There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. I believe Mozilla tried to invest in this pretty heavily.
But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted.
But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc.
But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
As others have mentioned, Samsung DeX does this very well. Plus, there are several apps out there for setting up a near Linux desktop experience on the device. Previously DeX itself used to support running Linux applications, it's a shame they dropped that.
As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra.
It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.
Yes, they load up Android with their own versions of apps in an attempt at end-user lock-in to their ecosystem, plus various other, what I consider, unnecessary padding that's not uninstallable.
The new life breathed into an older Samsung device by the installation of LineageOS is what I consider the proof of this.
Overall it's entirely subjective, however. I prefer minimal base Android so that I can choose which apps are allowed to annoy me with their various reminders to create an account, log in, look at these new features, rate me, etc.
Other (less technologically savvy) family members love their Samsung apps and the ecosystem, and just find my setup to be confusing or overly complicated.
Right. Whereas we want to strip the software down to the bare minimum into some sort of platonic ideal state, it turns out all the Samsung stuff is actually quite useful and actually is what most people want. It's really quite useful stuff!
I have a midrange Samsung tablet (FE model) and the only "bloat" I've noticed is a Google Now replacement that I can't uninstall. That's very annoying, but that's also the only unnecessary application on there.
Samsung has to package certain applications with their device to allow Google Play, like Chrome. Google has convinced people that their browser is the norm (not the perfectly fine Samsung Internet) and that any manufacturer making their own apps to compete with theirs is "bloat".
The well-integrated Samsung calendar is a lot better than Google Calendar, but Google forced companies for years to install their version as well, despite their failure to capitalize on the unique hardware features of some devices. The same is true for many other Google apps.
I don't think I've seen random ads in Samsung's pre-installed apps. Samsung Health on my (non-Samsung) phone started advertising their new phone at me, which disturbed me, but it seems to have stopped doing that soon after all by itself. My guess is that they received more backlash than anticipated.
I'm pretty sure I could give Samsung Dex to a lot of people and they'd be fine using it as a daily driver for their computer. It does everything most people want out of Windows (a browsers and light office work) and it's not nearly as bad as some other attempts. With modern smartphone CPUs, the UI is smooth and responsive, and Samsung's design makes me a little jealous as a Linux user because it's honestly just better. I'd even go do far as to call it better than Windows 10's UI in some ways.
If you're ever near a store that had Samsung tablets on display, I recommend you try putting one of the demo units in Dex mode. It's a toggle in the quick toggles and it'll turn the tablet into a full desktop (which is perfectly fine for the massive screens tablets have these days!).
Hell, if Jetbrains keeps developing their remote coding platform, I bet I'd be able to do programming work from a tablet and a sleeve as if I was working on my Linux laptop.
I think this depends on region, and the type of phone.
I am in Canada and have never seen ads or bloatware on Samsung phones. I currently use a Galaxy Z Fold 3 connected to a lapdock via USB-C video out. DeX is a very nice desktop environment for the phone.
Meh. Not really. I notice a few things here and there but avoiding Samsung apps is pretty easy.
With Samsung I can plug in a USB-C to HDMI cable and duplicate my screen with zero effort. And with DeX, apparently I can turn my phone into a desktop?! I never tried before last week but when I plugged in aforementioned cable, I get a DeX prompt. Exit, and I see the screen. Hit "enable DeX" and it turns on a mode that shows something like a desktop screen on the external display.
Perhaps the fact this isn't known or operationalized by companies means it has a ways to go, or that laptops are easier for remote workers. But it's cool stuff.
That reputation was why I had stuck to brands which stayed closer to a more vanilla Android experience.
My experience with their latest stuff has been that they do still have a lot of bloat and duplicated functionality, but the base experience is much closer to stock Android than what I remembered from their older phones. To put it differently, it looks and feels similar to the near stock Xperia 1 ii I switched from but has all sorts of little differences.
I actually find myself using a lot of the functionality too, so it feels a bit less "bloated" to me.
I haven't really noticed ads though. They do recommend stuff, eg their camera app has a bunch of modes and the "Expert RAW" mode was shown in the app but required a download from their app store. I don't really count those since they're somewhat more relevant than say, Windows advertising candy crush on the start menu.
I have a Samsung A32 and the bloatware has been completely unobtrusive for me so far, and no ads either.
My purchasing and usage habits for mobile devices is to get something new that is mid or low-range, use it until I notice performance issues, or the bloatware does something I don't like, then flash a custom ROM.
That's served me pretty well in the past, but I may still have hangups from teething pains with rooting devices and compatibility issues on custom ROMs back in the 2010's
Just be careful not to disable the ui, adb or something else that is essential. I haven't found anything that can't be disabled, yet. Always backup your important data in case you have to reset to factory defaults.
> But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space.
The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot.
The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations.
The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers.
