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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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A Western ‘Super App’ is ridiculous because of the reason why Asian Super App exist.

In simple terms, they exist because of the various shitty semi-stock versions of Android that dominate the smartphone market in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and pretty much the rest of Southeast Asia. There are few standardized apps, and for a long time Android Pay didn’t really exist or work. In these markets the Super App serves as a one stop launcher for payments, chat, online shopping, taxis and so on.

In America, the iPhone serves as the ‘super app’. It has messages (iMessage), payments (Apple Pay) and various other integrated services, and through notifications and cross-app integration accessing third party apps like banking and Uber is easy, with shared single sign on and payment via iPhone password or FaceID.

Super Apps evolved to fill a software gap that doesn’t exist in the USA, at least not anymore.

Elon also has to partner with Uber/Lyft/PayPal/Venmo/Amazon/Ebay/booking/Ticketmaster etc. I am sceptic that he will be good in that. Maybe a boring uncontroversial person could pull it of.

For Twitter to tacking a payment option onto itself is a monumental task. How many years would they need to be feature competitive with PayPal?

From a software-philosophical point of view my guess is that it will just bloat the X-Twitter app.

It can't be a Super App if it's not an app and can't be installed on all phones. Even in the US, the iPhone only reached 50% market share in September of 2022: https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-share-223251196.html

Apple makes a lot of money with their product margins but they don't even dominate the US market for phones, let alone global markets.

And is it not good for the consumer that ** the 'super app' is going to have competition now ? **

My heart bleeds for Apple users. Every time I am forced to use an Iphone - which is every time my boomer doctor father has some problem he can't figure out, I feel like screaming. It's like if someone took an Android phone and lobotomized it.

First time a few years back I found myself in utter disbelief when told the Iphone does not have a file system. There's no simple way for apps to share files.

Why people pay for these abominations is quite unclear. Fashion ? Don't know any better ?

Iphone does not have a file system. There's no simple way for apps to share files.

The file sharesheet (allowing transfer between apps but not saving) was introduced in iOS 8 (2014). A bona fide File system was introduced in iOS 11 (2017).

I agree they were a bit late to the party, but only by a couple years. A file system would not have added any functionality until iOS 4 or so (2010)--the earlier versions were too limited (as were iOS's competitors at that time, to be fair).

The file sharesheet (allowing transfer between apps but not saving) was introduced in iOS 8 (2014).

That was an optional app or something like that ?

No, on iPhone you press the universal share button (a horizontal square bracket with an arrow pointing upward) and then ‘open in’ any of your apps (along a scrollbar which appears automatically) and you can transfer files, documents, pictures, downloads, whatever between pretty much any app that supports that format.

Yeah Share > Open In works in almost every case.

Well… to establish my bonafides I’m a Linux user personally and professionally, but there are some very obvious reasons to use iPhone over Android. One is quality. There’s simply no comparison in build quality from basically any android phone to an iPhone. Second is updates. My iPhone will get quick software updates years and years past the end of (slow and unpredictable) support for most android phones. Third is usability. iPhones are much more usable than any Android I’ve had out of the box. Apple Pay is great. iMessage is great, the camera is great.

I understand the desire to tinker on your devices, I truly do, but the iPhone is superior on basically every metric except tinkering, which means it’s better for almost everyone.

I suspect you're probably only ever seeing cheapest Chinese android phones because in the US Apple has a lock on the market. Comparing between the Motorolas and Iphones my parents use, there's no noticeable difference in build quality.
The only difference is that the Iphone has far, far fewer features, although that might be due to the model perhaps ?

I mean I've owned many Androids over the years... HTC Magic, Samsung Galaxy, Droids, OnePluses... None of them really had the build quality of an iPhone.

What features is the iPhone missing, other than the ability to install software outside of the app store?

What features is the iPhone missing, other than the ability to install software outside of the app store?

It's like Android but worse and crippled in odd ways.

For example, recently saw someone bitch about how hard it is to get a ringtone into it.](https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1683202524789239808) and list some familiar software relatedsounding BS.

  1. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1684272662485295104

  2. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1684273095169789953

As a mature human male, this seems like a trivial complaint.

Trivial or not, it's worse re: apps and it's more expensive and the money goes to people who hate me.

Staying with Android is really a no brainer.

Also a linux user. Samsung's Galaxy S series is generally the same or even better build quality than an IPhone and these days gets functionality updates for at least 4 years plus security updates for a few years after that point, and they come out pretty quickly too once the Android version is officially released.

Maybe Samsung has actually figured out the software updates, but a few years ago they had not.

Samsung is probably closest to Apple in terms of build quality.

But they’re very expensive even compared to iPhones, or at least the flip versions are.

My other concern is privacy, or such remnants of it that remain. As far as I’m aware Apple is (mostly) content to make money from the hardware and the App Store and actually implemented pretty good privacy features, whereas android is riddled with Google spyware. Or is that not the case anymore?

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