Thoughts on Android (#382)

Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>

blog/android-thoughts-2021-07-04.markdown

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+---
+date: 2021-07-04
+title: My Thoughts About Using Android Again as an iPhone User
+tags:
+ - android
+ - iphone
+author: ectamorphic
+---
+
+# My Thoughts About Using Android Again as an iPhone User
+
+I used to be a hardcore Android user. It was my second major kind of smartphone
+(the first was Windows Mobile 6.1 on a T-Mobile Dash) and it left me hooked to
+the concept of smartphones and connected tech in general. I've used many Android
+phones over the years but one day I rage-switched over to an iPhone. My Samsung
+Galaxy S7 pissed me off for the last time and I went to the Apple store and
+bought an iPhone 7 on the spot. I popped my sim card into it (after a lovely
+meal at Panda Express) and I was off to the races. I haven't really used Android
+since other than in little stints with devices like the Amazon Fire 7 (because
+it was so darn cheap).
+
+Recently I realized that it would be very easy to package up my website for the
+Google Play Store using [pwabuilder](https://www.pwabuilder.com/). I've been
+shipping my site as a progressive web app (PWA) for years (and use that PWA for
+testing how the site looks on my phone), but aside from the occasional confused
+screenshot that's been tweeted at me I've never actually made much use of this.
+It does do an additional level of caching (which is why you can load a bunch of
+pages on the site, disconnect from the internet and then still browse those
+pages that you loaded like you were online) though, which helps a lot with the
+bandwidth cost of this site.
+
+So, I decided to ship this site as an Android app. You can download it from the
+Google Play Store
+[here](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=website.christine.xesite)
+and get a partially native experience. It worked perfectly in the Android
+emulator but you really need to experience it on a phone to know for sure. On a
+whim I grabbed a [Moto g8
+Power](https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g8_power-10052.php) from Amazon
+and then I used it for the final testing on the app before I shipped it on the
+Google Play store. I unboxed the phone, set it up, plugged it into my MacBook
+and then hit "run" in Android Studio. The app installed instantly and I saw [the
+homepage for my site](https://cdn.christine.website/file/christine-static/blog/Screenshot_20210703-101654.png).
+
+It was a magical experience. Me, someone that has no idea what they are doing
+with Android app development was able to take an existing project I've poured
+years of work into and make it work on a phone like a native app. I literally
+just had the phone barely out of the box and my code was running natively on it.
+I don't have to worry about the app timing out, I don't have to pay Google money
+to test things on my own device, I just hit play and it runs.
+
+This is the kind of developer experience I wish I could have on iOS. I used to
+have a paid developer cert for resigning a few personally hacked up apps, but
+when I moved to Canada and changed over my cards to have Canadian billing
+addresses I lost the ability to purchase a renewal for my developer certificate.
+I _can_ change my Apple account over to a Canadian one but doing that means I
+have to delete my Apple Music subscription and that would delete all of the
+custom uploaded music I have in the cloud. I have more music up there than I
+have disk space locally, so this is not really a viable option.
+
+Meanwhile on Android you just open the box, turn the phone on, set it up, press
+on the build number 10 times, enable USB debugging, plug it in, confirm debug
+access and bam, you're in. You can test an unlimited number of Android apps
+forever. I can give the APK to people and then they can tell me if it works on
+their device. You cannot do this on iOS. It's making me really consider if iOS
+really is the best option for me going forward.
+
+But then the claws of the Apple ecosystem show their face. I have an iPad,
+MacBook Air, Apple Watch, iPhone and AirPods. If I end up switching to Android
+as my main phone I make my watch significantly less useful. I won't have the
+seamless notification syncing to my wrist unless I buy a new watch. I don't
+really know if I want to do that.
+
+At the same time though, Android lets me poke around and change things that
+bother me. I can make animations faster, which makes the phone _feel_ so much
+more snappy and responsive. I can rip out Chrome and replace it with something
+else. I can choose which app to use for text messages. I have _agency_ and
+_power_ over my experience in ways that iOS simply cannot match. As a tinkerer
+that mains a NixOS tower this is a huge factor for me. And then I'm able to test
+my apps for free. I can just do it. I don't have to worry about dev certs,
+licenses or anything else. I just put the app on the phone and I'm done.
+
+Android's UX is a lot different than it was when I used it last. The last
+Android phone I used had hardware home, menu and back buttons. This Moto g8
+Power seems to have some kind of gesture control mode that mostly emulates
+modern iPhone gesture controls, so my muscle memory isn't totally freaked out.
+It was a bit more sensitive than I would have liked out of the box, but I was
+easily able to tweak the sensitivity until I got to a level I was comfortable
+with. This would have never been able to happen on iOS.
+
+I guess this post is a lot more rambly and less focused than I thought it would
+be while I was outlining it on paper. I didn't go into this expecting a 1:1
+experience matchup with what I have on iOS. This phone is not nearly powerful
+enough to make them comparable, however I can easily just pick it up, do what I
+need and it does it. I'm considering getting a burner sim for this thing so I
+can take it with me instead of (or in addition to) my iPhone. The camera is
+decent, but I don't really have any good comparison shots yet. Android and iOS
+are at a state of convergent evolution at this point. They both do about the
+same things. Android is more easily customizeable and iOS is more about a guided
+experience. Neither is really "better" at this point, but I guess it really will
+boil down to the ecosystem you want.
+
+Apple's walled garden approach has a lot of
+things in its favor. You can buy accessories from the Apple Store and they will
+just work. You can seamlessly copy things from your phone to your tablet or your
+laptop. iCloud and Airdrop glue your machines together, and in the future I can
+only anticipate that each of those devices will get more and more muddled
+together until there's not really a difference between them. Android has a lot
+of options. There's over 15,000 Android devices out there with official Google
+Play support. They're all at different patch states and have different gimmicks
+to distinguish them, but you have an unparalleled amount of choice and agency.
+This means that there's less of a consistent total experience, however it leaves
+a lot of room for experimentation and innovation.
+
+I like this phone and the instance of Android that runs on it. The only real
+downside I've seen so far is that the update notes are in Spanish. I have no
+idea why they're in Spanish, I don't speak Spanish and the phone's UI language
+is set to English, but I get ["Seguridad de
+Android"](https://twitter.com/theprincessxena/status/1411072416986587138/photo/1)
+patches on it and that's my life now.
+
+A lot of the Airdrop and integration features I've been missing have been
+supplemented by [Taildrop](https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop/) and
+Tailscale in general. It's really satisfying to be able to work for a company
+that makes the annoyingly hard problem of "make computers talk to eachother" so
+_trivial_.
+
+Overall, it's a 7/10 experience for me. I'd likely choose Android if I wasn't so
+entrenched in the Apple/iOS ecosystem. If only it wasn't so tied into Google's
+fangs.