Photos app. I will admit it's not very clear from the press release, but those are the facts.
I was not being disingenuous, frankly. I said that Apple is scanning your cloud photos, i.e. they are scanning photos that are uploaded to the cloud. Photos not being uploaded to the cloud are not scanned. I made no claims about where the scanning is happening, and I'm not particularly sure why it matters in any material sense.
You are thoroughly misrepresenting what Apple does. I initially thought you don't know what they do, but apparently you do very well.
Still: they scan photos locally - those are not cloud photos, those are local photos. And they have deployed the technical capability. You can bet that once capability exists, they will bend to government demands - there's ample precedent for that.
SO, yes, Apple, unlike all others, scans your photos locally. If they are going to be uploaded to cloud, or if they are forced to.
> Still: they scan photos locally - those are not cloud photos, those are local photos.
They are cloud photos. I say that because:
1. The photos are in the process of being uploaded to the cloud when they are scanned
2. The result of the scan is attached to the photo only when it is uploaded to the cloud. If the photo is deleted from the cloud, or the upload is canceled, the scan result is discarded
Practically, the system works precisely the same whether or not the scanning happens on device before the image reaches the cloud, or on the server after the image reaches the cloud.
The only well-intentioned argument about why on-device vs. on-server scanning matters is that "slippery slope" argument, which presupposes that:
1. Apple putting this scanning code in iOS not only somehow makes it easier/more tempting to use it for non-CSAM, but all but guarantees it will be used for non-CSAM.
2. Apple does not already have the ability to run whatever code they want, on any of your devices, without you ever knowing
3. Apple folds very easily to government demands, especially when it comes to privacy, their core differentiator
I don't think any of these are true. You might think they are, but then I'm not sure what point there is in discussing any more.
> or if they are forced to.
I'm not sure what this implies. If someone forces you to upload a photo to the cloud, surely that will get scanned regardless of whether the scanning is performed on-device or on-server?
This conversation is rather bizarre. The input to the scanning system is a sequence of bits, read from the flash memory in the phone.
Therefore, the scanning is local. There's really nothing more to it: The distinction is based on where the input is read from, in addition to where the input is processed. Both are happening inside the phone while you hold it in your hand.
It is scanning images locally.
This is totally unacceptable, and should never become acceptable.
I'm not claiming the distinction doesn't actually exist. Obviously the scanning is taking place on the phone. What I'm asking (which you have not actually answered) is: why does that make any sort of practical difference? Your argument is "it's happening on the phone, and that's self-evidentially bad".
>2. Apple does not already have the ability to run whatever code they want, on any of your devices, without you ever knowing
This is what I don't understand about the whole argument about this CSAM debacle. I've read quite a bit of the discussion about this, as I'm someone who takes privacy fairly seriously, and it never really gets discussed. Could someone maybe point me in the direction of some literature about this? Is someone doing extensive load and packet analysis? Don't they(Apple) upload at least some E2E data?...
My iPhone already does an insane amount of "indexing", including image classification. This is all under the hood and I have no idea what else its doing, for all I know its mining Monero. Additionally all my iOS devices seem to send an inordinate amount of data to the cloud; I'm particularly sensitive to this because I don't have a strong internet connection, and frequently have to turn off WiFi on my phone or iPad when playing online games to stabilize my ping.
I'm also skeptical that you can really insure privacy from a 5 eyes country. Maybe I just read too many spy novels as a kid, but it doesn't take a lot of imagination for me to guess how any given decently large western company could be completely infiltrated by a multinational espionage coalition.
Idk, I tend to like that Apple is fighting against Ad-tech, as that power dynamic is at least believable. I do think that playing around with deGoogled Android is fun and in my experience is much more suited to dropping off the cellphone grid. I have an Android running Lineage and microG and with OSM and Kiwix(wikipedia is indispensable, IMO) as well as a handful of other apps, it serves the majority of the purposes of a cellphone without the need for data. I still daily drive my iPhone, mostly because the UX is a lot better than deGoogled Android.
There are tons of academic researchers, jailbreakers, privacy watchdogs, journalists, government organizations, exploit developers, tinkerers, and hackers of all kinds who would go wild if they found Apple doing malicious stuff on iPhones.
Now if Apple developed a special update that they sent to only a few choice targets, that might be able to go under the radar.
That can be said about any manufacturer of any electronics, and yet here we are in 2021 when practically all manufacturers have been caught doing highly immoral things in their devices, Apple notwithstanding.
You can wrap intrusions in form of 'think about the kids' (what is used here), think about security/terrorism and so on. This playbook has been used ad nausea, isn't it about time to learn?
I know Whatsapp photos that I never even opened (from groups I probably muted long ago) end up in the phone library whenever I do the (manual) monthly photo dump to my PC.
But yes, I agree with the comment, there's no reason to hide between details: Apple plans to introduce the capability of scanning photos on your local device and comparing hashes against an opaque (non-reviewable) list of hashes that they (along with governments) control (details about how they plan to initially employ this capability are irrelevant).
Sure, but then don't pretend that this is not something every other cloud provider is doing (and has been doing) for years. This is only such a hot-button issue because 1) people love bashing Apple, and 2) Apple actually solicited feedback instead of implementing it silently behind the scenes.
Oh, I totally know all cloud providers are scanning photos in their cloud and I totally accepted that (hence why I mentioned I do manual photo drops from the phone and upload them to private cloud storage).
What no one has done before and what I totally don't accept is someone scanning photos on my device, which is what Apple is doing.
The in the cloud vs. on your device aspect of this debate is the most important part and cannot be glossed over.
> The in the cloud vs. on your device aspect of this debate is the most important part and cannot be glossed over.
I really do think it's a weird aspect to fixate on, though.
So long as Apple is only scanning the photos that're being uploaded to its servers, it genuinely doesn't matter to me where that scanning happens. It's a scan that could have happened in either location, and the version where it's happening locally is arguably more private/secure-from-fishing-expeditions. If I don't like that the scanning occurs, I can disable the uploading.
The distinction would matter if the local-scan involved things that weren't being uploaded. But it doesn't, so from my perspective the only difference is an implementation detail.
> If I don't like that the scanning occurs, I can disable the uploading.
You can already do that today (I do).
> But it doesn't
Maybe, maybe not. Even if I were to trust Apple 100% it's again a matter of principle (no local scanning).
Imagine the uproar if Microsoft Defender (which comes in-box enabled-by-default on all Windows 10/11 PCs) were to suddenly start scanning photos (it already scans executables and Office documents), hashing them against some opaque "database" and attaching tokens to suspicious ones that would be analyzed when uploaded to OneDrive (again, enabled by default for your Documents\Photos on Windows 10/11 if you use a MS Account).
Then on top of that, imagine Windows was a walled garden a-la iOS and you couldn't uninstall / disable / replace Defender with a different tool (which you totally can today).
I think there would be massive outrage in the press with MS being dragged through the mud for months, and droves of users switching to alternatives (like Linux) overnight. Yet (except for a few privacy / freedom organizations and a little press bleep) Apple gets to shake it off scot-free; I don't understand the dissonance.
It's interesting how our minds just give up when we realize all cloud providers are doing it. We accept our fate as weak consumers, unable to do anything.
"The CSAM scanning system is a part of the iCloud Photos upload process and it will be triggered once the upload is initiated. Keep in mind that it does not scan private photo libraries stored on iPhone devices" - https://medium.com/codequest/technologies-behind-the-apples-...
If you want to "correct" the claim to say their intent is to scan every photo, citation needed.
Apple does not scan on device photos at all. It's something they announced they might do to images you upload to iCloud Photos some day in the future.
Google, on the other hand, has been scanning the entire contents of your account for the past decade.
>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect’s Gmail account.
You do not have to use Google Photos if you do not want to on any Android phone. You can upload photos to your own server in the background exactly like the Google Photos app does. On iOS, only iCloud Photos can do that. It is strictly worse for privacy.
However, Google is scanning everything in your account.
We recently had a thread from a historian whose entire account was suspended after Google scanned all the files in his Google Drive, and didn't like what they saw (files on the history of tanks).
If you want your photos to upload in the background, iCloud Photos is your only choice on iOS. Not so on Android. This makes backing up photos to a server privately on iOS essentially unusable.
This kind of crippling anti-privacy pro-Apple-profits design permeates iOS. You cannot even install an app on your device without giving Apple your billing details and letting them know you installed it, which is used for ads. You cannot get your location without also telling it to Apple. You cannot tell Apple not to track your WiFi SSID's location. You cannot uninstall Apple News, which is filled with user tracking for ads. On and on.
> We recently had a thread from a historian whose entire account was suspended after Google scanned all the files in his Google Drive,
You're comparing iOS to the wrong entity when you compare it to Google instead of Android, but even your comparison to Google is faulty. Your link is about Google suspending an account for files shared publicly, not about Google scanning all the files in that account. Section V.B. of https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/ says that sharing those types of images publicly is also a violation of the iCloud TOS, and Apple has the right to do the same thing. The difference is that Apple will probably handle the customer complaint better, but that is an issue of customer service, not privacy.
> If you want your photos to upload in the background, iCloud Photos is your only choice on iOS.
Nope. Background App Refresh has allowed any iOS app to update data between the server and client in the background for more than half a decade.
Apple has discussed scanning photos uploaded to the iCloud Photos portion of their cloud service in the future, but nothing is scanned now.
Google has been scanning everything in in their user's cloud accounts for the past decade.
Also, given Google's reluctance to pay human beings to supervise decisions made by their algorithms, I have zero doubt that Google is turning in users when they have a single false positive.
Background App Refresh was added in 2019. How did that more than half a decade pass in two years? You're right though, iOS is not as terrible as it used to be. For many years, Apple crippled other background sync services relative to its own, and it continues to cripple other services relative to its own on iOS.
All the other privacy-invading criticisms remain, making iOS an awful choice for privacy.
I still don't know why you're comparing iOS to Google. As I've already explained, that is the wrong comparison. I can use my own services on Android. Apple is planning to scan photos in iCloud (and already does in mail) and only hasn't because their services are still so basic, so it is just as bad as Google in that respect but only temporarily better due to incompetence. My own server does not scan and review photos and never will.
Background App Refresh was added in iOS 7 which launched 8 years ago.
I guess I could have said almost a decade ago.
So, again, Apple only discussed scanning the iCloud Photos portion of their cloud service some time in the future, but NOTHING is being scanned now.
Google, on the other hand, has been scanning everything in your account for the past decade.
Also, documents from the discovery phase of Google's various antitrust trials show that Google has literally pressured device makers to hide the privacy settings from users.
Google also buys a copy of everybody's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on your real world purchases as much as they spy on your online life.
A company with surveillance capitalism as it's business model, like Google, will always be motivated to violate user privacy as much as possible.
I don't know why you're still trying to pretend that Google's cloud service is separate from Android while Apple's cloud service is not separate from iOS?
> So, again, Apple only discussed scanning the iCloud Photos portion of their cloud service some time in the future, but NOTHING is being scanned now.
I acknowledged that. The point is that they admitted this is an oversight because they are already scanning iCloud Mail. Their intentions are exactly the same as Google's. They are merely less competent. Apple is also a surveillance capitalist, as I explained in my previous post, giving several examples. iOS even splits the privacy settings of Apple's apps from the privacy settings of all other apps to make it harder for users to control what little Apple lets them control.
> Google also buys a copy of everybody's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on your real world purchases as much as they spy on your online life.
Apple gets the exact same information for transactions completed with Apple Pay. Users have to opt in for Google to see this information. Once again, exactly the same.
> I don't know why you're still trying to pretend that Google's cloud service is separate from Android while Apple's cloud service is not separate from iOS?
I already explained why. I don't have to use Google services on Android. iOS ties me to Apple's privacy nightmare. I listed several other examples of Apple data collection on iOS that are unavoidable. Android, even in builds provided by Google, has none of those problems.
> Apple gets the exact same information for transactions completed with Apple Pay. Users have to opt in for Google to see this information. Once again, exactly the same.
Nope.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
> Buying a copy of everyone's credit card transaction data, no matter who they bank through, is not even close to the same.
As I already explained, the user has to opt in to share that data with Google. The purchase is a deal with the credit card companies to send data that users have opted in to share. https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/10845853?hl=en
> Nope. Apple's cloud service is every bit as optional as Google's.
"You cannot even install an app on your device without giving Apple your billing details and letting them know you installed it, which is used for ads. You cannot get your location without also telling it to Apple. You cannot tell Apple not to track your WiFi SSID's location. You cannot uninstall Apple News, which is filled with user tracking for ads. On and on."
Apple, Google, and Facebook are all privacy nightmares. The difference is that iOS forces that privacy nightmare on its users, while Android does not. Your comparison of Apple to Google is as irrelevant as it is incorrect.
>As I already explained, the user has to opt in to share that data with Google.
As I have already explained, this has nothing to do with Google Pay whatsoever.
It doesn't matter who issues your card. Google made deals directly with Visa and Mastercard to buy your transaction data.
>as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
Google has gone from spying on everything you do online, to spying on your offline behavior as well.
As for the rest of your errors. I'm afraid that I'm not willing to take the time to correct them individually.
> Google has gone from spying on everything you do online, to spying on your offline behavior as well.
That is about aggregate purchases, which have no privacy implications at all, not about individual purchases, which need to be matched either by email or by users opting in to share their credit card transactions, which is exactly the same as Apple Pay.
> Also, how exactly do you use the Google Play Store without having a Google account?
You don't have to use Google Play to install apps on Android. Even if you use Google Pay, you don't have to completely de-anonymize yourself with billing details.
> I'm afraid that I'm not willing to take the time to correct them individually.
More like you're afraid that you cannot correct them because they are already correct. I have made those claims hundreds of times on this forum, and they have never been corrected.
You have simply fallen for Apple's marketing without critically thinking about what data Apple actually collects, and the embarrassment of overpaying for an ecosystem that is clearly worse has understandably caused you to become defensive. The takeaway is to not trust marketing and verify if what the marketing actually claims is true. None of these companies are looking out for you. If Apple can make more money by exploiting your privacy on top of getting you to pay more, they will do it, and they are doing it (why actually make a privacy-respecting product that ties Apple's hands when they can just have the marketing department claim that it's a privacy respecting product and have their cake and eat it too). The only reason Android has gotten away with less user exploitation is that Google is still not yet as top-down driven as Apple, so the hackers who work on Android can influence how the base system is made while just enabling the company's services teams to build what they want on top of that instead of directly into the base system, and the only reason Google still lets them get away with that is that Android initially had to be released as AOSP + vendor bits in order to bring other companies into the ecosystem, and it is now too expensive to change course.
It's Apple's fault Google spies on everyone's bank account?
I suppose it's also Apple's fault that Google pressured device makers to hide the Android privacy settings, and ignored users when they turned off the setting Google told them would stop Android from tracking their location?
> It's Apple's fault Google spies on everyone's bank account?
It might be Apple's fault that you believe I said that. Try reading my comments on an Android phone, which gives you a choice of multiple working web browsers instead of just different skins of the same buggy browser engine.
> Google pressured device makers to hide the Android privacy settings.
That's funny. The privacy settings on Android are more easily accessible than the privacy settings on iOS, and they apply to all apps, not special-casing Apple apps like iOS does.
> ignored users when they turned off the setting Google told them would stop Android from tracking their location?
You're talking about two different settings in two different Google apps, not in Android. The really faulty thing is that there is no way to prevent iOS from sending your location to Apple at all unless you don't get your location on your iOS device at all.
You keep trying to compare iOS to Google and failing. The correct comparison is iOS to Android, where iOS fails badly.
They do not have the ability to scan photos stored on your phone that are not uploaded to iCloud. The scan is only implemented in the iCloud photos upload system.
If that was the case they'd just implement it on their own servers, just like everybody else (it's not like iCloud is E2EE).
In reality they probably have a "photoscanner.so / .dylib" that currently is only linked in by the iCloud uploader thing, but at any time could be called in by any other part of the system (or offer exploits new avenues for data exfiltration), which was actually spelled out in their initial announcement (there will be a system API for accessing it).
So they absolutely have the ability to scan photos on your phone; the fact that they don't intend to currently use it outside of the iCloud uploader is totally immaterial to this debate (the thing I don't want on my phone is photoscanner.so or any such capability).
> which was actually spelled out in their initial announcement (there will be a system API for accessing it).
That is completely false. They announced, a week after the initial announcement, that the on-device nudity-detection they planned on implementing in iMessage would also be open to Snapchat and other messaging apps. That doesn't report anything to the police, isn't hash-based, and is done on-device; it just pops up a bypassable warning to allow child users who are part of "iCloud Family Sharing" to avoid seeing things they don't want to see. It has nothing to do with CSAM detection.
I continue to be frustrated by the amount of misinformation on the anti-CSAM scanning side of the debate, including on HN (and it's orders of magnitude worse everywhere else).
At any time they could implement a new feature in iPhone to do anything, yes that's true, and yes they could be flat out lying that this is how it's implemented. They could be lying about the whole thing. If they'd implemented it on their servers, they could still have taken that code and later put it on their phones and run it on whatever photos they liked.
Come on, now you're really going off the rails. What we're discussing here is the system Apple has said they have implemented and described. Anything beyond that is hearsay and accusation, for which some evidence would be appreciated. If you're just going to believe whatever you want to, and damn the evidence or what anyone says, go ahead. There's nothing much more to say.
I think that they can do that is the problem, though? If you don’t like the way Google is running things, you can swap out the OS on your Pixel for one of several open source privacy-focused Android forks. But if Apple does something to iOS you don’t like, you’re stuck with it.
That's got nothing to do with CSAM, or this change and isn't anything new. If we're going full tinfoil, Android manufacturers could force update, lock down or brick your Android phone any time they like anyway. If you allow remote updates, which I think we generally all want for security updates, it's all about trust.
That's why they require that you reach a certain threshold number of matches before its sent for human review. The threshold allows them to take the probability of a false collision, which they can estimate from data, and set the probability of an overall false-flag by requiring a certain number of these collisions. They've released that the threshold, to start, would have been 30 (Page 10 of https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Security_Threat_Model...). They claim that, given the probability of a false collision, and the threshold that they've set, the probability of your photos being sent for human review falsely is 1/trillion.
They mention a “very conservative false positive rate” - doesn’t 1/trillion imply that they used 1 / (1e12 ^ (1/30)) = ~40% as the false positive rate? If so, that does seem extremely conservative to me!
A 40% false collision probability would give an overall false flag probability of 1/trillion only if you had exactly 30 photos in your library, and thus all 30 had to be false collisions. The calculation gets a little more complicated if you have more, because you have to account for all the possibilities of combinations of 30+ false collisions among N photos, for N > 30. I wrote out the calculation in a comment from when this was being discussed a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28174822.
On page 10 of the paper I linked though, they state that they assume a false collision probability of 1/million, which is more conservative than the 3 in 100 million false collisions they saw in their tests. The way they chose 30 as the threshold is based on the safeguarding assumption that everyone's photo library is larger than the actual largest library. This is safeguarding because the more photos you have, the more likely you are to have collisions. Copying from my previous comment, we can compute their photo library size assumption by solving for N in this equation:
1/trillion = 1 - sum_{k=0}^{29} of (N choose k) (1 - p)^k p^(N - k), where p is 1/million (the probability of a false collision).
The problem with this argument is that the "adversarial environment" argument applies to a worse degree to all cloud storage services who do the scanning in the cloud, since they have no threshold mechanism, and lack transparency on whether there is any human review whatsoever. You would still be reported to the police if someone hacks your Google Photos account and uploads CSAM to it.
Accurate, but note that intent as OP referred to is not the same as implementation. Fucking up doesn't mean you intended to fuck up.
With Google you can be absolutely sure that their intent is to eat all your personal information and data for short-term profit. With Apple it was "just" a stupid attempt at legal (over?) compliance.
That's the narrative that Apple's marketing department is selling, but I'm not buying it. The fact is that Apple devices slurp up more data to Apple that you cannot turn off without making your phone essentially useless than Google devices slurp up to Google.
Unlike iOS, Android lets you use whatever maps app you like and set it to be the default handler for opening addresses. This includes maps apps that store the map data fully locally. Even better, when you get your location on Android, you do not have to send that location to Google. On iOS, no application can get your location without your location also being sent to Apple.
That "web and app tracking" applies to apps both on iOS and Android. The difference is that Android gives you more choice about what services you use.
They probably brushed them off because a malicious/accidental hash collision would lead to a human reviewing them and then not going to law enforcement.
Or they will, depending on reviewer, photo clarity, current political climate, potentially location and so on. You have no say in this process, nor anybody else on this forum, or elsewhere.
Its not the law enforcement that's the main issue, but various greedy 3-letter agencies who are already well known to have ambition to have profile on every person in this world (not unlike Facebook but for different purposes).
This is not privacy anymore no matter how you bend it, it has been cancelled and Apple realizes this very well. And it still doesn't care. Literally the only serious selling point for many new buyers not invested in ecosystems, blowing it off with a nice double barreled shotgun shot.
My understandimg was that the reviewer gets an extremely compressed version of the image, not full resolution, likely due to privacy concerns due to the potentially large rate of false positives.
I don't trust them not to jump to conclusions with a 256x256 (the exact quoted resolution escapes me at the moment) image at their disposal.
But a manual reviewer in Cupertino or elsewhere still gets access to your personal (possibly very intimate or otherwise private) photos. Privacy from law enforcement is hardly the only privacy that people value.
