I don’t care if anyone has a Xiaomi, Oneplus, Samsung, etc. Each brand is using a modified version of Android, and they chose to be compatible with each other. But for example the “blue vs green bubble” drama is a thing specifically because of Apple locking their unsuspecting users into a closed ecosystem. And it sure isn’t Android’s fault for not being compatible with it.
The more power a company like this gains, the worse will it be for the whole industry.
Fanboy wars are exhausting, stupid, and unproductive.
You will be a happier person when you stop giving a shit about what phone or operating system someone else uses.
OPs point is also that they’re exhausting. If you try and make a legitimate criticism of Apple’s monopolistic behaviour as a trillion dollar corporation, then you just get flamed by Apple fanboys.
Depends why you made that criticism. I hate Apple as much as the next guy but the post makes it seem like the creator is the one who typically initiates a targeted and unwarranted attack at the user specifically (“…accuse him of supporting an evil…”) as soon as they see an iPhone in their hand and then gets mad when they retaliate
Exactly. As an iphone user (and linux sysadmin, compartmentalization is not that hard), i agree with your criticisms of apple most of the time. They just make the better phone IMHO, and I say that as a nexus 4, nexus 6p, pixel XL, oneplus 7 pro, and oneplus 9 pro user. Yes i used custom roms, no I do not have the patience to treat my phone as a linux project anymore.
I regularly have android users go out of their way to try and fight me over this, and they always claim I must not have used android. It’s annoying to field over and over.
Idk where they got a fanboy war when people here are like “fuck google” and “fuck Apple” if anything it’s anti-fanboying
Your phone privacy is owned by your isp and the OS maker. You arent doing the world any better being on android. Google is fucking awful too. Both are awful and should be broken up. They are way too large and powerful and only having 2 phone OSes in the world everyone runs made by 2 greeeeedy ass corporations is the problem neither of you can solve gloating about which evil corp you give money to to interact with modern society.
So i support Google by using an open source OS? Just because your phone uses Android dosent mean it has any Google services included. Since Android itself is open source, there are many Android OSs that dont include any Google Software.
Technically, you support google when you buy a phone that ships with licensed android including all Google’s shitware preinstalled
Yeah, but unfortunately it is impossible to buy a phone without that
Thats my point.
Used or refurbished phones already payed that once and will not pay it again. So technically, you are not giving a cent to google.
Network effect. Same reason why you should use firefox (or alts) as much as possible over chromium (or alts).
I do miss Symbian smartphones. Nokia was the shit back then
Checkout sailfishOS. You can run android apps on it.
This was exactly my point, I’m not lining up for an iPhone or an android. The lack of choice is what drives me to buy apple because when the time comes for a new phone it’s one or the other and I prefer the experience on iPhone. Really I would rather not give my money to either but there are no viable alternatives. I would not criticize anyone for buying android or apple, it’s a matter of what kind of shit sandwich do you want to eat, and it’s terrible.
I have one of each. I guess I’m Chaotic Evil.
Install GrapheneOS , it is degoogled, and security focused. if you want play store it runs inside a sandbox so Google isn’t in all your biz. Also has Mic and Camera shutoff options for the paranoid types.
Show me a single Iphone running a custom ROM with no Apple shit on it.
bro, the are android ROMs… there are ROMs whose entire thing is privacy and removing anything google. Saying they’re equal is making a bad faith argument “Apple and Google are evil so Android is evil” 😩
Android is much more open than Apple ever will be. They aren’t even in the same universe.
As an Android user, Android phones with Google Play Services are no better - in fact I’d say they’re probably worse
No at least you can side loade and install other app stores out of the box with android. It`s far from perfect but still way better.
FDroid for open source apps.
There is plenty to criticize about Apple when it comes to anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices…
But if you’re gonna talk on the level of “evil” and “freedom”, Apple’s greatest sin is their supply chain.
And then there’s Google, whose evil I would place somewhere between [Apple’s] pseudo-monopoly and [Apple’s] pseudo-slavery. At least Apple is a tech company. Google is a surveillance company that just happens to make tech so they can monitor you more closely.
