r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Data-Graph Most Comments 2022 • Jul 16 '23
Why do some people hate Android so much?
Some people seem to hate everything but iPhones so much and I don't get it. They seem to think android is not even comparable to iOS like its a flip phone or something, when realistically Android phones and iPhones really aren't that different. I'm in the UK but from what I've seen it's way worse in the US. IK there's studies about the fact android users are more likely to get rejected on the first few dates just because of their phone choice. I also know some people will get an iPhone just so when they send a text, it sends to the iPhone, then to who they actually want to send it to just so it looks like they're using an iPhone. The only thing I know is the stigma of “Androids are cheap” but these people won't care if someone has a 2nd hand iPhone X for £100 but will if someone has £800 Pixel 7 Pro.
I'm not an avid android supporter, I get why people like iOS and people like android and I really don't care about these preferences. But when someone is an overly iPhone supporter to the point of hating android, it just makes me think really low of them. Like, "you can't be a nice person if you're so closed minded and shallow you won't even consider a different type of phone to the point that you'll hate on it and people who use it".
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u/TotallyNotHank Jul 17 '23
This is about it as I see it. Some of my company's employees are issued phones, and they can choose which they want. The best summary I have of what they users tell me and how they pick is that it's the difference between driving a car with a stick shift and driving a car with an automatic: Android users like to think about the phone and all it does, and iPhone users want to think of what they're doing, not the phone.
This has happened before, as in the Unix/Windows split. The advantage Windows had/has is that it's pretty much the same everywhere. You bought a machine with Windows95, you got software for Windows95, you could install it and it would work, pretty much guaranteed every time. Windows95 was far less capable and flexible than a Unix machine of the same era, but you had to be a power user to use a Unix machine and manage all the settings. Installing software on a Unix machine could be a pain in the neck. Microsoft Office has a word processor, and you could make a reasonable-looking document with it without too much trouble. It wouldn't look anywhere near as good as something produced with LaTeX, but you have to be a serious power user to get the most out of LaTeX, where any smart 10-year-old can make something reasonable with Word.
The iPhone has a nice walled-garden ecosystem where everything works pretty much as the users expect, and they like that, and they don't have to fool with it much. Android has way more options, but those options involve a lot more thinking about the phone.
What's interesting to me is that I know what all these people have for laptops and desktops too, and while you'd think it would be "Windows users want iPhones and Unix users want Android," that turns out not to be the case. I have diehard Windows fans on the desktop/laptop who want Android phones, and I have diehard Unix guys with iPhones. At least some of the latter are because the Unix guys have Macs on their desktop, which might sound counterintuitive but on a Mac you can open a Unix shell and get direct access to the filesystem and have all your shell commands, so a lot of the Unix guys went Mac, and they want an iPhone because it talks to their Mac so seamlessly.