Thus far, I think I’ve come to the following conclusions:

  1. Google is better at building a larger “System “, but will kill you with a hammer to a few major sore spots.
  2. Apple will favor doing well whatever they focus on, but will kill you with paper cuts to many minor spots.
I’m also pretty sure that those responsible for the design of iOS, it’s been a very long trend of people that love gestures. I’m still learning to swipe friend in elvish.
For the most part it has been a pretty good experience getting to learn my way around an iPad. It very much reminds me that Apple is a products company that learned how to do software and services, rather than a software company.

Random things I love about iOS:

Password management is freaking awesome. Rather than bake it into the line edit widgets like Google did, Apple puts a button over the keyboard that lets you easily bring up the password UI and search for stuff. It is the best freaking way I’ve ever met!
The whole slide over thing beats the hell out of annoying floating windows and bubbles. Those suck. iPad slide over makes up for how chunky switching apps feels. I will sorely miss the double tap a button and switch to last app trick from Android, but will love and abuse the multitasking features of my iPad 😁.
Siri seems to have the best level of tweaking I’ve ever seen. Really, I’m not fond of voice assistants but being able to use it with apps is great. Go into settings and you pretty much know what shortcuts an app makes available; kind of like how Android had shortcuts you could toss on your home screen, apps make such shortcuts available to Siri. I’m less inclined to throw my Google searches at a voice thingy than I am to want hands free use of an app.
By being late to the iOS game, I’ve probably missed most of the things that would really piss me off.

Random things I hate about iOS:

Compared to Android the launcher has zero value. Because who wants to make it easy to organize your apps automatically when you can just make people drag folders of crap across four screens.
Dragging and dropping is even more pervasive on iPad than PC, and that is no surprise given the same company made macOS. Which is fine, and probably a great paradigm for touch centric devices. But I find that it is painfully slow. E.g. dragging and dropping a hyperlink to Safari’s Tab bar is neat, but it feels more like waiting for a car’s cabin to heat up in the morning than something smooth and fast.
More than a few things are counter  intuitive but fairly obvious. I’m pretty sure that in the course of time, I’m either going go insane or be a happy enough expat.
I despise how clunky and slow editing text is on my iPad Pro compared to my Android tablet. It’s less issues like keyboard management and more that it is a tap happy affair created by folks that love slowly dragging and dropping everything instead of quickly tapping and sliding a cursor pip around. The two finger track pad trick built into Apple’s keyboard is really a useful trick. It’s on par with using a scroll wheel to move your cursor left/right and being able to suddenly mouse around: but I only learned this trick by poking around the user guide in a browser. Otherwise I’d have no clue it existed. Beyond that, I really wish Apple would steal Google’s cursor stuff from Android!

Forbes: Is Google Chrome A CPU Hog? Chrome Vs FireFox, Safari, Microsoft Edge.

A number of years ago, before Chrome was really a thing I came to much the same conclusion: the web is a resource hog!

I had a 64-bit Linux machine that would be constantly swapping if I was using more than a few tabs. Tried changing between Opera and Firefox without any luck. It wasn’t the browsers being pigs, it was webpages making like Hungry, Hungry Hippos with memory. Javascript, images, network calls, heavy styling, etc. 2 GB of RAM just was not enough anymore. In the end, I put more memory in the machine and it sucked a lot less.

Yes, modern browsers are hogs, but not as much as modern web applications!

I think the decision is largely made at this point. The fruit company is my tablet computing destination, whether I like it or not.

The dire lack of Android tablets with a stylus, the Q/A that matches Chrome OS’s rapid release cycle, and the shrinking number of companies making a ‘real’ Android tablet that is worth my time, has had me considering jumping ship for a while. Google’s pox upon multitasking making its way to my Tab S3, is pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Most of the software that I run on my Tab S3 supports both iOS and Android. Alternatives exist for the more systemy stuff at the edges, like the corporate printer or dealing with my file server. Pretty much if I find an analog to FolderSync Pro, the only thing I’ll really be losing software wise is free editing support for Microsoft Excel and Word. Before ending up with a Samsung that bundled MS Office, my long term solution was OfficeSuite Pro which has enough compatibility to handle documents at work. So for the most part I’m not worried much about software. It also helps that by living in Android land so long, iOS has been working its big boy shorts for while now instead of their update notes sounding like a baby’s toy.

