In June of last year, I finally decided to commit to an Android device. I had carried every flagship iPhone up through that point from the original iPhone to the 5S. To the world around me, I heaped the praise into a life transforming device, but in my tech circles, and on my blog, I frequently posted about my frustration, mostly with shackles and intentional limitations imposed. So last year, why I decided to make the jump to Android. I outlined 10 reasons why I was finally ready to make the jump to Android’s 4.4 release, KitKat. A year has passed. It’s time to revisit my original assertions and complaints with some follow up and see where I stand one year later.
I cited several reasons for choosing the KitKat release as the marker heralding Android’s readiness.
I’ve been waiting a long time for Android to get to the point that it was fast and responsive enough, with a big enough application warehouse, wide enough support, and a smooth enough experience, to support me. Android is maturing with a consistent, system-wide look-and-feel, almost every major service now has an Android app as the counterpart to its iOS-first experience, and has a bright future with wearables, home automation, and more.
So, let’s approach this in two sections: first, I’ll review my own iOS complaints as they stand today on Android. Second, I’ll score Android as a standalone mobile OS experience and register a list of complaints that I have with Android Lollipop similar to what I did with iOS last year. Before we jump in, let’s look at all of the devices I’ve carried in the last year:
| iPhone 5S | |
| HTC One M8 | A work device running a second phone number |
| Moto X (2013) | my first Android device, noticeably laggy, returned immediately |
| Nexus 5 | my first full-time Android phone, loved it, eventually upgraded because I found it underpowered |
| Moto X (2014) | first modern flagship, bought the day it was released, used it until it hard failed. Motorola replaced it. |
| Windows Phone 635 | A holdover until my new Moto X arrived. I actually really enjoyed Windows Phone, but couldn’t find quality apps |
| Moto X (2014) | Motorola’s replacement of my bricked Moto X |
| Samsung Galaxy S6 |
I forced my major iOS issues into 10 categories. It seems fair to see how Android compares on the issues I highlighted.
iOS UI/UX inconsistencies
iOS 8 is, to some, beautiful. To my eyes, iOS 8 is more of the same. I simply don’t like the style Apple adopted with iOS 7. The move to “flat” for Apple doesn’t feel like a complete thought. I find Yosemite less sexy than even Tiger was over 10 years ago, and I feel that iOS has less of a visual identity than any pre-iOS 7 image.
When I wrote my original article, Android’s current release was KitKat and Google I/O had just given us a preview of Material Design. So, How does Material Design stack up? Subjectively, I find Material Design to be best-of-breed today. The “layer” concept, the animations (which I routinely speed up in developer mode), the bold colors, the fabs, the buttons, I’ve been eating it right up. Design is undoubtedly subjective, but in this area, I simply couldn’t be happier. I absolutely love Material Design and appreciate every bit of thought that went into it.
Jony Ive, a design genius if there ever was one, has a lot on his plate, and I have no idea what percentage of iOS, if any, is actually influenced by him as opposed to his team. But I see so many areas where I think Material Design surpasses Apple’s design language, starting with confusing buttons/links and ending with a impossible to click widgets in the notification shade.
Verdict? For me personally, Android wins by a landslide
The Keyboard/Auto-Correct
Not much to say here. Third-party Android keyboards can be laggy and they’re inconsistent with their access to emoji, voice control, auto-prediction, and autocorrection. And every one of them is miles better than the default iOS 8 keyboard. Third party keyboards on iOS have gone through growing pains, but I know dozens of people who’ve had frustrations with rotation and lack thereof, and I’ve seen plenty of “keyboard won’t go away” issues. My co-worker, literally today, reported “every 2 to 3 days, I have a keyboard stuck in the wrong place, but I just quit my apps and it’s fine. But third party keyboards, forget it.”
I also hear users complain that they don’t understand why the keyboard switches. This is, of course, because the iOS keyboard reverts to native on “secure input.” This is a feature with noble aim that is unquestionably good protection, but several users just don’t understand it.
Verdict? For anyone objective, it’s hard to argue that Android isn’t the clear winner.
Siri
Siri has clearly been massively improved in the last few years, and it seems recently it’s gotten much, much better. It’s got some contextual awareness, and it has gotten far more accurate. I think Siri has impressively closed the gap in a big way.
But Google is the gold standard here, and Siri has a lot to live up to.
Verdict? Again, Google wins, but by much less of a margin than last year.
Integration Degradation
The AppleTV appears to continue to gain steam, and while Apple has evidently shelved the announcement of major AppleTV upgrades from WWDC 2015, I expect it’s coming. I fully expect AppleTV to be the center hub of Apple’s HomeKit-based vision of a smart home. But the AppleTV is such a garbage device for media. For Airplay? Amazing! But getting movies to the AppleTV is such an unnecessary pain in the butt. Like I said last year, my Roku is so much faster, with a better remote, supports Plex, supports Google Play, and has the ability to add over 1000 channels.
Sharing media from the iPhone is still a mess. AirDrop is still barely used by anyone I know, Handoff and Continuity are far from “it just works,” and Instant Hotspot is problematic. It’s worth noting that many of these problems may be due to Apple’s relatively new discoveryd network management process, which, at least in recent OS X betas, Apple has mercifully reverted to mDNSResponder.
Google’s first suggested result reveals issues with Instant Hotspot
On Android, I use Airdroid, a little app that starts a mini-web server on my phone that allows me to do a surprisingly large amount of things from my desktop browser. I also can use Google’s simple Android File Transfer for large media files and occasionally, Bluetooth. Truth be told, so much syncs effortlessly to the cloud at this point that much of the time, it’s just pulling something down on my desktop.