If you desire privacy, never upload your images to any cloud service that doesn't offer true end-to-end encryption of the data (that is, one where they do not have the key). Use a service where data is only decryptable on your own devices or devices that you personally authorize. Which is, presently, none of the popular services that I'm aware of.
It's even probably the right choice for a popular service to have made.
Full E2E encryption is going to trigger nightmare "I lost all my photos" customer-service stories when people forget their passwords... which is acceptable when you deliberately signed up for a service where security was the selling point, but not great for someone who bought a mass-market phone.
Yep. See the perennial complaint about Signal as a demonstration of that. They don't persist your messages across devices on privacy/security grounds. That's fine, it's why I use it (or one motivation for me to use it). But it's contrary to what many people expect from that kind of service.
Of course. But the second you enable iCloud Photo Library and want to upload your private photos to Apple's servers than you need to comply with their Terms & Conditions.
Which includes them scanning your photos for CSAM.
Right. Requiring exact matches for this kind of material is absurd as a single pixel change would foil any detection. So everyone, practically speaking, trying to detect it is going to use some form of hash algorithms. And every hash algorithm, by definition, permits potential collisions and false positives. Which is why any sensible program will use a manual review process before pushing anything forward to law enforcement. Apple's system, requiring ~30 matches, means that you'd have to have 30 or so false positives that also happen to look like CSAM to manual reviewers to end up getting a false case sent off to law enforcement.
Additionally, the while the publicity of that announcement was terrible PR for apple, it was really a request for comment. They got comments from security professionals, and then they acknowledged the problems, retracted the announcement, and are working with those professionals on a system that will be better from a privacy perspective.
Try getting that behavior from Google, a company who's existence is dependent on surveillance advertising.
Or more more accurately, their stated intent is to scan for anything any government deems illegal in any country where they operate.
Also who is reviewing this known child pornography list? Hopefully nobody because it is Child pornography but also hopefully somebody because what if somebody slips something in there… Say a offensive political cartoon or a ethnic group symbol or a picture of Tiananmen Square.
This list of “offensive images” needs to be auditable.
Also it is crossing a line in the sand because it is on your personal device not in their servers. All you can hope for is that they don’t alter the deal further.
For some definition. Russia's FSB might have a very different idea of what this is. Anti-Putin memes, for instance. Navalny support materials or brochures. You'll have to watch what you download, because your phone might upload it and incriminate you.
Or China's MSS. Winnie the Pooh, Tiananmen Square, Free HK, etc.
Or even the FBI. Financial or political leaks, Wikileaks, etc.
Once they know who you are and why they don't like you, they can incriminate you in other ways. This helps them find and flag you. They don't even need to monitor and decrypt traffic - they can just upload hashes of things they don't like and let Apple's dragnet do all the work.
Don't buy into "CSAM" scare. It's never the intent. The powers that be don't give a damn about children. It's about power.
The definition is from NCMEC[0] and ONLY from NCMEC. No FSB, no MSS, no FBI.
This is the EXACT SAME database EVERY cloud provider has been using for about a decade. Look up Microsoft PhotoDNA.
The only difference is that the company doing it was Apple, who wanted to do the checks on-device BEFORE upload. And with multiple redundancies and human review.
Not like Microsoft, who have - for example - shut down the MS account of a German man for having photos of his own children on a beach. No human review, no way to complain. Everything gone from Outlook mail to Xbox account.
That's a characterization roughly equivalent to "you have nothing to hide".
Our defense of privacy should be paramount, and we shouldn't defend the fruit company for assailing it just because we like the pretty things they make.
Every word of Stallman's warnings about computing freedom was right. He was prescient. And just like his arguments, there are many people that view this move by Apple as a huge erosion of privacy. We all have a very legitimate fear that shouldn't be dismissed.
You can attack and trivialize my arguments, but mark my words, history will show we're making a huge mistake here.
The difference is that if you don't want your photos scanned by anybody but you still want your photos uploaded in the background, you can do that on Android, but you can't do that on Android. People who value privacy do not use iOS devices.
Correct, but there have been known False positives that have hash collisions in this system. That is something to care about considering the trust in law enforcement is eroding day by day
People have had tons of fun finding collisions and seeing how far they can take an image until the apple neuralhash algo thinks it different.
It very much is not an exact match like what you would get with MD5 for example.
But a "perceptual hash" that means that it gets the same has even if you crop it by a couple of pixels or change some pixels.
The person arguing with you has misinterpreted how Photos works, the information you have provided is correct - they are merely surfaced in the Photos app and the software provides the user the option to save them to their library. Sometimes users on this site play dumb or falsely represent the facts for the sake of their argument.
On the device means it's going to the server in Apple's case. The option is only enabled when you have the iCloud Photos feature enabled, which means the photos it's scanning are photos that are on their way to the cloud.
If you turn the iCloud Photos feature off, no more scanning is happening.
> If you turn the iCloud Photos feature off, no more scanning is happening.
Yet.
A few years later, [Insert gov agency here] will force Apple to scan all photos and compare hashes to material banned by the government.
This ability to scan photos on the device simply should not exist. If they only want to scan photos being uploaded, just scan them on the server itself. It really isn't that hard.
Apple has turned a steel barrier that's capability focused, into a policy barrier that can be changed by influencing people. That's simply much more insecure and much less privacy focused.
> I want as little to do with Google’s services as possible in my life
As a Fi and Fiber user, those services have actually been really solid and reasonably priced.
Android wise, Calyx maintains a nice de-googled one (https://calyxos.org/install/ ) and they will sell you an unlocked phone at a reasonable price if you are a member. We use one on Google Fi with no issues in any of about 10 countries so far.
I like frictionless Fi is. Phone breaks? No prob. Grab a cheap Moto phone from the Fi store listing, get it in the mail the next day, and setup in 5 mins. Go over on data? No prob. Pay a prorated price at the exact same rate.
It's been by far the best phone service I've ever dealt with, although to be fair that is a really low bar. The international pricing was what made me switch over, but everything else has been great since.
Or you could be a T-Mobile subscriber and never "go over" on data, even when abroad. It just gets slower, but that's fine most of the time, at least for me. It's amazing to be able to use even slow internet in the butt crack of the world somewhere without paying an extra dime - that's the way it ought to be on all carriers.
Fi has infinite free slow data too. "Going over" in a way that involves money is only relevant to the first few gigabytes on the $0-60 data plan. (Unlimited Plus is flat $50 of data)
I agree. Three years is clearly too short. After five the battery would usually need replacing, but the devices being what they are, one probably opts for a new phone.
> I will continue to recommend those phones for most people (pending what they’re going to do with trying to incriminate you), but it’s not for me.
Why? Despite what Apple would have you believe, Pixel phones aren't "more complicated" than iPhones. They're just a little different. For example, I recently had to use an iPhone and the interface was difficult to use, coming from Android. Not because it was inherently confusing, but because I simply wasn't used to it. But I'm sure it would have only taken a few days to adjust.
Software support is 5 years in security upgrades and 3 in OS upgrades [1] (at minimum, so it depends on their mood).
In my case it's -1 year because I prefer to wait up to a year until I get a good deal, and then there's always the option to put LineageOS on the Pixel devices [2].
Definitely agreed, longer software support would be nice. On the other hand the repairability is important too, if you can replace battery and fix a broken screen easily the phone is unlikely to be useful after that many years anyway.
I think the previous pixels were reasonably good in that regard (not compared to framework of course).
Improving that would be higher priority in my eyes. Software support can always come later: even once the official support is dropped the community can backport AOSP fixes etc.
Pixel phones have absolutely not been reliable for me. From the Pixel 1 microphone defect to it needing a reboot every few days, and my Pixel 4A boot looping, Google phones are absolutely not reliable IME. (Almost as bad a Razer laptops).
I'll wait for the iFixit report on how difficult it is to replace the battery, before believing in a phone lasting that long. Also as usual for the pixels, there is no analog headphone jack. Still I can't believe I'm at least somewhat interested in a $600 phone since I'm not that much of a mobile user. I wonder if they will do a 6A version any time soon.
The main difference between the 6 and the 6 pro is the pro adds a telephoto camera, right?
Batteries have to be replaced once in a while, thus the famous story about iphones slowing down as the batteries get weaker. Maybe your parents were lucky or maybe their phones slowed down without their noticing it, or maybe the phones already had replacement batteries when your parents got them? Apple took a significant financial hit the year they offered $29.95 battery replacement since people got their batteries replaced instead of buying new phones that year.
I have a family member with an iphone se (2016 model) and it has needed a battery replacement. No big deal with the ifixit kit. But it seems to me, phones with wireless charging seem to have harder to replace batteries a lot of the time. The Pixel 2 is notoriously difficult. So I'll wait to see what happens with the 6. Of course I'm even more interested in a 6a, if they make one of those. I'm enough of a throwback to still want to use wired headphones.
Unless you have more recent info (please correct me in that case), that's not quite correct. Last I heard was that Samsung's promise has been 4 years of updates [1].
I recognize Samsung as being well clear of the rest of the pack of Android vendors. Other Android vendors are outright negligent, whereas Samsung seems to generally try to fight their bad incentives and come up with some decency.
Where I think Samsung falls short is execution. Samsung is fundamentally a hardware company and their software has always been mediocre in my view, even to this day. In terms of security updates they promise less than Google, they promise fewer and slower updates than Google (quarterly software updates for some devices / late in the lifecycle still makes older devices an afterthought!), and I trust their promise to execute on their promise less than Google.
Finally, Samsung devices don't have nearly the same support for third party privacy friendly OSes than Pixel devices do - you're stuck with Samsung's (warning: personal opinion) rather tasteless take on what Android should be, and have no real other options.
I really love what Samsung is doing with their note-line software wise. There're just so many integrations and little nooks integrated deeply within their Note-specific Android version that are all just actually useful in their own right.
I'm a huge fan of operating my phone with styluses in general, but I think Samsung is the only Android vendor (other than Apple with their pencil) that actually cares about the benefits of adding a stylus to a phone/tablet.
For instance, last week I discovered that you can annotate your calendar with the S-pen. Your annotations stick to your calendar like post-its would to a computer. At first I thought I was drawing on a _picture_ of the calendar application view, but I was writing inside of the app itself.
Samsung's Note os is full of these niche-but-useful-when-you-actually–need-or-want-them kind of features.
Taking macro photos of that little insect on a hard to reach life in the forest? You can point it right where you need it with your right hand while you snap pictures with your pen in the other. It's a neat little remote.
Use your phone for presentations? The pen is your clicker to go through your slides.
Like keeping a digital journal with handwriting? Samsung's (and Google's too) keyboard has great handwriting recognition built-in. Nobody except me seems to use it, but it's actually great!
Need to quickly quickly take a note to make sure you won't forget to do that one important thing? Take out your pen while phone is locked and you can write on your screen directly, this is saved instantly to your device.
Samsung has clearly put a lot of thought into this over the years. The integration is excellent and is available in places where you would never expect it.
TL;DR: I like my note, not only is the hardware great, the software is great too
> Where I think Samsung falls short is execution. Samsung is fundamentally a hardware company and their software has always been mediocre in my view, even to this day.
I disagree. I really like Samsung's take on Android and appreciate features like Dex. With some first-party software from the company, they also make Android extremely customizable. The long tail of Android features that exist only on Samsung devices would probably surprise you. OneUI is a pretty clean take on Android styling.
> In terms of security updates they promise less than Google, they promise fewer and slower updates than Google
I'm getting monthly updates on my somewhat older devices. Not just security updates but full on Samsung software updates. I just got a bunch of new features on tablet this week including quicker multi-tasking, better window docking, etc.
> The long tail of Android features that exist only on Samsung devices would probably surprise you.
We have different tastes in phones, which is okay. I wouldn't really normally respond to this, but I think this quote highlights _why_ our tastes differ.
"Having more features" is not a selling point to me, it's probably the opposite. I want a simple OS with a strong set of core features, with a small selection of apps relevant to me. Smartphones have been reasonably mature products for a lot of years at this point, I know what I want from them.
That's why Samsung is quite unappealing to me despite their best efforts - I have owned and used multiple Samsung devices in the past. They're trying to give you everything and the kitchen sink, wow you with a bunch of features. Don't bother me with that stuff, I just want something more basic - software wise, at least.
We might not have different tastes just different ways of achieving them. My phone is setup to be very minimalist and Samsung has a lot of features to make that possible.
One small example, I've removed all the Android indicator icons on top of the screen that are always on/same for me (alarm, network, volume state, battery, NFC, Bluetooth, etc).
Admittedly I love features but I don't feel like having more features necessarily interferes with minimalism of day to day use. I've used certain features only once or twice but I was glad they were there at time.
I used to believe Samsung's additions were all bloat. After using one, I know prefer the customizations, the additional side gestures, and edge panels. Dex is nice and I have Linux installed so I can use the phone like a computer when I connect it to my usbc huh. It's extended the functionality massively and blown me away. However Google's software is better IMHO regarding updates.
Google says "Feature drops for at least three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US." on the shop page footnotes.
Samsung says you get 3 major Android updates on your devices. Therefore, Samsung is a better deal for updates assuming Google doesn't release a new major Android version every year.
I'm utterly tired of Google's attitude and how little they really care about their customers. They have really cool tech and solutions, but their total neglectance of the individual but somewhat high attention of activists have made my view of a #1 company down the slope, I guess I would at one point have to try applying for some position to hopefully change my mind on that point.
I have a love/hate relationship regarding their Android ecosystem and lack of possibilites to keep an updated phone up to date more than 1-2 years.. so after many years listening to the Apple ambassadors among (okay, mostly non-tech) friends and finally went all-in on the Apple way of doing stuff, bought their "Pro"-version of wireless headset, their smart watch series 7 and their "Pro"-version smartphone series 12 (supplied from my work).
I feel totally claustrophobic about the lack of options and what Apple enforces. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, switching doesn't matter.. everything is Safari/Webkit engine, no firefox extensions.
Control volume of an app/media - no way, everything should have the same volume.. so my phone remains muted 24/7 and I hope important stuff vibrates on the watch (which is of course also muted as I cannot clearly select what notifications should sound or not).
If it weren't for my old android phone no longer receiveing updates I would switch back to my now three year old phone, at least that one let me unlock my screen with my fingers.. The Apple way is more.. if I, in the middle of the night, want to change track on my Bose Sleepbuds - I cannot do it unless I widely open my eyes and stare on the Apple camera so I am wide awake.
But an Android with 5 year lifespan.. then it starts getting interesting again.
> from the only phone vendor outside of Apple who appears to give a damn about that aspect
I hope the hardware is solid too. After having 2 Google phones die just outside of warranty to bootlooping, I'm skeptical they'll be able to make them last.
I'm aware of Google's scanning. I'm even inclined to support them doing that.
What I like about the standard Google Photos/Dropbox/OneDrive approach is that it's no secret you upload your photos to their computers, where they process them. They process them for useful features, and they process them to catch child abuse. But I understand clearly I upload it from my device to another device, and that other device can process these photos. I'm not a Google Photos customer mind you (as stated, I prefer other services than Google's), but I understand the premise, value add and what they do with my stuff on their computers. It’s not my device incriminating me, it’s someone else’s device that does that, someone else’s device I chose to send my things to. I understand that relationship.
I will not accept a relationship with a device I own, situated on my desk or in my pocket, where it try to start a process to incriminate me. That's not processing a personal device should be engaging in, even if this starts out gated behind the heavily pushed iCloud Photos (it’s technically opt in), even if the solution is technically sophisticated (it is), and even if there exist definitions of "privacy friendly" where this approach is more privacy friendly (you can argue that all day long). I just don't want a personal device to do this. If Apple wants to draw the line somewhere else than I want to draw it, that means I probably should not support that.
I don't care what happens in the cloud. What bothers me is the precedent that Apple sets by shipping iOS with `scanPhotoForIllegalContent()` and `reportUserToPolice()` functions. This code is working against the user's interests. As of now, these functions only run on photos that have already been iCloud synced, and they only look for CSAM, but they could easily expand this later on by changing a few lines of code or adding to the hash database.
To be clear, I think CSAM is absolutely disgusting and I want those in possession of it to be prosecuted. But scanning local photos is crossing a line. (I'm sure they catch most pedos through server-side scanning already anyway.) Besides, the only reason Apple gets away with this is because iOS is closed source. If Google tried to pull this shit on a Pixel phone, you could just install a different ROM.
Fairphone 4 has 5 years of updates; and it's much more ethical and better for earth to buy phone made with Fairtrade, than another Pixel. You are guaranteed there were no forced or child labour put into your phone too.
I don't understand replies like this one I keep seeing on HN. I thought the controversy around what apple wanted to do was that it was happening on device and not in the cloud. The user you're replying to made that distinction so what gives?
A big thing too is that Apple sells itself as privacy preserving. Google doesn't. It's one thing if someone says something they aren't and another thing if someone never makes that promise.
Apple's solution was to scan stuff that was going to be uploaded anyway on-device before upload.
Using that they could add multiple redundancies and they wouldn't need to look at your stuff on the cloud at all before getting multiple positive matches. And even then the first level is a human checking if it's an actual match or a false positive.
This was somehow a huge invasion of privacy, when people were competing on who could misunderstand the very simple premise the most.
> Apple's solution was to scan stuff that was going to be uploaded anyway on-device before upload.
Fairly sure that most of the worry around that was because such a system could very easily be changed to do the same to any photo.
And people felt like their phone wasn't theirs and that it could snitch on you. We know that you truly do not own your phone, but most people do not view it that way.
Sure, it is technically better than doing that check on on a server, but the general public do not currently view it that way.
Personally do not like the system as you would be unable to escape it if it started scanning local photos (which I feel is only a matter of time), something you can with google drive and such, by not using them.
It is generally a good practice to steelman the opposing argument.
In this case, the steelman is that Apple has turned a capability barrier (if your scanning is on the cloud, you simply cannot scan local photos) into a policy barrier (now you can scan all photos, there's just a flag in the software which means you don't do so.)
> a policy barrier (now you can scan all photos, there's just a flag in the software which means you don't do so.)
This is not the case. People are guessing about how it works and getting it wrong. The device doesn’t know if there’s a match or not. The logic is not “if there’s a match, tell Apple”, the logic is “attach a safety voucher to every iCloud upload and let Apple figure it out on the server”. You can’t flip a switch and just run it against all photos on the device – the iCloud upload is a part of the design. If Apple wanted to scan all the photos on your device, they would have picked a different design for this. If Apple change their minds and want to do this in the future, they need to redesign how this works, it’s not just a policy decision.
There is still a local CSAM database and still a method somewhere that returns a probability that an image is in the database, isn't there? The safety voucher logic is layered on top.
> There is still a local CSAM database and still a method somewhere that returns a probability that an image is in the database, isn't there?
Yes, but that method is on the server. The client doesn't know which images match, so it can’t scan all photos and decide to upload the ones that match. From Apple:
> On-Device PSI Protocol. Given a user image, the general idea in PSI is to apply the same set of transformations on the image NeuralHash as in the database setup above and do a simple lookup against the blinded known CSAM database. However, the blinding step using the server-side secret is not possible on device because it is unknown to the device. The goal is to run the final step on the server and finish the process on server. This ensures the device doesn’t know the result of the match, but it can encode the result of the on-device match process before uploading to the server.
Why do people prefer the scanning on the cloud storage?
That means it will never be encrypted and stored unencrypted on HDD's in someone else's computer.
'scan -> encrypt -> upload' is in my opinion better than 'upload -> scan'
Which would justify Apple using on-device scanning more if iCloud is end-to-end encrypted, except that it isn't. Apple has the technical capability to decrypt photos stored on iCloud, so why risk the slippery slope and governments applying pressure to expand local scanning to more than just what is going to be uploaded.
Do you understand how it's different when it's on their servers vs having the functionality to scan for anything they want on your phone?
We don't need to have this discussion again. Please go research the hundreds of thousands of discussions and blog posts about how what apple is proposing to do is entirely different.
> "Do you understand how it's different when it's on their servers vs having the functionality to scan for anything they want on your phone?"
It's this kind of casual fearmongering which stops people from accurately understanding.
What makes you think Apple doesn't already have the functionality to scan for anything they want on your phone, given that they built a phone content scanner a decade ago for the iTunes Match service and a photo tagger and analyser which does run on the phone, and they control everything about the software?
What makes you think Google doesn't have the functionality to scan for anything they want on your phone, or couldn't add it if they wanted to? Have you the source code for the Google Play services? The internal chip firmwares? Have you studied Google's terms and conditions in enough detail to be certain they can't move any such checks client side without telling you? And they also do analyse photos on-device and tag their content for normal use.
Why do you trust that Google isn't doing anything snitchy or on behalf of the authorities, but when Apple announces that they won't and designs a system which makes it hard for them to do that, then you assume they will? Not even quietly cynically suspect that they might, but spreading as a fact that they definitely will.
This is not a case of "not doing basic reading". It's not a settled debate. The anti-CSAM scanning side has advanced a lot of spurious arguments and quite a lot of misinformation, some of which was spread by NGOs and orgs like the EFF (!!!) and more.
When they scan it on my phone, they don't need to scan it in the cloud. They have one less reason to touch my stuff when it's on their servers. One step closer to full E2EE.
Every major cloud provider is already scanning every photo you put up and in most cases without any human review. Your photo gets flagged and it's good bye account. Next step: HN front page to maybe get a human to look at your case.
Well I wont. I will look for an accumulator replacement for my Pixel one.
