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Comment by randyrand

20 hours ago

If you cant beat them join them

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

  • 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.

    • I almost never go to the app store to find an app, but I can understand how that would be really frustrating. Sounds like they need to get serious about curating the app store content.

      From my perspective, the walled garden value I get is predominantly in the integrations between my phone, macbook, and watch. And to a lesser extent (because it's a bit buggy at times) the family integrations.

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-...