But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.
iMacs and MacBooks are definitely not “computers as appliances", and you can absolutely run unsigned code or an independent OS (with a vendor-supported mechanism for alternative booting that has been opened up significant to help Asahi along). On Intel macs you could flatly bootcamp windows if you wanted. Is a windows PC an "appliance"?
Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all.
Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things.
For context, I've exclusively used macs as daily work tools for 2 decades. The reason I did so was because I got tired of trying to make BSD work, and also burned out from windows.
I've heard many people having the same take, we wanted something that "just works".
But to step back, this also means, we don't care as much about raw perfs, we care less about new paradigms, we don't need the bleeding edge, and expect our devices to be stable and useable for 10 years, basically be "classics". And I also know if my mavbook burns down today, I can go to a store, buy the latest 13" laptop and be back where I was in 1 hour at most. They're utterly replaceable.
That's basically what we want from appliances.
I you care in any way shape or form to push the envelope, macs won't be your choice. The best GPU won't be there, the best CPU isn't (Apple's ARM is good, but not as powerful as the top of the line desktop CPU at full wattage), the best form factors aren't there, the most innovative apps didn't go there.
Some companies do crazy things with macs, but they're in a extreme minority. And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.
Can confirm. I recently demoted my old Samsung S7 to be Wifi-only and work stuff-only. MFA, mobile email when I'm not at my desk, etc.
When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
Personal laptop is much thinner and lighter, and I'm less concerned with losing it on travel compared to my work laptop. Also - accessing work resources requires a crap-ton of security policies applied to the device (full control including remote wipe, a stack of security & endpoint management software, just to be able to authenticate with my work account) which I don't want to install/grant on my personal laptop.
That's an interesting value system. Why is losing a work laptop more concerning than losing your personal laptop? losing either of them isn't great, but the company has far more resources than you to protect and replace the laptop than you do.
Yeah but it's yours. Replacing it is so much harder for you than it is for corporate IT which buys laptops by the pallet.
If you'd lost a work laptop ever than yeah I could see not wanting to lose another one, but the mere possibility of losing one isn't anywhere near being "the person who is always losing their work laptop".
Losing my personal laptop would be a big deal for me. Losing my work laptop, while still not ideal, is just what IT calls Tuesday.
The entire vision behind Windows 10 cross platform apps was inspirational. Code once run then across phone, tablet, desktop, and Xbox. And Hololens... I guess.
The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
I think Microsoft finally got it right around Windows 10, but the damage had already been done. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8/10 had caused too much damage to the brand.
Now, Samsung Dex is doing what Microsoft wanted to do, but very few people know about it. That probably has to do with how uncommon USB-C docks are, and how many of those docks use DisplayLink instead of a normal standard to do video. It's a real shame, because a modern phone is more than powerful enough for most people's computer work.
Indeed. I have a Nokia 950 and in many ways WinPho was a really nice phone OS; Microsoft's endless jerking about of developers as it went 6.5 -> 7.x -> 8 -> 10 did it no favours.
Absolutely, as soon as developers and customers found a nice place - they would pull the rug from under them. I got into the WinPho around Win 8/8.1 and it was pretty cool and the update to Win10 showed to much promise that vanished the instant they stopped working on the hardware. To be fair if I was in Nadella's position, even though I loved the Lumia line - I would have done the same.
I have said that in technology one step ahead is an innovator, two steps ahead is martyr. Windows phone was Martyr.
Phones are powerful enough these days, but computers are more powerful. I carry work laptop between home and office, but I couldn't do work on phone. Computers are also cheap, I am using Raspberry Pi 4 as spare desktop.
The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs.
Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.
Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.
Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript.
Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
> Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time.
Thinking of the people I know, about a third of them don't personally have any kind of real "PC" kind of computing device (laptop/desktop). Many get by with just their phone and a tablet, not even a laptop. They might have a work laptop, but that's usually only for work-related tasks; they don't have any permanent desk setup in mind for computing. This percentage of people is growing, not shrinking.
And to think, I've got that much exposure to people with that kind of computing lifestyle, and yet nearly half of my friends are people in PC gaming culture and go to things like massive LAN parties and watch game tournaments on Twitch.
I'd say people who have gaming PCs are an enthusiast of sorts. Step out of professional contexts and gaming PCs and a lot of people don't even bother with laptops these days. Having a dedicated space in your home for computing seems to be more and more rare these days.
> Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
"Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
You could maybe fix this with a cooled dock. I'm thinking of all kinds of wacky designs involving exposed heat pipes/metal on the outside of the phone that makes contact with something on the dock.
In most Areas HN is popular in, it’s still normal to have a laptop for school, work, or at least odd things like tax returns and document processing. You could use a tablet or phone but people tend to buy a laptop.
In areas where you do very much see phone and no laptop being common or the norm, the trend is towards increasing laptop ownership, not declining laptop ownership. It’s not a matter of phones displacing laptops so much as phones being more important and accessible.
