Comment by reacharavindh
16 hours ago
It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(
Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware… I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…
Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.
You shouldn’t have to use LLMs to run your software.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
> Vote with your wallet.
Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.
> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out
Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently but all the Mag 7 tech companies are too big for regulation to be a 'way out'. They now all have 'Regulatory Compliance' divisions which are about compliance as much as the 'Ministry of Truth' is about truth. Instead they are filled with highly-paid former regulators, lobbyists and lawyers who use their inside knowledge to avoid, skirt or nullify regulatory impact.
Company strategies are now purposely designed at conception to be almost impossibly difficult to prosecute or enforce. It's been working so well over the last decade that when the size of the prize is big enough, mega-tech corps are increasingly willing to just overtly violate regulations knowing they can fight in court for years until the govt settles for a reduced fine that's less than the profit already made.
20 replies →
I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
4 replies →
No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now. Nothing is stopping you.
99 replies →
> Apple is too big for that.
I think you're wrong, but even if you're right, why wouldn't you vote with your wallet anyway?
You alone might not hurt Apple much, but it could certainly help whatever upstart competitor you choose to support.
I have not purchased any Apple or Google products in a decade. Straight up ignoring them is a perfectly viable call in the modern world.
3 replies →
It's not only about driving Apple out of business. If you don't use Apple, you simply don't have to deal with any Apple bullshit. All your Apple-related worries just disappear. And you even have enough money left over to afford a separate non-rooted phone for your bank (in the unlikely event you need one).
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
Which country does this vote happen in?
Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.
Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.
> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.
5 replies →
I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
2 replies →
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive
I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.
Fair point. The megacorps probably are able to outspend pretty much any grassroots mmovement bar maybe a government led one.
> Vote with your wallet
The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.
Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?
Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?
Many Android phones are not unlockable without hacking. They use cryptography to protect the bootloader and to get the unlock code for your own phone first you need to provide them all your information.
Where would you point said wallet? Google isn't far behind Apple on this from, ahead in some ways, and many (all?) of the FOSS Linux powered phones cost even more than iPhones do.
Then maybe you’re onto something here: the hardware is subsidized. Point being that if you want the cheaper, subsidized device, you have to make some compromises.
1 reply →
> and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
Running local models is getting -cheaper- every month in spite of rising hardware costs due to intelligence compression innovations like Bonsai2.
I build operating systems for a living using only consumer GPUs at home.
> Vote with your wallet
If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.
It did work. You're just a very small minority of users, as are most people here.
What is your current phone?
>Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
The local inference threshold has been crossed already. Its possible to achieve big model like performance through agent harnesses with local models.
There are already open weight models that are quite capable and can use any provider.
> Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.
Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.
That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.
So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.
> degrading cameras on purpose
What's this about? I can't find anything, except some random Reddit posts.
Buy Jolla phone
> Vote with your wallet.
But what are the options?
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
And while you're at it, make real change happen in the US national elections by voting for a third party! That'll show them!
How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.
> Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
If Murican lobbying/corruption tries to snuff AI that threatens the Hutt cartels, China will accelerate it.
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.
Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.
> Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
Not entirely true. It absolutely has in the case of the Hackintosh. In fact many a year ago that’s what inspired me to get my first Mac, because every release of macOS made it harder and harder with custom bootloader and kexts to get around Apple’s active efforts to ensure you couldn’t use those unless you were on an actual Apple device, not just running their OS.
A Hackintosh is different from an iOS jailbreak.
An iOS jailbreak is trying to use an Apple device like a Linux device, with access to the filesystem and private APIs.
A Hackintosh is more like emulating the APIs (and an actual Apple serial number, which I guess they use to gate access to iCloud and iMessage) required to boot and run macOS on an Intel PC.
3 replies →
> I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated.
Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.
Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.
The procedure is quite straightforward.
https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk
https://magiskmanager.com/
That's why my next phone will be an unlocked Android device (Shiftphone 8), but murena[0] has also other nice devices that are unlocked.
[0]https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
Or a Pixel with GrapheneOS?
I considered getting another pixel with grapheneOS or calyxOS a couple years ago. It's definitely an option, and you can get used-but-still-supported pixels for like $100.
I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.
grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
1 reply →
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out
Does this actually happen? They did not do that in the good old days.
I do know that some apps try to detect jailbreaks and annoyingly refuse to let people log in. Banking and such.
