Can you iMessage me? Wait I have Android. You can’t. Damn. Facetime? Nope. This isn’t just an Apple thing? send a file on Android with NFC? Oh you don’t have S beam? As phones turn into more and more powerful mini-computers they seem to be still lagging behind when it comes to compatibility. It still matters if someone has iOS, Android or Windows Phone - not every app has been written three times.
There are three awesome things that are still functionally standard across all platforms:
- SMS
- Phone calls (I know, who uses that!)
And this is what holds mobile technology together. There is no relying on a platform to come up with a solution and then change it (Twitter), because if you don’t like something you can always use a different app any of the three that fits your needs better. (Well, I presume you can on iOS – wait you can’t :’( sucks for you I guess.)
This is the main reason why I favour Android over other mobile OSs - it lets apps fully replace part of my phone, letting them completely integrate into the OS. You wouldn’t notice that I don’t use the stock camera, messaging app or launcher. They all just slide in together like a crazy jigsaw.
Now I will admit it is a bit of a pain having to set these little things up, and I understand Apple’s want to fully control how iOS works - if you download an average messaging app and can’t send texts, who do you blame? Apple.
Although, imagine that you went and bought a shiny new Surface 3 and then found out that Internet Explorer was stuck as the default browser. Every link you open INTERNET EXPLORER! Why would you do that to yourself? You masochistic freak.
Even OS X allows you to change the default browser (to Chrome), mail app (to Mailbox) and search engine (to Google). Although by the looks of Yosemite the latter may be locked to Bing.. I don’t know how I’ll manage. Seriously Apple - if you do this and don’t give me the option to change it, I will consider switching back to Ubuntu for a whole 5 minutes.
It’s my technology - I should be able to add and remove bits as I see fit. ie:
I should have superuser privileges.