[cglan]

I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.

You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me

[coldpie]

I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!

[ewoodrich]

As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.

But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...

I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...

[bokchoi]

> I can use real Firefox!

This is the only reason I'm using Android when the rest of my family is on iOS. uBlock on Firefox Android is essential.

[SkyeCA]

I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.

NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.

[loloquwowndueo]

Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.

Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.

[tempest_]

Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.

The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.

[nyarlathotep_]

Things like media playback via a web browser (and really browsing in general) are so superior to iOS it's not even a fair comparison.

[cosmic_cheese]

I'm not the biggest fan of Liquid Glass, but I regularly use Android via single-use tablets and dev test devices and I think I dislike Material 3 Expressive even more. M3E feels weirdly awkward and unrefined and it's a struggle to come up with a color scheme that looks right. It would be a constant irritation if Android were my daily driver.

[esperent]

The latest top of the line Chinese phones (Xiaomi 17, Vivo x300 pro, Oppo X9 Pro) are at least equal if not better than top of the line iPhones or Samsung phones. Better battery life, larger batteries, better screens, faster charging. Much better cameras. They now do collaboration with lens makers like Zeiss and Hasselblad and it really shows in the photo quality, last year was the first time I've felt like a phone could replace an entry level DSLR.

People say that the faster charging will degrade battery life, but my last phone was a Samsung and battery life was massively degraded after two years without any kind of fast charging. The one I had before that was a Redmi, much faster charging and the battery was fine after a couple of years.

[guestbest]

I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again

[ricardobeat]

Especially with the state of the App Store. We used to have really nice, well designed apps to go along with the amazing hardware, now it’s even worse than Android with an endless list of SEO-optimized, copycat and IAP scam apps.

[danpalmer]

Yeah I switched to Android in large part because of Liquid Glass. Not the look, pictures of it are quite nice, but because of how it works or rather, doesn't. It's buggy, slow (on a 1 generation old pro phone), and way too UI-forward, prioritising UI over content in the same way that skeuomorphism did. Overall it just felt dated in the same way that skeuomorphism did when it died.