The Airdroid Interface (click for full size)
Android segregates pictures from apps into their own folders. I can choose not to backup photos downloaded from reddit, Facebook, and other third party apps with camera photos, cluttering my history with disposable garbage. Big win there.
Verdict? Not much has changed for my lifestyle here. Android is a clear winner again.
Lack of interactivity
iOS 8 is far more interconnected than iOS 7, but the home screen remains a woefully dead shell that does nothing save the “parallax” effect. I’m 100% certain that Apple has the technical prowess to allow for widgets or some form of interactivity. What I don’t know is whether those limits are technical (i.e. it eats up too much battery life) or philosophical (i.e. too confusing for the standard user). Apple has a long history of making compromises to make products simpler. Historically, they’ve been very measured in employing these limits, and for the better. But over the last few years, we’ve seen iMovie, Final Cut, and iWork, amongst others, reduce their interface and remove features. So I think it’s possible Apple just hasn’t come up with an implementation that isn’t scary or overwhelming.
On Android, you can wholesale replace your application launcher, which equates to iOS’ Springboard. Depending on which Launcher you use, the process of modifying the launcher is different. But noteworthy here is that even different phones come with different launchers, making this not so much an obscure power user ability as much as a differentiator from phone to phone. The Google Now launcher, Blinkfeed, TouchWiz, Sense, They all bring their own flavor of launcher and interactivity.
My launcher (which is Nova Launcher Prime) consists of 5 widget-heavy pages, none of which animate, but all of which provide some sort of information. I have a weather widget, an embedded calendar, Google Music controls, podcast controls, a widgets that shows recent texts, and a widget that shows recent Hangout chats. These are tremendously useful. Also, I occasionally change icon sets, just one more customization bonus of alternative launchers.
2 of my 4 Android Launcher pages
As far as actionable notifications goes, I overestimated Android a bit. Notifications before Lolipop were limited to three actions, all of which simply did one thing. “Archive,” “Like,” “Delete,” etc. The S6 has customized notifications which I’ll revisit later, but the default SMS client allows a reply from the notification itself, and Google’s “Messenger” does the same. A few other SMS apps support this as well, but very few other app notifications do anything besides offer a single verb of action. My experience with iOS suggests it’s mostly the same. So, we’re merely on par there.
Verdict? My Android launcher screens are far more useful and informational than my iOS home screens ever were. Notifications are a wash. Once again, point goes to Android.
Lack of system control
Last year, I bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t set “Mailbox” as my default mail client, or “Google Maps” as my default maps client. This year, if anything, I’m overwhelmed with choice. I’ve cycled through several mail clients (most recently Nine, but finally settled on the S6’s default Mail app for Exchange and Mailbox for Gmail), several text apps (including chompSMS and qkSMS before settling on Samsung’s default SMS app), several reddit apps, several music apps, several photo apps, several camera apps, several calendar apps, several twitter apps, several dialers, Do you see a trend here? There’s no discussion on the iOS side: you use the apps you’re given or you accept inconvenience. There’s no middle ground, and I don’t see this changing anytime soon, although I’d love to be proven wrong.
My phone feels like my phone, because I use my chosen apps. I don’t need more words here: iOS not allowing you to change defaults hurts the app ecosystem, because sometimes, it’s just easier to submit to the defaults.
Verdict? Android continuing to dominate.
Inter-app communication
Credit goes to the iOS team, iOS 8’s extensibility is pretty awesome. I didn’t expect this at last year’s WWDC keynote, and I just love where it’s going. For as many developer’s on the Mac who have not embraced the app sharing concept, iOS apps really have, and I think we’ve really just scratched the surface of what’s possible. I suspect the APIs to blow this out of the water are still one or two major releases away. For now, while it appears that Android integration is much deeper, on a day to day basis, this is a pretty close call. I just don’t do things routinely that require much deeper integration than iOS offers.
There are a few areas that are great though: when an app saves its first photo, it creates a new folder, and immediately, the system asks me if I want it included in backups. I can register default apps for individual scheme names and/or URIs. So I can tell the system that URLs for reddit.com open in Baconreader, and apps from youtube.com open in the YouTube app, repeat for IMDB, Amazon, Instagram, etc.
Verdict? In the iOS 8 world, it’s probably safe to call this one a tie.
Privacy controls
Let’s not overcomplicate this: I prefer the Android way of classifying privacy controls, but there is no doubt I got this wrong and iOS, which allowed granular permissions from the get go got it right and Android with its “all or nothing” got it wrong. Thankfully, Android M (which I’m betting is “Marzipan”) will fix this, and as far as I can tell, you’ll be able to access permissions by app as well as by permission.
Android M Permissions, “Finally”
Verdict? iOS is on the board with its first point!
Central account registration
Nothing has changed here. This is still awesome. iOS supports this for a few chosen providers, but has no API for other services to store credentials in any sort of global keychain.
Verdict? Android, iOS doesn’t even compete.
Stability
I wish both operating systems were far better than they are. But both are a mess. On iOS 7, I experienced what, in retrospect, must’ve been a bum install: constant Springboard crashes, constant camera crashes. In iOS 8 on my wife’s iPhone 6 Plus, I see plenty of issues still exist: she still experiences Springboard crashes – apps that become unresponsive followed by the Apple logo and a drop to the lockscreen. As mentioned above, there are plenty of issues with the keyboard alignment and rotation. I see these problems frequently.
On Android, background services constantly crash and report their crashes via a modal alert dialog. The lockscreen doesn’t unlock or appears frozen with some frequency. The keyboard sometimes just refuses to come up until after some inexplicable delay.
