WSJ: Apple dominates smartphone market because it supports old phones and no-one wants low-end Android models

[lolarusa]

I liked my 2012 macbook air so well that when I spilled coffee on it and killed it a few months ago I replaced it with another one, refurbished.

[TornPaperNapkin]

I think it’s great they support old tech actually. You’re paying a LOT for their hardware and services after all.

I’ll probably just try to keep my exponentially cheaper android phone running for as many more years as I can though.

It would take a something really exciting to bring me back into the brand.

Like once I saw just how much cheaper using a phone can be it was hard to care about anything else.

[politeruin]

@VeronicaConnor

No system is perfect, but Android suffers from countless deep structural flaws that I could write books about. The two OSes are not even close in terms of overall robustness.

I know, i’m not disputing that. I know how much android security is like swiss cheese, but it’s hogwash that the app store is free of malicious apps.

@VeronicaConnor

I’m not interested in yet another OS flame war, so if that’s where this is headed

Nope! Couldn’t care less about all that nonsense, so you won’t get it from me.

[sqlrob]

@VeronicaConnor

I was a mobile developer for 15 years, and let me tell you- supporting a range of Android phones is a goddam nightmare.

Thanks for the reminder (/s)

Some code I was working on could either be a) Immune to buffer overflows or b) work on Samsung. ARRRGGGH. Why did Samsung break the C library like that.

Don’t remember the exact call offhand, it was many years ago, but it was one that the function was defined such that it would return length if you passed NULL as the buffer. Samsung always used the buffer without checking, so boom.

[fiddlingfrog]

Oh neat. Too late to let my otherwise entirely functional ipad continue to use the BBS, but really neat nonetheless.

[spetrovits]

I dunno, both my and my wife’s Samsung phones are years old, still receiving updates, and still going strong. I probably will never own an iPhone, mainly because I don’t really like Apple’s continued user-hostile design decisions (not that I can avoid them, once every other manufacturer hops on the bandwagon), but also because it would be the only Apple product I’d own, and I don’t fancy having to make all the other non-Apple tech I own work with it.

[VeronicaConnor]

@newbrain

I sit on the other side of the fence, or, rather, the radio waves.
Supporting an almost infinite range of UEs (user equipments = phones) is a nightmare on this side too.
Apple’s UEs are as much a headache as the others.

I respectfully disagree, without disparaging your life experience in any way

I spent the same amount of time on both platforms, porting many apps and games back and forth over the years, and for my money Apple’s APIs and hardware ecosystem were much much cleaner and easier. Your mileage may vary.

[smulder]

@sqlrob

Samsung always used the buffer without checking