Comment by myko
13 days ago
I agree with the thrust of the GP comment but:
> The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
I seriously doubt this. I agree that this is the perception but anyone working in the mobile space on both platforms for the past ~2 years will know Google is a lot more hard nosed in reviewing apps for privacy concerns than Apple these days (I say this negatively, there is a middle ground and Apple is much closer to it - Google is just friction seemingly in an attempt to lose their bad reputation).
Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
In contrast, on iOS I get prompted to allow or deny access to my information when the app tries calling Apple’s API to fetch that information.
For example, if an app wants access to my contacts to find other people using the app. On iOS I can simply say “no” when it prompts me to allow it to read my contacts. I lose out on that feature to find other people using the app, which I don’t care about, but I can still use the rest of the app. On Android it seemed like by installing the app, I had already agreed to give up my contacts… it was all or nothing. If I don’t like one privacy compromising feature, I couldn’t use the app at all.
Android may have improved this in the last few years, but I found it to be a dealbreaker for the entire platform.
> Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
Sounds like it was years ago... I remember that it was being introduced like... more than a decade ago? Of course maybe it took longer than iOS because of how Android works. iOS can just force everybody to use liquid glass with one update, Android has to think more about backward compatibility.
You still have the same things on android. If an android app requests eg exact location it can refuse to run and there’s nothing you can do. That sort of behaviour is prohibited on iOS and an app won’t be approved if it does that sort of thing. They have to allow declining location permission or at least approximate location
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It was there for the launch of the App Store with iOS. They didn’t have to worry about backward compatibility, because they took the time to worry about user privacy and app developer overreach from the very start.
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It would be nice if the app stores offered different levels of requirements. Let the market decide how much it cares about privacy (and security, and ...), reduce the friction for developers who want to do a particular thing, and give end users more confidence in the entire system.