‘You’re Telling Me in 2023, You Still Have a ’Droid?’ Why Teens Hate Android Phones / A recent survey of teens found that 87% have iPhones, and don’t plan to switch

Yep. The popularity of iPhones in US doesn't represent the rest of the world. iPhone users are the minority in Finland. No one is complaining about green chat bubbles because iPhone users have to use WhatsApp aswell.

There are still enough people who are obnoxious about it, and most of them seem to be iPhone users interestingly

I see a big mix of devices in teenagers and grown ups hands

Casually observed anecdotal evidence is even more worthless than a survey.

It's almost entirely due to peer pressure created by apple. They bully people who can't use ichat. My family does this to me, and I'm way too old for that shit.

But the article just keeps asking if I'm a robot

At some point you'll just have to come to terms with it.

Let them enjoy it, they have yet to grasp how dire the situation is.

When I was that, I became a Linux user the moment I realized I can't just use XP or 2000 (what was on our home PC) on a laptop coming with 7, cause no drivers. Some literacy followed.

What I really felt bad about - everybody around carrying that expensive tech without any understanding of it, as if it were normal to use a portable personal computer for Instagram, Facebook, making photos etc. Like hitting nails with a microscope.

It's actually become less disgusting today. Back then (around 2012) normies would aggressively behave as if progress looked like Instagram, Facebook etc, with their dumb screen poking, and my idea of how computing would be cool is something stupid and old and imaginatory , as if they had any understanding to evaluate that.

OK, just a little flashback.

It's scary how tech illiterate most teens / young adults are. Despite the fact that they live their lives through digital interfaces, the majority do not know how to use a keyboard properly.

I wrongly had assumed that by being surrounded by so much tech, young people would just soak it in and strive to optimize it's use through early mastery. It turns out that despite everyone using tech all the time now, it's still the same thin slice of the pie that scratch the tech any deeper than the top surface.

I would prefer my phones to work well with other phones. If your phone requires that everyone else buy the same overpriced phone, it is not a better device. Anyone can make something that talks well with itself.

You robbed Apple of the true superiority of their offering: the hardware. There isn’t a phone out there that comes close to being as well designed and beautiful as an iPhone. That’s important to some people.

Apple holds 57% of the phones market versus Android’s 42% in the U.S., according to web traffic analysis site Statcounter. The data skews worse for Android when narrowed down to teenagers. According to a survey of 7,100 American teens last year conducted by investment bank Piper Sandler, 87% of teens currently have an iPhone, and 87% plan on sticking with the brand for their next phone. But the stigma regarding Android phones is mostly an American phenomenon, at least to the degree to which it affects purchase habits. Worldwide, per the same Statcounter report, Androids represent the significant majority of all smartphones, holding a 71% share of sales compared with Apple’s 28%.

From the article.

Stock android doesn’t want you to access the file system either. And the stock file manager on iOS/iPadOS is more than enough to do any kind of reasonable file management. And their are legitimate security and data privacy/protection reasons to want to use an abstracted file manager and give apps limited access to the underlying file system.

As far as sideloading, you can do it with a developer account or you can use web apps to fill in the gaps for a big chunk of those use cases. But if you need better performance from sideloaded emulators or virtualization host or programs of those sorts which apple doesn’t allow on the App Store, you will have better luck on android.

iPhone makes a design choice to be more restrictive by default than android but it’s for good reason. If full control of your privacy is something you value then you should definitely consider running an open source ROM on an android phone but you should also consider why you are doing something and consider if it is something that is secure and if there isn’t a better workflow to accomplish the same task.

For instance, on device ad blocking. Do you really trust that ad block developer with permission to inspect network traffic on your device and potentially modify ui elements to block ads (but maybe more). Or is that something that is better left on the edge of your network on a device running pihole.

Sorry to get so wordy on you, but I always getting slightly amused when someone criticizes an iPhone for being locked down and then runs stock pixel ROM with like a couple pirated apps and a shady web blocker on it

And being able to easily side-load apps. Also being able to just use a USB C cable like every other device. ( will not apply to future EU, but will probably remain relevant other places ).

I just really fucking hate apple and thier walled garden bullshit.

Apple has the longest support of any phone maker by far.