700 USD every few years? Quite a bit of money.
Screensize? We had a joke in our (European) high school to tease someone: You shoe size develops like 10, 11, 12, coffin for children, coffin for adults, motorboat...
Looks like the same thing is happening to cell phone screens.
I've been tempted by iPhone in the past for precisely this reason. But there's so many things it can't do on the software side. For example, with regard to music, FLAC support is poor and there's missing Bluetooth codecs like LDAC. Call screening, anti-spam and file sync are also not good enough for my needs.
>Finally here’s a seemingly good Android phone with 5 years of support - from the only phone vendor outside of Apple who appears to give a damn about that aspect.
I've got updates from both Huawei and Xiaomi many years after the phones stopped being sold. I've heard that OnePlus does the same.
>> Apple’s stated intents to actively incriminate you by scanning your photos on a personal device
You do realize that Google also scans your images for CP, and furthermore that Google's current business model is literally surveillance advertisement, right?
Just FYI, Google has gone on the record to say they don't use Google Photos commercially for any promotional purposes, unless they ask for the user's explicit permission first. The hoopla with Apple doing on-device scanning is that Apple has invested heavily into marketing it's privacy focus claims.
Sounds like they want to run a degoogled ROM on their device, which is paradoxically much easier with the Google Pixel line than other devices out there.
Interesting comment regarding voting with your wallet and choosing Apple for the software. The hardware guys seems really unhappy with Apple's "walled garden".
One doesn't have to dream. Flashing a rom on google-branded phones is so simple, a non-tech person can follow a 5min youtube video to do it. The Nexus 6 from 2014 can have the latest android running on it - not just security updates. And unlike an iphone, it has a build that disables some eyecandy that keeps it actually usable and fast. As I understand it if you run the last supported ios on an iphone 5s, with all the patches, you can take a nap while waiting for the answer slider to draw when you get a call. IS that the dreaming you're talking about? During the nap?
I'm a tech guy though. had a nexus 6, now got a pixel2. all custom roms, completely degoogled. In addition to phone tasks, I use the phone for solitaire, basic web reading, and email. I charge once per week. Both phones are extremely easy to flash. No hacking or exploits required.
That’s all great - but don’t lure people too much into a false sense of security. While your Nexus 6 may run a shiny new version of Android, underneath it runs a crusty old 2017 kernel full of holes of different sizes. The community is great, but vendor support remains important. LineageOS and other projects can’t fix things in kernels they can’t compile - they can only provide security updates for open source components.
That makes Google’s promise here so key. 5 years of updates is 5 years of kernel level fixes. After that, it’s probably left up to the community.
I really don’t recommend people to go out and buy abandoned Android phones to flash software. LineageOS and other community projects are a blessing in many many ways, but they don’t make your phone completely up to date. And that’s something one should make an informed decision about (buying an iPhone, I decided against that).
> underneath it runs a crusty old 2017 kernel full of holes of different sizes
> LineageOS and other projects can’t fix things in kernels they can’t compile
I think that you're wrong on this, that is unless you decided to use term "kernel" above too liberally, referring to all software running on a device. AFAIK, alternative Android images, such as LineageOS, include relevant - and quite up-to-date! - AOSP common kernels (aka Android common kernels or ACKs; https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/andro...), which are open source, plus some manufacturer-specific proprietary binary drivers and firmware (though there exist a related, but slowly-moving, project Replicant focused on creating and maintaining a fully open, i.e., kernel + drivers + firmware, Android distribution: https://replicant.us).
No, I’m talking about the Linux kernel. You can check this for yourself. Take a look at the roms distributed on LineageOS as the example project and see if they include kernels that are up to date in any way. For older phones outside of vendor support, those kernels will always be out of date.
Some diligent LineageOS projects are known to incorporate some open source kernel fixes sometimes, or grab newer blobs from other phones from other devices. But there’s only so much to they can do. In general, it’s true to say that older devices with community Android support are not completely up to date - the kernels are old, and vendor drivers are not getting updated. Outside of making big usability concessions in projects like Replicant, the community can’t do much here.
Good points. Though I'm a bit confused by your reply. Are you saying that LineageOS folks do not always or, at least, mostly use the latest AOSP common kernels for their relevant ROMs (as opposed to "some open source kernel fixes")?
I don’t know. I’m saying that custom rom use kernels that make your phone work. In the best case that involves shipping 1) the driver and firmware blobs the vendor provided while supporting the phone and 2) a kernel that is binary compatible with those blobs. Because of how Linux works, in the best case (2) is an old kernel of the same major version as the vendor shipped with the phone, with maybe some security fixes that made it into the mainline kernel or in the Android kernel. But if your stock rom has security bugs in e.g. the wifi driver, graphics driver of baseband firmware, your custom rom has those exact same bugs. Even if the custom rom is years newer than the latest vendor update.
Just ran across this relevant nice little article, which I found quite interesting: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/android-to-take-an-u.... I hope that people who interacted with me in this sub-thread (and other folks here) will enjoy reading it as well.
So would you please help me to find an ROM with an up-to-date Android Common Kernel for my i9300 Samsung Galaxy S3?
AFAIK, the only way to run it with working drivers for all hardware components, are ROMs which use the rusty 3.0.101 Linux kernel from back in the day and I think that is what DCKing is referring to. If you want to create a new ROM, you either have to use the old kernel and have an upper Limit of Android 7.x (in this case) or you have to accept, that not all components are supported (e.g. no GPS).
I would be glad if the situation would be different. Maybe it is different for phones you buy today?
Obviously, not all devices have up-to-date kernels. It depends on whether they are supported by relevant Android distributions. That's why I used the phrase "quite up-to-date" instead of just "up-to-date". Unfortunately for you, LineageOS has stopped supporting i9300 Samsung Galaxy S3 with the latest official release being 14.1, which is based on Nougat (Android 7.1.2).
Having said that, I ran across the following post that describes successful installation of LineageOS 18.1 (Android 11) ROM on Samsung Galaxy S3 i9300: https://devsjournal.com/install-lineage-os-in-galaxy-s3-i930.... This is just FYI. So, if you understand relevant risks and feel adventurous, you can try to install it on your device. Disclaimer: I'm neither affiliated with the author of the post, nor responsible for any damage that might be associated with following the advice contained in the above-linked post.
Thank you for looking up that ROM, as I might want to try it out. However, you are also proving my point, even that ROM with Android 11 is still running the old 3.0.101 Linux kernel. You can see it in the video at the last row:
So congratulations to the guy who made it possible to run Android 11 with that ancient Linux kernel, even when Android officially doesn't support it. And to illustrate what I mean by ancient: Linux 3.0 was released in 2011 and got support updates until 2013 [1]. So even when CyanogenMod/LineageOS supported the Samsung Galaxy S3 the included Linux kernels were old as crap. You can't blame them for it, as they had little choice given that a few crucial drivers are not open source and included in the upstream Linux kernel.
I just wonder if anything has changed for modern devices?
backported 4.2, which includes some of the 4.3 changes as well. supports lineage. 4.1 is a version google supports till 2024, so I'm assuming 4.2/4.3 is going to be even later. So, you got a phone from 2011 that's going to run a modern kernel and latest android till after 2024.
> And to illustrate what I mean by ancient
yes. I would love to see an iphone from 2011 that's going to be running the latest ios and apple kernel after 2024.
Given that the kernel still identifies as 3.0.101, my guess is that they just backported some features from 4.x and applied them to the ancient kernel ;-) I am not so sure that qualifies as a 4.1 in terms of Android support.
I think the discussion about which devices live longer is simple to answer: Apple (iPhone) and Google (Nexus/Pixel) do probably the best job of supporting their devices for a while from a manufacturers point of view (in comparison to Samsung, Xiaomi, LG, Huawei, Sony, etc.). However, if you want to spend some time and flash alternative ROMs yourself you are better off with Android due to the large modder community, but it also depends a bit on the device you bought.
My biggest issue on the other hand, is that if the manufacturers would also open source the drivers, they could be included in the Linux kernel and we would not have this discussions, because one could simply use an up-to-date kernel as you can with every PC.
And how does the kernel affect you in any way. Most of the internet runs on old kernels because servers user long term stable kernels anyway. If they ux is good the kernel shouldn't be a problem to you
1. UX: most of the time kernel updates don't affect the user experience. However, from time to time there are scheduler updates which can have positive effects.
2. Security: Being able to run the kernel with the latest security updates is evidently very important to have a system that is not vulnerable to newly discovered exploits.
3. Dependencies: As discussed already, some software components like the Android itself requires certain kernel features and therefore certain versions to let you run the latest versions of the software.
Btw. even LTS kernels are just supported for six years or so.
My biggest problem with the situation is, that 99% of the software is open source (Android incl. the Linux kernel) and just a few vendor-specific drivers make it very hard to upgrade the kernel and therefore the system.
It is different for phones made by the people who also make Android. Google. Which is why I was specifically talking about the pixel and the nexus phones sold by google. For example, kernel version 4.9.3 - the latest one (yes, originally released in november of 2017) supports up to the latest Android. In fact, since 4.1 supports the latest Android, and will till June 2024 according to google. I'm going to go on a limb here, and given the current timeline, project 4.9.3 is going to be supported for probably whatever android is released in 2026.
So, Nexus6 released in 2014 will be able to run the latest android, fully security patched including kernel (which is not that important), till about 2026.
Now let's keep in mind that I replied to a guy who said how great it is that ios has more longevity.
> So, Nexus6 released in 2014 will be able to run the latest android, fully security patched including kernel (which is not that important), till about 2026.
This is getting to borderline misinformation here. Sorry to have made you dig in to this position, but please don’t call this fully patched. Qualcomm abandoned the Snapdragon 805 in the Nexus 6 in 2017 (maybe even 2016), and no updates to that platform's kernel drivers or other proprietary components exist. You can patch up open source pieces - those are important too - but that doesn’t count as “fully security patched”. Kernel drivers are a very important vector on any system, on Android especially so.
This is why e.g. CalyxOS has these EoL notices for Google devices much newer than the Nexus 6 here: https://calyxos.org/install/
They’re honest not everything can be updated!
If you choose to run your devices this way, more power to you. It's a legit way of extending a phone's life with some tradeoffs. But please inform others about the actual limitations.
> For example, kernel version 4.9.3 - the latest one (yes, originally released in november of 2017) supports up to the latest Android.
I couldn't find anything online about Nexus 6 kernels that are not some version of Linux 3.10, which despite being an LTS release was EoLed by the Linux kernel developers end of 2017. Would be curious to get any sources on the information that the Nexus 6 has modern-ish kernels available.
It's a rare feat that Android devices get a new major kernel version, _even with_ vendor support.
It's not the kernel security updates that are important in regards to this 5 year promise, those are all open source and can be applied to any device a ROM (such as CalyxOS) supports. It's the proprietary firmware blobs that are the big deal, and what this 5 years promise from google means is that those blobs, required for certain hardware on the device, will receive 5 years of security updates. And that's good, because those are the security vulnerabilities that e.g. the CalyxOS team cannot patch themselves (no source code).
This is why CalyxOS now makes it clear what devices they support are still getting full security updates (kernel + firmware blobs) or just kernel updates. I believe the most recent CalyxOS patch added the ability for the user to see in settings the month and year of the last firmware security update for their device vs their current kernel security update.
Alright - I'll bite. This is a smartphone, not a windows PC with a bunch of services. There is Zero listening on any port. There is no attack surface for any kernel - the only thing there would be a bug in mms. Please share your source for kernel attacks, on any android version, that's not an attack on an app - but on the kernel. No, this is not a google play attack, or an attack on an outdated app - which are updated fine.
In addition, I'm unsure why you think you can't update the kernel on a phone. In fact, updating the kernel is standard procedure for... pretty much all directions on flashing a custom ROM. I had my nexus6 on kernel 4.9.3. There are literally new phones, right now, selling with that kernel version and earlier, with android11.
This is like saying windows server 2016 has a kernel that's outdated, or that windows 10 which came out in 2015 is outdated.
I think you are extremely confused.
>I really don’t recommend
Which is a good thing, because you should not be recommending about things you do not understand on even a basic level.
>After that, it’s probably left up to the community.
right. the entire point of my post. you can load stuff from the community. which includes the community of things like lineage - a big official community that's an llc - a corporation like redhat.
A phone is not a server. It is not a security risk to run an outdated kernel. there are no services running a hacker can connect to. You don't connect to a kernel over the internet. A kernel which is by no means out of date, and is currently running in many datacenters.
Smartphones aren’t servers, but they run tons of services that interact with the surrounding world.
Bluetooth, WiFi, etc…
The kernel also still plays a vital and security-meaningful role in processing calls from applications.
Running an out of date kernel could mean strangers ransoming your data, or could mean an attack becomes persistent and starts logging and uploading through reboots.
Running an out of date kernel often does not result in this, and that higher level security matters first.
However, the kernel does have an attack surface through those higher levels, and pwning the kernel still means something.
Those datacenters are running LTS kernels with minor versions updated, or have security patches backported, or have far more limited connections to the world than your phone — only one protocol, one port, one service, for example.
We are not talking about datacenter servers - we are talking about smartphones. you can run a 4.9 kernel with all security patches applied, just like you can run windows10 with all security patches applied. You can update bluetooth and wifi modems without going to a later kernel version. We call those drivers, not kernels.
The issue you note is only exploitable via a bug if you have an outdated version of the chrome browser. You don't need to update the kernel, in order to update an application.
Seriously, I feel like I'm talking to my wife here, who is not a tech person. Why are you and the other couple of people being purposely dense, and purposely ignoring the content of your own links that doesn't fit your viewpoint?
BTW, after you said smartphones aren't servers, you go on to talk about why an older kernel is bad on servers.
But since you asked, the latest 4.9.3 kernel running on that nexus6 from 2014, that's been compiled appears to be from the end of the year 2019.
Good luck finding drivers for phone wifi, bluetooth, etc. That’s the fking problem — linux doesn’t have a stable driver api, so the binary blobs drivers will not allow people upgrading major linux kernel versions.
If everyone around you is stupid, then maybe you don’t understand the topic at hand?
> There is no attack surface for any kernel - the only thing there would be a bug in mms. Please share your source for kernel attacks, on any android version
There are various kernel level vulnerabilities listed. Some weakening privacy over tcp connections, others locally exploitable via a malicious app such as Pegasus.
I don't understand why you call him confused. Perhaps you can approach with curiosity instead.
I'll start by saying I spent a full 5 minutes reading through those and gave up. I asked for an example, you pasted twenty pages of random garbage and said "here, maybe you'll find something in this dump I took - why don't you spend some time and maybe I'll prove you wrong."
In those five minutes of looking through your garbage dump, I found Zero vulnerabilities that do not need either you installing a virus, which then gets root (the vulnerability), or a bug in an application running as root that's out of date, which then of course gives the attacker of the application root. None of those are valid examples, and I'm now bored digging through random garbage.
Any hack, in Any application, will give the attacker root - we're running rooted phones (for the extra functionality).
If you want to make a point, note the actual bug listed that does not need a compromised application. You installing a virus then the virus getting root does not count. The thread is about a kernel bug giving a remote attacker control of your phone. Applications and drivers like your modem can be updated without you updating the kernel. The latest N6 kernel is 4.9.3, with updates from the end of 2019.
Do you also run all your programs as root on desktop? Wtf.
Also, regarding your previous post, modern Android and ios is lightyears ahead in security than any desktop os out there, for good reason (majority of people interact with their phones, and store much more sensitive data there)
>Do you also run all your programs as root on desktop? Wtf.
yes. always have. same in windows where I also don't use antivirus. and this is what most tech people do for their personal equipment. because the one issue I had, in my 30+ years of using computers, and 20+ years of doing it professionally as a dev, sysadmin, and storage admin, I only once got a virus.
i'll tell you a little secret too. yes, it's wtf to people who don't know what they're doing and need the safeguard against when they screw up. I know enough to not screw up. now go pipe a bash script from a webpage to sh to install something, because that's what the installation manual for your game said to do.
Anyone saying they know enough not to screw up, most definitely knows hardly anything. Also, screwing up is not about knowing enough, it’s about being human, who make mistakes.
Running anything under root is just insanely stupid.
for those times when I run that terminal application on my phone. which is already rooted, so it's doesn't need the kernel bug to get root. it can just run.
I'm not sure I'm the one confused here. Not really willing to get combative on what security priorities one should have, but I'll stick to mine.
> I had my nexus6 on kernel 4.9.3.
I find this very hard to believe, as no evidence of Nexus 6 kernels that are not Google's original 3.10 shipped exists that I can find. Even PostmarketOS that looks to update kernels links to LineageOS fork of the 3.10 kernel on their page for shamu/Nexus 6.
Unless you mean a custom kernel from "some guy on XDA" that names itself 4.9.3 like this one - which is just kernel 3.10 with some branding on it. It says so right in its description: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/kernel-sm-4-9-3-o3-graphi... . Kernel 4.9.3 is a weirdly specific point release to be on in modern times anyway - there's kernel 4.9.0 all the way up to 4.9.287 - so it'd definitely be oddly specific if that's what you had.
Outside of valiant community efforts like Replicant and PostmarketOS, who have an extremely hard time getting working or feature complete kernels running, Android devices getting new kernels is almost unheard of. Even with vendor support. Community ROMs have to stick with what the vendor gave them to have a functional device.
I think you're terribly naive if you think a phone kernel has no attack surface. It is absolutely a security risk to run an outdated kernel. It has nothing to do with whether there are services running for a hacker to connect to; it's about whether it's possible for an attacker to trigger buggy behavior somehow, whether that's sending malformed packets or Bluetooth frames or invoking patterns of syscalls that cause bad things to happen. Heck, here's an obscure bug in Linux on the front page of HN right now, which Android is based on: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-simple-li... Also, I know GP was specifically talking about upgrading the kernel, but keeping drivers patched is much harder without vendor support, and there's likely to be more attack surface there.
your phone is not a linux server. yes, if you install a virus or an outdated app, someone can daisychain a priv escalation using a kernel bug. no need for that though - my phone is already rooted.
Your car has pieces that run linux too. Guess an attacker can make you crash.
> drivers
since this is about iphone and android comparison, guess what has those same driver blobs form those same exact manufacturers. apple doesn't make their own bluetooth chips. oh, btw, the drivers get updated just fine, since that's part of the kernel and os, which all get updated just fine.
google supports kernel 4.1 till 2024 for android 11. the nexus from 2014 runs 4.9. so probably 2026 kernel and android, fully patched - 12 years.
oh, sorry, did you forget this thread started with a guy claiming ios is great because you can put later versions of the OS on there? where's that iphone from 12 years ago running the latest version of ios, and still performing fast? because that's what this thread is about.
I really don't get why you're so hung up on this server thing. Yes, a phone is not a server. But it still runs a lot of complicated software. Software has bugs. We haven't found all the bugs yet. Hence, it's important to keep all of the software as up-to-date as possible for when people find some of the bugs.
> Your car has pieces that run linux too. Guess an attacker can make you crash.
> the drivers get updated just fine, since that's part of the kernel and os, which all get updated just fine.
Just because the kernel is getting updated does not mean the drivers and firmware are also getting updated. Drivers are specific to hardware, and if a vendor stops shipping updates for some chip that is no longer used in newer phones, then you aren't going to get updates for that chip.
> since this is about iphone and android comparison
This isn't about iphone and android comparison, not for me. You made naive claims about kernels not having attack surface and unimportance of staying updated, and I am responding to those claims.
I love the openness of android, and the explicit permission to root your phone.
But iphones have amazing longevity. The iphone 5s you mentioned came out in 2013 - which is 8 years ago now. Back then Obama was still in his first term. Maybe it is way too slow to handle the most recent version of iOS, but I'd rather a phone vendor that releases operating system updates for 8 years than a vendor who releases updates for only 2 years (like you get with certain android vendors.)
Last year I replaced my iphone 6s with an iphone 12. The thing that astonishes me is that I didn't need to. After a battery replacement, my 5 year old iphone was still running fine. It still runs the latest OS, and it ran every app I threw at it with aplomb. I really only upgraded it as a personal indulgence. Its still in use by a friend.
I'm absolutely on board with complaints about apple's lock in. I'm disgusted by some of the documents that came out in the epic court case, and I wish you could easily root iphones. But it feels like a stretch to complain about their longevity.
I love the iphone. I get my wife the latest and greatest every two years, and I forget about it. If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support. It's absolutely worth the inflated price for me, and the fact that it's extremely limited in possible features is a bonus. Just like I used to love stick, but now an automatic tranny is great, as my enjoyment is the destination not the trip.
Now as far as the iphone 6s being usable - that's my point. It is usable, on the old OS it was designed for. Because you can't load your own OS on it, it will never run the latest. While the Nexus does run the latest, and is completely usable. I do remember when my brother loaded some latest ios on his iphone 5S, and it literally became too slow to answer a phonecall.
Apple's lock-in is in my opinion a feature for its target market. That's why they get like $1200 from me every two years. Me, my concern was battery life. For that I needed to not have crap that keeps phoning home and waking up the phone. Imagine charging once per week. While not an issue now, I used to travel a lot. Country-hopping trips. Yes, you can charge at the airport, tied to a full charing pole for an hour. Yes you can charge while sleeping on the plane and have a usb cable hanging in six inches in front of your face getting in the way. Or... You can literally not worry about it for a week.