> There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. <...> But it went nowhere.
It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.
I thought about this quite a bit when my phone and table started supporting Samsung Dex. It's a great system and I could literally do every single thing I need to on my phone.
In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc.
I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.
> I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc.
> But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more.
Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.
Apple has a better solution with Continuity, if you are near your Mac there is an icon for the activity you are doing on the iPhone that you can click to continue it on the Mac. So you can just finish an email using the keyboard if you want.
That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while.
You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work.
Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.
(VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.)
With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy.
Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling.
That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience.
(This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.)
I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.
I want to like this setup, but the NexDock's input devices (especially the touchpad) are so bad. Like, near unusably bad. Which, for a device that's mostly I/O, is a shame.
I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.
Perhaps it will now that third party app stores will be force onto apple. Granted, you still won't be able to jailbreak your iphone by just typing in the root password, but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024.
Compilers and interpreters have been allowed for a while now (with some caveats). Pythonista is an iOS Python IDE that lets you write apps on your iPhone.
HP did build a mobile phone with Windows Mobile (X3) and something they called Lapdock. It was like a slim Notebook, but just the screen and the keyboard. You could connect it wit the phone with a cable or even wireless. All the CPU and memory was in the phone. The Lapdock was just really just a second screen and a real keyboard. I have no Idea, why no other company made something like that for android phones. I mean all the tech is already there an it works (DEX).
iPadOS is mostly delivering on what you describe. Plug into monitor, mouse, keyboard, window manager, multitasking. Only gap is the “open/unlocked” bit, but Apple is making slow progress there.
It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.
iPadOS has some real weird limitations when it comes to big screens. For example, the small iPads don't support stage manager despite being more than powerful enough to drive a measily 1080p display. Their weird window managed also makes for a suboptimal desktop experience, with the weird mouse blob making the entire thing look more like a non-touch tablet than a real desktop.
They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.
I loved this idea too, but I think we’ve come to realise it in a different way, more or less, purely by syncing everything to the cloud. I feel that the transition between my phone, iPad and PC is pretty seamless with continuity of all the data I care about, and different views and interaction models based on the capabilities of the devices.
I just don't see the appeal of this. I still need a screen and a keyboard to use it in desktop mode. Then I can just bring a laptop. My data is in the cloud and my settings sync - so the only way this could be "better" is that I don't have to buy a phone and a laptop I guess?
I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac.
That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
But in the office, there could be a beefy workstation waiting for me. As long as we're not talking about floating workplace setups (which I'm no big fan of) or cutting costs, I still don't see the upside.
That's true, but I think different people have different needs and preferences.
Many companies give developers laptops (even though workstations would be faster) so evidently some people already trade portability for power, so having your phone be your main computer would just be a further step in that direction.
For people who aren't developers, e.g. managers doing email, browsing, Excel etc., I'm sure a phone would be powerful enough.
I think there is a GNU/Linux distro which can do that. Not sure whether it was KDE Neon or some feature of Framework laptops or another one, but they had a video where they plugged the phone onto a screen and were aber to use both.
Does the Deck count? It's just a laptop with a weird keyboard, you don't exactly put it in your pocket. Attaching an external display to s device running Arch isn't all that unique.
I really hate the modern idea of locking down devices to protect users from themselves. It's my device and I should be allowed to install what I want on it.
Android's better than iOS in that regard, but that doesn't mean it isn't still terrible. Sure, you can sideload apps, but you still can't run as root unless your device's manufacturer allows it. And sure, it might have a built-in file manager, but in newer versions of Android, you can't read/write to /sdcard/Android/data without a separate device.
And this trend is even infecting non-phone devices as well. You can't install extensions on Firefox if they haven't been signed by Mozilla. The only way to disable this restriction is to use a fork or beta version (Developer Edition or Nightly).
Most people are using computing devices to do the specific things the device is designed for, quite often in a low-trust high-security work environment (even when this isn't explicitly how people think of it, it's usually the case - i.e. bad things happen when unauthorized access takes place). For the vast majority of people creating barriers or guard-rails around what their device can do is actually a win. People and organisations often put a lot of effort and expense into creating even further guardrails and restrictions a lot of the time.
There are hobbyists and professionals who take apart, repair and/or modify cars but it's also generally a very good thing that you can't just make (or easily authorise someone else or their product to make) significant modifications to how your car works. The walled gardens are really just computing growing up.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't actually happen on Android phones, and it doesn't even happen anymore in Windows, which runs with admin privileges by default. The toolbars and viruses were mostly a thing pre Windows XP SP2, and they were mostly gone with Windows Vista.
It does happen, but in a different form. Now we have programms that prompt us during installation to install another software (antivirus or browser [looking at you Ccleaner]) for no good reason and most users (including my friends and family) simply click next without reading anything. Same thing on Android but with sticker/gif apps. I can't keep track of the times I had to help a relative or friend with stupid fullscreen pop-ups or adds on their phone and with unwanted software on Windows.
