Moving From iOS to Android – Temporarily..?

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I’ve been using an iPhone since the 3G [so about 5 years], right up to my 4S’ encounter with the washing machine. While there are many opinion pieces out there comparing the two ecosystems – just like pictures of cats – there’s always room for one more. I’m sure there are plenty of people looking at yesterday’s announcement from Apple and wondering where they are going next.

The point of no return for my moving to Android was the drop in price of the Nexus 4 to £159 a few weeks back. It is an absolute bargain for a phone that most benchmarks – I looked at GeekBench – put on a par with the iPhone 5. The additional real estate on the screen is a joy, and one which I think would be the single toughest aspect of a move back to the iPhone. The battery life is hard to compare with a handset that was nearly two years old and because of adapting usage patterns [more on this later], but it’s certainly very good. It’s only paranoia that has stopped me from charging more than once a day – and even then only on a couple of occasions.

The actual mechanics of my move were simple: for instance, I’ve used Google Contacts and Calendar for years. The first app that I bought was Tasker, which epitomises the flexibility of the platform. It can be a little bit tricky to navigate, especially as the majority of the documentation predates the current UI, but I’m getting there, with various functions set for when I hit / leave my home wifi, when I plug in headphones, and so on.

So on to some of the stuff that’s not so hot. I have a side-by-side comparison with one very specific iPhone app which I used every day for years on my early morning walk to the station: TuneIn Radio. It is now completely unusable: I get about 10 seconds of radio followed by 40 seconds of buffering. This could be specific to the carrier [I haven’t changed, it’s just what the handset offers], but on paper HSPDA should be faster than the 3g service I was using. Stuck in the back corner of our house – again a side by side comparison – the wifi reception is also not as good as on my 4S.

The various views that the Nexus desktop provides: the home screens versus the All Apps view that runs flows into the unkempt wilderness that is pages and pages of widgets – I mean who thought that was a good idea? I know why it’s there, it’s just messy.

A few more mini-gripes. I’m not that keen on the music app, and haven’t really found a podcast app that I’m sure is a keeper [BeyondPod seems to be popular but the full version for £4.49 strikes me as pretty expensive]. In the interest of balance, it has to be said that the podcast app on the iPhone had morphed into a real frustration. It was a dark day when it was carved out of warm embrace of the iPod app: the cost of not synching podcasts by wire was something that was borderline unusable. Maybe iOS 7 will bless us [and I still cradle my iPad every day] with something that actually works.

One of my biggest gripes is with the permissions list that apps are looking for – the double edged sword of flexibility seems to be that developers throw everything at the wall on the off chance that something will stick. I am absolutely prepared to embrace this for Tasker – it needs permissions to do what it says on the tin – and the liberty of life outside Apple’s walled garden is, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, a breath of fresh air. However, the list of perms that that the LinkedIn app [an example of one of many that I’ve passed on] is faintly terrifying. The ability to go in with a pair of tweezers, and toggle perms on a per app basis, is something that iOS does very well. It is coming apparently in 4.3, as a quick google of ‘app ops android’ will show.

The opinion I’ve been fomenting over the last couple of weeks extends what I already knew about the flexibility of the platform, pre-adoption. Fair enough, it is it there for you in Android, but I think that what’s left behind for the average person who couldn’t be bothered is not as polished or well considered. I think the ‘average person’ in this instance subdivides into two: people who either skim across the surface, or just install software with impunity.

Apple has a very accessible platform, and one that protects you from potentially poor decision making. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there wondering why their phone is glowing at night, when it’s churning through a dozen fat processes in parallel in the background. [Apple have been particularly conservative here, and the whole background process functionality was something of a hobby for me – right up until Washing Machine Day :(. It will be interesting to see how the new background functionality continues to develop from iOS 7 onwards.]

I’m only a few weeks into Android so I’m sure my opinion will refine, if not change. Was the move off the iPhone one-way? I’m not sure. Would I ever consider buying a ‘premium’ Android phone? No, I really can’t see it. That takes you into OS fragmentation territory, and an experience that is still predicated on good old Android.

One other thing I’m pretty sure about: I’m not going to develop for it. I have spent the last couple of years teaching myself Objective C and I can’t face Java!

iPhones and Washing Machines: Limping to the Finish Line

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My iPhone 4S had an unfortunate encounter with the washing machine at the weekend, which amounted to about 20 minutes of water exposure – not to mention detergent, and whatever goodies conditioner contains [for that softer, fresher smelling iPhone!]. We tried the recommended bag of rice trick for 24 hours, which didn’t work. When I opened it afterwards it was still soaking wet, and the battery was leaking. I took out the motherboard and dried it off, and spotted some corrosion on the camera connector. Clearly, any recovery from the condition it was in was going to be a borderline miracle, but I thought ordering up a new battery was worth a shot.

I duly replaced the battery tonight [all told about 2 1/2 hours worth of fun – it’s late!] and, rather surprisingly, it booted up with iTunes presenting me with a request to unlock the device. Rather less surprisingly, the screen doesn’t work. I did a bit of searching to find out which connector was for the screen data [I can find no others that drive the screen in any separate way], and spotted a serious amount of corrosion which I either missed at the weekend, or which has subsequently appeared. Here’s a macro shot before I cleaned it with a toothbrush:

Corrosion

…and after. Magnification is slightly better with this shot because I used a cheap and nasty extension tube:

Culprit

In the top right, the third contact from the end appears to have completely corroded. While it may not be the only damage stopping the screen from working, it’s got to be part of the problem.

I was planning on upgrading to whatever Apple releases in the next couple of months anyway. In the meantime, I have the dubious pleasure of a Nokia clamshell from the previous decade. I’d forgotten what a joy predictive text was :).

GeoFencer – Update

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I’ve fixed a bug that was having a fundamental impact on reliability. I mentioned this in my initial post about the release, and did some more digging. When the device is under resource pressure, the operating system can intervene and kill off apps. My understanding of the registering for location data isn’t a true background mode, and this is quite deliberate in order to minimise resource consumption. Assuming that the app is suspended, the operating system will make a decision on which apps to send the location data to via the appropriate delegate based on the registered mode in the plist file. At this point, the app will launch in the background, and you have a short amount of time to process. [I think it’s at this point that the OS can tidy up based on resource constraints.] Before hitting the location oriented delegate, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions is called, at which point you can check for a prior termination through:

if ([launchOptions objectForKey:UIApplicationLaunchOptionsLocationKey])

at which point I restart the location and region monitoring, based on a recommendation here. This does raise the question as to why you need to restart the location monitoring, given that the app is identified as wanting to receive location data in the plist. Having to register in code introduces volatility, which has to then ride through the various running  mode changes. Perhaps it’s to have convergent functionality [and readability] with doing the same in the foreground. Either way it works.

One other change in the AppDelegate is that I no longer use the same property based UILocalNotification. If more than one delegate is hit on restart, trying to use the same notification will cause an error.

I’ve also noticed a ‘feature’ in the GeoFence creation view controller. I thought it would be more elegant to automatically save the location data based on the pin drop event rather than a hard-wired button, as the map is already cluttered. One downside of this approach is that changing the radius of the region after the pin is down updates the screen but isn’t saved. It would be a relatively simple change to make but I’m toying with the idea of a podcast app [using some of the new background features].