There are of course other things - I want to chromecast my screen or cast a movie from a pirate streaming site (not the youtube app). I want toggles on my lock screen and home screen to turn off data/wifi/bluetooth. I want to turn on the flashlight if I press both power buttons when the phone screen is off. I more importantly need a filesystem that I can store OVAs on that I can take to customer sites for demos - why would I carry a usb stick when my phone is always with me. I want a web server running on it and my laptop to dump a backup of itself onto the phone daily. This means the phone phone software needs to recognize that the phone hardware is a computer, not a toy for 5yo kids. My wife on the other hand needs it to be a toy, because if it wasn't, she'd do everything possible to get viruses, delete everything, and screw something up. So I got an android, she has an iphone.
Now, you think I'm complaining about longevity. Let's see the reality though.
The post I'm replying to touts the iphone's longevity compared to Android. I point out Android has much, much longer longevity and he has it backwards. You then declare I'm complaining about the iphone's longevity.
Now, normally I would normally unload on you with all kinds of funny (for me) things at this point, because you now fit into a certain category of people, but this isn't the place.
> get my wife the latest and greatest every two years, and I forget about it. If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support.
That's... An odd thing to say. I'm not sure what you're saying about your wife, but I've never had anyone, young or old, have a problem with an Android phone that would require anywhere near that amount of time.
I've got to hard disagree with many of the points here based on my own experiences.
My whole family has Android phones from different makes except 2 people with iPhones and they don't need hours of tech support. Your experience may be different, but I think most people using Android phones would agree that for the most part it just works.
For the battery life and the latest iOS, once you upgrade your iPhone to a later version, it is hard to go back, and you need hacker chops to do that if it is even possible. Later versions of iOS do often reduce performance and battery life.
On top of that, iPhones have smaller batteries so even with a tightly-integrated OS, what happens is that with active use, the battery level drops precipitously. Sure they last ages when not touched, but what's the point of that when a video call drops the battery by 50% because the battery itself is smaller?
Most people stuck to power banks these days are people using iPhones, especially the smaller iPhones. Androids have taken care of the battery issue by going with 4000 mAH+ batteries.
>If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support.
I highly, highly, highly doubt that.
Considering how static phones honestly are after initial setup, when you've installed the apps you need and configured the few things you need configuring, you never touch anything that's not an app.
try installing 5 random apps per week from the google app store and report back to us with the results. make sure to change your phone to mandarin and look for apps from china. repeat in japanese and cantonese. this is what my wife does. she's a language teacher and translator.
> If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support
First: I hope your wife doesn't read this ;-)
Second: I can believe this to be true if-and-only-if you tried to run it on a language setting you can't read!
Third: One gets comfortable with whatever phone+ecosystem they familiar with or use the most and that is not a basis to claim one is superior to the other. For that person, yes it might be superior(experience), but it cannot be extrapolated to the general population.
In my little circle, if anything, I hear complaints and "how to get this done on my phone" requests way more from iPhone owning family members and friends than the ones with Android phones. But this doesn't just make Android a superior OS over iOS, because it is just 1 data point.
While Apple does provide updates for older devices, the devices are barely usable. Foremost, you most certainly will need a battery-swap on anything older than 3 yrs (not a cheap proposition) and their devices seem to get progressively slower (in my albeit limited) experience.
Apple and Android ecosystems and user-bases are wildly different so a true apples-to-apples comparison (pun-intended!) is not trivially possible.
> Now as far as the iphone 6s being usable - that's my point. It is usable, on the old OS it was designed for.
That phone was running the latest OS when I gave it to my friend last year. I think it might have been running faster thanks to ios 13 (or whichever version improved performance). I believe you when you say your brother's iphone 5s became unusable with subsequent updates. But my 6s kept chugging along just fine, updates and all.
I'm delighted there's solutions for android phones like what you're talking about. This sort of thing is really important - I mean, they're fully fledged computers capable of way more than we're able to use today. Its crazy that people throw them out after a few years. My iphone 12 is faster than my 2016 macbook pro. And I still occasionally code on that laptop. If I could run OSX on my phone and use my laptop as a terminal for it, that would be really sweet. But I can't because Apple doesn't care, and I'm locked out of making changes like that on my own hardware. Using old phones as web / file servers would be fantastic.
Companies like Apple are actively incentivized by the market to make their old products feel worse over time. And for that reason I'm always impressed when occasionally they release an OS update that improves performance across the board.
I guess my take is, Android phones have an awful history of dropping official support for recent devices. I'm delighted the hacker community can and has stepped in to clean up android's mess. Its a shame they have to, but such is life.
I'm sad you can't do that on Apple devices, but one saving grace is that, the 5s aside, apple seems to do a much better job of official software longevity than android. I'm expecting my iphone 12 to last 5-10 years. I do wish the battery lasted all week though - that sounds phenomenal.
I'm not covinced companies are out to "make their old products feel worse over time". It's just the inevitable consequence of the steady march of technological progress. A 10-20% per year performance improvements and new radio/camera hardware just add up over time and means that your old phone is worse than a new one. And that's before you take into account any degradation in things like nand and battery that they try and make fail gracefully (even if the PR messaging occasionally goes very wrong on that front).
There is of course also a degree of investing time writing to the new hardware more than the old one, and just cutting down features that don't fit due to lack of processing power or just lack of underlying tech on older hardware, but it's not something that being able to throw a different OS on seems likely to fix?
> I'm not covinced companies are out to "make their old products feel worse over time"
I don't think they're trying to make their old products worse over time. But I also don't think companies generally care that much about making old products work better over time. One of the parent commenters noted how well modern android runs on really old nexus phones if you strip out the "modern" animations and useless features. There's nothing stopping google doing this. People would love it. So its notable that they don't. Apple got a lot of good will from me a few years ago when they focussed on performance in ios 13 (or was it 12?). That OS release made my phone feel new again. After that update I think it ran faster than it did when I bought it.
Another way to think about it is that when you buy a product, your incentives and the company's incentives are aligned. You want the best phone. The company wants your money, and knows they need to deliver a good product to get it. After you've bought a product, the company's motivations aren't as well aligned with yours.
Arguably a company sells more phones in the long run when they have a good reputation for delivering on quality, and supporting their products. Eg, a few years ago some of my friends would buy every single blizzard game simply off the back of their reputation.
But most companies don't take advantage of this, and mistakenly focus on short term sales even if it harms their reputation. And, in turn, their long term profits.
As someone much wiser than me said, service and support is a form of marketing to repeat customers.
People aren't comparing their old phone to the new hotness, but to how it was when it was new. I think it is reasonable to assume that planned obsolescence is a thing and that OEMs make their products slower on purpose so people buy new ones.
I completely agree with you. If you want simple, if you want OTA updates from the people who made your phone, if you don't want to worry about it - iphone is perfect, i buy them for my wife.
But the discussion in this thread was specifically about the claim that iphones unlike android have a long life of updates. That's like saying "my dell from 2010 came with windows vista, windows vista is not supported, the computer has a short support life. Umm, no, you put Win10 or Linux on it, and can probably put win11 on it, and in 30 years still put the newest linux on it.
This sounds brilliant. If you were to start fresh today, what device would you use? My aged iPhone is on its last legs, and I’m looking for something on the small side (preferably Nexus 5 sized at most) that I can degoogle and use for telegram, HN, reddit, music, and podcasts. It seems like every older phone has a gotcha, like nonfunctional cameras or missing wireless bands. 7 days of battery sounds magnificent.
For 5 years of real support you will need to just get the pixel 6 when the roms you are interested in are ready. Graphene, Calyx, and Lineage will support it, but it might take a few months for their teams to get up and running. They are all very fast though.
Graphene and Calyx only support the devices as long as google is putting out the security updates, so all the phones before the 6 will only get the ~2/3 years that Qualcomm limits updates to. I am not sure how lineage is able to support devices for so long after vendors stop supporting it themselves. They are a super dedicated community of volunteers, though. [Here](https://grapheneos.org/faq#legacy-devices) is where Graphene talks about why they drop support after vendors don't officially support the device anymore
Of these projects Calyx and Graphene are the easiest to install. Graphene you only need a chromium browser and to allow unlocking your bootloader in the developer part settings, and over webusb the whole wipe, install, and flashing of their key so you can re-lock it. Calyx has a script you download to do the same. Lineage is a hair more involved.
Samsung S10 and S10+ looks to me like the place to be, flashed w/ a custom degoogled ROM. Nokia Maps (here wego), Open Camera, something like Aptoide, K9 mail.
I did a lot of research earlier, because I don't use a case, dropped my pixel 2xl, and the glass on the corner cracked. I ended up just putting a dab of epoxy on it instead though. I use the carbonOS ROM on the pixel, which os only for pixels I think. You do have to go through a lot of system services and turn off the unneeded ones though. Lots of useless stuff like "carrier services" and "sprint dm" and a bunch of other crap - just google them one by one. An app like Fibers is great too - I use it to do things like display percentages instead of icons, and when I need turn off half the screen pixels. You can do that in low brightness situations like reading this site in bed w/ the lights off, and you can't tell it's half the resolution. Adguard is great too - blocking ads at the DNS level saves quite a bit of battery when online.
Now here's the main thing - I do spend a couple of hours per day using it - either for email or reading sites. I get about 4 days from 90% to 25%. I never go below 25% or above 90% - my battery is like new 3+ years later. Another feature that an iphone can't have - an app having access to limit your max charge limit. I'm just guessing that 100%-0% is going to be about 7 days, so I can't fully promise that.
Also, a couple of banking apps don't work. The Uber app doesn't work either - you have to use the website versions.
Sadly it's just too big for me. The 4a is about as large as I'd go. And I'm even skeptical of that because as networks phase out 3G and even some 4G bands in favor of 5G, phones that don't support 5G will become increasingly hard to use. Talk about planned obsolescence!
You're ok w/ a pixel5 size (6" screen) but you're not ok w/ s10 size (6.1" and has headphone jack)? And the actual phone size of the S10 is smaller than the nexus 5 you mentioned.
The Pixel 5 is larger than the nexus 5, but it's almost in the range of reasonableness. The S10 is well past that size range -- there's no way I can reach the top of the screen.
Admittedly, it is nice that the S10 includes a headphone jack. But phone size is even more important than that to me. Guess I'll keep using my 2016 iPhone SE for a couple more years!
> Flashing a rom on google-branded phones is so simple, a non-tech person can follow a 5min youtube video to do it
Lol, this reeks of how little you understand how much a non-tech person is capable of. A vast majority of Android users won't bother or know how to flash the ROM.
They throttled performance depending on battery capacity, because the alternative was that the battery could not keep up with a sudden spike, powering off completely.
The problem was that they didn’t notify users, and after people in France winning a lawsuit, they now have it opt in I think? Nonetheless, it was a feature made in good faith.
The optics of that were absolutely terrible. They could have announced it in WWDC and made people aware of it. Instead they raised a shitstorm for no good reason.
Good intent or not, the management execution of it was completely botched. They could have even come out on top by projecting that they care about older devices' usability, if they had announced the feature; it was a no brainier and PR/marketing person worth their salt would tell that.
Which makes me question the bit: "good intent on their part" :-|
it's not a custom rom thing. they check for root and sometimes google play. i have to turn off root if i run a banking app. uber won't work - i use their website version. vanguard app runs perfectly fine on my custom rom, downloaded from the aptoide store.
I just flashed my pixel 2 to lineage 18 now that it's not receiving updates, and I was disappointed to discover that because of SafetyNet, I can't use Google pay in stores or install the Netflix app. So to me it's still less than ideal.
It does not matter if it is a 5 min youtube video, that just wont happen to the majority of the population. Most people can't even change their battery in their car.
it's def not for the iphone crowd though. also the crappiest lineageOS support ever - but lots of other roms.
I got the panda version. after 2 months in my side pocket, the white paint that for some reason the google geniuses decided should cover the also white plastic, started peeling off. From rubbing with my leather wallet. completely irrelevant to the functionality, which is the good part about it. searched it and everyone w/o a case is having the paint peeling issue. but... it's a much better issue than the entire phone, front and back being made of glass that breaks and costs $100+ to replace, and falls frequently because it's too slippery to hold in one hand.
I hate the trend that the "pro" versions of all these flagship phones need to be an XL Phablet monstrosity. Human hands haven't gotten any bigger. I have owned most of the Nexus & Pixel phones throughout the years. After having the Nexus 6 as my daily driver for 2 years, I have always opted for the smaller option ever since.
I would totally pay flagship prices for a regular ~5.5-6" phone with flagship specs, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Make it 50% thicker if there are space/heat concerns, but making it wider and taller just makes it super difficult to use consistently with one hand. I also say this as somebody with larger-than-average hands!
There are many reasons I’m in Apple’s walled garden but a sane phone size is simply the biggest.
I sometimes think about what I’m going to get after 12 mini that I’m using is done for :) Because there are reports that Apple is done with this screen size segment.
It's a tough market. The majority of people who want a smaller phone do so because phones aren't so important to them. And those people probably expect a cheaper device.
I think Apple would make a better selling product if they could chop an extra $100–200 from the price of the mini. A single rear camera, fewer SKUs (say, two colours and two capacities), and maybe a binned version of the A16 chip with one fewer GPU core.
> The majority of people who want a smaller phone do so because phones aren't so important to them.
I flat out disagree with this sentiment. People who don't care about their phone that much will buy whatever fits their personal needs (usually what is least expensive), while a person who specifically in today's market opts to purchase a smaller phone is doing so with intention.
Sure, a cheaper iPhone would probably sell just by the virtue of being a cheaper iPhone and perhaps a future iteration of the SE will be based on the mini chassis to facilitate that price sensitive market. But the people getting iPhone minis are almost all doing so with intention. That intention being they want a physically smaller device for whatever reason.
I think Apple would sell more iPhone minis if the branding were different. If the iPhone mini was simply called the 'iPhone' and then the current 'iPhone' became 'iPhone plus' and then the max remains the 'iPhone max' more people would probably purchasing it as the default phone.
Sure, everyone is entitled to an opinion. But really we're all just guessing. My guess is that the iPhone 12/13 Mini has potential appeal to two markets:
• Someone who wants a flagship device, who places positive value in smaller size, and is not price sensitive;
• Someone who wants a premium device, who places negative value in larger size, and is moderately price sensitive.
With the anemic sales of the last two generations of mini iPhone, Apple has shown that this first market is smaller than hoped. The question is: is it nonetheless big enough to warrant Apple making an iPhone 14 mini? If it is, great.
If not, your preference is moot because the device won't exist. My argument is that this second market is likely much larger and represents an opportunity which Apple hasn't quite honed in on—yet. If it's necessary in order for an iPhone 14 mini to exist, a device with wider appeal is preferable to no device.
> With the anemic sales of the last two generations of mini iPhone
The 13 mini just came out less than a month ago. How do you have data for its sales?
The 12 mini was announced 5 months after the 2020 SE, which itself was announced 4 years after the previous smaller phone, the 2016 SE. I suspect many people, like myself, who waited years for a new smaller phone jumped on the 2020 SE when we would have purchased a 12 mini instead.
> The majority of people who want a smaller phone do so because phones aren't so important to them.
Like the other person, I say this is a ridiculous claim. I'd go as far as say most techies I know want a smaller device than what's available in the Android land, and would be willing to pay a premium. Small size has been the second most important feature of the Pixel line, right after the great camera.
Yes, they did. Exact same dimensions except the thickness (which is fine I'd have preferred a thicker 12 mini with much more battery).
Thing is I bought 12 mini 3 weeks ago (replaced my 4 years old iPhone 7). It was way cheaper than 13 mini at the time of that sale. Also the only thing important for me in 13 mini better than 12 mini was battery which isn't that significant a difference imho.
I hope to use 12 mini for at least 3 more years. Wouldn't want to buy a 13 mini to replace a 12 mini then. I would want a 15 or 16 mini at that time (or equivalent).
Also a pattern is Apple reusing physical specs for a generation or two. The 13 mini is essentially an upgraded 12 mini in the same case. There was no innovation or upgrades in design, so they likely decided to get the most out of their parts stock.
Some think the 12/13 is the last small apple phone. And like the OP implies, it's a catch 22: They only put non-premium specs on the small phone, so people don't buy them, so they justify killing it because of the size.
There are always rumours that Apple is ditching the smaller phone sizes, that's been the case from the moment they started offering smaller form factors. They do tend to keep the smaller phone models around longer between refreshes, which I think is what stokes the rumours.
thats why im still sticking with iPhone SE from 2016. this phone has perfect shape and size. no camera bump so it can be used without case and enjoy its perfect shapes. and also it costs 50€ so i don't need to worry about dropping it. it basically costs less than phone case for new iphone. and it still supports latest ios (not for long though)
I am a lifelong android user. I almost switched to iPhone during the 5 era because I loved the form factor of those solid metal edges. When iPhone 6 came out with the "Samsung esque bar of soap" I was shocked and disappointed. I think iPhones today are sooooo slippery! The iPhone SE is a really attractive device, but I am pretty deep into the android ecosystem at this point and have disapproved of a few of apples decisions. It's funny to me that companies keep copying the worst parts of each other's designs: the slipper bar of soap rounded corners, the notch, the removal of headphone jack and USB A...
Looks like the Galaxy S22 will be smaller than the S21. (And same size as the iPhone.) Will likely be my next phone despite never owning a Samsung phone and not liking their take on Android, simply because of the size.
thats a full cm longer than the 2020 SE, which is already bigger than the mini. it might be "an answer to the mini" in features and spirit but not in size by far.
From a quick look at tech specs from a few sources (asus, gsmarena, etc.) the USA version lacks 5G band n41, which is the backbone of T-Mobile (+Sprint).
Recently spent a long time agonizing over getting a new phone. This is the only phone that checked all my boxes (small, decent ram, storage and camera, headphone jack...) but it doesn't work on Verizon :(
4a is a great choice. I think you'll be happy with it. The Samsung 10e is another similarly priced device. I think the Google photos integration is really nice. Even though the Google photos app drives me nuts sometimes.
Agreed, and I'm personally struggling to decided whether to get the 6 or 6 Pro an an upgrade from my "regular" Pixel 4.
The size difference between the two doesn't actually seem that substantial, but the specs difference kinda is. Meanwhile, both are bigger than the phone I currently have.
Apple is finally taking that more seriously. The 6.1" pro and the 6.7" max have the same hardware. Likewise, the 5.4" mini has no compromises over the 6.1" iphone except battery life.
I used Android for about a decade, but I'm glad I switched.
Yes! I have small hands and can barely use the Pixel 5, which was the smallest Android phone of the largest generation. And now it seems like Pixel 6 has also become a fablet.
I hear you, but being able to read books on my phone is a game changer for me. I wasn't able to do that with my old 5" phone. Also, along the same line, not straining my eyes to read a text or work email is pretty great too.
Adding thickness will increase battery volume and thus capacity quite significantly since most of them are currently thin rectangular prisms. You can try the math yourself.
I got a Umihertz Atom. I love it, as a backup phone for off grid adventures
But there are a few issues I've had, of course your mileage may vary
1. When my primary phone broke, I had great issues getting Google Fi to work. It seems the phone/sim process often hung when making APN changes, manually or with Fi app
2. Battery life is fantastic, but by default it kills apps after five min when the screen is off. You'll need to allow for music apps or whatever you want running when screen is off
Smaller phones with decent specs like the Xperia Compact range and the iPhone mini series have not sold well, so there does not seem to be much of a market for it. You may very well be the only one.
As long as I can hold it in one hand to my ear, and put it in a pocket, bigger is better. With much longer wireless earphone battery life, the former constraint might not apply.
Ultimately, the main use (by time spent) I have for my phone is reading and watching, and therefore the main complaint I have with phones is that they don't have enough screen, and the next biggest is UI lag. The recent folders like the Surface Duo and others have been interesting to watch, but they have so far sacrificed too much in other specs for that gimmick.
The 6 pro is 0.3" taller and 0.1" wider than the 6. But both are also significantly larger than the previous generation pixels. The Pixel 6 pro for example is 0.8" taller and 0.2" wider than the Pixel 5, which is a significant difference (especially considering you lose the rear fingerprint scanner that gave the ability to swipe down notifications from the unreachable top of the screen).
Google seems to have for some reason requested a very/overly broad embargo from reviewers which does not let them show any photos taken with the device or software features for now.
MKBHD mentions this (and shows nothing from the phone really) @ https://youtu.be/roWxo6jWoYw?t=140
And Mrwhosetheboss said he refused to cover these phones due to the embargo.
The Tech Chap mentions he can't show anything apart from the home screen. Can't even swipe down to show notifications @ https://youtu.be/aLr7eCsY6Cg?t=191
Wonder what made them think that that's a good idea. Especially because Android 12 is not exactly a secret.
Did you notice MKBHD said this kind of embargo is a "red flag". Well, he already knows any issues that may exist, so it's very interesting that he chose to say this.
Funny to see him in that video, with him getting begged by his viewers to cover the CSAM scanning controversy on every video for weeks - but he ignored it. Wonder why.
I don't think there's anything nefarious going on. MKBHD is a "cool tech bro", and he knows that, and that is what he excels in. He isn't particularly great at talking about more niche, meta topics, until they hit the mainstream. His recent Right to Repair video shows this, and it took him YEARS to make that video - but it's also one of the best.
FWIW, he does talk about CSAM and is definitely aware of its pitfalls on his podcast, so it's not like he's blindly banging the drums.
In which episode(s) did he talk about it? I checked 2 or 3 episodes around that time and it did not come up. We are talking about the Waveform podcast, right?
Besides that, I'm sure his reach on Social Media & Youtube is quite a bit larger than on his podcast. And I guess, the reason he had those comments under his videos was, because those people don't listen to his podcast either.
