I think focussing on Android vs iOS might belie the true point which is not everyone has a 'good' phone.
Almost any currently in use iPhone has a 'pretty good' processor and probably has up to date software. Even the iPhone 8 still holds up pretty well.
On the Android side you get a wider spread of devices. I imagine a Pixel 8 or S23 compare pretty well to 'iOS'. The problem is old, low powered budget phones. I wonder how much of the problem one those phones is specific to the tech we use to build sites, and how much is the crappy hardware.
I also don't imagine the expected value of a potential customers on a flagship iPhone or Pixel device is the same as a potential customer using a Huawei P20.
“Everybody worth transacting with” is more accurate. Makes sense for business, but a shame when government (or an essential business that should be a government utility) does it.
Well as software engineers there’s not as much we can do for people who don’t have computing devices, but it’s still important that information be accessible without them.
Well, people can have laptops, or "unsupported" phones (i.e. non-iPhone/Android).
Locking all sorts of basic stuff to two for-profit closed platforms sounds rather non-ideal to me. It's also quite a shift from stuff being web-based, where in principle you or I could sit down and write a compatible browser and/or port an existing browser (some work, but very doable).
It's not all that different from locking everything to Windows and/or Internet Explorer like it was 20 years ago, except worse because it's so much more pervasive now. The old "mandatory Microsoft tax" got replaced with a "mandatory Google/Apple tax". Any startup has basically zero chance of entering the market.
Probably a well supported postal service as public infrastructure!
Yes, you can make an app or sell a widget without supporting transactions via mail, but many companies providing critical services are starting to require cellphones to participate.
My country has a large religious demographic with dumbphones. I'm glad to have them, as I have a smartphone but I'm not about to install an app for banking, an app for charging the car, an app for the supermarket, etc etc.
The problem isn’t older phones FTA they show that there is a 60% difference in flagships. I agree with you that the latest pixel has a huge disadvantage to a Samsung phone .
The bigger problem is how much money you can budget for supporting every phone and which platform is more profitable. This is a video game but, Warframe was ported to iOS and then to Android. If this isn’t an indicator that you will make more money than what is ?
> I imagine a Pixel 8 or S23 compare pretty well to 'iOS’
In fact from the article it doesn’t. Modern Android phones have the performance of a 4 year old iPhone.
When the new iPhone SE is introduced this year - Apples low end $400 phone - I wouldn’t be surprised if it is faster than high end Android phones. It will probably be based on the iPhone 16 SOC.
> In fact, your looking at the iPhone 12 until you find a previous version of the iPhone that scores less than todays fastest Samsung Android device. To add a little more perspective, this device was first sold over 4 years ago!
This is a fair point, even an optimistic read for Android has their best phones sitting somewhere on the lower end of the iPhone distribution.
I wonder if the relationship between Geekbench score and TTI etc. are linear though. My guess is the areas that slow Android down are crappy phones that are freezing up from lack of RAM lack of headroom in processing power due to system overhead. ie any phone above a certain threshold score is probably fine.
He is comparing high end phones though and traditionally Android phones come with more RAM than iPhones.
If a low end hypothetical iPhone SE comes out this year with the iPhone 16 SOC, there will be no iPhone that is as slow as the fastest Android phone.
The iPhone 14 is the slowest iPhone Apple sells and soon won’t be selling that or the SE in the EU at least because they both use Lightning instead of USB.
My point is that in the graph showing Geekbench score and INP [1] you can draw a straight line, but what I see in the graph are three clusters – phones with a Geekbench score:
- above 1,500 (look very good)
- between 500 and 1,500 (look decent still)
- below 500 (really terrible)
Both an iPhone and a flagship Android will have a much better INP than a phone with a Geekbench score of 500. I'm not so sure if an iPhone has a much better INP score than a flagship Android though (maybe it does, I'm not seeing that in the data though).
It’s lack of / small size of processor caches on the chips that are used Android phones that’s the big issue — Alex Russell has a good post about this somewhere
Yeah, Apple started pulling away from Android with the 64 bit transition that caught everyone by surprise, and the Android performance has simply never caught up again.
The halcyon days of the Qualcomm Krait (which certainly had some problems) are very long gone by now.
Almost any currently in use iPhone has a 'pretty good' processor and probably has up to date software. Even the iPhone 8 still holds up pretty well.
On the Android side you get a wider spread of devices. I imagine a Pixel 8 or S23 compare pretty well to 'iOS'. The problem is old, low powered budget phones. I wonder how much of the problem one those phones is specific to the tech we use to build sites, and how much is the crappy hardware.
I also don't imagine the expected value of a potential customers on a flagship iPhone or Pixel device is the same as a potential customer using a Huawei P20.