In principle, I don't entirely disagree with that, however, humans are part of the environment. We need "the environment" to survive, such as a sustainable marine ecosystem. I mean, if there are no more fish to catch due to overfishing then humans will be in trouble, too.
All well and good until you run out of environment. If the ocean is overfished and its ecosystem collapses, the people who depend on it for food will starve anyway.
This. We either use the little bit of abusing the ocean we have left to flatten out population curves, or the population crashes to a much lower level later on.
We wouldn't need such dramatic changes to combat global warming if the population didn't continually exponentially expand.
I don’t understand how could you pay such a vast amount of money for a phone that is not even subpar… it is unusable by your own testimony. Not trying to be snarky or anything, but why didn’t you return it?
You only get 15 days to return it and a lot of us wait until the next patch to see if that fixes issues which are on a monthly cadence now. Unfortunately after buying so many Google devices unless some major changes happen I won't be buying another one.
I've now got quite a few phones on my desk (6 right now) plus all the other historical ones. It's surprising to see the differences, quirks, and little gems. My main phone has now become an 13 Pro Max, it's solid, reliable and smooth (but my main reason was the camera/video quality). While features might be hidden via gestures I don't think I've ever seen a problem or bug with anything - certainly nothing that is repeated or sticks out in my mind.
But that said the functionality of Android is much wider in scope, which is a blessing and a curse.
For my startup one of the core features is uploading photos/videos, and lots of them.. getting to know how each platform deals with background processes has been very eye opening. Apple : there's a couple of ways, it's on our terms, maybe, if we feel up to the task - but you know what you're getting. Android : here's the kazillion different changing API's on how to do it... you'll get there with better performance of what you want (maybe) but good luck navigating the landscape !
I suspect Androids eco system problems is just keeping up with ever changing APIs, or learning what worked fine on your Sony xperia 1 ii, fails miserably on your first customers Samsung S20.... then realising you're doing it wrong on the apis, then re-writing it, then the api's change....
So the chance of app bugs is far, far higher in Android.
As a person that has been dealing with Android programming since version 1.6 I have to say that things got very stable since version 4.4 Kitkat. That's 9 years ago...
The ecosystem has improved, and added a bunch of new optional stuff, a new language, a new way of making UIs, etc. Retrocompatibility is still very good.
The "stability" of Android Studio stable releases, how much Android build system requires as developer workstation (Google employees must all use gaming rigs), the artisanal tooling on the NDK front, lack of easier JNI integration after 10+ years,...
Across several android and iOS phones (including some of the first android phones in the US market), I have not personally experienced issues anything close to what I’ve read about from the Pixel line.
We need to push manufacturers to be better, especially about providing timely and stable OS updates.
People are pushing them. That's why the iPhone passed all Android devices combined in US market share last week. That's the pushing. A lot of longtime Android users have obviously finally gotten tired enough of the quality issues and have fled to iPhone.
None of them had glaring problems I had to live with or work around.
The battery life up until the LG G2 was a problem -- I usually needed to recharge mid-day if I was doing anything active. The G2 had the best form factor ever -- honestly, they should have kept the external dimensions the same and just improved the internals each year. 5.2" screen, 460 ppi. 138.5 x 70.9 x 8.9 mm. 143g. Eventually it developed a touchscreen fault that slowly spread.
The Nexus 6P was a great phone, but big. It developed battery problems after about a year. Up until then, fine.
The Pixel XL was a little disappointing because it didn't really feel like much of an advance, but it didn't have the battery problem.
I'm still using the 7 Pro, which, for a bigphone, is not bad. It has the excellent motorized pop-up selfie cam, which I like because I hardly ever use it. When I do use it, it deploys quickly. Battery life is starting to degrade (2.5 years in) and I'm thinking about either a Pixel 7 or an Asus Zenphone 9 this fall.
As a fairly long time Android user (Android 2.2 -> 12 from various manufacturers), the iPhone 13 Mini in my pocket works really well.
