I think it's been said that nobody has yet cracked Apple's Lockdown Mode, but that's likely not truly comparable?

I'm sure they do collect data but not to the point that they hamper functionality. They still focus first and foremost on usability, functionality whereas Google focus on collecting data, serving ads and then on functionality.

But yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that they both collect as much as they can.

Google gets nearly all of its revenue from targeted advertising, and Apple does not. Apple has an incentive to restrict or completely deny third-party data collection, because they’ve made privacy a major part of their brand marketing and there is major reputational risk to Apple for being caught lying about this. Apple’s “Ask App Not To Track” feature made such a measurable dent in the revenue of various surveillance tech companies that they complained about it, loudly, including Meta paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times about it.

There are multiple objective reasons to believe that Apple is a more trustworthy actor here than other companies, including vulgar capitalistic reasons.

You can just say “pfft, wow, you really believe that?”, I guess, but if that’s your position there’s no reason to argue about this with you.

For free? No, but if you built a native app that needed a backend, you'd still need to host the backend somewhere too. I host my own web apps from a cheap mini pc at home and access them over tailscale for personal use.

I host my app on GitHub pages for free. But yes, it's just static which is really all you need with how powerful wasm and JavaScript are.

I'm pretty sure that if you build your PWA in a way it works offline through caching (which is easy if it's just a static website), you could host/serve it temporarily and just install it once.

Yeah it stands for Progressive Web App - but there are lots of hosting solutions with generous free tiers.

I host a bunch of my own PWAs on Cloudflare using Pages and Workers. It's been free so far.

As a lark, I built a set of personal productivity apps that are delivered as standalone local webpages. Works surprisingly well on Android, haven't tested on iOS.

even worse - if you need to build some app with entitlements or some features likes push notifications etc then you need non-free account

Most apps can be a PWA nowadays. A Hetzner VPS costs roughly the same as the Apple dev membership. Saying this as a native iOS dev since iOS 4. For your average pretty json printer you don’t need to go native.

[flagged]

You don't need a computer to develop Android apps?

The limit is 3 apps AFAIK

Not only is it TOFU but that comment is doubly wrong because you can't really back up much other than the bulk storage directory without adb root (which requires a custom build, which obviates the issue to begin with).

Apple has the same thing, but for some reason added Developer Mode which you must enter on the iPhone first. It’s quite involved, with a restart and 3 confirmation dialogs. That had me wondering why they are suddenly so cautious around this.

I agree with you that iOS is just as not acceptable, and don't plan to switch to it myself.

Yeah but the situation used to be you don't need to jump through flaming hoops on android and you do need to jump through flaming hoops on ios for installing. Now it's you have to jump through X flaming hoops on android and X+Y on ios for installing. If I'm not going to jump through flaming hoops then I'm not installing so it doesn't matter what Y is in the equation and I'm not taking into account installing when comparing those devices, which mean ios might be a better proposition.

Alternatively if the difficulty of moving from 0->X is not negligible but moving from X->X+Y is then I may still be installing but I'm not considering the Y in the comparison then either. i.e. If I have to show my id to google once and apple twice it's the initial showing that is the turn off, or if it's the action of getting my credit card out in the 1st place rather than the cost difference that concerns me.

> People believed in Android, and in Google.

I wonder why. The last time I considered believing in Android was in 2008 when I was choosing between getting an Android phone or Openmoko phone. Went with the latter and never regretted, as Android quickly turned out to be a disappointment. This is just the continuation of the slow crawl they've been on since 20 years ago and it's been really obvious that it's going to happen. The answer is to reject Android just like iOS, not to keep hoping that inevitable isn't going to happen.

I think the excerpt fits well enough for my intent.

Benny.

Weird way to promote the /e/ project.

Your first sentence and that last link are practically at war with each other.

I can see the alure of having a very secure mobile device and can understand why you personally wouldn't see a reason to use anything else.

But Graphene requires too much fidling to get spouse approval.