I see it a good bit with less technical users on Android. They'll get apps which put full screen ads on their phone popping up all the time, they'll get ads on their lock screen, they'll get their default browser swapped out and not understand what happened, all kinds of things.
Nobody should be banned from anything. I'm literally member of a libertarian party (not the crazy american one).
What I'm arguing for is people who voluntarily buy devices which are locked down for themselves and their loved ones because we'd rather put sensible restrictions in place for ourselves.
It’s not voluntary when it’s your only choice, or when you get it second hand from someone else. You should always have the option to unlock your own device
Ah yes, the “lowest common denominator” argument. Personally, I hate the idea that everyone should be punished because some people can’t handle something.
They are majority. Why punish them because a few people can't handle not having full access to the device? I like open ecosystems but I don't think your argument holds. Nobody can be an expert in everything.
If only people thought this way about guns, where the overwhelming majority causes no problems yet <1% are insane so some people try to ban them for everybody.
Dang. This is the future I wanted to see for mobile devices.
Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system.
Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device.
My android devices have all come with basic file system browsers, but even better, I can choose from a plethora of full featured apps for full file system access. This is one of the issues that has kept me away from iphone, though.
Modern Android (11 onwards) no longer allows full filesystem access for file manager apps. Apps can opt into exposing some of their files for management by implementing a horrible Java API designed for cloud storage services. Some vendors' forks probably disable this change but that's not something that can be relied on.
Meanwhile iOS also has sandboxing but at least you can still meaningfully use normal goddamn filesystem APIs and there's now a system file manager.
Minecraft for Android has two storage locations in-game: Application (default, not accessible to users) and External (accessible to users by connecting their phone to a computer).
I cannot backup my worlds without either using a third-party tool, or paying Microsoft $4 for the privilege of uploading my world to their server (Realm), changing my storage location to External and then downloading it back. Ridiculous.
I seem to recall very Android phone I've had came with an app called "Files". If not named "Files", they always had some kind of baked-in file browser. The last few phones have been Pixels, I don't remember exactly the specifics of the one on the Motorola devices I had prior, but on the Pixel devices its this app:
No ads. Sure, it tries to group things by categories and searching at the very top, but its still easy to see "Storage devices" which lets me navigate the actual folder structure. My Pixels have come with USB-C male to USB-A female adapters which allow me to plug in things like flash drives, memory card readers, cameras, external hard drives, even other Android devices and access the files through the Files app.
Yep, this is the main reason I use Android. It also means I can modify things on the OS level to e.g. fabricate false GPS data and supply it to apps that insist on GPS access to be functional.
On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
Out of curiosity, are you referring to rooted Android, or some variant that provides the user some protection from apps "knowing"? GrapheneOS seems to provide some of this (Storage Scopes, network permission, etc.) but not all.
Custom mod of LineageOS, not rooted stock Android, although you might be able to accomplish it with rooted stock and some frameworks like Xposed, they can be detected by some apps, and some apps actually do detect those frameworks and ban users. WeChat is particularly notorious for this kind of detection. If you get banned you not only are disconnected from communicating with your family and friends, you can't even book train and flight tickets, you can't buy food at many places that only take mobile payments and don't take cash, just for a stupid framework. So it has to be done on the OS level.
I was thinking about getting an xperia, I asked about rooting/custom rom and apparetly unlocking the bootloader will delete keys that the camera needs to run. Seeing as it's designed as a cameraphone first and foremost, that's a bit of a major feature to lose.
Why, as a user, is that story (even without losing the camera) would any of that sound better than just having the app store require that apps follow some approval guidelines about what they are allowed to do with privileges and what they are allowed to do when denied privileges?
Unfortunately, you can't really have sideloading and an app review process. If sideloading is trivial/normalized for users then it'll be trivial/normalized for bad actors wanting to exploit those users.
According to the App Store rules for iOS, An app can’t withhold functionality when you deny it GPS access unless it’s required for the app’s functionality.
Why would I use an app that requires unnecessary permissions?
The SSH client Prompt uses GPS permissions as a round-about workaround to ensure your SSH connection is not reaped and closed by iOS while in the background.
To stay in touch with friends and family who only use a certain app for communication and social event planning. I don't have the energy to convince them and an entire country to move off said app.
To get permits to certain wilderness areas that require GPS permissions to even apply.
To get on restaurant waitlists before arriving. (Some restaurants insist on your phone-reported GPS location being within a certain radius to get on the list. Welcome to Silicon Valley in 2023)
So exactly why do you need access to the file system? You have access to a location where you can share files between apps. Any application that supports access to file picker gives you access to any of your installed document providers like iCloud, Google Drive, Box, an attached USB drive, a network drive and the local device.
And direct access via the Files app.
The one thing missing is that admittedly there is no way to add your own music to the music library on the phone itself.