I honestly can't even say one is better than the other, just different, and they've mostly stolen the good ideas from each other over the years anyway.
Ha, that’s pretty much the entire history, minus the HTC Dream.
Same run for me. Started with Samsung Captivate (Galaxy S1). Jumped to iPhone 12/13 mini when Google designers hired Buffalo Bill and pushed his skin-lampshade-inspired-design in Android 12 (Material You Will Put The Lotion On Its Skin).
I have two exceptions that come to mind... My Galaxy J7 (Original version) was a lovely little device that still works, aside from lack of updates from the mfg. It wasn't fancy or fast, but it was cheap and has been able to do what I needed it to.
I bring that one up specifically because it wasn't a 'flagship' phone which tend to be as polished as possible (although often wind up with quirks on/related to new features), but a cheapish low to midrange (which often see problems around hardware choices and/or bugs around software for said hardware choices [^0])
I'm also going to give the 'WTF' shout-out to the Original Nexus 7 with HSPA+, you had to jump through some hilarious hoops to make it a device usable as a 'phone', and talking on it was something that became a meme among my colleagues... yet sadly was more 'reliable' than most of the HTC/LG shitshows of the day.
For a number of years, I was on a 'tiered' setup where my phones were WinPho, and I had either the aforementioned Nexus, or later a Samsung Galaxy Tab for my android 'needs'. The WinPhos sucked from an app standpoint but were otherwise the best 'smart phones' IMO between 2012-2016 [^1][^2]
[^0] I often wonder how many problems are related to firmware bugs versus a problem with the underlying hardware. As an example from another semi-related sector, consider the Intel Puma 6. You can try to mask some/most of the problems in firmware, but at the end of the day the design has a problem. Sometimes I wonder whether the extremely aggressive release cycle of phones is/was a way to 'mask' the problem.
[^1] Here! was far superior to Google navigation IMO, even had offline map downloading before it was cool. Call quality was always good, none of the weird drops/bugs I'd see on android, SMS was good except dual sim support on the late models.
[^2] I'll admit I don't really use iPhone. I buy them for my dad (he loved his WinPho for the simplicity and tile interface, but 'I like this too!' so that is what he sticks with now).
Phone quality is uneven with some OEMs consistently producing crap and others sometimes laying eggs. Your sample size is likely small. Many people don't buy a new phone until the old one doesn't work anymore. So you could trivially have only experienced 2-3 phones total. It would be trivial then to conclude all phones have these problems even though its not so.
Try a Motorola or a well reviewed model from another manufacture paying attention especially to people's complaints and whether or not they represent legit flaws. Spend at least 30 minutes reading reviews before you buy.
It sounds like something fancy but it’s common where I live. It’s usually hot all year round so it made sense to buy an air conditioner with a heat pump built in. Although it’s been a few years since we last turned it in because it’s never cold enough to justify the electricity usage given the always high prices here in Europe. So perhaps it doesn’t even work anymore :P
I'd put them squarely midrange. They start out better but their OS modifications often wind up sabotaging the hardware (insanely fast charging to go with the insanely fast, heavy use drain).
It hasn’t received updates, not even security updates, for years. It’s unacceptable for me to use a phone that doesn’t have security updates. On the other hand the other day Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s, released in 2013.
If everybody accesses Instagram from bibliogram, bypassing ads and data collection techniques, who’s going to pay for the service? I know that your answer will be “so close it”, but that’s hardly what the users of the platform want.
It has dominant market share of photo-centric social platforms.
In some smaller communities, it is also has a monopoly on social media in general and instant messaging.
This is even more problematic, because such platforms have a positive feedback loop of user acquisition. Many users have no option but to use them, because all their contacts are using them.
The definition of a tiny specific monopoly within a niche is meaningless. If you had 30 different factors to describe exactly what each platform does then each of them would be a monopoly in themselves.
In any case Instagram is certainly not in a monopolistic position at the moment unless you try to twist the sense of words to fit a narrative.
