Comment by fainpul
20 hours ago
Even after Google puts this crap in place, you can still uplodad your own apps to your own Android devices, using ADB. Doing the same for iOS, using Xcode, costs you USD 100 or more (depending on country) per year.
I'm in no way defending Google here, just pointing out you're going from bad to worse and think it's a good thing.
Yeah but where you were losing a lot, you're now losing only a little bit.
And on the other side, the benefits of using iOS over Android spyware outweighs the cons now.
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...
I think it's been said that nobody has yet cracked Apple's Lockdown Mode, but that's likely not truly comparable?
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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.
I'm sure they do collect data but not to the point that they hamper functionality. They still focus first and foremost on usability, functionality whereas Google focus on collecting data, serving ads and then on functionality.
But yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that they both collect as much as they can.
Google gets nearly all of its revenue from targeted advertising, and Apple does not. Apple has an incentive to restrict or completely deny third-party data collection, because they’ve made privacy a major part of their brand marketing and there is major reputational risk to Apple for being caught lying about this. Apple’s “Ask App Not To Track” feature made such a measurable dent in the revenue of various surveillance tech companies that they complained about it, loudly, including Meta paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times about it.
There are multiple objective reasons to believe that Apple is a more trustworthy actor here than other companies, including vulgar capitalistic reasons.
You can just say “pfft, wow, you really believe that?”, I guess, but if that’s your position there’s no reason to argue about this with you.
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While not equivalent to a true iOS app, PWA is a decent option that allows you to circumvent the app store restrictions. If you are trying to build apps primarily for yourself, it's a decent option.
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?
I'm pretty sure that if you build your PWA in a way it works offline through caching (which is easy if it's just a static website), you could host/serve it temporarily and just install it once.
For free? No, but if you built a native app that needed a backend, you'd still need to host the backend somewhere too. I host my own web apps from a cheap mini pc at home and access them over tailscale for personal use.
I host my app on GitHub pages for free. But yes, it's just static which is really all you need with how powerful wasm and JavaScript are.
Yeah it stands for Progressive Web App - but there are lots of hosting solutions with generous free tiers.
As a lark, I built a set of personal productivity apps that are delivered as standalone local webpages. Works surprisingly well on Android, haven't tested on iOS.
I host a bunch of my own PWAs on Cloudflare using Pages and Workers. It's been free so far.
Have PWAs stopped working on Android, or something?
I love PWAs. I just hope they never get too popular, or Google will kill them.
No. You can upload your apps on your iPhone for free. You just need an Apple ID.
This is not true, running your code on your phone with Xcode has always been free.
With a free account, it needs to be reinstalled every 7 days because the signature expires. It's hardly convenient for personal use.
even worse - if you need to build some app with entitlements or some features likes push notifications etc then you need non-free account
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Most apps can be a PWA nowadays. A Hetzner VPS costs roughly the same as the Apple dev membership. Saying this as a native iOS dev since iOS 4. For your average pretty json printer you don’t need to go native.
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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.
You don't need a computer to develop Android apps?
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Sorry, even as a developer, "but, you can use ADB" is a big big copout.
What's the next step when ADB requires some hoops to enable? Will we say that but the eMMC has an unencrypted EXT4 partition, we can just desolder and write into it?
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.
Not. You don’t need to pay $100 to upload your app to an iPhone, even with XCode for iOS 26
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.
The limit is 3 apps AFAIK
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Isn't keeping ADB enabled (most people who do this don't enable it and then promptly disable it) a huge security problem? ADB enabled means an adversary can completely own your device and "back it up" by simply plugging it in.
This is much worse than nagging about "untrusted sources".
No, there's a trust-on-first-use procedure where you have to accept the computer's key on your phone.
Not only is it TOFU but that comment is doubly wrong because you can't really back up much other than the bulk storage directory without adb root (which requires a custom build, which obviates the issue to begin with).
Apple has the same thing, but for some reason added Developer Mode which you must enter on the iPhone first. It’s quite involved, with a restart and 3 confirmation dialogs. That had me wondering why they are suddenly so cautious around this.
>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