Verdict? Both have a long way to go. Both are equally, but much differently frustrating. For me, personally, I’d prefer the Android method of alerting me, only because I can say “Hey, at least the system knows something is wrong!.” But I’ll call it a tie, because I think this is more preference than evidence.
iTunes
One year later, Google Photos is now my authoritative storage for photos, because getting photos back into iPhoto, and now OS X Photos, has been difficult. Even with iOS, this would be confusing, because of the insane prices of iCloud storage. I won’t rehash the entire debate, but when you buy a 16GB iPhone, the smallest iPhone out there, you can eclipse your storage space, and you can’t really use iCloud Photo Library without buying more space unless you have a very small photographic history.
Google Music is amazing, beautiful, far easier to manage than iTunes, and available anywhere, For free. I never load music on my phone anymore, because I just use Google’s shuffle, which caches an ungodly amount of music into the free space on my phone. I have access to my entire library, and no, I don’t have to subscribe to Google Music Match to get that feature.
I load media via the methods I detailed above. In fact, I never really have to use iTunes for anything anymore. And I feel my Mac experience is better for it! This is a double win.
iTunes is a disaster. It’s just as bad and bloated as it was last year. I really wish Apple would break it up into multiple apps: a syncing daemon, a video manager that supports far more codecs than iTunes, and a music manager. Having iTunes live in the periphery of my life and my Mac experience rather than at the center of it has made my computing experience less frustrating. For everything good/great that iTunes is, it’s lived past its prime.
Verdict? Android wins. And so do I.
Part I Conclusion
So where does that leave me? One year later, almost all of my concerns are no longer concerns or, at least, I am happier than I was with iOS. 8 points to Android, 1 to iOS, 2 items too close to call. Seems like the move to Android was a good one for me.
In reviewing the first page of this article, you might conclude that I am an Apple hater, a blind Google lover, and/or completely satisfied with Android. But all three of those would really be unfair characterizations, because none are really true.
I’ve been using OS X full time since Panther. My house has two Airport Extreme Base Stations and an Airport Express, an iMac, a Macbook Air, a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini, several iPads, several iPhones, and one last iPod Touch. We still have an AppleTV in the guest room. We are unabashed Apple lovers, even if the iPhone and AppleTV have lost me.
But more importantly than that, and certainly more relevant, is that it’s not all roses and butterflies with Android. Android has its own set of challenges. In no particular order, here they are:
- Backups
- Background service policing
- Inconsistent hardware
- Android File Transfer
- Better SD card support
- Integrated voice mail
- Video calling
- Hangouts
- Lockscreen
- Encryption
Backups
Without question, the number 1 issue with Android is lack of quality backup/restore. Now, I tried not to include things that will be resolved in Android M, and this is thankfully addressed in M. As it stands, when I get a new Android phone, as we saw I’ve done several times, I have several apps in which I simply lose my data. Games that don’t use Cloud Save data? Fuhgeddaboudit. They choose not to so the game is usable offline, which means that if my phone dies, the data is gone. Email configuration? Options in every app? History. The iCloud restore process is such an out-of-the-park home run that it ends the conversation before it begins.
iCloud Backup is the Gold Standard
Android M allows developers to include all app data up to 25Mb, to include only specific files, or to exclude specific files. That seems like a great solution, with 25Mb seeming like enough, but almost certainly increasing as time goes on. Unfortunately, it will be 24 months before even half of Android users can use this feature. People in 2017 still won’t have reliable phone backups. That’s not okay. This is Android biggest weak point. I get that Google’s hand are tied: they can’t force manufacturers and carriers to update old phones. But it’s taken too long to get this right and should be embarrassing for them.
Background service policing
I started to notice that not only was my Galaxy S6 less responsive, but also the battery even less impressive. As a last ditch, I uninstalled scores of unnecessary apps. I’m an app guy, I had close to 200 apps, so I uninstalled the majority of them. Made an immediate difference. Turns out that many apps were running background services. Amazon is always running on my S6. I want that app on my phone, but I can’t tell it that it can’t run in the background. Without the ability to limit an app to foreground activity, I have to either live with the toll it takes or uninstall it. Sadly for your developers, most of the apps are getting the axe.
Inconsistent hardware
The Nexus 5 and the Moto X both have three soft buttons in this order: back, home, and app switcher. The Galaxy S6 has two soft buttons around one physical button, in this order: app switcher, home key, back. How did we let this happen, you guys? You can’t let Android water down to the point that each phone decides how to implement your main navigation paradigm!
Allow them to move around buttons on the sides and top, let them make soft keys or physical buttons, let LG put those goofy buttons on the back of their phones, but please don’t let them tinker with the order of your primary required navigation. It’s just feeding those trolls that complain that Google can’t manage Android.
Android should have a standard button order. For the record, it took me a long time to get used to the S6 order, but I still prefer the back button on the left, because for one handed use with my right hand, I can reach the back button with my thumb and hold it steady, even though the key is farther away. Either way, it should be standard. It’s less an everyday niggle than an “Android, get your crap together!” one.
Android File Transfer
This simple app works incredibly well! …Except when it doesn’t. And it doesn’t a lot. The wrong cable? Doesn’t work in this app, but works in others. Either way, getting content onto an Android phone shouldn’t be a challenge. If there’s a technical challenge here, I’m not aware of it, but I will say that I’ve very rarely seen issues with Apple’s 30-pin or lightning cables.
Android File Transfer is awesome… If you’ve got the right cable
Better SD card support
Android “supports” SD cards. The way it *should* work is that when I add my SD card, I just have that much more storage. I understand why, programmatically, this can’t work: we can’t have a borked device when I remove the card. But I should be able to store apps, photos, and media on an SD card without issue. Evidently, that’s not quite the case.