Oh man, those early days of XDA forums and SenseUI roms on my NexusOne. Those were truly a thing of beauty. We still haven't gotten back to that level. I'm with you though, I stopped playing and moved to a stock device. Then I moved back to an iPhone and have been completely stock ever since. I haven't been excited about an iPhone since the 10 released. After that I think, "oh cool, another rectangle". "A grid of icons"... "The best camera Apple's ever put in a phone.... how wonderful".
I remember a long while ago when you could jailbreak iOS with a corrupted font in a pdf.
There was a website jailbreakme you simple slid a slider and you were done.
From Wikipedia
August 1, 2010, exploited a vulnerability in the FreeType library used while rendering PDF files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.
A functioning government committed to free markets would mandate unlocked devices.
The unregulated market naturally coalesces into oligopolies or monopolies and doesn’t fix issues like this.
Regulators have been asleep for the last two decades while Apple and Google continue to extort 30% taxes from developers.
There was a glimmer of hope with the DMA but regulators are again asleep, emboldening Google to cripple app installation outside of their store and force developers to enter into a contract with Google to distribute from the developer's own website.
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
Don't sign into any of Apple services then! Just use it as a pure developer playground or create an alternate ID. Can't be looking for everything everywhere :-)
Such antiuser behavior from Apple or others should be illegal.
No you do not. Go buy a Fairphone
Can't anyone customize the source of grapheneOS and simultaneously get a phone that is not trying to disable itself?
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.
Two things:
a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.
If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.
But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.
> a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
Because updates break the jailbreak. If Apple actually had a sanctioned way to let you do what you want with the device you bought there would indeed be very little reason to not update.
Updates slow down your phone, eg Liquid Ass. Lots of people follow the rule of only running the OS that came with your iPhone.
Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
> Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
I don't know where you live, but where I am most banks insist on proprietary 2FA via their own app. Only (some of) the fintechs allow TOTP.
Yes you can get your codes via SMS, but I thnk we all know what a security mess SMS is. I would rather have the bank's proprietary app since at least everything will be going over HTTPS and also eliminates most of the vulnerabilities associated with SMS just by virtue of being an app.
5 replies →
If your phone does not have any important or sensitive on it, why even secure it?
4 replies →
If I'm happy with how it's working, an update can only break things.
Am I the only person/iPhone user that hasn’t given in to the iCloud ecosystem?
I’ve never used iCloud. I hate Apple but I hate Google more. Instead of iCloud I use WebDav, CalDav, Bitwarden and NextCloud. Contacts, calendar, passwords and photos that I control. I recommend the same to others but I can count on one hand who has actually gone away from iCloud into such a setup.
We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.
1) They of course lack the resources
2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required
3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.
4) The release schedule is laughable at best.
> open source and hobbiests do not design good products
This is opinion. In my opinion, closed products are not good products. To me, openness and freedom trump subjectively better UX any day.
> as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values.
Consider that in our society and software ecosystem, this is all but required to stave off the forces that would enclose the software commons that these "self-righteous" volunteers work so hard to maintain.
This seems more correlated with big vs. small organizations, not closed vs. open organizations. There are open projects (e.g., Debian, Blender) that tick all four of your boxes in my opinion.
this must be nailed to the wall somewhere at autodesk
linux?
... is an example in support of GP's point.
Great for professionally administered servers or expert power users. Not for much else. Until recently, esoteric use-cases like playing audio were catastrophically unsolved. And then those got better around when screen sharing, accessibility devices, and remote-assistance tools all broke because of another OSS schism. Installing and running an ordinary program requires choosing among a handful of ways of doing that (container systems, package managers) even on the same distro. And then if a graphical program wants to do crazy stuff like "open a file", well, the permissioning situation is "fragmented" to put it generously.
Gaming? Gaming works great on Linux now! ...because a corporation with centralized planning, KPIs, and incentives spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I like Linux. It's been my daily driver for years, on and off. I use it for a living, I use it for a hobby. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfect example of every single one of the OSS flaws that GP listed.
You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.
I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.
You're right, but I could see Apple acting on iOS alone, just because of scale.
There are some orders of magnitude more iOS/iPadOS devices than macOS devices.
There's a bunch of ways we could debate ourselves about things Apple would or wouldn't do, but at the end of the day, Apple is going to do whatever is in it's best interest.
My computer is jailbroken, I have sip disabled yet icloud and imessage work. So what makes my computer different from my phone?
Who bears the security risk? The user.
The only security risk for apple is a job security risk if the ecosystem lock-in is eroded.
The risk to Apple is everyone else’s trust being eroded by having their ecosystem compromised. Why risk it?
1 reply →