I have an urge to write about Android and mobile phones.
Every 6 to 12 months I post about how astounded I am about the improvements in mobile phones, especially in low to mid level range where my buying choices have always been. (Carry an easily breakable $1300 computer in my pocket every day? No thanks.)
I remain pretty happy with my Moto G5 Plus, but I am a bit puzzled about Android and the way apps seem to rapidly accumulate memory. My phone has 16GB internal memory, and after my last phone had, what, 4 or 8GB?, this sounded like a luxurious amount which would take a long time to use up.
However Android apps seem to take up quite ridiculous amounts of memory for what they do. Photos and video go to the sd card, so they can't be blamed, but my internal memory is now always hovering at about 15 to 15.5GB, meaning I am forever being urged by my phone to delete files and apps I haven't used for a while.
When I check on my phone as to the size of certain apps, I just don't understand why they can take up so much space. A couple of hundred MB used to be considered an enormous size for a program of any description. Now, to take an example, the Flipboard app, which I quite like as a sort of news and magazine aggregator, takes up 42 MB plus 179 MB of user data, and 51MB of cache. I can delete the cache, but I presume I lose my topic preferences if I delete the user data.
Line, a chat and call app that I sometimes use, but not that often, takes up 220 MB in the app itself, plus has 342MB in user data! That's huge. But even the internet browser I like to use now - Brave - takes up 112MB and shows 70MB of user data. Why so much?
Anyway, this has made me consider a new phone, just for the internal memory increase. I see that I can now get $399 phones with 128MB of internal memory - again, a huge leap forward in the space of a couple of years.
I do love Android, and would never consider going to Apple.
But as I say, I still would like to know how Android Apps have become the incredible memory bloat software that they are.
One other thing: it's really weird what sensors various phone companies choose to put in their phones, and how they can be completely inconsistent across their range. There are two Moto phones I was considering buying, which until one went on sale recently, were both $399 and both in the same series. Yet one has NFC capability, and one doesn't. My current Moto, which is getting up to 2 years old now, had one and I don't think it cost more than $400.
OPPO phones, which are very popular in Asia and my son loves his, at the cheaper end at least, do not seem generally to have NFC (needed to use your phone in lieu of your credit card), and a lot of other cheaper Chinese phones don't have it either. Yet when I checked the specs on a cheaper OPPO model currently on sale at JB Hi Fi, it does have it.
Then the other day I wanted to put a compass app on my phone, only to discover it doesn't have the magnetic sensor to allow that. Websites written years ago say that nearly all phones have it, but not Moto in their midrange. It seems all OPPO phones in the mid range have it, but even the new Moto with 128GB I am considering buying - a 2019 model - does not.
It is really odd the way companies seem to play around with what they can provide. All part of the fun of buying Android, though, I guess.
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