Goodbye, Android

Rightfully scathing article from Vice’s Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

I’ve been antagonistic with Apple products ever since I was a teenager, when Apple used to try to shove its apps down my throat (cough iTunes cough) whenever I just wanted to watch a movie trailer on Quicktime. I never liked Apple’s walled garden and “we-control-everything” approach, and I particularly disliked Apple fanboys’ dumb “oh my god there’s a new iThing coming out” reverence and hysteria.

So when the original iPhone came out a few years ago, I swore in multiple heated discussions with friends and strangers that I’d never buy an iPhone. Since then, I’ve only owned Android phones. First a few HTC ones, now a Sony phone.

Well, I’m sick of it. And I’m ready to go to the dark side.

I love the Android users in the comments chiming in that rooting a device and installing a custom ROM is a reasonable thing to do for Android devices that receive no updates from their carriers and manufacturers.

The ability for devices to receive updates in a timely fashion is critical to having even the vaguest hint of security in our post-Snowden revelations world. Windows 10‘s silent update mechanism is a great step in that direction for end-user security. Google even does it for their Chrome browser. Everybody else needs to get on board with it.