I pretty much never use it on my Mac, all the apps I use show the filesystem in a sidebar and have a fuzzy search feature. Even Apple apps (like Xcode) have that so clearly they're aware of how bad the file picker is.
The difficulty I had just copying things from one phone to another recently was ridiculous. You’re right, this should be a basic function. I have files I’ve copied from computer to computer that were originally from the late 80s.
I have this problem also with Windows, it's one of the two purposes for which I made https://dro.pm. If it's too large for email or there's no email client installed, I wouldn't know for the life of me how to copy things on Windows without spending >5 minutes setting up shared folders, firewalling, and then undoing the changes when done. Uploading to a website and typing over a very short link is done in ten seconds
Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
Cool service, probably shouldn't be used for anything you don't want to be public. The URLs seem to change incrementally, and https://dro.pm/g is self referential for that reason, probably. You can go letter by letter to look at various thicks people share.
Yes, I'm hoping that's obvious as it'll be inherent to such easy-to-use links, though the site has such low traffic and I know from access logs that nobody is guessing these links in an automated fashion, that a few seconds of exposure are almost negligible, depending on what it is you're posting.
If the links were unguessable (or had a password option, as has been proposed many times), you'd also lose much of the convenience. But unguessable links is an option if you use the second tab, effectively the same as a password.
Especially if you use "delete after opening", the custom link can be extremely short-lived (no one will guess that in time) and you got an indicator of compromise as well. (I personally trust this enough for ID cards and passwords, but of course that's with the benefit of being the owner and knowing all of the above plus that there is no secret logging.)
Fwiw, I also like the "social network" effect so far. I've discovered interesting things on dro.pm by looking at what people use my service for. Currently, /q has an interesting youtube video that I wanted to continue watching on my phone for example :)
I still don't understand how move and copy were allowed to be fundamentally broken for so many years. File management is a very, very basic OS task. I should never, ever need to Jailbreak a device to make backups of files.
You can choose whatever words you want for it, but there's a difference between the targeted polished UX of "there's an app for that", and a morass of software that may or may not serve your needs that kind of sort of works together if you hold it right.
Is that true? mv isn't an application. To me, the GNU toolchain is more like an application, but the individual parts like GNU ld, GAS, ar, GCC, etc. are just programs, not applications themselves. And even then, application feels like it implies GUI, maybe?
I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't.
For the same reasons Android just actively broke it. Sandboxing is a matter of user security, if you let apps violate sandboxing then you can't have a meaningful permissions system.
You can allow certain common kinds of sandboxing crossover - apps that want to touch the camera roll, apps that want to touch wireless/location data (which are one and the same), ones that want to use the contacts, etc. But at the end of the day if you don't fall into one of these buckets you're going to have an awkward experience going into the OS and approving moving stuff into/out of the sandbox.
It'd be nice if you could allow complete crossover for certain apps - so, VLC can touch all of the podcast app files, or whatever. But I can understand why they don't even want to cross that rubicon.
You've gone and conflated user and application permissions. I was talking about owner permissions. The device owner should always have the ability to backup any file on the system. Only Apple controls the entire system. They can and should give this control to the owner.
modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.
To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN.
There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search.
How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
The whole point of the filing-cabinet abstraction is to reify my access to something in some app. It's not a purely technical concept, it represents an affordance that users do care about. We went through this before; programs used to be written without any generalized notion of a file, and you'd have to work with things like "unit" records represented on punched cards, and "datasets" meaning collections of unit records. There's no reason to go back to that kind of chaos.
It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents.
>How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to?
All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day.
And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state.
These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago.
They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter".
They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers.
So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
Honestly, for a lot of my personal files and documents I really don't care about the folder structure. Don't get me wrong, I do, but only because on most systems its the only reliable way to actually organize the files. But a directory structure isn't always the optimal way to organize things for a lot of my access patterns.
Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access!
And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often.
For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures.
IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is:
1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card.
2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup.
3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc.
But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files.
I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
> But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot
Fully agreed there. It would be nice to have some real widely used standards in this space. I'd love to just have a single API available to query any of my datasets wherever they may be. When I open a picture picker I should see files from my NAS, from Google Photos, from my local device, from any remote device I can access at the moment, from a NextCloud instance, etc.
Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun?
Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it.
If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad.
Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now.
Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.
iOS has come a long way, though. There's a local file system I can access and move files around with. I can run Syncthing on it (with Möbius). I can even run Linux on it (iSH), including a package manager. I can use qpdf to decrypt a PDF I downloaded with Safari, and I can even run Python and compile C code, on the device, with acceptable performance.
It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.
You can't do any of these things without doxxing yourself to Apple, as you can't install apps without an Apple ID, and you can't get an Apple ID without a phone number.
Signing up for an account with your personal details is not "doxxing yourself". Doxxing is when someone else publicly reveals your personal information on the internet.
