like many things, it depends. If you live and die by letting Spotify choose your music based on your listening, then yes, Spotify is better at that.

but if you just want a simple music player that isn’t also trying to shoehorn in podcast or other things, that just plays music for you, and that offers, lossless quality, AM for the win.

I had three months of Apple Music free when I was a Spotify user and so out of boredom I gave it a shot and at the end of the three months canceled my Spotify. I could give a shit about my Spotify wrapped sharing thing, and two things really started to annoy me about Spotify. the first was the way I had to look at artists if I just wanted to peruse. It made me look at either all the artists i “followed” (which is not really related to what you might have in your library in anyway) or it would represent an artist entire library to me instead of just the ones I had downloaded. and the second one was the frequency at which I would have downloaded music that wouldn’t play because something in the app made it so when I clicked on say, Nirvana, it would reach out to the Internet to show me nirvana’s sort of my space, splash page, and when there was no service would say give me an error about no service… even though I would have three albums “downloaded.” this is the thing that happened beyond just a single bug, because I used Spotify for probably a decade.

annnnyway, I made the switch, and I think Apple Music is way better experience on mobile AND they have a lot more music. The desktop app is still just a skin version of iTunes that looks like it’s from 2001 and I am completely fucking baffled that they haven’t redesigned it, but it’s nothing worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater for

If the visibility of scratches is enough to make you need a new phone so bad that you’re willing to smash yours now… you know that… I don’t know how this needs explained but… you realize your new phone even with a screen protector will… get… scratches on it… right? Like, phone screens eventually get scratches. That’s what happens. I’d recommend a flip phone if you’re gonna be that crazy.

That’s like getting a flat tire and then lighting your car on fire and filing a police report for the insurance money because you can’t be bothered.

Tl;DR What on earth are you doing?

yeah lower fees would also 100% be a simple solution here too. When it was innovative and the only legit app store on the market, site maybe it was easier to get away with, but nowadays that lead has closed so it’s pretty wild they still take 30%

exactly this. To all the folks saying “tHen jUsT dOn’T SiDELoAd” the whole point is that it’s not just allowing the users who want to sideload today, it’s opening the door for side loading to become THE way that major companies push folks to access their apps.

Regardless of what OS team you’re on, the “freedom” of the android and side loading is that it also requires a much higher degree of knowledge, decision making, and active self protection by the users - that inherently means more security/malware/support issues.

If you want or need all that, you’re probably gonna fucking hate a lot of things about iOS across the entire experience anyway, so you go Android. If you have zero understanding or desire to add that level of responsibility to your digital life, then maybe you aren’t married to Android and the iPhone simplifies this for you.

I think it’s a dumb pointless move to force side loading on iOS.

TL;DR Some people want to drive stick shift, others want an automatic, others want all electric - this like saying all car models need to legally be made in all three versions or it can’t be made at all.

this is the right answer. Feels like a lot of “but we have RCS!” talk but if you pull on that thread even for a seconds it’s still a total mess.

iMessage and Lighting are/were great examples of the value you could get by letting the company that makes your phone, develop messaging and proprietary ports. Until USB-C became more prevalent, the Lightning port was miles ahead of USB-A or micro-USB. iMessage was also miles ahead of any messaging platform. Miles. Ahead.

We’re im a shifting point now though where universal standards have caught up are catching up, so those arguments became a little thinner.

With that in mind… iMessage still has an operational edge still because it is so un-fragmented.

Even if RCS became a standard tomorrow on all Androids, the exact fragmentation that makes Android customizable, will slow its ability to ever be as streamlined as iMessage. Plus, I’d rather my shit go through Apple’s servers than Google’s if you’re gonna give me the choice. And I say that as a decade long Android user and former Pixel user.