When the 1″ crack in my Tab S3’s screen becomes terminal, I’ll have little option but to replace it one way or another, and I have had a very long time now to contemplate what that will be. For now I’m just happy the what the hell moments related to the crack are few and far in between versus my heavy tablet use.

In Android land: the only things that are viable replacements are the Tab S4 and S6, which are old and new successors, respectively. Negatives to both are they will also come with Google’s pox and they’re widescreens. DeX isn’t going to fix what Pie did to multitasking and I greatly prefer 4:3 and 3:2 tablets.

No Chrome OS device exists yet that aligns with my requirements, and the only ones worth paying for are too big to replace my Tab S3. And that just leaves iPads. Which for as little love as I have for Apple, and my lack of caring for iOS, solve the problem Android has been most screwing me with the longest–there’s a lot more freaking iPads to choose from that support a decent stylus than their are Android devices with a decent stylus.

It’s always been hard to find an Android tablet with a nice stylus, and Samsung while expensive has filled that role pretty swell. But they’re kind of becoming the only vendor to choose from, both in terms of an Android tablet that meets my requirement for stylus, and Android tablets in general.

I also find it kind of funny how this works out. In the old days when Android tablets were quite new, I found the iPad excessively overpriced and Android underappreciated; Apple has at least solved that with their expanded selection. Likewise, most new iPhone launches were followed by me scratching my head and wondering how people lived so long without essential features; iOS release notes stopped feeling like a slow as hell iteration several years ago.

And then there’s the fact, that I’ve never actually owned an Apple product. I’m more at home with an xterm than a Mac. More than a few of my friends have soft spots for fruity products, and have since at least as far back as the iPod and PowerBook. Me, never have. But I suppose there is probably a first time for everything.

Passing thought: I’ve had hard drives smaller than Nvidia’s driver download, nevermind flash drives smaller.

Pie sucks at multitasking

Things that Pie has wrought: Google’s curse.

Overview now has a more useful grid like view. Aside from the nauseating effect that happens when closing an app makes them all resort but at least it is really fast on the Tab S3’s hardware. on the downside multitasking is now chunky and fundamentally broken.

In the previous version the overview screen was a chunky phone centric sliding flipper but apps had a button on the side of their card, so you could open them in the current side of the screen. Now each app has its icon on the top of the card, and you get a menu when you tap the icon. Containing app info (used to be long touch/hold), open in split view, open in pop up (floating window) view, or lock the app. Which is a lot slower but at least flexible.

So instead of very, very quick access to snapping an app to either side of the screen: you get very slow access to deciding if you want it split or floating. The ability to just turn the currently running application into a floating window has been removed. Which is both good and bad: the gesture was easy to trip when you didn’t mean to but was also extremely convenient if you wanted something like a calculator floating over a web page. I’m not sure if the UI the device used on Oreo was a Sammy thing or a Google thing, but it was pretty nice.

Now here’s why I say fundamentally broken in Pie.

Splitting the screen and hitting overview used to place the overview in the currently active side of the screen. So if you wanted to replace one of the applications, you just tapped it and hit overview. Vola, really fast and simple and obvious. And good if you decided both apps needed to change before you were done.

After updating to pie: the overview ALWAYS opens in the bottom or the right side of the screen, based on whether you’re in portrait or landscape orientation. I have yet to find any way to invert the split apps–you used to tap the resize bar in between and have a UI to switch them. ‘Cuz that is useful. Now you’re stuck with the first app chosen being in the top/left side until you’re done. You might think the first app would show up and you could just select it again? Nope, its card gets removed from the overview.

Likewise you can only stuff in apps from the overview grid that were running. I used to be able to hit a button and select apps from a launcher instead of requiring them to be already opened in the background.

But really, whose fault is it for destroying the multitasking functions? Google’s. It’s Google’s fault. Why do I say this? Because my Google Fi phone running Android One and its pure Googely experience has virtually the same broken multitasking UI. The only real difference is my Samsung changes the string “Split view” to “Open in split view” and adds the popup and lock entries to the menu. Likewise on the phone sized screen it’s a sliding view of the exact same cards rather than a grid view of them.