A counter-datapoint of one, from me: I don't miss the file system browser at all. I have been a little bewildered by the iOS "Files" app, and the addition to the sharing widget of "Save to Files" - I never use it. I'm not saying it doesn't have a purpose and that no one would ever use it, but I don't miss it and don't have a need or want for it.
Sometimes I want to collect a couple of files and documents from emails, and make sure they are both available and together in a place. That's about the only time I use it, but I find it pretty handy in those occasions. It's more of a temporary place though, rather than something permanent.
But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.
It can also do things my watch, refrigerator, car, iPod, washer & dryer, and smart lightbulbs can't do. Know why? Because they're not meant to write and compile programs on. Why would anyone want to write software on the ergonomically constrained (for writing software) iPhone? Just because? Gotta do better than that.
Well, I run iPython on my Pixel phone a lot. When I'm at home, I can ssh into the phone and edit files etc with a real keyboard and desktop display. I have many Python functions defined which allow me to do quick, but fairly complex, calculations on-the-go. I also mount the phone's filesystem using sshfs on my desktop machine. That automatically happens whenever the phone connects to my home WiFi. Much of this may be possible on an iPhone too, for all I know, but with a Pixel phone, a Linux desktop and a bunch of Raspberry Pis doing home automation stuff, I only have to know Linux. So I hardly ever write software using the phone's screen and virtual keyboard (although I do occasionally do it), but I write quite a bit of code on the phone using the desktop machine to provide better I/O.
It can even run shortcuts which is pretty cool for home automation. I don't own an iPhone but your comment made me check if it was possible to run actual commands on the different python ide apps on Apple.
This is a fun use of technology I lose by having my iPhone 8 Plus. Previously I had an Android phone I used to automate to the nines with Tasker and such. Having similar capabilities on all of my devices and holistically binding them together (as you do with sshfs and similar technologies) is enjoyable and has more utility than any regular walled garden. Vendors locking down their devices to prevent advanced users from unlocking its full potential is sad.
I'm switching over to Android soon - once my current phone dies and I can find a capable device with a headphone jack, replaceable battery, and USB-C - and your setup has inspired me to get back into this game!
How many people in the world do something like that? Even in the bubble that is HN, how many people do that? The average person benefits a lot more from a walled garden.
His reason is that if he can program it, he is no longer at the whims of the manufacturer. They decided that two timers were "bad UX?" He can theoretically add it back in.
I used a bullet journal for a while for the same reason. No longer was I waiting for an update to a todo app, or voting on features. If I wanted to add a "feature" to my todo list, I was in full control of doing so.
Honestly, the iOS tweaking community is a great representation of why you should be able to have control over your devices. Over the years many of these tweaks have been integrated into iOS as standard features. Granted, many of these were "duh" features like wallpapers, custom keyboards, Control Center, wireless iTunes syncing, etc: https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/60-ios-features-apple-sto...
This is exactly what I mentioned before in another thread about Apple and how visionOS will be a similar walled garden unlike macOS and thus it will be very difficult to use it as a laptop replacement, by Apple's design.
> Anyone else worried that Vision Pro will simply be a large iPad and not macOS like, ie closed app store and not geared towards productivity? The fact that to run VSCode you need to mirror your own Mac simply boggles the mind, it's like Apple wants to cut off the potential of the device at the knees simply to continue selling services.
AVP is another vector for vendor lock-in, same as iOS. It cannot even do video out from a Macbook, because then you might actually play a video or a game without passing through Cupertino's toll gates.
Huh? They demo it doing exactly this in the WWDC keynote video. The user looks at their MacBook, the MacBook screen goes blank and is replaced by a virtual, floating, larger screen, which can be moved in space and resized.
It's a shame, I wonder when we'll get the comparable version of AVP as Android or Windows is to their respective Apple devices. I definitely don't want to mirror a Mac to play games, lol.
That's something I've been saying for a long time.
It frustrates me a bit when you see these announcements for a productivity app on iOS, and I'll just sit there thinking "wow, this is almost as cool as the stuff I had on Windows 98...". Stuff like Excel have (historically) been substantially worse than their desktop counterparts on mobile.
Now, in some ways I do understand why this is; I suspect the people making the apps figure that if you're doing "real" work, you'll probably still defer to a "real" computer running Windows or macOS or Linux, but that sort of implies that smartphones aren't "real" computers.
My iPhone 12 Pro is so much more powerful than a typical Windows 98 computer that I'm not even sure how you'd quantify it [1], but if I had to actually do work, it's not immediately obvious to me that the iPhone would actually be the superior option. Microsoft Office 98 is still pretty usable, early Photoshop is primitive but still reasonably intuitive, it's not hard to get proper text editors.
[1] Obviously you can look at clock speeds and "flops per second" and stuff like that, but there's other ways that modern computers are more powerful that are less obvious, like custom decoder/neural chips, better compilers and more efficient operating systems, etc. I think the safest thing to say is it's a lot more powerful.