I did notice that - even though I'm using a pixel 3a now I'm waiting for full reviews and some understanding of why they embargoed the phone reviews before deciding to buy.
This might be a long shot, but I once thought my USB-C port was broken but it turned out that all that happened was that fluff and dust/dirt was lodged inside and the cable no longer went in all the way.
The fix was to slowly scrape all the fluff out with a needle (I am sure there are better ways).
This is of course assuming your issue isn't anything electronic.
I've done it carefully a few times using the sim card slot tool that comes with the phone. When it gets crusted in there not sure compressed air will do it.
even paperclips are way too large for usb-c slots; toothpicks are even bigger than that, even if you consider their conical shaped tips, so there's absolutely no chance a toothpick will work. The only thing that worked for me was a bent staple.
What that really means is that the software has bugs and there's a hope that these will get fixed before they begin to be distributed. Note that there's more software in it than just Android.
Wait for a full review before hitting that buy button.
And we should appreciate journalists who disclose what Embargo is enforced on them.
I'm curious how exactly this is any different from any "hands on" embargo? I guess the software feature one is a bit weird, especially since they kinda announced most of them today, but generally you can never show photos before the full review embargo.
It could be that they are a bit late on the software update and want that before reviews start? The fact that android 12 only came out today kinda points towards that.
If it were the case that they were late with the software update, it would make more sense to impose the embargo along with an explanation so that everyone could better understand why it's there.
Interesting. Wasn't it the same for the last pixel? And also, MKBHD still made a video about them, why? Wouldn't it hurt Google more if he would just not cover them?
Also, he regularly has Apple devices that he also has similar embargoes for and is not allowed to release stuff until the products are on the street or shortly before that - as for this Pixel. Does he always call it a red flag there too?
I think there is a difference between a general embargo not to show anything and an embargo that allows to show a few very specific things. The latter being a "show it but not really" vibe. Did Apple do that in the past? Or is it rather nothing and then everything?
Don't think he has an interest in hurting Google. But he has an interest to have some level of transparency.
There might be a difference, but there isn't for the consumer in this case, if that is what he really cares about.
They are allowed to publish everything on the 25th, that is still in the pre-order window, and everybody can cancel their pre-orders or wait until then to pre-order in the first place.
Also, not being mentioned here is, that another advantage of that staggered approach is that smaller reviewers get the phones right now and have a chance to publish their reviews at the same time as the big boys. And the big boys also had the option to opt-out of the early units, if they disagree with Google's way of handling it - and get it now, like the smaller guys.
I also think MKBHD did do similar stuff with Apple in the past, was it the new Mac Pro by chance, where he was one of the chosen ones who got one really early but couldn't show everything? I vaguely remember something like that.
I couldn't wait any longer so I purchased a very expensive Samsung S21 Ultra ($1200) because no Google phone could lure me away from my fading Pixel 2 XL.
My mistake, because the Samsung phone had preloaded software that took considerable effort to remove (more than most people could/would deal with). It wasn't the software itself that bothered me, but rather that there were notifications for apps I don't use that I could not turn off. That's enough to make me hate a company for a long time.
Bloat my phone all you want, but notifications take my brain-space, not my drive space. At least with a Google phone I have a semblance of control over the core function of the device. Looking forward to the Pixel 7 or equivalent once this Samsung device has served its purpose.
You stated the reason why I'll never get any Samsung hardware: bloated software, by design.
I still believe Huawei is missing out big time. When they got banned in the US, they should have *open sourced the whole stack* and put forward a truly open Android platform and let it thrive. They make the best hardware (cameras!) but their limited closed-source environment is a definitive no.
Conclusion: I hope the Pixel 6 will be available in my country soon!
I've only ever had Nexus and Pixel phones, and I've purchased most of the releases, starting with the original T-Mobile G1, which, along with the 6P, will have a special place in my heart.
I finally switched to Samsung S20 last year, and my wife to OnePlus 8T. They were more expensive, but we got better hardware and noticeably better battery life.
On the software side, the Samsung S20 is not only bloated, but buggy. The keyboard likes to die once in a while, so there's just no keyboard unless I reboot the phone. There is way too much in that phone. It's like someone said Yes to every idea that was uttered in meetings. It also likes to kill background processes very aggressively, which sometimes affects Google Maps navigation and casting to Chromecast. On the flip side, Samsung has this software (Link?) that lets you use the phone from a Windows computer and it works very well. The touch screen is very sensitive and the screen has these slightly raised round edges, so sometimes grabbing the phone sends touch events which is fairly annoying.
I was pleasantly surprised with the OnePlus. Little bloat, compared to Samsung, hardware is very solid, didn't notice any glaring software issues, no weird stuff. I'm not sure how open it is to flashing another ROM, but to me it feels like a higher end Nexus phone.
> I was pleasantly surprised with the OnePlus. Little bloat, compared to Samsung, hardware is very solid, didn't notice any glaring software issues, no weird stuff. I'm not sure how open it is to flashing another ROM, but to me it feels like a higher end Nexus phone.
OnePlus is one of the two (the other being Google) manufacturers with absolutely stellar custom ROM support IMHO (if there are others I'm missing, I'd love to know) (:
And even their stock ROM is pretty damn clean and good as well, last I checked. It's really impressive.
Literally, the OnePlus 9 Pro (latest model) has an official LineageOS release. I don't doubt there are plenty of ROMs for the 9 as well and there will soon be an official 9 LineageOS release. Hell, the OnePlus One has an Android 11 official build on LineageOS's website.
I've been daily driving a OnePlus 6 for the past three years. After OxygenOS 10, I switched to LineageOS for Android 11 and the phone is just as fast and smooth as ever. Extremely, extremely satisfied with my OnePlus phone, although I may be trying Google this time around because the Pixel 6 is cheap.
For what it's worth, in all the Google phones I've had, the hardware worked after 2 years, but the software became unusably slow and laggy - particularly Google Maps.
> It also likes to kill background processes very aggressively
> I was pleasantly surprised with the OnePlus.
OnePlus is actually almost as bad as Samsung in this regard. [1] It's the main reason I left OnePlus and switched back to the Pixel line. Far too frustrating missing an important notification because it killed an app in the background, and it's basically just to lie that their phones have better battery life than they actually do.
I want to like Samsung, and I used to have an S III and it was great in it's day but they need to step up with their security updates. They provide 3-years of updates now I think which is better than they used to be, but for a lot of security-minded people I think a portable computer with a lot of sensitive personal data is pretty much obsolete the moment the critical security updates stop coming. For me that means I could only have a Samsung phone for 3 years before it would need to be replaced.
the apps preinstalled I can't remove that send notifications is exactly why I won't get a samsung phone either. I had an s7 (edge which sucked to use one handed because of accidentally hitting things on the curved edge) and all the samsung stuff on there that I had to deal with was a pain and the ass and impacted battery life (because it improved once I removed most of it).
My experience with Bixby on the 6+ was enough to make me never want another Samsung phone. And that was before the motherboard was fried 13 months into ownership, right after the warranty expired. $500 repair went to a Pixel 3 instead (which was the perfect phone, as far as I'm concerned).
I really like my Pixel 5, and I hope that Google maintains the course with future Pixels.
It's a proper appliance phone. It holds the same place in my life as my kettle or my washing machine. It does what I want it to do, and asks nothing of me. I don't know any stats about it, only that it's fast enough, has a long enough battery life, and takes good enough pictures.
Completely agree. I remember with my past phones, there were lots of flashy features to play with but then they'd become annoying and you'd start to notice glaring usability problems. Pixel has exactly what it's supposed to have and all of them are well designed.
In the same boat but I suspect I'll be sad if I didn't have a finger print reader on the back of my phone. But maybe there's a good reason everybody is putting it on the front now?
If I'm sitting at my desk I have my phone on the desk instead of in my pocket. It gets annoying have to pick it up to hit the fingerprint reader on the back when I fire up the 2-factor auth app.
I think normally I'd look for the Pixel or the iPhone but my next purchase will be supporting FairPhone.
When I think about how powerful I need my phone to be I don't need the best. I want something I can fix and update myself; something that's supported for more than a couple of years; something that is a little "better" for the planet.
Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?
I stopped looking at what the marketers tell me I'm supposed to want in a phone, and went shopping for phones that have what I actually want: Durability and battery life. I've started getting those rugged phones of the sort they market at construction workers.
They're brilliant. Water/mud/dust/salt resistant, you can drop them however many times you feel like without cracking the screen, battery life is alomost two days (and that is while using the thing).
They're also pretty big and clunky, the camera is unimpressive, and the performance is middling at best, but I honestly don't mind that at all.
Actually, I'm very rough with my phones and considered buying a ruggedized phone, but went with a Pixel 5. It has a rubberized back and has held up very well over the last 10 months of use with only a screen protector (no case). In fact, it held up better than my previous phone, a Moto Z2 Force I bought because Toms Hardware Guide named it the most durable: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toughest-smartphone-drop-t...
Also, it turns out that the camera sometimes matters more than you might expect. Other people in my family care somewhat that the pictures and videos I took of my kids using the Moto were pretty meh--and some pictures didn't get taken because the camera system was so slow. (Oh, and the audio on those videos was poor.) The Pixel has a much, much nicer camera and microphone.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I became a Google employee a few months after purchasing my Pixel.)
I have pixel3a without any case or screen protector. I am using it from last 2 years and it dropped like 100 times, so far no issue. Still going strong. Waiting for Pixel 6Pro to be launched in India.
Running a 5, just preordered the 6 Pro. I was amazed at how easily the 5's screen got microscratches on the screen literally a day out of the box. Thankfully it had another hardware fault so I got to RMA it and screen protect the new one straight away.
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?
No, people do the same things with every new generation of smartphones. Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on. It's equally stupid in my opinion that the software we use to accomplish those activities is constantly becoming more and more bloated and have ever increasing hardware requirements to run smoothly! At the end of the day many common mobile apps do the same damn thing they did 7 years ago, but good luck running some of them on hardware that old (assuming you can even find a phone that has a new enough OS).
Anyway, I'd love to support Fairphone as well, but I'm upset that they removed the headphone jack in order to sell their new wireless earbuds. For a company that's supposedly all about sustainability, repair-ability, etc. that's a pretty stupid move. Removing a basic feature in order to sell another product is the opposite of sustainable. It's greedy, and I thought Fairphone was against that.
> Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on.
They don't "require" it per se, but the power does help. Apps will load and start faster, scrolling social media will stutter less, more processing can be applied on photos to make them look better, more processing can be done locally to avoid latency, and everything will be generally more responsive. More powerful hardware doesn't only serve compute-intensive tasks, it helps for everything. If you have money to spare, it's worth it.
So what happens is that phone A has a latency of 0.2s to perform a task and people are like, that's fine. Then phone B comes out with a latency of 0.05s and people are like, oh, that's so snappy, I love it, so they buy that. Then developers are like, we know 0.2s was fine, so we've got 0.15s of budget to add some features. It's kind of a vicious circle, because every step is logical: it's logical for people to buy faster devices to get snappier operation, and it's logical for developers to use the margin between snappy and slow to add new features.
TBH, if we could freeze all hardware development at all levels for a few years, it would do wonders for software and I think we'd ultimately come out ahead, but we all know that's never going to happen.
> No, people do the same things with every new generation of smartphones.
People who use the same apps and do the same things as 10 years ago don’t upgrade until it fails them, or they upgrade anyway because of other reasons that were worth the money. People who do benefit from the improvements do upgrade. People who do benefit from the improvements and can afford them do upgrade and are happy with the power and features.
Why is it even a discussion, and who among us can categorically say “yes” or “no” beside what we see in our small life circle ?
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?
The old joke about Microsoft Word driving an upgrade treadmill (no matter how fast your computer gets, Word will still take 30 seconds to boot) still applies, except it's to web browsers. Welcome to the future, where every tweet will include its own multi-megabyte, cpu hungry javascript app.
>Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?
As someone with an years old iPhone 6, I haven't once said, I wish this phone was faster. Maybe a better camera would be nice, but that's about it.
Maybe with the ability to plug a phone into a screen and keyboard and use it as a computer (As is starting to happen) I'd want more power but right now I'm good as long as my battery is holding.
I just wish more of these phones still had headphone jacks...
I just upgraded from an iPhone 6s to a lightly used 2020 SE for around $300 and I have to say, I didn't get it till I got it.
I don't take photos and browsing hacker news is probably the most computing-intensive thing I do on my phone, but I'm really enjoying the longer battery life and general responsiveness of the new device. I kinda wish I'd upgraded sooner.
They use clever marketing to sell legacy hardware made in China. Not sure why people catch the hype. Probably because there is quite big gap in the market for a phone that is ethically made.
If you renove marketing bs, I can't see how it is any good.
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?
Yes, many many people. The simplest widespread example would be that anyone recording for Tiktok or Instagram clips will be re-encoding and downscaling 4k video while applying ML transforms to the video stream. And it's all done live. You might not do it, but your local neighbourhood teens do.
I only bought my Pixel 5 because it was not huge. Most phones are too large for my hands, including the Fairphone and the Pixel 6. The Pixel 5 is almost too big too.
the camera app alone takes a lot of power. Carmack discusses it a bit in this article[0], but essentially Google uses a ton of software to overcome the often mediocre hardware, and the camera app is a great example of that.
Hot take: I haven't seen a compelling new phone feature from any manufacturer in as long as I can remember. I spend 99% of my tapping time sending texts, using a browser and taking pictures with the rear camera. Same as I did on my Droid X which was my first smart phone circa 2011.
Just as some people never felt the need to upgrade their DSLR once it hit 24M pixel, or change their TV for the last decade, or buy a new car, or buy a new house.
That’s arguably how things should be for the vast majority of people, if we consider the product getting marketed to have any lasting value.
Quality of the basics matters. Folks like to say they don’t need a fast processor, because all they do is browse the web.
If you open the messages app and browser 50x per day (which seems like a conservative estimate) and load the maps app a few times a week, the speed differential between devices adds up. Personally, I find the annoyance factor more bothersome than the raw hours of wasted human lifetime.
Side by side, my iPhone 12 takes several seconds less to open Firefox than pixel 4. 1.5 seconds faster to open Slack. 5s faster to launch Sonos. 5s faster launching The Economist. 0.5s faster launching phone. 4s faster launching Spotify. This is with iPhone running several other apps, android idling with no background apps.
Recent phone launches look boring, but getting the basics right absolutely matters. I was hoping Tensor would bring iPhone level performance, but we may have to wait a few years, since they’re only focusing on AI, which iPhone already does quite well.
Personally, I think it is totally valid to count performance and quality as features. Imagine if instead of performance, there was a feature where the phone cut your need for sleep by 5 minutes a day, or cut 5 minutes off your commute, or dropped your cortisol levels x%. Or shortened your wait for the elevator/grocery store by 5 minutes. That’s ultimately what performance means - time saved from the pure waste of waiting for apps and content to load.
Edit: to clarify, this isn’t iPhone elitism. I absolutely believe android users deserve best in class hardware. It is a shame that the vast majority of phone users are having their time stolen from them by Android and Qualcomm. I really wish I had the option of switching to android but I’m just not willing to tolerate it anymore; I have these devices side by side because I just gave up on my post-CSAM scanning switch after two months.
It's kind of sad too, because any phone built in the last 5 years should be able to launch apps nearly instantly. As always, software gets slower and then hardware has to improve to bring latencies back to where we started.
My Pixel 4a opens Firefox in ~ a second from a cold start. I’d have to film it to get an accurate figure, but it’s definitely not multiple seconds.
Maybe they’re opening a very Javascript heavy homepage (and what site isn’t Javascript heavy in the modern ad-laden world?) and is including the download & render time in that measurement?
Test was closed all apps, launched Firefox, and waited for it to complete loading news.ycombinator.com. iPhone and pixel were on the same network.
Just showing the app filling the viewport isn’t fair because iOS and android handle splash screens differently. All of my side-by-side comparisons are waiting until the initial load completes.
I am running grapheneOS, so slightly different, and you might say that’s unfair. I’d expect a distro without the bloat to perform better, but it does have extra hardening to try to get closer to an iOS level of security. I do consider that a fair comparison, since that is the bare minimum you need to trust the device. Looking at the network traffic of an android device really gives one goosebumps, even in the best of circumstances.
Well, you’re not exactly comparing like to like then, are you? Graphene OS is optimised for other things than raw speed.
Fwiw, I’ve just filmed my 4a at 60Hz & imported the video in a non-linear editor & it takes 2.1s to go from a tap on the icon to displaying the HN homepage.
It takes 0.7s for curl to load the HN homepage (compression on, but ignoring CSS & images) on the same network.
I agree with your premise that speed makes a difference and should not be ignored, but your conclusion about android seems a bit off.
The pixel 4 is older and much more of a budget device compared to the iphone 12, I am not sure why you are comparing the two.
That being said, my even older oneplus 6t takes around 200ms to open Firefox so I am not sure what is wrong with your pixel 4. Same on my partner's pixel 4a (which should be even slower).
> The pixel 4 is older and much more of a budget device compared to the iphone 12, I am not sure why you are comparing the two.
The Pixel 4 and the iPhone 12 both MSRP'd at $799 when they were released. Not sure how the Pixel is considered "much more of a budget device" in comparison. Technically the iPhone 12 mini is $100 cheaper than either of those, with the same basic hardware as the larger 12.
This is precisely why I wish more manufacturers would start adding physical keyboards again...at least 60% of my phone use involves writing. I still hate touch-screen keyboards, and am easily twice as slow as I used to be on physical ones.
If someone would come out with a smaller phone with decent battery life, a processor that's not underpowered, physical keyboard, a headphone jack, and mediocre camera, I'd definitely jump on it. Almost the entirety of this press release is camera based, which I just don't care about that much...but maybe I'm not the target market.
“It understands the difference between a recorded message and an actual representative on the line.”
If it can really understand that hold music stopped to play a periodic voice recording of “your call is important to us” is still a recording (and not have the urge to smash phone at the wall) I’m completely sold!
Also automatically recall silently, if the line timed out. Basically notify me when it got through to a human. Maybe record my interactions with automated systems and then offer me a dialog for a pre-fill next time. Would be a real, valuable edge for me. I hate spending life time in phone queues.
I have pixel 4a and it has some things like call screening and low light photography. I have used them on occasion but they aren't things I consider reasons to buy a phone.
I broke a Pixel and went back to my spare iPhone 7. I thought the spam calls and texts would send me past the edge of sanity. I suffered through that for six months and went back to another Pixel.
The original Motorola Droid is the only phone I look back on and wish I still had (with current hardware). There’s not been as good and usable a device since then in my opinion. However the X, at least for me, was pretty buggy and never lived up to the quality of the Droid with the slide out keyboard.
The camera quality of phones has increased significantly in the past several years. This is due both to hardware and the algorithms that can really do wonders in terms of focus and lighting.
OLED screens and high refresh rate are a treat for the eyes, especially if scrolling through text for an hour or more per day.
Same with cars. people will often buy them to show off or other irrelevant reasons. It's one of those items where people will spend irrationally more than they would e.g. in a desktop, despite spending far longer time on the latter due to pandemic.
Phones are boring commodity devices at this point. The good news is even the cheap ones are pretty good these days. Which is why the market is so boring these days because it is strictly incremental updates to features that barely matter.
I have Fuji camera with a nice lens. So, I have no use/patience for ever disappointing phone cameras. I'm well aware that the high-end phone cameras are pretty decent at automatically getting the most out of mediocre sensors and lenses. However, this is something I enjoy doing manually with the best sensors and lenses I can get my hands on and the results just don't really compare. I think it's great complete amateurs can also take nice photos now but just not my thing. I actually care about my photography. And since cameras are just about the only feature either Apple or Google seems to talk about, I kind of lost interest in the whole market ages ago. Bla bla lenses bla bla sensors bla bla AI. Could not care less about megapixles, fake bokeh (aka. blurring), overly saturated and noise reduced (more blurring) photos (aka. night vision), etc.
Phone cameras are just not something I care about fundamentally. I use my phone as a glorified document scanner occasionally and that's about it. I also don't play games on my phone. Just not a thing for me. Otherwise, all smart phones I've had in the last ten years are fine for light browsing, consuming news, some audio, etc. which is pretty much all I do with them. Even answering phone calls from recruiters is not a thing I care about and that is quite literally the only incoming calls on this thing. Everything else I do with either my laptop or my desktop. Typing on a phone is not a thing for me either. Endlessly frustrating for me to use touch screen keyboards. It's an output only device. All the input modes are mediocre and tedious and I have no patience for them.
So, I've been carrying a cheap Nokia Android phone since 2018 and it's the best phone I've owned in recent years. It no longer receives security updates because of Google basically twisting people's arms to buy their new but hardly improved versions of the same shit they've been shipping since 2008 that I've owned before. Other than that it's fine. Battery lasts me two days; even more than three years in. And after having owned a few Nexus phones, I don't trust Google to deliver a device that will actually last as long as my Nokia has. Best phone I've had since I actually worked for Nokia when it did not license the brand to a generic Android phone manufacturer.
So, not really eager to buy a Pixel phone. I'll probably buy another Nokia when I need to. The Nokia X20 looks pretty good to me. 5G and using it as a dumb modem would be the big headline feature for me.
That's how Android felt for me. Too many knobs, and a lack of good apps. I'll take Apple's integration over what amounts to nothing any day of the week.