Suddenly I realize why DeX became so popular among users of newer model Tab S’s that shipped with it. It’s not because DeX mode is that more PC like: it’s because Google fucked Android’s multitasking experience. And I fear, if I was to dig up the CDD for Pie, it would say OEMs aren’t allowed to fix it anymore, lol.

Of course my model being older, DeX is not a feature that was integrated into it. Much like how my model was the first to get USB-C charging but alt modes for driving a monitor didn’t show up until the Tab S4, which does have DeX. Reasons to buy an iPad, += 1.

I find it a great shame. Samsung has done multitasking for so many years, I first used it on my Galaxy SIII phone a very long time ago.  In recent years it became a standard piece of Android, which was a really good thing until Google pissed down the feature’s throat and crippled its utility for real multitasking.

As I watch my tablet upgrade to Android 9, I find my mind flashing to when my phone updated closer to Pie’s release–and the distinct feeling that “All my icons are different for no good reason. Other than that: it’s hard to tell anything changed.”

But it’s worth noting, I use my Galaxy Tab S3 excessively every day, but my Moto X4 is only lightly used. Because unless I’m literally walking around in public or answering a text message in the middle of the night: there’s a 95% chance that I’ll use my tablet instead.

Both devices were released in 2017 and had Android 7/Nougat as their original operating system image. The primarily difference is my Android One edition got Pie around Christmas time and my Sammy gets pie to the face shortly after Android 10 launches.

That’s par for course for Samsung’s tablets in the past, except seeing three major OS versions on one tablet is odd for them; I had the upgrade to Android 8/Oreo to be the Tab S3’s final operating system based on previous experiences with their high end tablets. I’ve owned a lot of those.

If anything actually changes that makes me give a flying floop, it’ll probably rely on Samsung’s UI customizations. Because on the more “Pure” load my phone uses, “Damn it, my icons are all different”, really was the most noticeable difference. The bit about text selection might be more in my face on a tablet but wasn’t necessary on my phone, nor is it on my big screen; especially with pen in hand.

A few notes for my own reference, Octane 2.0 and Jetstream 2.

Scarlett: ~9,000 ; ~20
— Snapdragon 820.

Stark: ~23,000 ; ~65
— Core i5 3360M

Centauri: ~30,000 ; ~80
— Core i5 3570K.

Which amounts to my Tab S3, Latitude E6430S, and custom desktop with their scores rounded to the nearest whole number.

I’d also run things on Cream’s N3700 but it’s VNC session and various services make it an unfair candidate for such a test. Likewise I left Celes and it’s N3060 at work because my Chromebook has been gathering dust as of late in favour of making Stark work harder.

Never brothered read Intel’s errata sheets in the past. After reading the documents for some of the hardware that I have to deal with, I think I could use a stiff drink and a few checks for BIOS updates.

A few wild ass guestimates from the long term planning bin.

Remaining in beloved Android country: ~$650.

  • Galaxy Tab S6: $650.
  • I hate 16:10 tablets.
  • What comes next?
Turning to an iPad Pro: ~$780
  • 11″ 2018 model: $650.
  • Pencil 2: $130.
  • CPU on par with my desktop.
Turning to any other iPad: $479 ~ $589
  • 7th gen: $330 ; Air 3: $450.
  • Pencil 1: $99.
  • Lightning cable all the things ~ $40.
  • I already routed USB-C all the things.
The best price to performance in my opinion is the Air but simply put, I pretty much reject anything that requires a Lightning connection to charge. To me the cost delta between a regular iPad and a Pro is a time based one; e.g. by the time an Pro goes to the old folks home, just as much will have been spent on regular models in the name of faster SoCs. If Lightning cables littered my home the way USB-C and USB-MicroB cables do, I’d probably go Air.
I’ve been extremely happy with my Tab S3, and before it a Tab S2, and before that a Note 8.0. Damned 1″ crack in my screen and the occasional side effect of that becomes increasingly worriesome as time goes on. But other than that, it has been a perfect device for me.
Samsung’s Tabs S4, S5e (barf), and S6 make me question their road forward. No one else makes a suitable device. And the level of bugginess my Chromebook offers, the odds of me taking a 2-in-1 or tablet based Chrome OS device as an upgrade path aren’t very high. Unless Google changes in larger quality assuring ways, I can’t really call a Chrometab any better than suffering i[Pad]OS versus a real Android device.
The real question, I suppose is when my Samsung finally heads towards failure versus when my budget converges with a replacement.
Every now and then my device acts a smidge funny. Like today, it decided to stop taking pen input for a while. As far as I can tell the crack in the screen has not been visibly expanding but events like this seem to now happen several times per month. When you consider that if neither Direct3D nor bash are involved, my tablet is my primary computer at home and my secondary computer at work, that gives worries, alright. Sigh.