In KitKat, Google changed the rules so that Android apps can only write to their own folders. This is a good move for security, we don’t want a rogue app modifying my system files. By the same token, we don’t want some game or photo viewer to be able to read my bank balance or my texts or my local Lastpass data.
The SD card needs to be formatted, and if we format it with ext3 or ext4, as Android typically uses on system partitions, it can’t be removed and natively read by Windows or OS X. So it has to be FAT32. But FAT32 doesn’t include any sort of file system level security. You see the challenge? There’s no easy fix here without trading off data security or portability.
If I were the sole system architect, I’d write SD cards as ext for advertise that once a card is formatted, it is essentially Android system extension and can not be removed and used elsewhere. That said, I’m certain some chunk of people would be unhappy with that solution. We basically have four options: use an SD card to extend system space, use an SD card to offload some data without security or access control, remove SD card support entirely, or do nothing and leave us in purgatory. For me personally, I want the space, there are plenty of other ways to get data off of the device. I understand why that viewpoint hasn’t been universally adopted and why more manufacturers and just leaving SD card support out.
Globally: if we’re going to champion our OS as “SD card system expansion” capable, we need a consistent, logical solution.
Integrated visual voice mail
If Apple can include a visual voice mail app in their OS image, why can’t Android? Does AT&T really need a different, crappy, slow app than T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon? I realize there are other carriers in the world, but why Android doesn’t have a visual voicemail application out of the box is confusing to me.
I owned several unlocked Android devices over the past year, none came with reliable voice mail until I bought the S6 outright from my carrier. Turns out AT&T has a material design visual voicemail app that works… Kinda. The one featured in the Play Store isn’t the same app, and it crashed constantly on my Moto X Pure Edition. How come I’m bouncing between voicemail apps in 2015? I don’t even like getting voice mails.
Either way, I have an app that works. But why? You’ve gotta give people the complete experience, and no one should buy a phone and not be able to get voice mail.
Video calling
FaceTime. Do I need to expand upon this? FaceTime is so much better than Hangouts video it’s not even funny. Even iPhone to iPhone, Hangouts doesn’t begin to compare.
The Hangouts experience, even on incredibly fast Wi-Fi, is still a grainy mess that requires all sorts of plugin magic to work. It doesn’t have to be unbundled from Hangouts to be a premier video calling solution, but on my wish list would be: a downloadable client for Mac and Windows that isn’t a goofy Chrome extension, an Android and Mac app that doesn’t make it tough to get installed.
And then it should be smooth: not pixely video, not boxy, flanged audio. I use this method to talk to my kids when one of us is traveling, but we always revert to my wife’s 6 Plus for FaceTime. Why? It’s a much better experience, from the calling (integrated into everyone’s contacts) to the quality.
Hangouts
Hangouts is the centerpiece of modern Google Android. So why is the app itself so slow and unappetizing. Even with its Material Design update, Hangouts is still a dog. If one were to use it for SMS and chat — and no one should, because there are far better and more featureful SMS clients — don’t store too much history, or the app will be painfully slow to open.
Hangouts: core to the experience, painful to use
Hangouts is a core part of my daily routine. It’s a shame that there’s no open API if this is the app that Google chooses to present their premier service, because a beautiful native desktop client would go a long way.
Lockscreen
The Android lockscreen got a facelift on Lollipop. But as much as I love the notifications, I wish you could customize it more. I realize that manufacturers and carriers have already customized lockscreens, and that there are replacement lockscreens, but vanilla Android should offer more at a glance than just notifications. If my watch can do weather and traffic, why can’t that be a permanent part of the Android lockscreen?
The Android Lollipop lockscreen needs more life
Yes, maybe this is a nitpick. But these are things I think would put Android miles above the competition. And when iOS 9 is announced on Monday, I expect there to be support for “complications,” or little informational bits from apps. Imagine a quick tally of notification by app icon. Again, third party lockscreens already do this, the default should too. The lockscreen is an area where Android should be better than iOS, and shy of complete replacement, it’s not currently.
Encryption
It seems odd to me that Android doesn’t have much better security tools and features than iOS, but with the secure enclave, Apple has literally stored your security keys on your body. Android M will feature a fingerprint API, but there’s no evidence it will create a device image mountable only with a fingerprint (or a recovery key).
If Android is truly the OS of the masses, we need better device-level security. I realize there’s motivation for Google to keep its fingers in our data (pun intended), but this is a case where we need strong privacy advocates protecting us.
It’s really necessary for us to have reasonably unbreakable encryption on our devices, and that a device wipe actually works.
If someone gets access to my Gmail account, they could seriously destroy my digital life: several services depend on my Gmail credentials, my photos, music, email, I’m all in. In return, I let you sniff my personal content and display relevant ads. But, in exchange, I need security.
Conclusion
Android isn’t perfect. iOS isn’t perfect. But ultimately, having been deep into both, there are parts of each I admire and parts of each that excel. More importantly, there are certain bits of each system that will appear to individuals more than others. For me, Android is unquestionably the right decision today. But I don’t think the iPhone is a bad product by any stretch.
I do think the iOS system is unnecessarily shackled. And I also think the Android system is less stable and consistent in favor of freedom. Ultimately, there isn’t a clear winner for everyone: just preference.
I’m sticking with Android.
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Apple has literally stored your security keys on your body
Good security implies that the keys are only in brain memory (or the combination to a safe that holds the keys). Biometrics are not security, they are identity. Security can be enhanced by biometrics, but biometrics alone is not security. It is far easier to copy a fingerprint than it is to copy a passphrase from my brain.