I agree that at some point it can be a bit overwhelming, but I'd take "slightly steeper learning curve" over "literally missing a critical feature I rely on daily" any time.
I have literally never missed not having a "always-back" button. Where would I want it that a way to go back isn't baked into the flow?
I mean half the Android apps out there have broken backstack implementations anyways so pressing back on Android will do anything from send you back one screen to set your hair on fire and everything in between so...
As another cross platform mobile dev that mainly uses iOS, this is how I feel too. It’s much easier to mentally model things with intra-app and inter-app navigation being entirely separate.
Navigating within apps is frustrating enough between apps that intentionally implement wonky custom stuff for no reason and cross platform apps that don’t obey conventions by nature, the last thing I want is those same apps mucking up otherwise consistent app switcher behavior.
The most common scenario I have is switching from RSS reader into web browser for the full article and back. This is also about 50% of what I do on the phone that's not scrolling web pages vertically.
I've been using iphones for a decade and had no idea I could do this...not sure if it's a me problem or an apple problem but discoverability of gesture based shortcuts seems like a difficult challenge
As you can see a clear "Done" button, that's straightforward enough. Hit it and you go back to the app.
But even better, you can promote it to a normal browser tab by hitting the Safari button at the bottom!
That will transfer the tab to Safari with a transition to make it clear now you are in Safari can use the app switcher to go back and forth.
It's a great example of how the SDK baking explicit back handling into components ends up being better than a generic "always goes back" concept apps have to implement.
I'm also not sure if they support promotion to a browser tab natively, I'm guessing you have to add your own UI to close it and fire off an intent for the system browser
1. It is a less general solution to a relatively common problem so less beautiful.
2. It probably does not work if your link is a deep link into another app, e.g. Netflix. Especially if that another app can in turn link elsewhere, e.g. IMDB
3. My default browser on Android is Firefox, cause I like my uBlock Origin.
1. What? How is a fleshed out API dedicated to presenting websites "less general"?
2. Are you talking about Custom Tabs or Safari Services? Because Safari Services handles deep links fine...
3. Custom tabs work with Firefox if enabled in Settings
I mean Custom Tabs, like most of Google's efforts on Android start, is a half-baked concept. And like most of Google's efforts on Android, there is a chance that they will actually flesh it out, and there's a chance they might not and it'll just kinda exist and undergo death by a thousand small-but-unaddressed bugs...
SFSafariViewController had its teething issues back in the day but Apple worked on it until it became something something most apps use, most people use, and it's seamless enough they don't know they're using it (especially because it supports everything Safari does, from ad blocking to reader mode)
I am talking about iOS behavior without the back button.
1. showSafariView(), that has Done button, that returns back to you, which is less general than show(appView), that has Back button, that works for any appView, system or not.
2. I do not know iOS. You tell me what the experience would be. On Android in RSS I click a Netflix deeplink, that sends me to the show in Netflix app. There I click IMDB link, that opens IMDB app for the show. After checking out reviews I click Back, that brings me back to the show view in Netflix, I check "Add to Watchlist" here, then Back again, and I am back in my RSS reader. My guess is that Done functionality you mentioned before would stop working after encountering the very first deep link to Netflix, which my guess is will either open Netflix website in Safari popup (bad, because not the app) or open Netflix the app (but that won't have the Done button).
I don't know if it's worth changing phones over, but Overcast is a really nice podcast player (smart speed works very, very well). Apollo is nice for reddit.
I think some of that might be what you're used to. There are plenty of quality podcast apps on Android, such as PocketCasts. Same for reddit app, there are dozens. Maybe not as flashy but I've been using rif for almost 10 years now and it has been very solid.
RIF is really good, I miss it. I've used Pocket Casts on iOS and it's not as good as Overcast, but people on Android seem to like it. Maybe it's a bad port?
Yep, I switched to an iPhone 11 and regret it. The hardware feels better but I really dislike the OS experience... very clunky... and CarPlay is miles behind Android Auto.
I'm about to switch in the other direction because there are iOS-only apps that I want to run. Plus, because of higher resale value, iOS devices cost less.
I already have an iPad which is probably my favorite device to use. I might end up taking another look at Android when Google finally releases their Shortcuts clone.
I recently did this, as a long android-only user. I purchased an ipad pro when the M1 came out to replace my windows laptop for content consumption and love it. I thought now was maybe time to switch to an iphone from my pixel 4xl.
Long story short, I returned my iphone 13 pro. I found that, for me, the way I use the ipad and the way I use my phone are completely different. On the ipad I use it almost exclusively to consume content. Websites, youtube, streaming, email (but only using the browser). I found that I use my phone more as a “mobile command station” for my life. I get notifications and react to something, or I use it to launch an app to do something (like my blink camera or thermostat). I constantly scan it for notifications and do something with those. I rarely spend time watching videos or consuming long-form text.
And for those things, at least for me, ios just pales in comparison to Android. Android notifications are just so much better. I can scan them and act from them better than I can on ios.
Lastly (and the straw that broke the camels back), voice dictation on ios is laughably bad compared to Android. I was just becoming annoyed that android seemed to be missing more and more words for me lately, but when I tried to use ios dictation in anything but a perfectly quiet environment it is unusable. I use this a lot, so it was a deal breaker for me.
Quick anecdote, I went to a concert recently before I got my iphone and texted my wife while the canned music was playing before the concert started. It was not as loud as the band, but pretty loud none-the-less. I used voice dictation and just after I did it and scanned it for accuracy, my iphone-using friend said under his breath “that aint gonna work!” right as I hit the send button. I remember him being mildly surprised when I hit send, but didn’t think much of it until a week later when I got my iphone and tried to use it out in the wild in a similar way. I then reflected on that and understood his perspective.
I use voice dictation quite a bit and I haven't really noticed a difference between Siri and Google Assistant with respect to accuracy. I'm not generally in noisy environments though.
I'm very much a software-first person. I bought the iPad to run GoodNotes. It's the only good note taking device I've ever owned. Since then I found Procreate and use it all the time as well. It's an amazing program.
My phone is used mostly for voice calls, text messages, maps, and listening to podcasts. I want to run Things and Overcast on my phone and that's my primary motivation for moving to iOS.
As far as notification go, I generally disable them. I want to know when I get a text message and that's about it.
I was excited about these but realized it's probably because Google put so much effort into marketing. The phone is unspectacular and has a wacky design that doesn't hit the spot for me.
At the end of the day, there's a huge focus on photography, live transcribe, and extended support. From my perspective, that's their hook.
For photography, I have a Sony Alpha with OIS, etc. Live Transcribe has been a Google Research app for months, so it's not unique to the 6 or even to the Pixel lineup. Companies like Fairphone are fighting to bring long-term support to Android, and the major players are slowly coming around e.g. Samsung.
For me, the downsides include the appearance (smooth, shiny, uniform glass on both sides; dull two-tone colors), unnecessary curved screen on the Pro, lack of a headphone jack, virtually no mention of audio quality or tuning of the onboard speaker/microphones, giant size, and plenty of features I won't use (wireless charging, reverse wireless charging, security chip, 120Hz display). The fingerprint scanner seems better in review videos than the Fairphone 3's abysmal sensor but is in an awkward location if you pull the phone from a pocket with one hand---probably the second worst location, TBH, with the worst being next to the USB port on the bottom edge. Of all the silly nuances (protruding camera, curved glass) the fingerprint sensor location is most likely to drive me to put a case around this phone. A case isn't a bad idea either; it would hide the weak exterior design, keep your palms from accidentally touching the waterfall display, and make the thing so bulky and uncomfortable, you'd never put it in a pocket and risk bending the frame. It's good the software support doesn't last longer than 5 years, because if it survives this long, every non-camera hardware feature would be an annoyance. This is purely my opinion.
I don't want to financially support the assembly country, as I disagree with their style of government, stronghold on entire industries, and widely rumored aggression toward outsiders and the lower class. They're almost as bad as the U.S.
In short, the price is right. The features feel almost all wrong.
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Even the bonus deal misses the mark. In Europe, they're including Bose NC headphones. But ... I already have wireless NC headphones, so I'd need to resell either NC pair, then sell my Beyerdynamic wired headphones, then throw away my wired buds, and optionally buy a set of wireless earbuds. At the risk of irritating the North American Pixel 6 buyers who would love some Bose 700s, I'd rather have the phone for a lower price or have not-so-awesome Pixel earbuds as a bonus.
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On skin tone: Does every smartphone manufacturer develop their own system camera app from the ground up? If most phone makers have camera apps based on Google Camera (just as most browsers are based on Chrome), it's a bit of a dick move for Google to declare great progress in skin tone photography and inclusiveness unless your company is gonna share those algorithms with other Android partners. You know... since Android is also made by Google, and the skin tone correction is likely performed 100 percent by software. I mean, why not just press release, "Black people, dark-skinned Latinos: you all matter to us, ... UNLESS you buy an Xperia or Oneplus running our OS and system apps!"
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Here's to hoping the Pixel 7 focuses on audio, physical durability, and repairability without sacrificing a good IP66/67/68 rating.
Tensor SOC seems pretty impressive on paper, will be curious about how it benchmarks and performs in real-life. The Pixel 5 with its "mid-tier" SOC (Snapdragon 765G) was actually pretty good thanks to the software optimizations.
Bigger news is Qualcomm being left out. Will they go the way of Intel by incentivizing their customers build their own SOCs?
The bigger problem with Qualcomm is that they're primarily the reason why devices only got a two year span of updates and poor support. Each board built for each phone still had to get the software support starting with Qualcomm before it could be built with new source for updates. Outside that 2 year window, every device OEM had to support the hardware themselves. That's why new phones with older SOCs never got any updates at all. (Read up on Project Mainline as one attempt to mitigate this problem.)
I'm not surprised at all that OEMs are moving towards own/custom SOCs or other sources. Been seeing more Motorola phones with Mediatek socs, Samsung has Exynos, Google now with Tensor.
What are you talking about? Pixel 2 was releases Oct 2017, end of support was Dec 2020. So, about 3 years. Pixel 1 was the same, 3 years. For the later ones, still supported, let's see. Tensor based ones will get at least 5 years.
I've been playing around with the edge TPU on a coral.ai board. It's very impressive - I'm able to do real time object detection at tens of frames per second vs one frame every 15 or so seconds on my CPU.
BTW, this sounded surprising to me, so I went to check it out. According to YOLOv4 GitHub, i7-7700 can only do 4 FPS of detection. For comparison, tuned version on Jetson Xavier (NVidia dev board) does 40FPS.
> Will they go the way of Intel by incentivizing their customers build their own SOCs?
Intel still only have one legitimate competitor in the x86 space and they can at least get a bit of the business they're losing back through their emergent FAB outsourcing division. They also seem to be throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and some of it might stick!
Qualcomm seems to be keeping their head just above water. I suspect that's going to change quite rapidly though.
Every generation the gap between Snapdragon, Dimensity, and Exynos gets narrower and narrower. However, this coming generation might finally do them in. The Dimensity 2000 looks like it's going to be a monster and the next generation Exynos is about to pick up some RDNA 2 IP, so who knows what that crazy thing is going to do.
Benchmarks are meaningless and they also took the time to mention that in the presentation too. As you mention, the Pixel 5 did fine even with the mid-tier chipset. The reality is that phones are rarely CPU bound, and most of the heavy tasks are done by specialized cores anyways.
That's not how open source works in SoC design. In fact it doesn't work at all an here's why: Google hasn't made the SoC and doesn't own the IP, it most likely bought a bunch of IP blocks from established vendors like Cadence, Synopys, Samsung, etc and fused them together to create a SoC.
All those IPs come with their own license terms and NDAs that limit what you can do with it. You can use it in your final product and make money selling it, but most most IP vendors in the semi space will not let you open source anything about their design, including drivers, as that IP is their golden goose.
If you want to blame someone for this sorry state of affairs, you can blame the entire semi industry starting from the EDA and IP vendors all the way to the fabs. It's pretty much a cartel and they all keep their cards close to the vest any way they can.
I haven't see this as a problem, but I am working for a consumer network equipment semiconductor company. I haven't worked with graphics drivers which could be different.
Normally we get the driver code from Cadence and Synopsys under a permissive license, it can be integrated in what ever you want. The documentation and especially the RTL is under strict NDA.
This driver code is often very self contained and does not use many or any Linux frameworks, it should be easy to integrate it into any operating system in any way. Normally you have to rewrite the driver code you get from Cadence and Synopsys to get it integrated in upstream Linux, because it does not meet the upstream Linux guidelines. This is a general problem with the out of tree drivers you get from the semiconductor industry.
There are also big players in the semiconductor industry which demand that every code inside the Linux kernel they ship has to be under GPL for legal compliance.
There is also not a single bad guy in the semiconductor industry which prevents upstream Linux support. Every player could do it, Google probably got most of the drivers in source for their Pixel phones and could have upstreamed them, but most of them probably need a rewrite. They could have offered Qualcomm some money to port support for the SoC used in a Pixel phone to a more recent major kernel version, I am pretty sure Qualcomm would have done it for the right amount of money.
"right amount of money" does not mean what it actually costs to write proper drivers, but the amount that Qualcomm expects to earn less when people buy smartphones less often, which is probably much larger.
How do they use the GPL2'd Linux kernel then? It implements drivers in the kernel and the license requires that the source be released. Do they use tricks like nvidia and create a free software shim module ties in a userspace driver?
Each major release of Android has an explicitly stable kernel internal ABI, meaning that shipping binary drivers is much more viable than it was before.
They do, though, their chips aren't on the bleeding edge of performance so I guess they're less fearful of competitors copying their IP since MediaTek, Samsung, Nvidia and Qualcomm steamroll anything in NXP's offering.
That's why their chips are mostly in e-readers and IoT devices that don't need massive processing power.
True. NXP chips can also be found in devices made by vendors who are too small to get a response from Qualcomm or NVidia. Unless you're moving thousands/millions of units, those big dogs won't even entertain you with a quote.
Don't forget foreign actors constantly looking to steal designs. If government properly enforced IP laws and imposed sanctions on countries violating them then we wouldn't be in so much mess.
Intel does this all the time, but they want normal Ubuntu, RedHat and so on to support their hardware when their hardware gets into the market. With these phones the hardware and the software is shipped together in a bundle, it is a different thing.
Getting new drivers into the kernel can be a long process, sometimes taking months. Some companies prefer to engage early to minimise pressure when the device is released.
May I ask you what experience you have with upstreaning or not upstreaming kernel patches that have led you to make this comment? (I have recently read very interesting articles/presentation from Netflix and Google about both approaches and had a conclusion opposite to yours).
When I first read about the Pixel Pass, I wished it made sense for people on existing family plans. But digging deeper, I see that's the least of the problems there.
Some red flags:
* If/when you cancel Pixel Pass in the future, it will also cancel your Google One membership. If you're over the 15GB free tier, your email will stop working (!!!)[0].
* You have to cancel your existing YouTube Premium subscription before you can sign up.
Their claim of "Save up to $294 over two years" seems to be based on monthly rather than annual prices too. If you get to checkout, they list "Pixel Pass services (Google One 200GB)" as $17.97/mo. Annual prices for Google One and Play Pass are both $29.99. Add in YouTube Premium which doesn't have an annual plan for $11.99, and you're looking at $17/mo.
So the real savings are entirely from the phone + warranty where you'll save about $200 on the Pixel 6 Pro, but you're still forced to buy all those Google services you may or may not need.
I'm also on a family plan (with the grandfathered YouTube pricing), so it doesn't seem to be worth it.
It really makes me sad that every generation just gets larger and larger. I miss a phone that I could comfortably use with one hand without feeling like I'm going to drop it half the time.
Also, what is up with the gigantic camera bump on the back? It looks terrible.
I guess I'll be keeping my Pixel 4 a bit longer...
There's a hilarious dissonance between the talk of SoC design, AI, computational photography and ambient computing and the inability to handle a website with a relatively simple purchase flow for a phone that, let's be real, probably has about 1/10 th of the interest and web traffic of the iPhone.
From the moment the store website went live with these phones there were all sorts of errors, and I ended up forgoing purchasing from the google store after trying to for an hour!
Once Best Buy went live with their stock, I instantly was able to pre-order with little issue. I'll be picking it up on release day there.
People will never learn. You don't preorder Pixels, there are always better deals on Black Friday (literally in few weeks, just a week after Pixel start shipping).
Never take preorders, especially with Pixels. (learned that hard with Pixel 3).
Not true with last year's Pixels in several European countries. We got $200 Bose headphones during preorders. There was never a better time to buy them after that.
Probably the same thing with the Pixel 6/6P this year.
I think that was a loss leading tactic to encourage sales. Google can't gauge an early-adopter market that isn't buying their products.
Pixels are more expensive in Europe and no Bose headsets were ever included in the US version. If it weren't something they intended to entice Europeans, wouldn't they have provided a similar deal elsewhere?
The Pixel 5 was actually cheaper in Europe because it didn't support mmWave 5G.
Sure, it's a loss leading tactic. And that's my point. Outside the US, Google is using incredibly weird, inconsistent and half-assed marketing tactics. If you believe there will be something better than getting free Bose 700 headphones, you'll probably be disappointed.
I ordered my Pixel 5 on day one, and I was waiting for good deals throughout the year so that I could recommend it to family members, and that just didn't happen. And the 5a wasn't even released in most of the world.
It's super easy to resell them, it took me a couple days last year even though they were the QC35 II (which were heavily discounted right and left around Black Friday). It'll be only easier this year with the 700.
Sure, it'd be much easier for everyone to get a $200 discount but that just hasn't happened at all after preorders.
You're right, I checked, there were pre-orders, which made zero sense given there was no promotional offer of any kind and very little demand then.
Anyway the Pixel 3 and 4 were pretty big flops. Pricey and uninteresting devices, with abysmal battery life for the non-XL variants. I remember third party sellers fire-selling their stock of Pixel 3s during summer 2019.
The 5 and the 6 are priced a lot more reasonably, Google probably doesn't need to do anything to sell their current stock, so if you believe you'll get better than $200 headphones, good luck with that.
Pixel 3 and 4 were great devices, and 4 is one of its kind because it has Face Unlock. And has better CPU then 5, which was more mid range phone.
If Google ads $200 headphones, it means they are afraid they won't be able to sell a lot of phones.
I wanted to buy a second Pixel 4, year after release, there was no such option it was sold out.
I had non-XL variants (I have normal hands, XL are for giants) and I don't complain about battery, but I'm always near places where I can charge my phone. At work I just put it on Pixel Stand.
Pre-orders come with free Pixel Buds ($99), which if you care, is a nice bonus.
With all the supply chain issues this past year, you might not even be able to buy one come Black Friday, much less at a discount or with a better freebie.
In Germany (and some other EU countries) pre-orders come with Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 (A ~270 EUR value). Here in Canada not only is the phone more expensive, it also "only" comes with Pixel Buds which are a ~CAD 160 value after tax. The Bose headphones are also more expensive in Canada (as pretty much anything except gas and electricity) so they'd be an even better value here.
So I'll investigate if there are significant (to me) differences between the EU and Canada models and may just order it in Germany then.
And personally, I won't buy anything directly from Google ever again. Their customer service for me has been terrible. I'll happily buy another Pixel, but from pretty much anybody else.
But I was lucky during Pixel 3 preorders, after 3 weeks the phone was off 100 Euro, I wrote to customer service and magically they gave me back 100 Euro price difference.
For Pixel 4 I waited till January when it was finally available in German Amazon, after a year NFC stopped working, and Amazon returned me the whole amount after I returned the phone (they didn't have Pixel 4 in store for replacement).
Year after year, Google keeps reminding us its hardware line is not something's it's taking seriously. They sell phones in a ridiculously small number of countries, and without fail, they can't even do it without hiccups. And when you actually get a device, there's often some hardware issue, or annoying bugs, and sometimes both.
Iphone 5 (New but not most recent) | Screen broke from the inside after 3 years \
->
Samsung Galaxy S7 (New but not most recent) | Friend made me great offer for 2XL
->
Google Pixel 2XL (Used, 200 CAD) | gave the Galaxy S7 to my mother. She never had a Cellphone before.
I'm heavily thinking about upgrading from 2XL to Pixel 6 (Not Pro) and giving my 2XL to my mother since the Galaxy is rebooting randomly even after a fresh reset.
The Google Pixel 2 XL is the best phone i've ever owned and I've personally never had any issue with it.
I gave up after my Pixel 4, now on a OnePlus. Google has consistently omitted something annoying on their phones. No wireless charging when everyone else has it, replacing a fingerprint scanner with face unlock (hello pandemic!), laughable battery life.
They take 3 steps forward and 1 giant step back with each iteration. I wasn't willing to find out what stupid shit they would pull with the 6.
The color grading on those photos, though. So sublime and authentic.
This hn link isn't even available in all regions! I understand if the phone is not yet sold in all regions, but apparently I can't even look at it. Really good advertising google...
Pixel 6 207g weight is horrible. Pixel 5 is just 151g so this is huge jump. I wish smartphone manufacturers stop adding unnecessary weights for premium (like glass back). Pixel 6 Pro 210g is fine compared to non-Pro.
I was curious how this compares to the iOS options. Looks like the iPhone 12 Pro Max is 228g and the 13 Pro Max is 240g. I’ve always disliked the weight of my 12PM that will be getting replaced with the Pixel 6 Pro, I’m excited to feel the difference in standard use.
I’m not sure if it’s people don’t care or don’t have much of an option, especially if they lock into an ecosystem. There’s just a lot more choice on Android devices and the various trade offs.