Over the years, a number of things have attracted me to Android.

Around the time Android first showed up on the T-Mobile G1, it represented what I really wanted at that time. Which was something more like a computer and less like a PDA that could send e-mail or word files. Something that I could scratch my itches by writing software. Likewise at that time, I may as well have wanted a Porsche, lol.

What really made me enjoy the experience however was the moderness of the platform and the compatibility it offers.

Permissions

It has long bothered me how PC software works. You run as a user, let’s call you Bob. You go download some program written by someone else, and probably won’t be compiling it from code. That program can do anything you can, Bob. Whether that’s as simple as uploading your address book (if you actually, still have a local one), encrypting your files for ransom, infecting your files, or just being useful, like you know: doing that task you had downloaded it for. A frequent solution in PCs has been to require running software with elevated permissions. But usually in a nuclear form: where the program goes from being able to doing anything you can, to literally being able to do anything your operating system can.

Newer models like the one Android follows, I believe are the natural evolution. Rather than “Ahh, shucks, I’ll just run it as root!”, the solution is a service interface. Android applications don’t shout “Hey Bob, I need you to hit the grant godlike powers button right now”. Instead they shout, “Hey Bob, I’m gonna need permission to use location services before I can tell you the nearest shawarma place”. That’s how things should work.

Once upon a time, computers didn’t really have permissions. Time sharing used to have more to do with computers being expensive rather than a commodity. Today, I wouldn’t expect a non-nerd to know what I just said. To be fair when the IBM PC came into being, it didn’t have a lot of horsepower and having fifty people using it at the same time was the least personal worry.

UNIX and Vista probably had the longest reaching impacts prior to Android. I say that for two real reasons. Firstly, Unix’s concept of users and file permissions are not only pervasive but the baseline of what you can call a multi-user system today. Secondly, thanks to the CP/M heritage, it wasn’t really until Vista that a lot of PC using mooks got smacked over the head with the permissions stick; despite how long NT supported ACLs. Yeah, I’m a asshole.

I really like the brokered model that systems like Android follows. You don’t solve a problem by running as god almighty with power to touch all the pointy things. You solve the problem by a service that brokers access to that specific thing. Because why should a program have as much power as you do? Do you trust strangers on the side walk with your debt card’s PIN? I hope not.

User Services

Over the years a lot of things have become broadly universal. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a network aware program that does not utilize network sockets. Likewise as GUIs rose, so did frameworks to ease the task of writing such software. No one makes a GUI program by drawing raw pixels into a byte buffer anymore, they use things like GTK and MFC. Often these interfaces become common (e.g. BSD sockets and winsock are very similar) or they become portable (e.g. Qt runs on just about anything).
But there are also a great many things that are not broadly universal, aside from the concept that we want those things to work.
There are no universal APIs to solve problems like syncing and managing your contacts, calendars, locations, and so on. We have tools not interfaces.
In Android, we have concepts like a Calendar. It doesn’t matter if I’m using Samsung’s calendar app or Google’s calendar app, or someone else’s. There’s a concept called a damned calendar. Wanna create an event? Fill out a common intent and expect good things to follow. If you write a calendar app then you’re expected to do some things deemed the right thing, to make this work for the user, and that is the right thing if you’re writing a calendar app that supports events.
On my laptop, I have to run a program like Mozilla Thunderbird or KOrganizer if I want an event calendar. Can I write a program that opens a new event in them and pre-populates it with some user provided data? Probably. Is there a common interface for my program to say, “Hey, operating system: Bob would love me to add this appointment to his calendar called ‘Medical’. Here’s the info!”. Nope, nope, and nope a doodle! That’s just not how PCs have evolved.
On the flipside, I will confess that Windows 10 does one thing I actually like. My contacts, messages, calendars, etc are all synchronized in much the same way my Android device does; I do not have the gag reflex necessary to see if MS also added any decent interfaces for applications to trigger these data exchanges the way Android does. But using Microsoft’s built in apps for that suck less than interfacing my Debian machine.