As an extreme case, if a VIP was captured and their phone was biometrically locked, how much easier would it be to access their phone if the only security was a fingerprint vs a strong passphrase?
Biometric identity to unlock the average user’s phone is highly convenient but very insecure.
Passwords stored in head are not better than physical traits, in the event of a kidnapping.
http://xkcd.com/538/
Security is difficult as it involves both technology and people, and can’t readily be assessed in a comment on a web page.
I agree it does you little good in a kidnapping, but memorised passphrases have the advantage that I have much more control over them. I leave fingerprints everywhere, but I’m not constantly reciting my passphrases for all to hear.
Biometrics are very democratic in that they offer the same level of security to any human user regardless of any special skill they have.
Passwords are dependent on the user to derive good ones, and to keep them safe. There is a good deal of human error here.
If you wanted a system that provided a greatest common denominator of security, you’d probably pick Biometrics.
If you wanted a system with the highest possible theoretical security, you’d devise a multi factor auth system that relied on more than just a password.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Agreed.
If you wanted a system that provided a greatest common denominator of security, you’d probably pick Biometrics.
First of all biometrics is not secure, at all. Just like passwords suck most of the time.
I’ve been following the debate around biometrics for years and seen what the results of studies are. These studies are usually from governments that try to create a biometric passport of some kind.
And when you see those results then as an identity tool it clearly is not a common denominator, because for one it is basically age discrimination:
Take a good look at somebody past 65 years of age.
The iris sucks for doing biometrics because of things like cataract.
The finger prints have less fat and other ‘juices’ which give you the ‘prints’ and have basically worn down a lot so the grooves are much less deep.
Facial recognition sucks because your skin doesn’t fit tightly around your bones any more, so a camera can’t see the structure of your face.
I’m sure I’m forgetting other examples.
And the ease with which biometrics can copied is just ridiculous.
The Chaos Computer Club proves this again and again.
I’m sorry that the video doesn’t have English subtitles though.
In the latest presentation from the end of last year they prove a whole bunch of things. I’m going to list them in chronological order:
– you think you control your own finger ? The photo is funny, but in the US passwords are under the first amendment, but by law you don’t control your own fingerprints, the police does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=1m33s
– there are lots of ways to get fingerprints, for example here is finger prints from paper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=7m41s
For example modern photo camera’s in for example mobile phones are ridiculously good at taking pictures.
– you can use the camera in your smartphone to see from the reflections in the subjects eyes how they are typing the unlock code of their phone:
for a 13 megapixel camera you get 6 pixels wide per virtual keyboard button:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=11m31s
It also works with passwords on virtual keyboard, but obviously that keyboard has more keys so that makes it more difficult.
Researches in an other conference so far were able to reliably get passwords from up to 3 pixels per keyboard key with special software:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=14m01s
Reflections in sunglasses also work really well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=14m55s
Iris-recognition it’s ridiculously easy to fool, you take a picture of someones face and just print it out on paper,
Here they are testing with a system which is about 1000 euro’s a piece and is used by organizations like for example banks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=15m41s
Now if you take not your smartphone camera but a photo camera like from Canon, you can take usable photos from up to 10 meters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=17m53s
They couldn’t get this to work for people with dark eyes before, but if you take an infrared-camera (or dismantle your camera and remove the infrared filter) it will work just fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=18m06s
The picture you see there is from 6.5 meters, it gives you 75 pixels which is enough to fool any recognition software.
But that were lab conditions, so let’s try this for real.
This is a picture from a press conference made by a professional photographer at 5 meters which gives us 110 pixels so 10 meters should be easily doable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=20m53s
How about from pictures from a political campaign you get large signs next to the road like 8+ meters wide, you get 175 pixels wide:
https://www.google.nl/search?q=wahlplakat&tbm=isch&tbo=u
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=21m22s
Face recognition is really easy:
You have face recognition at the borders, but they get easily fooled even by a photo on a smartphone.
The only some what interesting barrier for fooling those systems is the ‘liveliness recognition’, but turns out all that adds is they check if you blink your eyes.
But that can be easily fooled with the use of a pen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=22m53s
The next thing they tried to do is take pictures from fingers, this is a picture from 7 meters and 3 meters, the 3 meters picture works a lot better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=25m11s
Infrared at 6 meters works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=27m14s
How about from outside of the lab, yep that will work too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=27m36s
But these newer camera’s where you can afterwards change the focus of the photo (I believe later in the talk someone from the audience mentioned that
on many modern camera’s you can replace the non-vendor supplied firmware and you can probably use a normal camera for that too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=29m28s
So now we know why Merkel always stands like so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=30m35s
This is the older video on how to make fake fingerprints you can use to break into an iPhone with pretty cheap stuff you might already have at home
and some of things used might look some what more professional but you can do this process in your kitchen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=30m40s
Because they’ve done this before when the newer iPhones became available at the time they were able to break the iPhone ‘security’ within 2 days.
There are also scanners which check for veins, they did some have a look at it and with the infrared camera they got some interesting results, but they
didn’t have time to do some proper research yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=37m30s
A question from the audience was about how to fight facial recognition in public places:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVivA0eoNGM#t=44m00s
Basically, just do an online search lots of people have figured out ways to deal with this:
– beards work
– drawing a 3rd eye on your forehead works
I’m going to stop ‘live blogging’ the video now. 🙂
___
basically, it’s easy.
Edited 2015-06-06 10:43 UTC
If you think security is a Boolean value, you need to relearn security.
>> If there’s a technical challenge here, I’m not aware of it,
Well, there’s one single *challenge*: Apple limiting and blocking and damaging anything but theirs hardware.