Name one Android phone that gets 5 years of the latest OS, without rooting or installing a third party OS, followed by another couple years of security updates.

I don’t get this. Are you saying that iPhones are more disposable? iFixit says iPhones are more repairable than almost all android phones.

The software situation is no contest. My iPhone 6s, released in 2015, is still getting security updates in 2023. It got its last OS update in 2021. Meanwhile, most premium flagship Android phones don’t get security updates for more than 3 years, much less OS updates, and even that’s a recent change.

Not to say iPhones couldn’t be better, but I left Android specifically because of longevity. I wish all phones were as repairable as Fairphone.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. My kids school is all Chromebook and I think many are these days.

You’re approaching this entirely as a contest of what’s the best kind of phone. Of course a survey of teens is not a great way to decide that.

However it’s incredibly important to any company whether their product is / isn’t liked by the younger generation that’s coming up right now.

Old customers die off and younger ones grow older and wealthier, so you’d better pay attention to what the youngs think, because it will inform your business.

Android enthusiasts can refute this result a million ways, but there’s no question that this headline is not great news for Android.

Also I question the accuracy of this data anyways, according to the article it's only a sample size of a little over 7k people. Also anecdotally as a current college student I have not had any exclusionary behavior towards me as an android user, and know that some of my friends also use Android but tbh it just doesn't come up in conversation either.

I dunno, I'd call that one of the definitions of stupid. Not that they are necessarily overall stupid, but IMO being influenced by fashion trends without reasoning about it is a stupid trait (in kids or adults).

There’s a spectrum of answers here.

— As a tech guy I prefer to know how stuff works and to be able to play around with them. That’s critical for my servers and automation projects

— However as a person, I want my phone to just work, and to be secure and private by default, as far as those things go in current times. I also want a company that stands behind their products, even if I never need it, I want a tool that is well built, I want to count on security updates for several years, and there is quite a bit of built-in functionality that I like

— as a parent, I want to take advantage of secure family functionality on the iPhone, I want their phones to just work and to default to secure and private, as far as that goes. I want phones to be well built and well supported, to survive a teenager. And most of all, I don’t want to have to show my kids how to use a phone I don’t have, or to help them recover from their mischief.

My beef is with Apple playing the good guy when anyone with half a brain knows they are just as bad as everyone else. Their whole ecosystem lock in without caring about anything else is what really gets me. They are literally opening up their users to potential privacy issues because they would rather force people to use an iPhone than implement basic RCS capabilities.

After getting an iPhone for my mom, and running into multiple issues just setting up the account, including an apparently rare known UI bug*, I can't say I am convinced by the "It just works" slogan.

I really don't see the difference in experience for an average person buying any big brand android phone vs an iPhone.

*something about an old account re-setup not working on the phone and apparently some steps had to be done in the web interface. The phone UI was just giving an unspecified error and I had to dig deep into Google to find out wtf is wrong. A non-tech person would have no chance of solving it on their own.

After disabling a million warnings, being constantly reminded you should not do it, and i wont be surprised if future versions will require rooting for doing so.

I have always been an android user, but honewtly, if libre android OSes didnt exist, i would have been an iphone user already.

Let us know how it goes.

I'm sure it's highly variable by region, I live in a, I suppose you couldn't call it rich, but not a poor area, and nearly everyone in my school has an iPhone. Not only an iPhone, but usually the latest one or at least within a couple generations.The district also provides us with MacBooks. (Writing this from a Pixel 6 though!)

Modus operandi for apple, too. "Get one because everybody has one" is one of the biggest marketing tools they push to sell their tech.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/hWDeZpwesAg

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Get a different keyboard, bro. Changing your default keyboard has been a thing on Android for like a decade and a half. Even so, most keyboards these days have a shortcut that's basically 'long press the wrong prediction -> don't predict again'

Also, the android settings menu has had a search function for a few years now. You don't have to know where to look to find most things.

Google Keyboard will do the same, adapt to your quirks of typing. I actually find that semi-useful sometimes as I occasionally write software, but yeah you should always carefully monitor your text before you post it.

The analogy I have always used is that it's like trying to cook in someone else's kitchen and all of the things you need aren't where you'd usually look.