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Comment by fruitworks

5 hours ago

no ublock

How can whatsapp be better? Android at least has features like scoped storage.

Where is the ios equivalent of newpipe? Where is the iOS equivalent of pojavlauncher? where is the iOS equivalent of libretorrent or syncthing?

Open source is essentially banned on iOS.

What is the advantage of iOS? "Feels smoother"? Totally subjective.

Safari just got uBlock back!

iOS isn't particularly open source friendly, but mostly people don't do it because of personal incentives, not because it can't be done.

It's subjective, and I get that, but what you miss is that features are subjective too. Missing parity apps are only relevant when you care about that feature; at no point in my life have I ever thought my life would be better or more convenient if I could only torrent on my phone.

But having an app that is responsive and works well has made my life better. Standing outside a bar in the rain trying to get a stupid Covid app to work, not work well, just work, on Android has made my life worse.

(Ironically, I've kind of noticed this is part of the Unix ethos writ small: do one thing and do it well. It's not exact, and iOS for sure has tons of crud everything apps. And they sure don't work together! I just think it's amusing.)

  • You say that they are ideologically driven when they say browsers are better on Android, and then go on to defend that having LESS features is not necessarily bad. Honestly, you are the one sounding ideologically driven. Having more options is good, specially if there are better options out there (which is the case). Firefox on Android is a better browser than Chrome or whatever, and having the option to use it IS better than not having. You have the right to say that Safari is great, but you cannot say that Gecko on iOS would be worse because, well, you don't have that option.