Comment by pngwen

I haven't seen new data from celbrite in awhile, but I believe that grapheneos was the only truly secure phone from it for both bfu and afu as of a couple years ago.

Apple lost my confidence after they removed Advanced Device Encryption for British users (plus implemented age verification for them).

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...

Can I plug iphone via usbc and access photos and videos directly and rest of the filesystem directly? Thats my flow, I am not buying a phone which has this artificially disabled 'for my own good', while being unix under the bonnet. Insult to my intelligence and all that.

You really think Apple doesn't gather data on what you do on your devices? This notion that Android == spyware is so old and boring but HN just loves Apple.

Actually I have been tinkering with PWA as a way to remake some of my toy apps. Though a lot of the automations I made for Android can be replicated through Apple’s Shortcuts app.

The biggest loss for me was Termux. I had lots of scripts and such that I ran, plus just having a Linux environment in my pocket was nice. Luckily I found ish which gives me alpine Linux on top of a virtual x86 machine as provided by a JITC layer. I can host PWA apps out of that environment for local use. Of course I can also ssh to my unix like machines from there too.

I am starting to tinker with swift a bit more too. As with google, I could buy a dev key to deploy my own apps only this way I have all the window dressing and end to end encryption on cloud storage.

Doesn’t that require you to host it and have it available on the open web, though? Is there a host that allows you to, for free, not only HTML/CSS/JS but also access to arbitrary tools and bespoke scripts on the backend?

Have PWAs stopped working on Android, or something?

I love PWAs. I just hope they never get too popular, or Google will kill them.

With a free account, it needs to be reinstalled every 7 days because the signature expires. It's hardly convenient for personal use.

This is not true either. At some point you had to pay. But it’s been a long time since they made it free (with caveats).

Even free-er with Expo and React Native. Course then you have to touch JavaScript ;)

What an insane song and dance to run software.

>free

You forgot to factor in the cost of a Mac.

It's not a copout, it's a comparison to iOS. You're seeing an argument they didn't make.

As a dev, i'd say having to use adb is a minor inconvenience.

Still unacceptable, a better option would be to use something like lineage or some other aosp distro without the google services (hoping that nothing makes you dependent on them).

This still doesn't address the vast majority of people though (and that's what I'm concerned about the most).

What we need now is:

- short term, work on pushing apps not to depend on the google services so phones preinstalled with something like /e/ become a viable option for most people. Push our public services to stop mandating Google and Apple OSes for random stuff.

- longer term, work on making alternatives to Android and iOS viable options for most people (stability, usability and availability of services people use). The best candidate for that today is Linux mobile.

Breaking network effect around proprietary services is one of the strategies towards this.

Another one is reducing our reliance on computers (of any shape) altogether, maybe.

There are ways to wrap adb in a friendly interface. I can totally see a desktop based manager and marketplace for phone apps as a workaround.

Technically not but the devil is in the details. Having to reinstall the app every 7 days and a limit of one app doesn’t even pass the bare minimum.

Jolla has a prelaunch campaign, decent phones for 200€. I might just as well grab one. Sick of having a phone which is more expensive than my laptop but I can barely use.

No, there's a trust-on-first-use procedure where you have to accept the computer's key on your phone.

>ADB enabled means an adversary can completely own your device and "back it up" by simply plugging it in.

each adb host has to be individually white-listed by an unlocked device. also the current behavior is that it auto forgets any white listed host that hasn't connected within 7 days.

No it's not. Your computer creates a unique ID and you have to accept that on the unlocked phone the first time (or every time if you choose to).

So even when adb is on an attacker can't just plug into your phone and use it. Besides, I just switch it off when I don't use it

I agree it’s not acceptable. so then iOS is just as not acceptable as it has all the same issues and worse. this thread started as switching to iOS

> It's a continual erosion of people's ability to use hardware _they own_ in ways _they want_ under the guise of 'security' - which to be fair google does fuck all to actually prevent malicious, scammy and misleading apps from appearing on their play store.

A lot of people don't seem to understand this and point out that Android is still more open and free than iOS, but iOS has never been about openness and freedom. People believed in Android, and in Google. Now they either see Google betraying them (once again) or only see the Android vs iOS comparison, forgetting about the implications about autonomy, agency and about the future of Android. Many people don't care which actors control their digital lives and what motivations they have. People should be made aware that Google is on their side and that they have shown many times that they have no honor.

AFAIK there is more to that quote and it is usually misrepresented.

Lincoln?

GrapheneOS is significantly more secure, more private, and more free. Not sure why you would use /e/.