/e/ might not be as secure as GrapheneOS but it is at least as secure as everything else. Plus it actively helps you preserve your privacy and use self hosted services.

and limited to one type of device that not everyone can get or wants.

Because in order to use Graphene, you have to financially support the same company that is making Android less free.

Well, for one you can actually buy an /e/ device right now.

Also, once you have it, it just works.

Some people like that.

>Maybe you're just used to your flavors of jank so you don't see it?

That's a throwaway line, everyone is used to their own flavors of jank, even on Linux.

>Your goal is to get off windows, but I've had only Linux on my home computers for ~10 years and it's been working great the whole time, Literally nothing I can think of to complain about.

I think you're trying to read too much into a comment and trying to poke holes...I don't have any Windows, if that wasn't clear. Since we're flexing about experience...I've been doing this since RH 7.2 came in the back of a book 20+ years ago and deploying production Linux services for about the same at a large scale but whatever.

Everything has its flavor of jank, and for most people, Linux is a flavor of jank just barely too far over the horizon still. But, once again, far better than what it ever was 20 years ago, and has the potential to pass Windows at least here soon. But, one of the biggest hurdles especially for adoption is, well, the community, 90% of which think they're one step away from being Linus simply because they installed Arch following a tutorial, and they treat new users the same way for no good reason as they tell the same new users "it's Easy!"

You must be one of the luckier Linux users I guess. I have heard of them, but I've had plenty of convos where once you actually dig into things it's usually not as truthful and playing to the crowd on an internet forum _about Linux_ for confirmation.

>It's been a few years since I had to use OSX for work, but last I used it, you couldn't maximize windows without a 1+ second animation playing when you cmd+tabbed

I use it every day for work, for heavy eng work. Let's be honest, yes there's an animation delay to some degree, but this is trafficking a bit in hyperbole here. GNOME has basically the same behavior for many aspects including switching workspaces by default...which can be turned off in both. The Cinnamon or KDE default experience is better in this regard.

>Docker was also super slow

Only issue I've had with Docker on a Mac with speed is when I'm trying to use some hefty x64 images on ARM macOS (I still have a last model i7 MBA for fun too), which is expected, same with VMs. I've run some pretty gnarly full stack apps, some that included Java backends that needed up to 8gb because reasons, without issue as long as I built an ARM image.

>There's no package manager and the usual recommendation (brew) for a third party one is trash that will update programs you didn't ask it to when you're installing something else.

It behaves roughly the same on macOS as it does on Linux, IME. If I'm not explicit on dnf/apt, I get more updates than just what I wanted too. But maybe I'm missing something. It's how I manage all my tooling on the work env and gives me very few issues save usually for only the occasional connection issue which is always attributed to work VPN nonsense.

>IIRC external monitors are completely unusable from blurry text.

Even on a Mac? The ecosystem is designed for professional graphics use, never had an issue there even back to CRT days heavily using all the Adobe suite versions, and even with non-Apple displays. Every Linux setup I've ever used, including this one is janky with external monitors, let alone dual. Even the "Easiest distro in the world" (Mint) according to most Linux nerds is problematic to say the least in trying to use the screen res/layout settings.

>I used a windows laptop recently for a year or so for work. Absolute jank. Sleep was just broken. Like wouldn't sleep/spin down the fan with the lid closed unless I unplugged it. Often completely frozen requiring hard reboots when opening the lid.

A - agreed, I don't work anywhere which requires Windows, because for all my devtooling, it's all tied into a macOS ecosystem, yes, with homebrew for now. Been that way for almost a decade now. Ideally, one should also do a lot in a build container for 1:1 matching so your CI jobs run the same env/toolset/versions. It's better for real dev work and way more stable in a way that won't require you to become a support headache for the company either.

B - what you are describing is a hardware issue and attributing it to Windows. I had the same issue on a B550 series desktop mobo, went to Linux, same exact behavior. This is not an OS issue.

>Leaving it "sleeping" for an extended period would still heavily drain the battery.