Openness

As a curious and opinionated nerd, I prefer easy access to knowledge and limited restrictions. I first used computers running MS-DOS but most of my time has been around Unix systems.
To me the best way to know how something works is to take it apart and study the pieces. Want to know how programs are loaded into memory? Read the kernel’s code for loading and linking executable files. Want to know how files are stored? Read a file system driver; coincidentally one for FAT is usually pretty simple compared to modern, more robust ones.
While I am a fan of tight permissioning and siloing of software, I am not a fan of restricting the owner. You paid good money for the device and it shouldn’t try to stop you from using it. Whether your taste is cat videos or bouncing boobies.
A lot of people have been uppity over the nature of app stores, and they probably should be. But I also see it as natural. Modern unix systems typically get their software from a repository, and any package manager worth its salt is going to do things like verify signatures on those packages.
Where we diverge with younger systems is control. Android has done pretty well at that–in that you should be warned about importing some random file that you might not even know is a program, but you’re still free to do so. Most people should obtain their software from a repo that they trust. Whether that’s something like Google Play and iTunes, or something like your local mirror of Red Hat and Debian packages. But you should always be allowed to decide what that repo is.
Android has managed to hang onto a lot of that openness, where Apple has preferred to maintain control. I mean, razor wire, triple layered concrete thick barn doors. Whatever.

Stable Runtimes

There is a pretty long history of being able to run a pre-compiled program and share it with others. We’ve been doing it longer than most people have owned a computer. I view a major key to the success of PCs, the ease at which you could write a program, compile it, and expect it to run on someone else’s machine without having to ship a code monkey with each floppy diskette. And not have to have a warehouse full of every microcomputer known to man, usually. Since then, computer software and hardware have become more isolated from the other for a great many tasks.
Today software is very long lived. Further time goes on, the more likely the code you write is to outlive you and the machine it first ran on. How well that binary runs on future systems is a more variable story.
Android has generally maintained a pretty strong ABI for keeping developer’s stuff running. Think of Dalvik and the Android APIs what you will, and please do feel compelled to make rude hand gestures, but an Android application tends to execute without shouting “Holy link error, batman!” and aborting back to the launcher. Unless you do something that you shouldn’t, or someone upstream does something that should be considered violation between vendor and stability worth smacking with a Googlely test suite sized beating stick.
But nothing is perfect or forever. To evolve, platforms must both create and destroy.
When I install a program from eons ago and it just runs on my PC, this tends to be a testament to how stable Microsoft’s ABI is, and how (insanely) much work they have put into backwards compatibility. I find it kind of amazing how often old ass programs just run.
When it doesn’t run, this tends to be a testament to how well the program was written or how well its assumptions have aged. It could be anything from assuming every file on disk is writable, or that all of nVidia’s graphics accelerators work the same as back in 1999.
Considering how many programmers that I’ve met had a source-only mindset, I find it amazing how stable Android’s runtime is at running APKs. As a user, you probably need worry more about issues like the evolution of GPU or service brokering breaking the apps assumptions at runtime than the app will fail to run at all.
You see there’s a really big distinction between API and ABI. In really simplistic terms, an API means the programmer’s shit will probably compile and an ABI means the programmer’s shit will probably execute.
The more complicated operating systems and frameworks become: the less likely this is to be the case. But it’s kind of nice when you can install an old game or utility and enjoy it without having to fire up a virtual machine with an antique operating system.