There are options, but they’re much more limited. As a bit of anecdata my wife was coming from a pretty old phone. She views it as getting something more cutting edge so she can keep this one as long as her last one and didn’t think that starting with older hardware would get her there. That view limits the options to only a few.
they care but the other way round: if the device is made out of lightweight and stable high-tech plastic, they complain it feels and locks cheap, and they hate that, regardless if the plastic would be superior to metal, glass or ceramic in almost any way. As always, the mainstream is much more guided by their emotions and sense of status than rationality.
Only problem with Google‘s Pixel phones is they are almost unrepairable. If you break their screens you total the device. For example: The Pixel 4‘s display is connected through the housing for the motherboard and battery. You need to remove quite a lot of screws and components from the phone to access the screen cable. Furthermore, this way you need to remove the seal/glue for both the motherboard housing and the screen itself: https://youtu.be/3HTeJAgBl3g
It’s unlikely but let’s hope Google has improved the repairability …
I'm still using my google pixel 2 xl with no case for the whole time I've been using. I dropped many times (including some drops I definitely thought that I was gonna need a new phone instantly), but nope, it still works like a charm with only minor scratches on the corners.
While I do really love pixel, I do think they are not putting enough effort into building a functional eco system around the phone, sharing files is such a pain in the ass and the "sharing nearby" feature never works on this phone, and everytime I needed to transfer files I have to use a cable, that's why I'm switching to iPhone. But I do like what they've shown about the new pixel phone tho.
My dog chewed on my Pixel 4 display and totally broke it. I mailed it off to get repaired. Cost me $299. Not sure how much it usually costs to replace a phone's display, but as the phone was pretty new at the time, I paid it.
That's about the same price I had to pay for broken display on my S10. So it seems it's about standard (and ridiculous) amount of money for a screen replacement.
Wow, thanks for sharing! It looks like a strong candidate to be the successor of my Pixel 4a. Small size and the presence of a headphone jack is a must for me, the 120Hz OLED screen is a very nice cherry on top.
I've never understood why they don't sell them in the Netherlands. The way they just pretend it doesn't exist in the store by redirecting you is extra annoying.
Anyone know if Google has any plans to mainline the kernel support for the SoC in the Pixel 6?
One of the largest troubles with running your own OS on phones is having little to no information on the SoCs, and thus having to run parts of Android with a shim to a standard Linux user space.
I leave outside US and in my country Google has no official dealer. I bought an unlocked Pixel 3 via my friend in US, who shipped it to me.
At first, everything seemed good unless it started to lag in few months. First, battery percentage was stuck at 26% (but the phone was charging), then, received phone calls were having a very bad quality (calls via messengers were good).
So, in conclusion, I couldn’t:
1) understand if the phone was charged or not;
2) always had a bluetooth earpods with me in case I needed to call or receive a phone call.
It appeared that both of the issues were a hardware failures and needed my phone to be shipped back to US to the Google Service Center, which I didn’t do.
When you pay a decent money for a flagship phone, such issues are unacceptable.
Pixel 6 might be an excellent phone, but I’m not risking my $$$ anymore with it.
I was in a similar situation with my first Pixelbook that I imported from UK because it wasn't available in Germany. Shipping it to a Google certified repair store was quite expensive, but at least I didn't have to pay for a new Chromebook.
I don't know, importing something and then complaining about a lack of service doesn't feel right to me. I knew it'd be a gamble when I imported the Pixelbook and since it got replaced, I haven't had any issues since 2018.
Yeah the lack of options for small devices is really frustrating. I really don't want to switch to iOS but the iPhone Mini is the only serious contender...
Not knocking these phones at all -- I'm sure they're great -- but I found it genuinely hilarious that in 2021, one of the features Google chose to highlight, in the main, big "The reimagined Google phones" section, under "An all‑new Pixel experience" is "...and checks your spelling as you type."
One interesting thing to note is how much more high-budget Hollywood style Apple's event feels in comparison to Google's event. Having watched the two events on successive days, some things stand out -
Apple throws numbers repeatedly at you through out the presentation and you end up remembering quite a few useless statistics (55.7 billion transitors in M1 Max)
Apple makes a much bigger deal about each device with lots of close ups and pseudo x-raying of the product. Google just throws in a Pro with an extra camera that you can barely make out on the dark glass.
Apple spends several minutes talking about their SoC. Google says it spent years on Tensor and just leaves it as a shiny golden box.
The weirdest thing in the Google presentation is that several sections had presenters talking to a different camera than facing the screen. That just felt very strange.
"The weirdest thing in the Google presentation is that several sections had presenters talking to a different camera than facing the screen. That just felt very strange."
The camera director is probably living in a different decade, these side shots were used a lot 20 years ago, and it was still annoying then.
Yeah it's amazing how other companies are unable to generate hype or awe in their presentations. I consider most Android/Windows products quite ugly but even the pretty ones are just not marketed or shot well. Notice how Apple always has their laptops displaying some stunning photo? Or how it shoots the phones to emphasize the shiny, reflective metal? It's so simple yet other companies utterly fail at it.
I remember reading about how Jobs would rehearse product releases for months, even going as far as to demand that the fire exit lights be turned off. I don't advocate for putting your audience at risk but it does demonstrate the fanatical obsession with presentation that has remained at Apple.
> Notice how Apple always has their laptops displaying some stunning photo? Or how it shoots the phones to emphasize the shiny, reflective metal? It's so simple yet other companies utterly fail at it.
I'm looking at the Pixel product page, and the pictures are a mix of blurry - pixelated - showing compression artefacts, banding, in addition of the pictures being super bland and boring. Even the animations are stuttering. It's mind-blowing...
EDIT: Just looked at Samsung's page and it's not much better.
> The weirdest thing in the Google presentation is that several sections had presenters talking to a different camera than facing the screen. That just felt very strange.
B-Camera angles are common in interviews. It's to help create a less formal and less stuffy 'presentation' like feel. It's intended to be more of a "you're standing there, somewhat behind the scenes" feel.
It is also one way to obscure the fact that someone's using a teleprompter because it is more difficult to see that their eyes are moving back and forth.
From what I watched of the presentation, there was also a fair bit of moving around. In my studio, we primarily used it as a way to hide main camera adjustments in the edit, usually from the interviewee changing positions, slouching, etc. Generally, a high enough quality production will never rely on a single camera regardless.
I went back and checked Apple's keynote and noticed that all their presenters faced the camera. But the camera itself was panning slightly which helped, as you said, to feel less stuffy. Nice!
Apple has next level processors, it makes sense for them to brag about them. Tensor is good processor, but nothing special, except for the TPU in combination with their ML. So they focused on the UX enabled by that.
Is this also a difference in audience though? Yesterday's event was geared mainly towards creative professionals who are both more technical than average as well as have specific technical needs. Today's is towards the average consumer for a consumer device (even though it's called the "Pro").
>The weirdest thing in the Google presentation is that several sections had presenters talking to a different camera than facing the screen. That just felt very strange.
Not sure if that is reassuring or a sign of carelessness or a very well planned stunt.
This is a common technique used in film when someone is reading from a teleprompter. It is meant to draw attention away from the speaker's eyes moving from side to side.
Which makes the Apple presentations all the more impressive. The camera is head-on, but I don't notice anyone's eye's moving as if reading a teleprompter. I think they've memorize it
Pixel hyphen offers? What a scammy looking domain. This isn't the first time I've seen a large company do this. Perfect way to help phishers confuse customers.
It's larger than 4->4.5". It feels a tiny bit smaller than the 8, but with the notch and no Touch ID I wish they would've made SE sized with a 8 size screen. I don't need a phone this big, and with my usage (~3 hrs SOT) the battery is more than good on the Mini, there's room to shrink it.
And every year I'm disappointed at how small the "big" phones are. What I really want is the Nexus 7 without bezels, which is wider than the phones of today and had 142cm^2 screen. The 6 Pro only has a 110cm^2 screen despite being 6.7"
One of the more compelling new features looks to be Live Translate built into the keyboard for 48 languages using Private Compute Core. I'd be curious about accuracy but I'm glad things moving forward in that space.
Ordered a Pixel 6 Pro for both my wife and I to replace a Pixel 4 and Pixel 3. Looks like a nice upgrade, very interested to see how the Tensor CPU performs compared to other flagship SOCs. The price was a pleasant surprise. Trying to order the phone was an act of frustration - that's for sure. I refuse to believe that Google, who handles more traffic than anyone else on the internet, can't create a store that can handle a bunch of people trying to pre-order this device. I ended up having to order from Best Buy after continually erroring-out during checkout on the Google Store and then finally having my items removed from my cart because they were out of stock. I also can't understand why Google limits the storage options of certain colors.
It's hard not to compare Google's event with the iPhone 13 launch event a month ago, and the wildly different strategies the companies are using to try and market their devices. Apple (rightfully so) is very proud of the performance of their SoCs and definitely emphasized that aspect - using tons of numbers and data throughout the presentation. This was also seen in the new Macbook event last week. Meanwhile, google hardly mentioned a single hardware detail and focused more on the software and user experience. I have to admit the google event felt more "hand wave-y." They may have avoided talking about hardware details in the event though since they basically revealed the phones months ago.
But I'm not fond of the recent front-facing camera cutouts in the display, which are tackier to cover with tape. I foresee being sad if/when end of upstream device security fixes forces me to upgrade hardware from my Pixel 3.
It's truly incredible that the operator of like half a dozen of the most heavily used web properties on the planet still can't operate a basic e-commerce store that caters to the few fans who buy their phones. Maybe they should just start selling them on Amazon instead.
Does anyone know if these finally have global nfc and if allows for custom secure boot keys? I don’t want to but a premium priced Japanese version for global nfc and I don’t think that just because older versions has support for custom keys this one will as well.
Same goes for SoC and driver support. This is mostly a rehashed Exynos, so are we really certain that the drivers will me more open than on the exynos side?
NFC-F + Felica is truly one of those technologies that could have really made a huge difference in the world (imagine a no-internet, no bank/middleman payment system in 3rd world countries) but got ruined because of Japan's Galapagos Syndrome. Had NTT & JREast looked from a global POV and worked with OEMs to reduce hardware & licensing cost we could have seen Suica working all over the world today.
I think it's more NTT and Sony. Every single Felica card in Japan is manufactured by Sony. Either way it doesn't matter.
It actually is a shame, because most countries that did buy felica are dropping it because of licensing even though it's technically better than any of the competitors.
Regardless of that Apple managed to get global felica into their phones since the iPhone 8. Googles japanese google pay is just a shim for Osaifu Keitai. At the end of the day they seem to be too busy reinventing android pay every couple of years instead of taking some lessons from Apple.
This is as much Googles fault as it is Sonys and NTT.
Even for Apple, the most profitable smartphone OEM, it took them many years and so much engineering effort to make it work. They started with iPhone 7 JP edition, next their "Global NFC" iPhone X,8 series was pretty much a failure[1]. I can see why Android OEMs don't want to pursue providing solution to a technology that isn't widely adopted, is expensive to implement and has minimal user base
What are you talking about? So many incorrect statements and false statements in such a short comment with a post as reference that actually conflicts with what you said.
iPhone 7 was successful. So was iPhone 8. iPhone X NFC failure was just that. An iPhone X NFC defect. They knew it was defective and they released it anyway. All the felica magic is in their secure element and they had it nailed down in iPhone 7 already. iPhone X NFC isn't just defective in Japan, it's defective globally. Another contributor to iPhone X's failure in Japan was the lack of TouchID.
Also Android OEMs have had Felica support forever, but only in Japan and only using specific secure elements. The issue here is that Google kept telling everyone how HCF without SE is as secure as having a secure element and kept trying to push that narrative until they didn't. Pixel phones now have two secure elements, one comes with the NFC chipset they choose - usually from NXP-, and one is their own.
Basically every bigger Android phone manufacturer nowadays has their own secure element. Oppo, Samsung, Google, Huawei. The most absurd is probably Samsung's Knox that trips when you unlock(iPhone works fine after resetting it even if you jailbreak it). And on top of that every countries NFC programming is region specific. Hongkong Knox can do Octopus, Taiwan Knox can do Easycard, Japan can do osaifu keitai(probably not stored in knox though).
This is not entirely Googles fault, but they deserve a pretty huge share of the blame. At least for the fragmentation of the payment SE solutions. And again, they've had 3 or 4 iterations of Google Pay in the way.
That camera band - sand bar, whatever the hell it is - is one of the most atrocious smartphone designs I've ever seen. Extraordinarly stupid on the part of the designers. Phone designs should be pursuing a flush camera segment design, not an approach of how obnoxiously can we make that part of the phone stick out from the rest.
I don't really pay attention to smart phone specs (I stick to cheapo android phones), but holy cow - 12GB of ram in a phone? Better than my work computer and my personal laptop. Kinda neat to see. Aside from it being neat, I sure hope to god I'd never need that much ram for what I use a phone for.
Biggest complaint is fast wireless charging limited to their own wireless charger.
I had a really hard time finding an in-stock fast wireless charger for my pixel 3, and ended up just not purchasing it. Kind of a pain since the usb-c charger is always getting gunked up from putting the phone in my pocket.
The store is working but it won't connect with my Verizon account to let me check out. If anything was going to go wrong, of course it's integrating with Verizon. Have had so many issues with their website.
They deliver a terrible shopping experience whenever they launch anything. At this point I just assume it is intentional because there is no way Google can't handle the demand and connections to order
You're confusing "not implementing" with "disabling". There is no default-enabled HDMI out on any SoC. Rather you have to wire it up and enable it, which includes paying the HDMI licensing fees (and also test that it actually works)
"Are they still denying us basic functionality that's been part of smartphone USB ports since MHL in 2011 for the express purpose of making us buy crap we don't want?"
You're the only person I've heard of using HDMI out of their cell phone USB port. So, I can definitely see a vendor deciding not to provide it and not pay a license for that technology on every handset they sell.
Every Samsung S Series phone has Samsung Dex which allows you to connect your phone to a TV or monitor via HDMI and have a full desktop OS experience. It's pretty great and they've been offering it for years now. You can also connect iPhones to TVs and monitors with the Apple A/V adapter.
If google wants to make phones people buy, they should at least match their competitors features.
Hell, I'd buy whatever Chromecast Super Mega Ultra they wanted to sell me as long as it gave me lag-free mirroring. You can't game on a half second delay.
Anyone got a page with these phones' specs in English? The linked story keeps forcibly redirecting me to a page in some other language, even if I manually edit the URL back to the one in the story.
What is the warranty experience like on earlier Pixels?
I've heard some bad things about Google's consumer-electronics-side customer service, but I don't know how representative those stories are.
I dislike iOS, but AppleCare+ is the one thing that tempts me to go back to iPhones. If, after spending my entire work day writing code and fixing bugs, I have a problem with my phone, being able to say "you know, screw it, this is is a problem for the Genius Bar" has a very strong appeal.
I've done 3 or 4 Pixel RMAs and device protection plan replacements in the past few years. The good news is that it's relatively easy to convince them to replace the phone. I've never had a problem getting a replacement, even multiple times for the same issue. The bad news is that communicating with them is infuriating. In one case they were so incompetent that two different reps separately sent me replacement phones. And when I called them trying to return the extra phone they were totally unable to process the situation. I eventually gave up wasting my time trying to convince them that I should return the extra phone and just kept it (gave it to a friend). Luckily they were too incompetent to charge me for it.
The other bad news is that the Pixel 2 XL and Pixel 4 XL both had issues warranting RMA and the RMAs did not totally fix the issues because these were design defects, and the replacements also exhibited them to varying degrees. Speaker buzzing for Pixel 2 XL, and back glass detaching over time on Pixel 4 XL.
I'm still buying Pixel 6, but if it doesn't have an RMA-worthy design defect it'll be the first one since Pixel 1.
Looking at the Google Fi plans available right now, the Subscribe and Save option ($15/mo, upgrade after 2 years) for the Pixel 5a and the Pixel Pass option for the Pixel 6/6 Pro ($45-55/mo) that bundles a bunch of extra services like Google One and YouTube Premium are both interesting, but what I really want is a Subscribe and Save option for the Pixel 6.
Maybe I should just wait until a Subscribe and Save plan for a (hypothetical) Pixel 6a is available.
Google seems to be hiding the fact where the phone is made.
I think it's very important to know for a consumer to make an ethical choice.
Where they make it?
I'm never buying another Google device after the customer support horror I went through for my Pixel C tablet.
I guess the customer support horror I went through when they canceled my phone number out of the blue in Google Fi is also factored into that decision (took two months to get my phone number back), but to be fair, that wasn't an issue with their hardware.
It's a bit disappointing that ARM v8.3-v8.5 has some security features that aren't available in even this custom SoC (PAC/BTI/MT), and they would still help with a JIT. The size increase on the 6 from the 5 is also :(.
I still like what I saw, and I hope Google's able to get to shipping kernel updates through the play store.
One of the big issues that I have with Pixel phones is the large file size for the videos. Even a 5 minute video runs into 300MB-400MB file. I disabled HDR, reduced resolution but nothing helps. Has anyone else seen this issue and found a way to reduce the video file size?
How do folks evaluate upgrading their phone? I'm using an iPhone 6s still that was a hand-me-down and wanting to upgrade the camera - not sure what I ought to be looking for. Dropping 1k CAD seems exorbitant for this purpose.
6s is next on the chopping block, that's usually when I call it necessary if nothing fun has come along to snatch up in-between. As far as the price 1000 every 6 years doesn't seem exorbitant, it's about the price of something like Netflix over the same period but you likely spend a lot more time with it.
If you want lifespan you can't go wrong with another iPhone plus that comes with the added bonus of not having to worry about every technical detail of the phone to make sure it's actually a good deal. If you want to hyper optimize on the Android side of things look at signal bands (even for some higher end devices) and make sure your carrier of choice is well covered with them. Also look for either reputable brands or bootloader unlocked phones (or both) so you can load your own OS updates more than a year after buying the device.
I switched from Android to iPhone a few years ago and certainly don't miss having to sort through a sea of models when looking for something new. I keep all my old devices to use for hobby projects, so I appreciate the longevity of updates that Apple gives.
If you're looking for a great camera, a new iPhone will certainly give that to you. And of course you'll almost certainly get a long tail of os upgrades like you've had with your 6s, so if you keep it for 5+ years the price is more tolerable. A 64gb 12 mini can be had for 800 CAD new. And you can certainly get cheaper if you buy second-hand.
I'm in a similar spot, I have Galaxy S9 and want to upgrade mainly for the camera. I would also prefer something that is not huge. I'm waiting for S21 FE announcement and if that doesn't come, I'll buy either Zenfone 8 or I'll throw my money for S21 I think. I really like Pixel 6 looks and camera performance but if Google doesn't give a f** to sell it in my(European) country through normal channels I'm simply not gonna work around to give them my money.
I also used a 6s for years and years. Has a great form factor. I bought a 2nd hand Mate 20 Pro from a friend as replacement. It has a much larger, AMOLED screen, bigger battery, faster charging and better cameras. So many features!
A refurbished iPhone x or similar may surprise you and they're not too expensive
This is the first time I'm buying an Android phone in over a decade. My last Android phone was a Motorola Droid X from Verizon. I'm excited to spice up my life a little bit after being so locked into the Apple ecosystem.
I'm interested in pixel devices since they are supported by GrapheneOS. Is there any concern of hardware spying by google even if using an alternative secure OS without google services and applications?
Is it possible to disable all the google apps on that phone, like search, chrome, gmail, assistant, text to speech, youtube etc? I can do that on my samsung phone using adb. If yes, I might buy one.
Several hours later, I finally got the order through and even got an email confirmation and a fairly rapid delivery (end of month). If you were having issues earlier, you might be able to get in now.
0% APR finance over 2 years in the UK, interesting. Never seen that before. Will definitely wait and see though, my Pixel 4 was terribly disappointing (woeful battery and tiny screen).
Why is the subscription purchase option for the Pixel 6 Pro saying "From $689.72 or $28.74/mo for 24 months"? Is it really $209.28 cheaper than just buying the phone?
Is it just me, or does the phone's aesthetics make it feel so premium? The only downside is that if you try to play games, you will probably be annoyed at the camera.
used to love pixel phones, my first smartphone was a google nexus and had one until pixe 2.
Then one day I needed Google support for hardware… It was terrible. Just to contact them was multiile multi hour wait calls until I could get it RMAd and had to stay a week without a phone… then I switched to iphone and guess what, it has the same apps… except I know if something happens with my phone I can just take it to a apple store and have it checked right away
I gave up and bought an iPhone the last time I wanted a new phone because the last Pixels were so uninspiring. Glad to see them trying to turn it around.
I’ve been using Google Phones since they first launched Nexus. My last Google phone was Pixel 4a but boy is the battery life on these phones bad. Moved to iPhone 13 and I’m really happy that I did. The battery lasts one full day. I’m exploring new features everyday that show Apple has put in a lot of thought into designing the hardware and software. I don’t think I’m going to use a Google phone anytime in future.
I understand if something works, people copy it, but this is ridiculous. The pixel showcase page might as well be apple's. It's literally an ad for apple's brand and design and marketing, etc. So tired of this laziness.
It wasn't. He was simply stating what he saw and why that made him uncomfortable.
It wasn't even remotely off-topic. This is a RELEASE banner/promo website for the product. He discusses that.
It seems just like censorship, and that's cool. I understand the requirements to keep narratives flowing. But we'll all end up in an echo chamber, unable to admit when we feel like something feels wrong.