To my mind, non-mac laptops are garbage for battery life, everyone knows this, and yeah if it wasn't sleeping for real it's gonna eat up resources. This is more a hardware issue than anything, not the OS layer. Put Linux on it and I could almost guarantee you would have had similar issues, I've dealt with this like I said w/ the mobo above.

>WSL barely works. For some reason I have to care whether things are in my Windows or Linux home directory. Wrong one and git commands take seconds. I'd get environment mismatches where the terminal in VSCode would fail to run commands that run in a normal CLI, etc. DNS would break inside WSL because it wouldn't propagate config from DHCP. UI is just slow to respond to anything. If you start typing in the start menu search (e.g. "shut down" or "power off"), the menu replaces itself with a different one, and you can't find the power options until you close and reopen the menu.

Man, I have to wonder....was this not using latest/WSL2 and instead using WSL1? Because there _is_ a massive leap between the two. It's not ideal compared to native on Linux or even mac but still works quite well for many use cases. When the WSL2 upgrade came back when I was forced in a past env to use a Windows laptop, myself and 4 other Devs could run our full stack including Kafka locally without much issue on WSL2 other than producing heat on the laptop b/c of how many services we were running. (About 35 .NET Core microservices at the time, along with redis, Kafka, etc.). Yes, the home pathing was a tad annoying.

>If you start typing in the start menu search (e.g. "shut down" or "power off"), the menu replaces itself with a different one, and you can't find the power options until you close and reopen the menu.

Yeah every OS seems to have issues with their search/launcher tooling, but the Start Menu has been shit for a while now. I've had more issues on Windows than anything else re: manu defaults (once tweaked on like W10 it's fine), but then Linux, and then even macOS...before paring down Spotlight to only search certain things, which made it way better.

shrugs

I think this is one of the challenges of building good software, it's why Apple does what they do. Some experiences on one hardware set are somehow perfect, but they're rare, some are the exact opposite. But a lot comes down to what a user is willing to tolerate, too, and while someone might say it was "Easier on Linux" it's usually just that they're willing to tolerate more terminal madness and odd behaviors than others in their daily driver.

Do you run into issues with apps not supporting it? Things like banking or auth? That is the main complaint I see for alternative phone OSes, and I don't know if that has gotten any better.

Unfortunately, there is no way to use Google Pay on it. I'm all for trading some convenience for privacy, but not having to carry all my cards is too much of a convenience for me :(

Graphene sounds great in theory. Until you read the device compatibility page and see you're still at the mercy of Google. In order to support graphene you must first pay Google for one of the most expensive android devices on the market. Oh and Google never sold this device in my country so I guess I'm out of luck even if I wanted to do that.

Uh huh. Freedom. In some empty rhetorical sense. Meanwhile you still have 99.999% of the usual obligations.

Go freely walk out your local supermarket without paying.

But your Android phone is unlocked #winning

No, it might sound smart, but it's incorrect to equivocate. You don't need to "lock in" to Apple's services either. Apple has a meaningfully better track record than Google on privacy in many regards.

(Apple's Terms of Service is also much better, for not having an arbitration clause anywhere except the Apple credit card, with a very easy opt-out flow.)

The iOS app store is like the craigslist personals of online markets. I feel incredibly dirty just going on there. I have to scroll down 3-5 options just to find the exact match for what I searched for, many of the prioritized options being look-alikes that could easily fool people into installing some malware-esque garbage.

I love my 13 mini as a phone, but I don't understand how anyone could compare the two app stores and think iOS comes out on top. At least android has f-droid.

Includes status symbol and ecosystem lock!

RCS barely works on regular Android.

In the last week or so, multiple people have told me they cannot text me. I found that I was getting a "verification limit exceeded" error (perhaps because of my unusual behavior of usually being at work or at home, both which have known wifi networks, and sending maybe half a dozen texts any day?). I got the error to go away for half a day and they were still unable to message during that time, and now that I have it disabled I still appear as online on RCS (yet still unreachable?) so they still cannot message me lol.

