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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Most Stable Smartphones These Days?
janimal writes: The iPhone used to be the smartphone that "just works." Ever since the 4S days, this has been true less and less with each generation. My wife's iPhone 6 needs to be restarted several times per week for things like internet search or making calls to work. An older 5S I'm using also doesn't consistently stream to Apple TV, doesn't display song names correctly on Apple TV and third party peripherals. In short, as features increase, the iPhone's stability is decreasing. In your opinion, which smartphone brand these days is taking up the slack and delivering a fully featured smartphone that "just works"?
Windows Phones (at least the Lumias).
No, seriously. Blackberry OS 10.3 is pretty damn solid. I don't have any issues with system stuff crashing on my Q10.
I do have some apps crash, but that's the app developer's problem. Not much the OS vendor can do about that.
I initially got a Blackberry because I wanted a hardware keyboard, and couldn't find an Android with a good one. However, after using the Q10 for a while, I would hate to go back to Android even with a good keyboard - I really, really like the Hub and the way gestures work.
Blackberry's voice assistant isn't as flexible as Google's or Apple's, so that might be an issue for you. It works well within what it's designed to do, though.
Apps can be an issue. Usually for anything I want an app for there's one or two apps, probably paid, versus thirty free ones in the Google Play store. I can access the Amazon Appstore for Android (comes with the OS) and sideload Snap, which lets me use the Google Play store, but the phone lacks some Android services so a good chunk of apps don't work. The Android runtime's pretty solid, so the apps that don't need Play Services work well.
Actually, I'm pretty happy with the iPhone6: it just works. I'm on T-mobile, and I doubt I've had to restart it to get it to work more than 3 times since I got it in September 2014. My wife has had the same experience -- she can't recall ever having to restart it to get it to work.
In my experience many problems can be attributed to networking. Most wireless routers have crap support for device discovery. I have some WNDR3700 routers are they were constantly requiring reboots. The only solution was to install a basic OpenWRT firmware - then they were great.
So when a device can not connect to another, or freezes when communicating over the network - check your wireless network. Many problems that are realized on portable devices can actually be tracked back to other devices entirely.
Why is an OS in 2015 allowing applications to make the whole UI unusable?
They don't, generally. They make a very solid effort for that not to happen.
Its conceivable that the kernel or watchdog is misbehaving, but more likely competition and increasing complexity has lead to:
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I've had my 5S for close to a year now and it has never actually crashed. It's rebooted for OS updates and for a few dozen dead batteries but that's about it. I *have* had to reboot it maybe a dozen times in all due to lagging performance though when it hadn't been rebooted in weeks. My desktop computer's the same way though. Every 2-3 weeks it just needs a reboot to clean house.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You're not kidding about iPhones (or rather iOS) becoming less stable.
I've got an iMac, Macbook Air, iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, all in daily use, and it was a godsend to me when Yosemite and iOS 8 introduced handoff and full AirDrop support. Except... it only works randomly. One minute the iPhone can see everything but nothing can see it. Then it can only see the iPad but now the iMac can see the iPhone.
I regularly need to transfer screenshots from my iPhone to my Mac and I used AirDrop for about a week, but then it stopped working and hasn't worked since.
When it first stopped working, I started using Cloud Share and uploading all the screenshots to the cloud so I could then download them on the Mac... but there's always one file missing. No matter how many screenshots I transfer, if n>1 then only n-1 turn up on the Mac.
Honestly over the past couple of months I've lost confidence in Apple. There's no point adding these great features if they don't actually work. And in my experience, Apple features that don't work never get fixed. New features seem to be more about marketing than actual usability.
Part of that is because Windows Phone allows very few background processes to run. For example try running a VoIP app like Zoiper and you will see real quick that it's not allowed to run in the background. Even apps from Microsoft like Lync don't work most of the time when you return to the start screen or some other app.