On other OSs, you simple plug the USB and it will be recognized as an standard USB drive, no crapware hardware-layers at OS level and things alike.
I’ll rephrase this in a more miled, less knee-jerk tone. OS X does not support MTP out of the box. Come to think of it, I am surprised that, with the number of 3rd party file managers there are for OS X, that none of them has implemented MTP. Actually, why not a fuse MTP implementation we could install using OSXFuse? I’m guessing that, what with the prolipheration of cloud storage and Android file transfer on top of that, no one has really seen the need for it. Feel free to write one though. OS X is not iOS, and we can install a filesystem driver easily. I’ll be glad to beta test it for you.
You mean like this one? https://github.com/phatina/simple-mtpfs
Maybe. Doesn’t look like it’s been maintained in a while except for updating copyright data, but I’ll give it a shot. It’d need Mac integration with Finder and an installer package for people who don’t want or know how to compile, but if it works it might be a little project I’d do. I don’t have the knowledge to write filesystem drivers but I can integrate and package them.
Titanium Backup supports automated backups, including transfer to cloud storage services. You never need to lose an app, data, or configuration again. The only limit is your upload bandwidth and the amount of storage you have in your preferred cloud storage service.
The restore process isn’t quite automated yet, but it’s almost there. On the new phone, let Google restore your installed apps (which includes your cloud storage app). Then download your backups from cloud storage, and use Titanium to restore only your app data.
I haven’t lost an app or data in several years thanks to the above setup, even when formatting the phone’s internal storage completely (switching between ext4 and F2FS, for example), or when switching phones.
I love titanium backup, but I’ve found one program so far that doesn’t restore quite right, and that’s Samsung’s S-Health. It used to, but with the newer version (4.x) it just makes it crash. Granted, it could be some ROM specific bug, but I never enabled the backup to the samsung account because I always prefer to try to keep my data in my own hands, sadly in this particular instance, I could not.
I’m not disagreeing with you, because Titanium Backup is an excellent program. But within the context of this article (backup capability of the core OS) it has no bearing.
I look at Android with every new version and wonder why it doesn’t have all the nice stuff that Windows Phone and iOS have had for a while. Then I look at those two and wonder when they will ever be as open[1] as Android.
[1]From a user control point of view, not a software freedom point of view; there will never be a 100% open source phone OS until we have a fully working open source baseband.
I remember using it and it was an ungodly mess. Powerful as it may be, I haven’t seen a complex app that was designed worse. I can’t install such a monstrosity on my phone.
What is it, and why do you need it? Never heard of it, and never used it in my 5 years using Android devices.
Just connect a USB cable between the phone and the computer and drag’n drop files into the Phone icon that appears. MTP support has removed a lot of the issues with data transfer between phones and PCs. No special apps or software required, it’s build into just about every OS out there, including Linux.
And for those times when you don’t have a USB cable, apps like WebSharing make it beyond simple to use your web browser like a file manager.
It’s necessary in order to transfer files between an Android phone and a Mac over USB as the protocol (I’m too lazy to look up the name) is not built into Finder (the File Browser app on OS X).
Edited 2015-06-05 16:50 UTC
Why not switch the Android device to use PTP instead of mucking around with 3rd party software?
MacOS X supports PTP natively … Android devices support PTP natively … you can do everything MTP can do with PTP … not seeing why buggy 3rd party software is needed.
Because some of us have more things to transfer than just photos and videos?
Not all USB cables are the same.
Back when I was an Android user I had an HTC phone. Some USB cables would charge the device but not all would allow data transfer. I am sure that there is a logical (or patented) reason for this but the phone bricked itself before I could work out why. Now I use an old 6310i for personal use. It does what I want it do.
If the S6 is such a great phone why is Sprint virtually giving them away with their latest advert of 0$ down and not contract surcharge for the phone (As seen in Denver, Colorado on Saturday)
True. Some are just charging cables where the data pins are shorted to the charging pins allowed for faster charging but preventing any data transfers. These are usually marketed as “fast charging cables”.
Others are “normal”, in that they don’t do any shenanigans with the pins. You see these advertised as “charge and sync” cables.
And then there’s the issue of quality whereby some cables can’t support the voltage/amperage of newer chargers and will refuse to work when plugged into some USB ports.
I had considered doing the same thing. I’ve been only on iPhone based smart phones from the very beginning. Last year when it was time to replace my iPhone I decided to go with a Galaxy 4S. I figured I’d see how the other half live and decide if I should leave the increasingly annoying Apple ecosystem. I ported all my music into Google Music. I got my podcasts out of iTunes and into Downcast (on iPhone) and into other players on Android. If all went well I was going to convert my personal phone over to Android when its number was up too.
Unfortunately I can’t say I’ve enjoyed the Android experience much. It works, and it works okay enough. However I find it increasingly twitchy and cumbersome to use. I have the opposite impression of the Google Music interface as you do, especially with integration into my car. I haven’t found a podcast system that works as well as iTunes does, which still sucks compared to Downcast. Worst of all, I’m not a fan of these phablet sized phones. I really would prefer something no bigger than an iPhone 5. The smallest I can get is an iPhone 6. Therefore I’ll probably end up keeping iPhone for my personal phone and will second guess my move to Android for my work phone on its next upgrade too.
Edited 2015-06-05 21:30 UTC
Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is the Android phone you’re looking for.
Same innards as the larger Z3 (Snapdragon S801 SoC), but with a 4.6″ screen (just barely larger than an iPhone 5). Screen is only 720p, which means the GPU should just scream, making things buttery smooth.
