Nice article @andrewmurraydunn!
I agree on you on being able to go the extra mile on Android, to hone the experience, and make apps comply to humane principles wrt attention, addictiveness, and Time Well Spent. Also as a developer I am very happy with the openness of the platform and can program both in popular Java and Kotlin languages, rather than Apple-only Swift.
But for the users this also has its downsides. Android has much more privacy issues, for instance. The permission system is too coarse-grained, and both Google and smartphone provider, such as Samsung (while a hardware provider with paid ‘customers’) build in their own sauce to get at our personal information. I recently gave Samsung Head of Digital my feedback on this:
The most nagging aspects, if you ask me, are:
- Having to spend a full hour to change privacy settings from their opt-in defaults to opt-out on a new smartphone or tv set
- Having privacy policies that are enormously long reads full of judiscial text, that only a specialized lawyer can realy understand >
- Having (sometimes nasty) 3rd-party software trackers built into your products, or dragged in when updating
- Having lots of Samsung-related and 3rd-party software apps installed by default and not being able to deactivate and uninstall them, even when not using them
In the compiled software codebase the tracking codes can be deeply embedded and very hard to trace. The fact that our data has so much value, and the fact that both Google and Samsung have a big hand in its collection, makes me lose trust in Android, and I am actively looking for alternatives.
Apple has a better reputation in this perspective.
While a tech-savvy person can compile an Android OS without Google and Samsung codes in it and install it on their phone, this is not easy. Luckily there are 2 open-source, privacy-first alternatives that look promising to me, which are Eelo and Librem 5 (this last one runs Linux OS, and will be able to run Android apps in a compartmentlized part of the phone).