iOS 16 brings the biggest update ever to the Lock Screen, the ability to edit and collaborate in Messages, new tools in Mail, and more ways to interact with photos and video with Live Text and Visual Look Up. iOS 16 is available today as a free software update.
Unlike in the Android world, every iOS user here on OSNews will most likely be able to install this latest update right away. I’m especially enamoured by the notifications popping in from the bottom instead of the top – this makes a lot more sense, and I hope Android picks it up as well.
I will take a pile of all sorts of devices at my home. To see if i can install and use iOS 16 on any of them.
Any Android user who cares about this kind of stuff owns a Google Pixel. And yet, Google’s market share as an OEM stands at a staggering… 0.6%: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers
People. Don’t. Care. Even some nerds like me don’t care. I am not going to buy a Pixel just to see Google randomly move things around or change some colors. When the EU mandates security patches for existing phones, it will be time to put this crusade to rest. Smartphones, and Android smartphones in particular, have reached finality. The times we were all anxiently waiting for Gingerbread or ICS or Lollipop to hit our phone are over.
If anything, ever since my HTC U11+ stopped receiving updates, I got a slight improvement in user experience by virtue of the fact I don’t have to interrupt whatever I am doing to update it. As long as there isn’t an exploitable vulnerability, I am happy with my phone.
I had to actually go to ‘settings > about’ to see what version of Android I’m running. Had no idea.
Amén, preaching to the choir! I stopped caring for android when usb mass storage disappeared. I used to be able to boot windows installs from my mass storage device. Then they changed the yes no around. Literally .. ok to cancel. It took me a long time to retrain my muscle memory. ever since then it’s been a race to remove usability and look identical to iOS. Then no titanium backup or loose NFC…
Notifications on the bottom! That makes too much sense, almost like the address bar in the browser should have been there to begin with. Like in.. windows…..I can’t wait to install a launcher to remove the stupid home screen folders and just use an alphabetical menu that doesn’t move things around for no reason…like ….. Wait didn’t Cortana actually read msgs and notifications to you? And let you reply….. didn’t windows have a dark mode……
USB mass storage disappeared because Google wanted to get away from FAT32 and also because Google wanted to unify the internal storage. Before that, an Android phone had at least two free spaces: One for apps (formatted as a Linux partition) and another for the user files (formatted as FAT32 so it can be made available as mass storage). And if you added a MicroSD card, you had three free spaces to manage. Now, I know Linux nerds get giddy at the idea of pretending their disk is multiple smaller disks, but for most people, having their free space fragmented into multiple smaller free spaces (each one with an assigned “purpose”) is a chore. In my old Optimus2X, I always hated seeing one of my internal free spaces fill up before the other. So, goodbye and good riddance to USB mass storage. Modern Android uses a Linux filesystem for all writable storage and makes it available via MTP.
The rest of your post looks like irrelevant rants too btw.
kurkosdr,
I agree that having several different spaces is a hassle, even for “linux nerds” like me, however when you look closely the reason it’s a problem is the terrible state of file management on android. If that were better then replaceable media wouldn’t be such a problem. This has been an ongoing struggle and leads to very bad organizational practices even by people who know better by leaving everything in completely unorganized directories. 3rd party file managers can’t really solve this because android lacks anything like standard file dialogs that applications can use.
Still, it was so nice and practical to take your files to a new phone just transferring the micro-SD card. That is something that I’m sure even non-advanced users miss. I honestly wish the primary storage was an MMC instead of soldered in. However I realize this would be impossible because android images are device specific. It’s unfortunate that android installations are not very standardized as it would solve so many frustrations.
Does anyone care that it’s FAT though? The main purpose of micro-sd cards is to expand internal storage capacity and transfer between phones.
What was the “internal SD partition” is now exposed as an MTP device, which means that you can copy all the contents exposed by MTP and it will be the same thing as copying the USB mass storage contents over. Other data such as app binaries and app settings are in a different directory and not exposed by MTP, so they are just as inaccessible by your PC as they’ve been when they were on a separate partition. This complaint is irrelevant tbh.
The only issue is that when you do a data wipe (factory reset), you also wipe all your user data, because now it’s the same partition as app settings etc. But still, I prefer it to not having my disk split into smaller disks and having multiple free spaces. Just back-up your user data before factory resetting.
I think you have confused the meaning of “MicroSD” on Android. On some early phones it was a physical MicroSD sure, but on later other phones it was a partition in internal memory called “internal SD”. And the actual replaceable MicroSD was the “external SD”.
FAT32 in internal memory creates lots of problems, such as the fact you need a separate Linux partition for apps and app settings, the 4GB limitation and the fact it offers no support for sparse files (which Android uses in DCIM/.thumbnails directory). Its only advantage was that it was mount-able as USB mass storage really, but this is now done using MTP (and you can use the phone at the same time, which couldn’t be done with USB mass storage).