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

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, which made maximizing completely useless. Docker was also super slow. 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. IIRC external monitors are completely unusable from blurry text.

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

I agree with your sentiment, but I want 100% Linux about a year ago and it's been much better than OSX. Yes, there are downsides - I really miss the iPhone "continuity". But the bugs, gatekeeper, liquid glass, ads in system settings, etc in OSX dwarf the rough edges on Linux desktop.

For non-power users OSX is still a no-brainer, but for a programmer I feel like Apple's left us no alternative.

Or choose freedom. I've been enjoying GrapheneOS for a couple of years now and recommend it.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I use Android and iOS regularly and while Android's ugly, it's slightly less ugly.

GrapheneOS.

> iOS offers better privacy

No, it markets lockin dressed up as privacy. Convincing you that they are the same thing is the real magic here.

If you are stuck in a walled garden either way, might at least try to get the benefits of it.

It's probably worth mentioning that as far as i know this change does not affect AOSP phones[1]. I'm currently living with a Kyocera flip-phone[3] for the past few years. I even got F-droid installed, though it turned out to not work all that great on a flip. I wish more people wrote apps for flips. I keep intending to look into writing my own APK if i ever get the chance. As i understand it, it's a bit like The Wild West, though there are places where you can get flip-phone apps[2] like maps, media players, messengers, etc.. i just never seem to have time to look more into this(and i'm a little concerned about getting scammed). I did manage recently to successfully tether my old touch-phone to my flip for a car trip i took, so i could get data to the touch and run maps(i feel somewhat clever to have sidestepped Big Tech on that issue). Hopefully i'll get some time one day to look more into flip-apps.

[1] https://source.android.com/

[2] https://www.apkmirror.com/

[3] https://www.kyoceramobile.com/rugged-devices/duraxv-extreme-...

If you don't want to invest in getting your contacts on Signal, you can try OpenBubbles. It gets iMessage on Android devices and works fine.

I highly recommend switching to GOS, it is wayyy better than iOS UX-wise and obviously better privsec and freedom.

One thing that I had to do when I first got GOS, to get a better experience, was find all the Open Source apps that I needed. Otherwise, it looks rather bland and the apps are mid. Once you find the right apps and launcher, everything works much better.

RCS is proprietary so it only works on GrapheneOS if you have Google's Messages app. At least, that was the case a year ago, but I'm assuming it hasn't changed.

On the bright side, Messages works without linking to a Google account

Everyone's using Subversion now ...

RCS can be hit or miss on GrapheneOS, but they have made significant progress recently. It requires using Google Messages rather than any other messaging app, and may require enabling an ICC authentication option that is disabled by default. And it may depend on your carrier. RCS is kind of a pain in the butt but the messaging improvements over SMS are substantial which is why I wanted it.

When I first tried last fall I had it working for a few weeks then it stopped entirely delivering messages and I fell back to SMS only. After the recent system updates and enabling the ICC option it has been working well for me.

The official page explains briefly, https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs

There is a very long discussion threat going back several years that is now considered resolved, which seems to be the case for me. https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...

Same. Google Maps quality has gotten noticeably worse these past 2 years for me. It routinely tries to navigate me to making impossible turns or taking weird and sometimes more dangerous routes just to shave off a potential minute. I started using Apple Maps at the advice of a colleague and it’s given better directions. This is all local. I have no baseline comparison for using maps while on trips.

You mean buy a Google Pixel?

How many people can afford one?

I'm not the commenter you replied to, but I'm doing the same math they are and coming up with the same answer.

From my perspective iOS is better than Android in a number of ways but Android always won out overall for me, in large part because of the freedom regarding software. Remove that freedom from the equation, I think the balance tips towards iOS.

Its more about the principle for me.I know I can jump through hoops for google but I prefer to say no-thank-you.

The long term fear/plan for google is that they know they days of SAAS and Apps are obsolete. People will just write their own platforms, apps, websites all from scratch using AI, which means the app stores becomes obsolete, which means no more ad revenue from shitty ads and no more control and unfettered tracking of your behaviour. AI will make these guys obsolete, they know it, this is them fighting back.

So would you say that the value of Apple products increases as you have more of them (higher than just the linear benefit of more products)? I've used them, but always as one offs.

For example, Ive had a Mac(book? The one that you connect periphery to use) as a work computer at a previous software job, the iPhone because of a girl I dated who wouldn't be with a green bubble man, and iPad also in a previous job, so never together or actually adopted in personal life, so I didn't get sold.