And Sony has the thinnest of customisation layers over standard Android. Not to mention, they participate heavily in AOSP development.
You really should not judge “Android” based on Samsung’s TouchWhiz UI bastardisation of Android. It’s one of the least-liked variations out there. Samsung makes good hardware, but really sucks at software.
Edited 2015-06-05 22:52 UTC
You can still get an iPhone 5c or 5S. You don’t have to go with an iPhone 6/6+
There are rumours that Apple is preparing to replace the 5c/5S with another 4in sized screen. So all hope for you is not lost.
I finally moved the other way around (to iPhone) last year. Got fed up with devices never getting updated.
Couldn’t be happier.
Oh man I could never use an iOS device. I briefly used an iPhone 5S before I sold it for a Nexus 5. iOS is just missing to many features that I need or want.
Like being able to choose my own default apps, I don’t use a single Apple app, including iCloud as it’s to expensive. I have 1TB of storage from both OneDrive and Google Drive and pay the same as a single TB from iCloud. Not to mention I get much faster download/upload speeds with OneDrive as their servers are actually located in my country. Unlike iCloud which is located in Ireland.
I could never use an OS that I couldn’t run apps in the background. I use a terminal app to login into my servers at home and and at work, if I start a compile job I don’t want to haven to stare at it’s progress. In iOS, the terminal apps connections are lost every time I navigate away from it for a small period of time.
iOS has the worst share function and inner-app communication that I’ve ever seen. I installed the OneDrive client however I have yet to seen an app list it under it’s share function except for other MS apps. So basically iOS app developers hard code in their share to lists unlike Android which lists everything that is installed and supported by the app in question. Same thing goes for MS Outlook, I don’t use Apple Mail, but when I need to send a file, MS Outlook is no where to be seen so In have to open up MS Outlook and do it manually. Which also sucks as IOS saves it’s files under the app that created it, so if you don’t remember the app that created the file it’s an absolute pain.
Basically Android is a 100 times better when it comes to file management. I use an app called FX File Explorer in which I can also mount all of my cloud storage services and even access FX inside an app.
My list actually goes on and on, I personally just don’t understand why people like the iPhone so much. Sure if you just use your phone to watch media and play games I guess it’s fine but even then I think an Android device is better. I can stream every movie that I’ve uploaded to Google Drive directly, unlike iOS which first downloads the file.
Yes, yes, I’ve heard it a thousand times, well I just don’t need those things you listed, fine, but I do.
Also only having 1GB of memory nowadays is inexcusable. Yes you need more, try typing a post like this in Safari, than switch over to a different app before you post it, when you come back 9 times out of 10 the page would have been refreshed, loosing all of your work in the process. This is caused by a lack of memory.
Edited 2015-06-06 20:18 UTC
Install tmux on the “server” and run all your sessions through that. Then it won’t matter if your connection is terminated, as the session is still running on the server. A must-have, even for normal PC-to-PC SSH connections.
All you had to do was install CyanogenMod 12, you can get updates daily, yes daily. The iPhone is just no where near as powerful as an Android device as it’s missing many core features. You can’t select your own default apps, you can’t run apps in the background, inner-app communication is horrible, Example: if you install OneDrive, you will never see it listed under any of the apps share list, so it’s pretty much useless. File management is just horrible in iOS, it saves all of its files under the app that created it. You can’t modify the quick settings toggles, etc. There are a lot more but you get the point. Now I’m sure you will come back with I don’t need any of that, yes, actually you do, your just compromising and are convincing yourself that your fine without them. You can torture yourself if you want as it makes no difference to me but any company that doesn’t allow you to at least choose your own default apps is not one that I want to do business with and if you except this as being okay, your part of the problem, as it’s wrong. No other mobile OS does this but Apple’s iOS, that tell’s us that they think they can get away with anything, which if people like you keep ignoring things likes this than, well I guess they can.
That’s why I use iOS and I will keep using it until Apple screw it completely (If they keep copying Android… well We are not too far from catastrophe).
My only hope is Firefox OS, Mozilla must focus on it again.
To be fair, judging from the last two releases, Apple have managed to screw up OS X all by themselves, without copying anyone….. well, maybe they copied Lennart a bit by including a stupid process/daemon ending with the letter ‘d’. =P
About the bad apps and software support: Android gives everyone enough rope to hang themselves. Hardware companies, carriers, software developers alike. If you want the best of Android, you need a Google phone (Nexus) and you need to curate every app personally.
The only way to get Apple-like software support from Android is with a Nexus…. or by buying a new Android phone every year, so you never find out how bad your hardware manufacturer is at maintaining software.
I switched to Android because I was fed up with Apple for actually developing and patenting technologies used to help the police suppress smartphone communication and cameras in political protests. They were actively used against people who protested lethal police violence in the San Francisco Bay Area and later Occupy demonstrations. That is a cut-off point for me as a customer, period.
Of course, there’s no way to feel very invested in an Android phone either. I still think Snowden only showed us the tip of the iceberg. The Chinese government and the NSA feel entitled to backdoor everything, and lie to the public about it. Goodness knows what’s up with our SIM cards and SD cards.
An open-source Android is more friendly to user’s rights, but it doesn’t deal with the baseband firmware or any other features.
I can only say, stay tech savvy, but remember to unplug and sit under a tree, by a rock, in some level of basic living beauty. There’s still good stuff out there.
It has been a few years since i used a smartphone. Those UI’s in the pictures looks absolutely awful. It looks almost as bad as the windows and mac flat trends….. yuck.