I've been on the other end many times across multiple Android devices across multiple years, being able to send messages to some RCS users, being unable to send messages to other RCS users, not being able to receive messages in group chats entirely comprised of Android users, etc.

SMS/MMS: Handled by carriers, you can send messages to people who are offline and they'll get the messages when they turn their phone back on.

Telegram/FbMessenger/Whatsapp/etc: Handled by individual corporations, you can send messages to people who are offline and they'll get the messages when they turn their their device on.

RCS: Handled by both Google and carriers at the same time for some reason, maybe 80% chance of being able to send a message to somebody who's online, let alone offline.

I'm sure there are multiple reasons it was challenging, but Google and friends have not risen to the occasion at all. Truly a garbage protocol.

I've found that RCS works ok-ish on the Owner user, but doesn't work at all on any other (it appears as an empty message). Moving to the Owner account you can tap to redownload the message and then it appears correctly in all accounts. It's a mess that makes daily driving a secondary account not worth it

SMS is pretty horrible yes but I don't know anyone that uses it anymore. The only ones I get are spam from my phone provider and some MFA systems that are stuck in the past. Oh and the odd shipping notification.

RCS I didn't even bother to set up. I don't want to use yet another system. If people want to reach me they have WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to choose from.

In the USA, I think most people can easily afford a Pixel 9a at $56/year of device support starting from today.

Calculator checks yearly cost based on device support: (https://ibb.co/xq82YQCw)

Sources for device lifetime from calculator: (https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime)

I used a New+Unlocked+Pixel+X on eBay to find a rough price of the phone.

Most people get scammed by their carrier and pay $25-45 per month just for their wireless subscription, and many more get caught up in the device bundles which gets you the "latest and greatest", at a huge price. So people are paying, per month, what you can pay, per year for a Pixel.

You can use Silent Link to pay by the gigabyte with no expiration date. Most people don't need unlimited—I use a maximum of 5 GB per month, and my average is around 3. At $1.60 per month, that is $60 per YEAR for me.

Swap in https://jmp.chat for another 60 dollars per year for calls/texts and you get a $120/year phone bill which is just $10/month.

I will be moving from US Mobile to Jmp.chat once my plan expires.

You could also use US Mobile for $17/month which is unlimited and is user friendly. They also often have Pixels for a significant discount with no lock-in.

If you're considering buying an iPhone, you can definitely afford a Pixel

Motorola + Graphene coming 2027. I'm at least waiting to see what comes of that before making any decisions on my next phone.

A Pixel 9a is ~350 Euro here in Europe and it still has better device security (separate secure enclave, MTE, etc.) than pretty much any other phone besides iPhone and other Pixels. Pretty great cameras for the price too. Still supported until 2032 (so presumably also on GrapheneOS).

I get you. I used to buy Nexus devices as well as some of the first Pixels, until at some point the prices shot up to ridiculous levels for a phone and I went with other brands.

Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.

I bought an 8a new when it launched for the express purpose of installing GOS. It cost like $450, and will last me most of a decade. If you are using a phone that costs significantly less than that (and I am speaking from personal experience! I had an Obamaphone that I got at a foodbank for many years, as well as a number of crappy used Androids!) your phone storage is so limiting that you are struggling to install more than a few apps.

That's £105-£150 for first two pixels 6a on ebay.

If you consider getting iPhone you DEFINITELY can afford something much newer than that.

Don't have pixels in my country. Apple only alternative. And a bunch of chinese brands which I wont touch in this scenario

I always wonder what these unspecified ways that iOS is better than Android actually are.

These posts always have a few comments like that, but they never actually say what they find to be better on iOS.

Install anyapk. It uses a wireless ADB bridge to install whatever you want.

Yes, significantly. That’s a great way to put it. My dad is all-in, and I’m pretty surprised at how nice things can be.

Still, it’s like a credit card with a fee. It’s great so long as you can pay, but oftentimes it’s a nightmare to get out of if times are tough.