Working with the shared-space AR APIs in iOS and Android really drove home the difference in their priorities. The iOS SDK only allowed us to share AR data through a local, SDK-managed connection. The data is opaque, can’t be directly serialized, and doesn’t work anyway if you try to persist/distribute it yourself. Android, on the other hand… They wanted us to upload your AR data to Google-owned servers, where they could do Google-knows-what with the scans of your living room.
It’s sad that we’re at a point where you have to either pay for your privacy, or pay with your privacy. But we can at least not be naive about it. Android is more interoperable, more prolific, and more lenient with third-party code. And that’s because it’s a good strategy if you’re a surveillance giant. Not because it’s good for consumers.
Edit:
Got a couple of comments that are like “Um, actually, Apple is still subject to government surveillance and exploits”.
Let me be clear: You should not expect any off-the-shelf product to shield you from intelligence agencies and state-sponsored hackers. You will have to radically change your life to accomplish that, and “Apple or Google?” won’t even be a relevant question for you.
And I’m not saying Apple doesn’t do shady monitoring for their own commercial purposes.
All I’m saying is that Google’s core business model is shady monitoring, and that directly influences their decisions regarding Android. So painting it as the commoner’s hero against the greedy walled-garden warden is a dangerous proposition.
There are no good guys here.
There’s some hardware, SDKs, and back-end services that you can evaluate on their own merits if you’re capable.
But if you want to just look at business practices:
- There’s one company that doesn’t want to integrate with anything outside of their own products – because that’s good for their bottom line.
- And there’s one company that wants to integrate with anything and everything – because that’s good for their bottom line.
Don’t assume the difference is benevolence.
I cant be the only one who dreams of apple and all their pattents becoming foss.
Itl never happen under capitalism but damn would it be nice.
They are all kind of terrible right now, at least for me. I hate what the big companies are doing, and the smaller projects such as Fairphone simply aren’t good enough yet. Guess I’ll try to make my existing one last for as long as possible, though that was already the plan.
the smaller projects such as Fairphone simply aren’t good enough yet
What is not good enough with Fairphone ?
Their 7 (?) years of software support is kind of misleading to me because they stop getting chip-level security updates after something like 3-4 years due to the specific Qualcomm chip they use. Not to mention the chip is on the slower side of today’s phones, let alone phones 7 years from now.
I can see how others might be fine with that though, just my 2 cents.
Display, battery life, performance, supported bands, software reliability, camera quality, etc.
I know I am one of those weirdos that asks for a lot from a mobile device, but I want something that can act as a high speed hotspot for 5 devices and a desktop environment at the same time, while playing back high resolution media and charging fast. This kind of thing has always been possible with Samsung’s flagship, but now every generation it feels like yet more is removed compared to the older one. I’m still on the S21U and while I’m not very happy with it, I haven’t seen anything better, including the new Samsungs.
Maybe I should set my sights lower, but it just frustrates me because these are all things my S9+ could do in 2017.
Power users get screwed over now.
“My personality is based on the fact that I have an iPhone.”
The corporate oligarchy of unmerica working exactly as designed, divide and conquer
I have used a number of android phones and iPhones, and I can say that the experience on an iPhone is vastly superior to anything android has to offer. Until that changes, this problem is going to continue.
Companies can keep pumping out dogshit all they want and slapping a different coat of paint on it, at the end of the day it’s still dogshit.
Someone needs to build an OS superior to apple’s that is designed exclusively and optimized for the hardware of the phone, and it seems unlikely that will ever happen. Also that fact in and of itself is the reason iPhones are and will always have a superior user experience than anything android has to offer.
I would love to see something similar that is more secure, more privacy focused, and still has as good of a user experience as an iPhone, but this is an accessibility vs security problem.
Apple has leveraged what they once touted as a safer option because they would look after the security part on behalf of the user and twisted it into a more sinister business model (or perhaps that was always the M.O.)
Someone needs to build an OS superior to Apple?
IOS is a very bad OS. I really took android for granted until I had to manage iPads for work. Short list: You can’t have a management app auto start. So if someone locks themselves out of their device without manually opening the management app, they’re screwed and need factory reset.
Apps aren’t built to auto scale to device? I literally couldn’t believe my eyes the first time I tried to run an iPhone app on an iPad and it showed as phone sized screen in the middle of this iPad pro. Android is so well made that you can resize windows on the fly and most apps react just fine.