You keep using words like "flamewar" and "flamebait" for the topic of someone feeling that a race was purposefully neglected for marketing. It sounds like you're the one trying to smooth over a very validly concerned topic.
Edit: I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments because he replied to other comments that were clearly not very nice (in his edit). So I guess you're just torching the flames that he's already tried torching? But with force?
We don't care about "narratives" - we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't destroy itself in the obvious internet ways, and the principles of how we try to do that are well-established. As I said, this wasn't a borderline call.
The problem with changing the subject from the original topic (the new phone) to a generic flamewar topic (race grievances) is that the latter tend to quickly take over a thread and to quickly lower comment quality. In that respect, they are like flames—they spread quickly and consume everything—so "flamebait" and "flamewar" are good words for this.
> I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments
It's really easy to jump to conclusions about this kind of thing, which means it's best to hesitate and sift through what you've actually observed vs. what it seems-like-it-absolutely-must-be, because the latter is usually a misinterpretation. This applies to all the moderation practices here. For example, if you see a post getting moderated and conclude that we must be opposed to the views expressed in the post, that's a big non sequitur. We moderate posts with the opposite views just the same way, when they break the site guidelines.
You can disagree with the guidelines and/or refer to moderation as censorship if you like—people differ about such things. Nonetheless the HN guidelines are the rules by which this site operates (we're not trying to impose them anywhere else!) and, agree or disagree, users here need to abide by them.
This isn't race grievances though. It's marketing grievances... on a product that we're discussing.
I understand. I've seen several cases where you've moderated unfairly in order to maintain some form of status quo, where the quo is just an opinion that we all have to share.
Familiarised myself with the rules long ago, but it doesn't really matter since anything that someone might get upset at is suddenly hovered within there.
Yes. None of those break the rules. I guess you can address whatever you want because at the end of the day (post), it's clear that you're not actually going to moderate appropriately and are just trying to generate an echo chamber.
That's cool though. It's your website, not ours. You're free to censor whatever you want.
My statements are accurate though. You won't be able to censor that out.
Edit: Since you seem to miss a lot of actual inappropriate material, I've flagged it for you. Hope you can learn from my experience.
Yeah, the explanation is literally right above the pictures: "Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for all people beautifully and authentically."
This may be obvious to the previous two commenters but I want to specifically add that a lot of camera tech is not great capturing darker skinned people. This has been an issue perhaps as long as the camera has been around. Clearly google did some work to address that and want to show it on the page.
I'm going to assume that because the copy just says "skin tones" and doesn't specifically call out darker skin the gp (or whatever the first commenter is) is confused by what they're seeing and reading.
Are they talking about how they've improved skin tone representation for all people, in which case I would expect more variation of skin tone in those photos, or are they saying that they improved representation of skin tones which contain more melanin? They literally said "all people," but I assume they actually mean the latter based on the representative photos.
I disagree. I hate taking photos with my phone when I have the opportunity to use a my full-frame Sony camera. It's also very easy to mess up skin tones in tricky lighting situations, whether we're talking about light or dark-skinned people. Having multiple temperatures of light in the frame is probably the biggest issue (e.g., window light plus light from an incandescent bulb). It can really unbalance the rendering of skin tone.
From what I can tell, they have likely improved things for people of all skin colors, but probably moreso for those with darker skin due to increased focus on ML training. They include a person with fairly light skin on that page in comparison to the product page.
The copy on the page itself seems to disagree with you
> Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for *all people* beautifully and authentically.
(Emphasis mine)
There does seem to be a discrepancy between the copy saying "all people" and the photos above that paragraph only including individuals with darker skin.
Edit: I'm acknowledging that there are photos of white males elsewhere on the page, but I think my comment's parent is specifically talking about that one section?
Unfortunately, since there are more than 7B people alive on earth and several more billion people who are dead, it would be quite difficult to feature literally all people in the copy. So they, like absolutely every product marketing copy that has ever featured people in the history of everything, included the people for which the actual product featured is targeting.
Aside from that, you can also infer from the negative view that the copy is implying that other phones do not represent the nuances of all people, which is the reason that they said it to begin with.
Yeah this is probably the best explanation. Elsewhere on the page you can see examples of photos of lighter skin-toned individuals, and when viewed holistically – both photos and copy – this particular section is actually trying to communicate that the camera can capture well _darker_ skin tones. But I guess it's rude to specifically say it that way, and more "inclusive" to simply say "all people".
2. Even if it was true, welcome to not being included for once in your entire life. Now maybe you can start to begin to understand what others have experienced basically every day of their life.
Your examples are hilarious and you can imagine how I missed those. Pretend all the photos were reversed, and those were the only two people of color on the whole page. Google would be (rightfully) chastised.
Is it rightful to chastise them either way? It'd be one thing if there were a leaked internal memo saying to exclude a particular race, but this could just as easily be the result of a marketing intern arbitrarily selecting stock photos.
Personally, I also didn't notice the presence of white men or lack thereof until you brought it up.
Except we're talking about over 20 pictures. Do you know how often you'll get heads 20 times in a row? I'll give you a hint, it's in the neighborhood of 1 in 2 million.
As others have said, the large group of pictures of non-white people is about a specific feature: a camera that does a better job of capturing darker skin tones. So we can ignore those.
The other pictures I see are:
- White woman
- Asian man
- White(?) man (the guy with a man-bun who's jumping)
- White(?) man looking at mountains (his hand looks beige, so he could be any lighter-skinned race)
- Black woman
- Black man/woman
- White man/woman
- Asian family
- Asian man/woman and Black woman
- children that are too small to see
- Asian woman
- Asian woman
That's 20 people, 15 of whom seem to have an identifiable race. Of those 15, 3 are White, which is 20%.
The US is ~60% White and humanity is ~15% White.
So what exactly are you complaining about? In the grand universe of marketing pictures, White people have been dramatically overrepresented. Did you complain about that in the past?
I think they will survive being slightly underrepresented this time.
These aren’t stock images, they are meant to show what the pixel camera looks like. But at google, you can assume these things are all _very_ carefully considered. Usually all google marketing images contain exactly equal numbers of white/black and male/female people. It doesn’t really matter but it does stick out how they are all exactly proportioned in every graphic.
Yeah this "what about white men?" doesn't feel genuine given there is a white man on the page, the new tensor feature for detecting POC, historical context of marketing in general, and the fact the Apple iphone page is comparable...
Reversing the distribution only sounds logical if you reduce your sample to this one instance and ignore the entire history of product marketing. Which is convenient for some people, and totally bonkers for anyone who isn’t CW&H.
Having to squint to find anyone who even remotely resembles you is the lived experience of millions of people. Perhaps you should reflect on why you can’t relate to people in an ad that look different from you? It’s a skill that someone of us don’t have the luxury of not developing.
If you read my comment, the answer is "no". That appears to be a white woman, and I was specifically talking about white "guys" which I used to mean "males"
> welcome to not being included for once in your entire life. Now maybe you can start to begin to understand what others have experienced basically every day of their life.
Your examples are proving OP's point.
Your snarky response is what's wrong with the world now a days. I am brown but this over-pandering by companies feels more patronizing and condescending than genuine care. It's like winning an award or being hired just for being a specific skin color and not because of my skills.
This over-correction ends up creating more animosity because people start wondering if their heart surgeon was hired because of their skin color or skills and the brown person starts feeling lower because they aren't sure if they got hired because of their skills or just to tick a checkbox on the diversity list.
This type of over-pandering might be okay if this web page was localized to lets say another country with those demographics. But when countries like US and Canada don't have any representation of the largest demographic, then that's not genuine and mere pandering. I would even go as far as to say it's simply exploitation of skin color.
> their heart surgeon was hired because of their skin color
This may come as a surprise to you, but for most of American history surgeons were hired because of their skin color and genitals (two things not as far as I know used during the practice of medicine). And many probably still are. The number of medical degrees for women is now about at parity [1]. But as far as practicing physicians go, only 38% are women [2]. And the numbers for surgery are much lower. I've heard from multiple friends in medicine tell me that surgery has a culture that's very macho and frequently abusive.
Uh, there is a technical reason on demonstration as well. Don't try so hard to be that guy.
"Take authentic, accurate portraits with Real Tone.
Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for all people beautifully and authentically."
Tide ads don’t show every single stain their product could remove. Beer ads don’t show every type of person with a working esophagus. They’re trying to get black people to buy Pixel phones. Let’s not overthink this.
It's not an over-correction, they're just trying to sell a new feature. That's like they were trying to market Night Sight, they'd do it by posting a bunch of pictures in the dark.
As a white person I've never had to wonder if a camera would be able to properly capture my skin tone, so them showing pictures of white people won't really give me anything new. The whole point of this is to show underrepresented people that their skin tones are now better supported. Those are the people who care about this new feature. And the photos are there to convince them. A white person doesn't need convincing that a camera can capture their skin tone.
There's roughly 2 dozen photos of people on the page, 2 of which appear to be white-ish men.
One whole section of six photos is explicitly there to demonstrate that their cameras now work as well for people who aren't white. Itself an issue of underrepresentation.
Several others appear to be white-ish women.
You say "I'm not sure why it's ok to vastly prefer one group for representation" but there's many groups represented, black, white, Asian, and men and women of each. The fact you see "non-whites" as one "group" is a little odd. It doesn't seem good to me.
And of course the main point is that if you total the representation in society, white males are still massively, incredibly overrepresented, so I don't think it was really necessary to make this post.
For me, the very first picture on the original article is of a white woman. Most of the rest of the photos lower on that page and on the page you specifically linked to are showing off that their camera captures authentic skin tone, which is known to have historically worked well for white skin tones and poor for darker skin tones for pretty much the entire history of phone cameras. So to me this comes across as a good advertisement that their camera takes much more accurate photos than other phones.
going through it some look pretty white though. ill be the first to admit that i'm not particularly good at classifying people, but this one in particularly looked like a white male
I don't know what you're talking about. This guy[0] looks white to me. As does this guy[1]. I'm white, and those guys look like they could be my brothers.
Funny enough. These images don't show for me when loading on a PC. They're outside the "content view" for the page. Resizing removes the first image altogether. The second image isn't even a portrait.
This is the price we pay for our history. You might think it's unfair, and you might think equal numbers would be better, but given how shit the entire marketing industry has been to non-whites for decades maybe it's not completely unreasonable to swing to the other extreme for a while.
An objective look at history will tell you that "whites" (by which, I take it you mean europeans) were not worse than africans, asians, or most other groups.
If this isn't obvious to you, then you've been studying racist history. Asians slaughtered their way through much of Asia with Genhis Khan. In Africa, the Bantus genocided their way through the entire subsaharan region. Arabs ran huge slave societies and conquered much of the middle east and North Africa. Amerindians genocided each other. The list goes on. And none of these groups - including europeans -- should be made to feel guilty for any of this. To suggest that one group should feel bad for their history but not another is just bigotry masquerading as history.
We are all standing on a pile of bones. There is no special guilt to the pile of bones that Europeans stand on, nor is that pile particularly larger than any other. Nor is there any such thing as collective or inherited guilt.
"Since they were racist in the past, we get to be racist NOW!" At least you admit you're not morally against racism, you're quite for it, just targeting Whites is perfectly OK.
>You might think it's unfair
There's no "think", it is logically and factually racist, unfair.
The reason why you're seeing this more and more is because White liberals are the only self-hating subgroup [0].
"Remarkably, white liberals were the only subgroup exhibiting a pro-outgroup bias—meaning white liberals were more favorable toward nonwhites and are the only group to show this preference for group other than their own. Indeed, on average, white liberals rated ethnic and racial minority groups 13 points (or half a standard deviation) warmer than whites."
To be honest, I couldn't get to the end of the page, and not because of the lack of white males.
Scrolling is broken, images bounce all over the place, it is slow, laggy, how can Google make such a terrible page? I am using an older phone, it is not a beast, but most of the web works fine, maybe it is a way for Google to tell me I should upgrade to their new phone.
There seem to be a general trend of hijacking the scrollbar in product presentation pages, I don't know why but Google is particularly terrible at that. Also, it doesn't seem to get the idea that you may want to use a language that is not the language of the country your connection originates from. For example your URL explicitly specifies English but I get the French page because I am in France.
Practically, there are more races and nationalities than there are people in most advertisements. Once in a while white men (like me) will get left out in a fair process for choosing models.
How interesting that this clearly made made you uncomfortable. I imagine it's similar to how people of color feel when seeing seas of white faces on product pages past.
That was my point. It's ridiculous whichever extreme they choose. In 2021 when everything is about race and equity, I find it telling who its OK to exclude. Why couldn't they just have it be equal across the board?
Is it really that ridiculous to put minorities in the spotlight for a few years? Try watching a "popular" movie from the 70s, 80s, 90s, or early 00s (e.g. Star Wars or Lords of the Rings). It is very depressing how blatantly they are excluded.
Featuring minorities for a while isn't that big of a deal. It would be an incredible moral failing if we pretended racial representation is all fine now.
Even though I agree with your sentiment, you would be surprised just how many ads in India include foreigners (all white) exclusively, it’s fucking ridiculous :D
What’s frustrating is that almost nobody cares or is frustrated by it :D
That's actually really interesting. I wonder if there has been any research around this preferred marketing race phenomenon. It's interesting that an asian country would show preference for whites, while a white country shows preference for non-whites.
In the US the motivation is entirely political (and a meta layer of playing to political interests). What's the related phenomenon in India about, in your opinion?
Lighter skin is a near-universal beauty ideal, including in cultures with no love of the West. It's apparently biological, and nobody's sure why it's a thing.
I actually don’t think this is why they did it. I only know white males who use Android. Period. They already got that market. Therefore there is no point for them to advertise to white males. You always advertise to demographic you want.
Yep, welcome to the woke world where racism is at the front and center, instead of pushing it behind us and calling everyone a human. Slack is begging me to choose a skin color for my emoji.
Everything about this culture is extremely off-putting to me. I am an immigrant to USA and a person of color if that matters, I didn't sign up for this and really don't want this culture in the place I now consider home.
It is frankly ridiculous to call better photos for people of color -- particularly Black people -- "social engineering". There is a very long history of photography methods discriminating against darker skin tones, stretching back at least a century.
Not really. Google wants black people to buy their phones because a featured they developed works better for their skin tone. Should companies who make smaller handsets be barred from advertising to women?
Do you think black people striving for equality are looking for companies putting black people on their ads? They want equality, not their struggle to be washed away by bullshit empty posturing.
"Want to end racism? Stop talking about it. I'll stop calling you a white man if you stop calling me a black man."
Do you think that finally tuning their photo processing software to produce good results for people with darker skin tones (to match the good results they already had for lighter skin tones) is empty posturing?
> Do you think black people striving for equality are looking for companies putting black people on their ads?
Absolutely. How else would a person with attributes typically ignored know that a product was designed for them? Ethnic hair care products is another example. Do you think only white people should be in ads for hair care products for African Americans?
But it's never enough for these types of people that want to push their narrative forward and over anything that stands in it's way. There's never an end to it until the collective just says "No".
You can fight it with agree-and-amplify:
"Well Google you included dark skinned people of west african descent, but none of east african. I won't buy your product."
"Well google you only included asians of Han origin, and none of Mongolian descent"
How is this a fallacy? It's just extending their argument to show/highlight the absurdity that it could lead to.
Why stop at basic arbitrary things like skin color? Why not break it down by country of origin, way of speaking, etc. Every tv show should have someone with this list of accents, etc.
How is using the exact same logic of the initial argument in a different way hyperbolic? It simply shows the absurdity of the original in a different light.
White people don’t count towards diversity. White people are the status quo. White people don’t need to be represented in every situation. White people are over represented in tech and seeing white people in the minority is refreshing. Would you have the same opinion if there were no people of color? Would you voice that concern?
This is a systemic way of thinking. “Oh, most of the people working in this industry is one thing, let’s isolate this group further and discourage others from joining”. That’s how you sound.
Also, depending what on the source white people (in the US) account for between 60 to 70 percent of the tech work force.
Please research systemic racism in the tech industry. PoC have harder times getting interviews, getting a second interview, finding mentors, getting raises, getting promotions, etc. These all discourage non white people from entering the industry.
But why who blocks them? I may be biased because I'm from a country where PoC are < 1%, but all other people have different skin colors, some are very white, some are very dark (probably descendants from old Tatars).
So I'm genuinely curious why PoC might get problems with getting interviews? Do US based employees biased in some way, still in 2021?
All that matters for me in interview if is that person smart enough and nice enough to work with.
I don't see a lot of black people in IT, but I see plenty of Indians and Asians - those are also PoC I assume.
Not races. Race is artificial construct to group certain visual characteristics.
But if your parents are good at math, chances are high that you will also. Genetics play huge role here, for some learning e.g. math is harder than for others.
Thought you started out sarcastic, then realized you might not be sarcastic.
Amazing that people went from "we need all colors represented in ads as best as possible" which was completely reasonable, to "maybe we don't need white people in ads at all sometimes, ok? maybe it's a good thing!" which is objectively an absurd stance.
I'm not insecure about any of that. I'm just agreeing with the guy who sees this blatant hypocrisy and calls it out.
It bothers a bit because it such an obvious thing, where they had to go through and find the exact people they wanted and you know that they purposely did it because it's "the thing" right now.
Google Pixel devices are some of the few with a relockable bootloader and availability (though not open source) of drivers. That makes them the _only_ option for someone that focuses on privacy. (By installing calyxOS)
Google fails at even building an ecommerce website for the special launch event. In 2021. For a launch of a major "premium product".
Why on earth would one ever believe the rest of the product which is orders of magnitude more complicated would actually function and not suck in 4 months?
> they have no history of working devices to prove themselves!
* Boot loops.
* Android updates that they push to their own phones that brick those phones or break the cameras. It is as if their engineers write code against the devices those engineers can't use to test on.
* Non-existent customer service in case the phone does go into a boot loop or update breaks the camera.
Their main selling point seems to be that they can take "authentic pictures of people with different skin tones" (translated to English from German by me, as I can't get Google to show me the English page). Google truly is all in on diversity. Wonder how it will work out for them. Nothing against people with different skin tones, but how different will the skin tones of the average people an individual is surrounded with be? I personally don't know people of so many different skin colors that I ever worried about that issue, but perhaps it is different for many people in the US?
Another garbage phone to show off. Google Pixel has been highly unreliable. My OG pixel XL bricked twice within 2 years. My Pixel 3 had defects that forced me to take calls on speaker phone otherwise the mic wouldn't work after the warranty expired.
Meanwhile, my wife is still rocking the iPhone 7 with some degradation in battery life, but pretty much everything else working as it should. I don't regret jumping into the Apple coolaid one bit.
I wish instead of "cool features", they'd spend some time improving their supply chain. You expect some quality from a $1000 phone. And in case it seems subjective, look up lawsuits for faulty hardware for pixel phones. I’m not making this up.
Maybe it's an odd-number issue with the Pixels? My wife is using my old Pixel 2 with reduced battery life, but otherwise no issues. My Pixel 4 XL is still working great.
I've had Pixel XL, 2XL, 3, 4XL and 5. They've all worked 3-4 years (I pass them on to various members of my family). The only one I had any issues with was the 4XL, with the back plate peeling off, and Support just swapped it for me after 5m online chat.
My Pixel 2 was solid and reliable up until it stopped getting security updates last year. One year in on a Pixel 4a and zero complaints with it so far.
Your experience isn't always representative - and mine isn't either, of course. I've been buying Nexus devices since the Galaxy Nexus and I owned every Pixel device so far and the only genuinely bad experiences where the following:
- Nexus 7 from 2012 became slow as hell due to storage issues after a year. It worked fine after I RMAd it.
- Pixel 2 XL had a terrible display on the first charge. I got it replaced and the new one was way better.
- Pixel 4 XL got replaced once because the phone got quite hot while charging. The replacement has been working well.
I know a lot of people who definitely had more issues with their Samsung and Apple devices.
I want as little to do with Google’s services as possible in my life, but they really deserve credits for making a modern usable smartphone that is reasonably open. There is just one single feature I will be buying this for - the 5 years of software updates. While good image processing is definitely a pro, all of these software you’re presenting features I really don’t give a damn about. Just give me a phone that is meant to last a little while - and allow me to run what I damn please. This looks to be like a continuation of the Pixel 5, which allows you run your own software like /e/OS and CalyxOS aside to just being a lot less of a walled garden on the stock ROM.
The Android market is completely dire, and no vendor can be trusted to provide openness, reasonable taste or security updates. They sell you a phone, and once you’ve clicked buy they’ve already stopped caring. So last year I switched to an iPhone 12. I needed to vote with my wallet to get a phone that lasts. But although I get what’s appealing about iPhones and the walled garden, I started feeling claustrophobic. Feeling claustrophobic about what I can tailor about my browser, how easily I can run Game Boy games, what ads I can block, and Apple’s stated intents to actively incriminate you by scanning your photos on a personal device. I will continue to recommend those phones for most people (pending what they’re going to do with trying to incriminate you), but it’s not for me.
Finally here’s a seemingly good Android phone with 5 years of support - from the only phone vendor outside of Apple who appears to give a damn about that aspect. Don’t get me wrong: 5 years is still too short in my view, and not as long as Apple provides support for on their stuff [1]. But the market needs change, and I’ll put money towards that.
[1]: The iPhone 5S has just hit 8 years of _kernel_ security updates last month with iOS 12.5.5. One can dream on the Android side, but I’ll take 5 years in the current market.