I don’t see how you can compliment Android on design and then go on to show screenshots that highlight why it can be such a nightmare. The current state of widgets is nothing short of a disaster, with every widget taking a vastly different approach in typography, margins, colors, shadows, animations, and every other design element that I’m missing. And that’s not even touching the subject of (default) icon styles that are all over the place.
I wouldn’t be surprised if when Apple finally do add widgets to iOS (because let’s be honest, the day is coming), they’ll have rigorous guidelines as to how they should look, a UI framework that enforces most of those guidelines, and an army of merciless reviewers that reject every app that contains a widget that’s the slightest bit off. I don’t know how it used to be back when Dashboard was a thing, but I imagine it won’t be any less painful for developers this time around.
Disclaimer: I’ve owned various Android phones and tablets as well as Windows Phones. I currently use a Lumia 640 and a Nexus 7 (2013, Lollipop, Nova Launcher, no widgets), which I both enjoy most of the time. I also have the unfortunate privilege of testing my code with all mobile platforms, including iOS, at work. And yes, I tend to nitpick about design.
Repeat after me. OS X is not iOS. Repeat again.
We can install any widgets we like whether Apple approves of them or not.
Ps Dashboard’s still a thing.
I never claimed OS X was iOS. That being said, I imagine the Mac App Store review process to be similar to the iOS App Store’s. The main difference is of course, as you said, that it’s easier to operate outside the store.
By Dashboard being “a thing”, I didn’t mean that it merely still comes with the OS. None of the Mac users that I know actually use it. Anyway, that wasn’t really the point.
What I’m saying is that, when iOS starts supporting widgets (or whatever incarnation Apple deems appropriate), I think and hope that they’ll be far more confined to platform guidelines than Android’s. With Apple’s ecosystems being about aesthetics to such a degree (which is a Good Thing), I can’t imagine them cutting developers as much slack as Google in terms of design.
And again, I agree that OS X isn’t iOS. What that means for iOS widgets specifically is that I don’t expect them to be anywhere near as freeform as desktop ones. Personally, I’d prefer that approach. Consistency is a good thing.
> I owned several unlocked Android devices over the past year.
It’s good you’re leaving out the old iphone is too expensive argument. Quite frankly, it’s android phones that are too expensive, cause you have to buy so many of them to get an upgrade.
I love my iphone 6.
Or in order to have a working device and a backup device for when your current Android device fails. Good grief, I’ve had 7 Androids, and 6 of them failed.
I have no experience with iOS devices, but it is shockingly bad that their keyboard still doesn’t change to show capital/lowercase letters. The insistence of iOS to use only capital letters seems like insistence on skeuomorphic design (“real keyboard don’t change their letters either!”) and is extremely impractical for me as an end user.
The uppercase keyboard thing is something I constantly torture an Apple fanboy colleague with. And, yes, his only pathetic defence was the ludicrous one that you stated – “real keyboards have upper case keys all the time”.
Android has a better default keyboard than iOS without a shadow of a doubt and has had the ability to change between the default and third-party keyboards (some of which are even better than the default) for years now. I personally prefer the Hacker’s keyboard, which has the option for what I consider essential keys such as cursor keys amongst others.
Edited 2015-06-06 19:38 UTC
Hey, cursor keys! Where has this been all my life? Exactly what I needed. Thanks for the tip.
my conclusion after 6 month with an android tablet:
even though android is less limited than ios, it’s still way to limited for my taste
if it dies, i will probably go for a surface with typecover and a real OS
What exactly is it that you need to do, “on a tablet”. As I think that is the issue here, you expect the tablet to operate like a normal laptop with Windows or OSX. It’s not, it’s meant to consume media, read ebooks and other materials, email, web surfing, light gaming, maybe edit a office document. I think your putting to much responsibilities on a device that wasn’t meant for the tasks that you had in mind. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for more powerful tasks. I use Codenvy, a cloud based IDE, it’s fantastic and runs fairly well on my Nexus 9. I now use my Nexus 9 for almost all of my Office tasks as I use MS Office for Android. There are great tools on a tablet you just need to find them.
What kind of tablet do you have as this is important? If your using something like a Tab 4 from Samsung than yes, it’s completely useless as Samsung’s entire low to mid range is absolutely complete garbage. However if you grab a good Android tablet like the, Nexus 9, Sony Z2/Z3/Z4, Samsung’s Tab S 8.4 or 10.1 (make sure to install Cynogenmod 12 though, TouchWiz is horribly laggy, never gets updated and is full of unnecessary bloatware that no one ever uses), Dell Venue 8 7000 and one of personal favorites the Nvidia Shield Tablet as it’s extremely powerful, has a HDMI port, opened platform and is cheap with a starting price of 350, 420 if you want LTE.
The Surface Pro 3 is also a great option but is also a grand, without the keyboard or docking station. I have the i7, 8GB, 512GB version, bought it the first day it was released, great system but I prefer my new Lenovo Lavie Z 360 a lot more. It’s as thin, weighs about the same and can turn into a tablet by just flipping it around. You get best of both worlds and since it’s so thin it feels like a tablet unlike many of the other convertibles. There are lots of options out there but just know what you want to do before buy anything.
Could you list your current needs and the Android tablet your using?
Edited 2015-06-07 19:48 UTC
thats exactly what i want to use it for
but the reality is:
– browsers are crap
– mail-clients are crap
– mediaplayers are crap
– office-tools are crap
– filebrowsers are crap
– the whole thing is dog-slow (which i blame on java
)
and for the killig-blow riddle me this:
what went wrong when you have a device that was specifically made for touch-input, with an os that was specifically made for touch-input, that connecting a bluetooth-mouse is a vast usability-improvement?
Edited 2015-06-07 21:08 UTC