Thank goodness we paid for an extremely expensive MDM solution, because there’s no way to install apps without making every single user make an Apple account.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but the typical user experience is vastly superior to anything android has to offer. I’m also specifically referring to phone os. Not tablets. I really don’t like apple as a company, but user experience on apple vs android phones are like night and day.
I work in IT for a school board and yeah, the support of iPads is straight shit, so I feel your pain.
It’s really not.
Even just how Apple handles apps. If I asked you which company would present their apps in a neat organized alphabetized list that you can quickly scroll or search through, and which company would just dump them all in a mass of garbage on your homescreen and make you search for them, you’d assume it would be Google that forces you to search, but nope, that’s Apple’s terrible UX for managing the most basic aspect of a smartphone.
Literally just scroll all the way to the right on the home screen, there’s your category/alphabetical app list.
A feature added late to iOS, and one they have hidden behind the pile of homescreens you have since every app you install is just dumped on them. On Android you swipe up from anywhere on the homescreen and you immediately search or browse.
You are describing GrapheneOS. Privacy and Security focused and built to run on Pixel phone hardware only.
If what I read is true that does sound promising, but still leaves consumers with a number of issues.
You still need to support google to get this phone, (if part of the goal is to not support companies with questionable business practices) and while GrapheneOS does look promising I still have my doubts on the user experience.
From what I have read I believe you would need to install this OS yourself on the device. That to me is more of a workaround than a solution.
The typical user isn’t going to want to install a custom OS. This isn’t a product that is readily available to consumers to purchase through conventional means as far as I can tell. (I may be wrong on that, but it doesn’t appear that I could walk into a carrier store and purchase one ready to go).
Yes, the Pixel has specific hardware and security which makes it ideal for a private/secure phone. So it is unfortunate that a purchase supports Google, however the pixels are cheap so I assume Google is taking a profit loss to gain market (and data).
Graphene does have a web installer, so rather than the old days of connecting to a command shell and typing cryptic commands( for the average user) you connect your phone and click the web install buttons in order till you reach bottom of webpage. it gives you an instruction how to boot the phone into certain modes with volume and power buttons. While my mom isn’t going to work with this a 9-10 year old could do it.
/e/ OS was selling preinstalled phones, I haven’t seen the same from GrapheneOS yet…but I have not checked in depth to see if somebody is offering this.
Preinstalled is where it needs to get to though.
My main beef with smartphones is how easy it is for OEMs to completely lock that piece of shit and make it impossible for anyone without lots of patience and a hacker mindset to get root permission to uninstall bloatware, or a custom rom. “Oh, but you can do that on phone XYZ!” - But you can’t with nearly every other phone
Freedom was when Telephones were still with a cable attached to the wall, before the dependence on always being reachable with these snitches in your pocket.
Well, Samsung’s are a bit more modified.
Guess I’m no longer an Apple fan. Huh. I’m just locked in at this point. Switching would just spread my data around more and I’m already committed to not upgrading for a few years.
On Android you can make a hell of a lot more choices on where your data goes. The vast majority lives on my nas… and i can call back to it any time i want. Personal cloud of sorts.
Virtually any company big enough to make a worthwhile phone is going to do terrible things. Think a given company is an exception? They won’t be once they get larger.
That being said, the fact that “everybody does it” doesn’t make it okay. The “blue vs green bubble” shit is nonsense that’s totally unnecessary.
Sent from my iPad
Who is unsuspecting? I choose to use a iPhone because:
It is a closed ecosystem, a billion apps is enough for me. I wanted to be able to update the phone for many years I didn’t want to have preinstalled 3rd party bloatware I wanted a device that was less prone to malware
Android is a great OS, and it is better in some areas than iOS, but nothing particularly important to me.
Only Americans are concerned about green and blue bubbles. If it’s so upsetting to you, use WhatsApp. Don’t blame Apple because Google couldn’t standardise on a single messaging app for more than 5 minutes.
Using Google devices and pointing at Apple and saying “they’re evil, don’t use them” is laughable. They’re all bad companies, no organisation should be worth trillions.