Comment by voakbasda

15 hours ago

Mega-kudos to the author for chipping away at the wall around Apple’s garden.

I have had a iPhone for 15 years, and I have only ever been able to back it up with iTunes on windows (as I will never buy a Mac).

Apple’s refusal to provide interoperability borders on criminal. I wish there was a better option.

Have a look at https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice and iOS backup projects that are based on it.

Since you are dead-set against getting a Mac, why don't you move to Android? It seems like a better fit as Apple's whole thing is about continuity between their own devices, which obviously will not work for you.

  • > why don't you move to Android?

    Because I trust Google even less than Apple (and a de-Googled phone would not be useful to me).

  • > their own devices

    Sure! Apple can do whatever they want with their devices. But when they sell them to people, it’s no longer theirs.

    People are (IMHO rightfully) not happy with a general computing device not being open.

    Societies are pushing back against this practice through legal means, which is good!

    The best part is if people want to stay inside whatever ecosystem, they can! It can be opt-in to enable developer mode to do what you can already do on any desktop PC.

    If you want to lock down gran and gramps iphone (or PC for that matter), you can! Make an admin account and have them use an account with less privileges.

    We can have the best of all worlds. An integrated ecosystem. Security. User computing rights.

I'm shouting into the wind here a fair amount, but I just discovered DeltaChat and ArcaneChat. ArcaneChat is available only on Android, but DeltaChat is available on iOS and uses chatmail relays. My family has found it to be super useful and effective. I don't think it's viable to convert everybody in my social circle, but I've been very happy with the apps and attachments, notifications, and general performance.

https://chatmail.at/

I'm considering running my own chatmail relay, although I haven't tried that yet.

  • DeltaChat was much more useful when it worked with any email server and didn't need its own special kind of server. We have plenty of messengers that use their own servers, like matrix, XMPP, and simplex.

    • Didn't know they stopped working with regular email servers, that is a huge letdown. I'm guessing this was quite recent?

      That was their one big plus and while I avoided it because of PGP, this means that it really has no upside over XMPP for me.

    • I appreciate the simplicity of hosting ChatMail versus a regular mail server. It's simpler, lighter weight, and better suited for the chat use case. It's basically the ideal messaging platform for my needs.

      1 reply →

  • I use DeltaChat just by myself to share things between devices. Not really the intended purpose but it's good enough for me!

You could stop using iMessage and iCloud.

  • Green bubbles, WhatsApp, Signal, etc. are not an option for a lot of people. I don't get it either.

    • What is the problem with green bubbles? I don't get it. Doesn't it just mean the other person is not using an Apple device?

      If you really want blue bubbles, use Signal, the default color is blue.

      4 replies →

    • What is there to get? Some people just don’t want to use other services. Period.

      Not sure why people having their own subjective views and preferences is such a hard concept to grasp.

      1 reply →

    • I know people who have iPhones just for FaceTime because young and old non-techies use those a lot.

      I’ve gotten my close friends onto Signal but there are still always 3-4 group chats where that isn’t possible.

      1 reply →

  • Or leave the walled garden entirely. GrapheneOS has all the same stuff.

    • GrapheneOS hardware options are substantially behind iOS hardware options. Also Graphene is somewhat annoying to use; I missed shots bc the camera app didn’t open fast enough.

[flagged]

You mean the same Apple, who supports RCS, and historically supported open protocols?

As to iMessage, think carefully about the architecture, and maybe you can imagine why it is Apple only.