Not by much these days. The Pixel 10 actually gives you half the storage as the iPhone 17 at the same price.
The only Android phones that are significantly cheaper than equivalent iPhone tend to come with some kind of compromise (and don’t forget that Apple’s phones start at $600 - the iPhone 16e exists).
That’s an irrelevant aside because we are already comparing apples to apples here. The reality is that there are very few phones with SD card slots in them.
I’m personally fine with it at this point. It’s not ideal and it’s not consumer friendly, but SD cards are slow and failure prone compared to internal storage, and I find that multiple storage volumes introduces management friction (moving apps and content between two locations).
I did. I cannot recommend it. There is no real way to unlock bootloaders on these. They've locked it down so much that you can't really do anything but run what they give you.
The Chinese phone ecosystem is basically unavailable in the US. Huawei was banned, and none of the other brands sell products officially besides OnePlus, which has iPhone-adjacent pricing.
Ehh, I'm unconvinced. A lot of these cheapo Android phones have bizarre restrictions and really short lifespans. A used iPhone might last longer and therefore be cheaper in the long run.
You can definitely get cheaper Android phones than an iPhone. There will be compromises but it will be cheaper. Many people are fine with a $200 or less phone.
Most android flagships are about the price of iPhones.
> Android is short for AOSP.
This actually made me laugh out loud.
Uh, no. AOSP is a showcase project which currently cannot run on any phones produced on Earth.
Android is the most popular mobile operating system.
AOSP does not include code to run almost any viable hardware and also does not include code necessary to run android applications. Everything that is Google play services is not in AOSP.
Bear in mind Google play services isn't the Google play store. It's basic device functionality, like cellular service and GPS.
A month or so ago I went to NYC, I visited some of the museums.
Although I managed to get some great pictures, framing wise and sharpness wise. The color resolution was absolutely ridiculously bad.
I couldn't figure out a way in that moment to fix the issue, but seriously, the colors were so far off it kinda ruined this phone for me.
My friend had an iphone, we took the same pictures of the same paintings and his photos looked much closer to life than mine. Huge disappointment.
In the iphone its very easy to shoot raw and the camera app has a lot of very good intuitive controls. Not to even begin talking about video.
At some point I think Google did make really good photography phones but it seems to me like they've basically stopped trying to stay ahead of the competition whereas apple is always trying to improve. Thats my impression anyway.
I mean, flagship vs flagship idk if one has ever been significantly cheaper, but I've never been in the market for those either. It's very easy to get a higher priced, more interesting, highly specced Android phone. Both iPhones and flagship android phones are way too expensive for what they are capable of compared to any of their own prior generations of themselves, if you ignore tech specs and consider the tangible end-user functionality, but even still.
I've always bought the phone that suits me in the moment, have never budgeted higher than $600CAD, and have simply never been interested in iPhones beyond what used to be nice industrial design. For that, last time I got a brand new Pixel 7 on sale, Pixel 4a, Nexus 5 etc.. and they've all done what I needed and usually came close to matching the fancier versions in some ways in the same year's lineup.
Usually though I have breadth of options to pick from across a range of brands that I can choose between based on whatever the hell I prefer. iPhones are just iPhones, bigger or smaller, more expensive or cheaper, big camera plateau or small, and that's all fine too.
The sideloading aspect for me and a better sense of control is absolutely a component in that preference, and I'll have to consider that going forward, but I'd sooner just dial back my dependence on phones in general than switch to an iPhone.
>requires Google Play Services, which is basically every commercial app.
Not my experience at all. Only some banking apps or apps that otherwise hard depend on play services feature like google pay. GrapheneOS offer isolated unprivileged sandboxed Google play services for those.
No longer true with the newest chip that Mediatek cooked up, ARM licensed cores like C1 are catching up rapidly with Apple CPUs (or maybe Apple has hit the limit of their current design philosophy)
Over the last years Android has gotten increasingly worse, which is something you just have to expect from a Google product.
It is still unbelievable to me that Google is shipping a product which takes 10 seconds to show anything when I search through my phones settings. What are they doing?
>open source
Sure. If you buy the right phone you get some open source components. Of course half the Android companies are trying to funnel you into their proprietary ecosystem as well. The rest just wants you to use Google's proprietary ecosystem.
> takes 10 seconds to show anything when I search through my phones settings
Ah, I see ol' Google's been shamelessly copying Apple again.
Unrelated but related to embarrassingly-bad search: On my iPhone, I have a Hacker News reader app called Octal. Now when I search the phone itself for "octal" (like I do to launch most apps), sometimes the only result found is... the Octal entry under Settings (where iOS sticks the permission-granting interface for notifications, location, etc.) Can't find the app itself. Just the settings for it.
>GrapheneOS is a private and secure mobile operating system with great functionality and usability. It starts from the strong baseline of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and takes great care to avoid increasing attack surface or hurting the strong security model.
They are doing it like everybody else, they have their own system apps (because they got kind of unmaintainted by Google in AOSP since Android 12), they add drivers from the pixel device tree and then they add their security patches.
If you would put AOSP on a Pixel, it wouldn't even boot and if you managed to get it to boot, the apps would be
unusable.