The physical MicroSD card (aka the “external SD” card) can be FAT32 or exFAT. Android 6.0 and above offers you the option to “unify” it with internal memory (“adoptable storage”) but it’s not a requirement.
Basically, this is how things were in the past:
– Internal storage partition for app settings etc
– Internal storage partition for user storage aka “internal SD” (mountable as mass storage)
– Replaceable MicroSD card aka “external SD” (mountable as mass storage)
.
This is how it is now:
– Internal storage for app settings and user storage (only user storage directory exposed by MTP)
– Replaceable MicroSD card (fully exposed by MTP as-is, and you can also pull the card out lol)
As you can see, nothing is really lost, other than the need to backup user files on internal storage before you factory reset.
kurkosdr,
I have no qualms about MTP replacing mass storage block devices over USB.
That’s a problem too for different reasons, but it’s a different topic so I agree it’s irrelevant here.
Your last post mentioned the “MicroSD card” and I thought you were complaining about it. But I probably misunderstood you, if your complaint is mainly about the partitioning on the internal drive, then I do agree with that.
Most devices are following google and dropping the expandable microSD card all together 🙁
Ohh please, mtp is the stupidest solution to file transfers, it’s obnoxious and obvious that you don’t use it. If not you would run into it’s limitations like a glass wall in the apple campus. If you actually use mtp you notice problems right away, device is busy, can’t browse and copy simultaneously, file transfers stop if phones , file system doesn’t refresh directory, it hides parts of the file system and is painfully slow.
Micro SD support is dumb, trying to get me to format my SD card and encrypt it so that I can’t use it any where else to copy the data? What’s a SD card for? Since when can’t an operating system mount a path to a folder??
Try typing this out with oven mitts on both hands, because that’s what this operating systems are doing doing to people. No wonder Facebook and everyone collects everything they want.
Android keeps on getting worse, again I’ll point out that dark mode is a feature….. that’s what Apple and Google have been doing….. material u, not u?….. Change permission system to where apps can’t do certain things??.. how about a real task manager Google? Or a start up manager Google? Have a real task manager that kills the apps when you close out, instead of kill process at the app section in settings. Then have the app spawn again. Mickey mouse gimped os’s are a security nightmare because.
missingxtension,
It’s unclear who you are replying to here. You responded to my post, but contextually maybe you meant to reply to kurkosdr’s parent post?
I don’t think mtp is perfect by any means, the android implementation is indeed limiting. But I agree with kurkosdr that exposing internal file systems as a USB block device was problematic and had to go. No other operating system does that. For better or worse MTP is the standard way to transfer actual files to a device (and not just sectors).
Though personally I wish android would just support standard LAN file systems. I absolutely hate that android’s file sharing capabilities are so limited. “There’s an app for that” is an awful substitute for native file sharing.
Well, it seems everyone has gripes with mobile devices these days, haha.
Boo Bad take. I care about other users security, because their infected devices can affect me. I’ll believe the EU mandate will fix things when it fixes things, and if it does I won’t care as much about pixel or non pixel. I agree the functionality changes are mostly minimal, in terms of UX. Things like the virtualization framework, I think are going to be big in later releases/updates that depend upon its presence.
Also, it doesn’t actually matter for Android whether users update – the SDK can ship new bits of Android with the apps themselves. New features are therefor available for older Android versions, and it’s been this way the entire time. Other than security updates, which can and do happen separately, there’s no pressing need to update these things.
And it’s not like older iPhones get new features anyway – they are often disabled on the new (and almost always slower) version of iOS. Frankly, I prefer Androids update model (with security updates) because at least the phone doesn’t get slower over time.
“iOS 16 is available today as a free software update”. Free? Come on, it is planned obsolescence – and always has been – tied to Xcode/iOS updates, forcing a specific segment of users to buy a new iPhones. It is unfortunate that users today are so docile and easy to please.
For normal users xcode has nothing to do with their ios updates. Or are you talking about the difficulty in maintaining some ios apps before or after a specific ios version to support specific devices stuck on older ios versions? IMHO, it is planned obsolescence but Apple does a better job of maintain devices longer than anyone else, So I can only be so annoyed as a user. As a developer, I hate ios development for many reasons.
Indeed.
Where else are they going to go? I mean, we’ve only got two platforms and even though we all have gripes with one there’s just as many gripes to be had on the other side. Switching from one ecosystem to another is twice the work since nothing carries over.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Yes, I find it highly likely that EU regulation of spare parts and better batteries for smartphones will further tighten Apple’s incentive to use software contraints as a means of controlling planned obsolescence. Apple will obfuscate these intentions by both creating and controlling a narrative of security concerns. Everyone will simply comply apathetically.
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Alfman,
I agree, we are screwed and treated like cattle due to the market situation. How I loathe duopolies…
IOS 16 will end support for the iphone 7, which was released back in 2016. So It got 6 years of new versions of ios. The proposed regulations for spare parts is only for 5 years. I’m a bit confused, they’ve really been the best at supporting older devices.