I don't think Excel is worse on a phone than on desktop because people don't think it's capable of "real work". It's worse because the whole interface of Excel is designed around a mouse and keyboard. The tiny little cells, the dragging things to be wider and narrower, typing everything - everything is designed around using a very accurate pointer and a keyboard. I have no idea how you'd use Excel productively on a phone. Even if the cells are the same size as they are on a desktop, the screen is tiny, so you'd not be able to see anything. And if the cells are smaller, then they're even harder to use. They actually need to be bigger to be a decent touch interface, and then you'd be constantly scrolling around.
The same applies to things like text editors. Phone keyboards are awful for typing anything except English prose. The only reason they're usable for typing is the autocorrection features. I turned mine off for a while and then you really realise how precise you have to be to type everything correctly on a phone. You certainly can't write code on them - imagine switching to the symbols keyboard every couple of seconds. It just doesn't make sense. It's bad enough typing a URL.
Did you actually try using Excel on your phone? (The Microsoft 365 app is free, you don't need a subscription to use many features of the mobile Excel app.)
The cells are displayed at a size that is comfortable to read on a phone (which means you need to scroll). When you click on a cell, you get two handles (top left and bottom right) to grow/shrink the selection. On double-tap, a small popup toolbar appears, where you can select Fill, which makes the handles control the usual Excel filling feature. The cell headings have handles to make the cells wider. It just works, and while there are no macros, and some other advanced things might be missing, it's pretty good for most typical editing.
Right. And we can see that by looking at the iPad, a device halfway between a full size computer and a smartphone. Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. The world's progressed since Windows 98 for good and bad. There are a multitude of cloud services that let you program from your iphone or ipad. Yes, that's not gcc running locally and yeah something's been lost along with progress. I miss it too. But we live in the present, not the past.
Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.
There's no "debacle with Wayland". There was some controversy a few years ago, and some people will stick with X forever for the same reason that there are still people that will resolutely stick with sysvinit. But Wayland is not controversial in the mainstream any more than systemd is.
Snaps, on the other hand? Yeah there's certainly some controversy there. The clear aim there is a walled garden distribution. But the good thing is that you can just not use Ubuntu. Nobody is forced to use Ubuntu.
I don't know anyone with a Sonos. Yamaha's multi-room audio hasn't had any problems for me.
I'm not sure you get to decide what is controversial and what's mainstream without hard numbers behind your statements. As a single datapoint, I can say that systemd is awesome but Wayland is still crap, whenever I try to stick with it I hit a stupid issue within few weeks, debug and analyze for a week, then when I remember that I have enabled Wayland I go back to X and everything just work. I have zero ideological or personal affiliation here, I just want my stuff to work.
I don't really care whether you have issues with something Wayland-related. You can't "enable Wayland" anyway because Wayland isn't software, it's just a protocol. If you have a problem with Wayland it's like having a problem when you enable HTTP/2 on your web server. The problem is with the particular server, or the particular browser, or something in between. If you have a Wayland issue, you don't have a Wayland issue, you actually have a Gnome issue or a Firefox issue or something.
Regardless there is no 'Wayland debacle' that Linux is 'going through' with 'no clear path forwards'. There is a clear path forwards, and it isn't really controversial at all. Wayland is the clear path forwards, and in the long-run is the clearly better choice. But it is a big change and in an "ecosystem" that is so decentralised that kind of change takes a long, long time. Enabling Wayland in your particular environment might not be the best choice yet, whether because of bugs with your desktop environment or the applications you use, or because of features that aren't there yet or just general instability. But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better. No more screen tearing, no more buggy insecure X display server. It says something powerful that people whinged and moaned at first about it, but that their revealed preferences tell a different story: nobody was so annoyed that they were prepared to maintain X going forward. Clearly it can't actually be that important to them.
Of course I can enable Wayland - I have option to enable Wayland for GDM, and I can use Gnome over X or via Wayland. The fact that it is protocol have nothing to do with the ability of disabling and enabling, I enable and disable protocols in many other domains.
It isn't me that have issues with Wayland (or with Gnome on Wayland, if you must be pedantic). It's everyone who try to use software that you will probably categorize as rubbish but still actual people are depend on, stuff like commercial remote sessions.
> But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better.
If by years and years you mean a year, than sure. But it isn't the default for years and years, that's simply not true for any distro.
If you want to assert that Wayland isn't controversial show me the numbers. Find a source that most people don't use X because it works great despite no one maintains it.
Conspicuously absent from your arguments why Wayland isn't controversial: NVIDIA. Trick question long did it take to settle the controversy over which memory manager to use? The answer is indeterminable, as it is still ongoing. The NVIDIA proprietary drivers used with GBM and Wayland still work like crap, the driver architecture is stacked heavily in favor of EGLStreams, and there is no fix but to either switch to Nouveau and lose performance, CUDA, and lots of HW-accelerated video codecs, use GNOME or KDE and hope that they don't drop support for NVIDIA, or hope and pray that someday NVIDIA will open-source its drivers so that others can fix their bugs for them.
> Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without.
If you're going to be using Google or web apps, why even bother paying the Apple tax?
Battery life and responsiveness. Eg there's no alternative to the M2 Pro CPU. It's not just pareto optimal, but at the top of the leaderboard in both metrics
Just got a mini pc with AMD, which can hold its ground against a mac mini, but costs ~4 times less (602€ vs 2259€).
Comes with 32GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, and Linux works great!
That's a desktop. I mentioned battery life because I was talking about laptops and tablets.
btw price grows exponentially with single threaded performance, which in turn determines responsiveness. Your link shows that the M2 Pro is much more performant even compared to your desktop. 2689 vs 2023 is a huge gap: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs...
Excel on a phone is dog slow for some reason (seriously, I've run Excel on a Pentium II, you don't need this much CPU power) but the UI is fine.
Cells are large enough to comfortably interact with but not big enough to cause problems. The lack of space for UI hides a large part of the standard Excel ribbon, but there's absolutely nothing that prevents Excel from working on your phone.
Phone keyboards don't always need to be QWERTY. Setting flags on input controls to hide autocomplete or to focus on numeric/mathematic input is trivial. Microsoft Excel displays its custom keyboars optimized for formula entries for phones, with formula autocomplete available as well.
Word is dog slow as well, but Google Docs seems like a fine text editor for most cases. GDocs isn't that extensive a text editor to begin with, but you've got everything you need to type out a document. In fact, I think many people under thirty will be faster typists on the phone with autocomplete than in their keyboards sitting behind a computer. A whole generation is currently doing their homework on a phone!
I wouldn't want to program on a phone keyboard and tasks that need a lot of UI (like PowerPoints) probably aren't very comfortable either, but for Excel and Word you don't need a computer at all.
I don't know what office suite you've tried or what device you've tried it on, but it's really not as bad as you make it seem. It'll be terrible for someone who's used to working on a PC, just like using Excel is terrible for someone who's been working on phones their entire life.
Calling out excel, photoshop, and text editors (I’m assuming coding)… those are all computationally expensive tasks.
My mom runs her entire business off of her iPhone and iPad. I’d say that she’s doing “real work”. She just doesn’t need a discrete GPU.
My sister is in a similar boat with her business.
There are definitely certain classes of work that lend themselves to larger screens and an actively-cooled chassis. But many people don’t need the extras and are quite happy with the “mobile experience“. It’s just a different market. They love the updates coming down the pipe.
I can certainly see someone running a one-person Etsy or farmers market stand business all from their iPhone. You use Excel or Google sheets to track expenses and income or just track it in a real ledger book. All the banks have an app now. She can order supplies through a browser or just by calling vendors. She can take payment in cash or card using the phone itself or a Square reader. TurboTax has an app. She can file state sales tax online or through the mail by printing forms from the phone if her payment processer isn't already handling this for her. You can even build basic websites using templates.
I'm sure all of these tasks are a little easier with a bigger screen and real keyboard but they aren't impossible to do on a phone. Plus, record keeping on paper still exists and isn't difficult if your volume is small. You could even run something like a dropshipping business where you don't do any physical work and hire freelancers to do things that usually require a real computer like graphic design. Or maybe you just own a larger business with people under you that handle all the day-to-day work while you do big picture stuff in meetings or contact clients via email.
Have you tried using excel or google sheets on an iPhone or android. It is perfectly serviceable. In fact on many days I get most of my work done through my iPhone, if I don’t have to _write_ code, just documents, review PRs and attend zoom meetings. Especially after the GitHub app has become good.
It feels likes some of the office like apps on the browser at least let you read documents and sheets and what not but when you go to edit them they push to to install the app. That's when I switch to the desktop version of the website which lets edit operations proceed. Kind of a weird workflow but it is what it is, mobile biased to reading, and apps biased towards editing. Problem is I don't want the app.
There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc.
Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. I get that the empty clamshell laptop you slide a cell phone into never took off, but this just gets cheaper and cheaper every year. The drivers exist, the OS capability mostly or entirely exists, we're just... not doing it. With a dock, you can cobble things together; the TV your dad threw away, a keyboard you found at goodwill, any old mouse. Incredibly accessible; anyone with a phone and that level of access to tech could have a full computing environment.
I have tasted this with my Steam Deck. I have some limited uses for it when I take it places but want it to do just a bit more. I'd love it even more if my cell phone, which has all the computing power it needs for the uses I have, could do it. If I was a student, or less well off, being able to turn my phone into a full computing environment and use it at its full power would be a great way to save money. The only two limitations on cell phones at this point are 1. the IO with the screen and touchscreen and 2. power limitations from being stuck on battery. Other than that they'd be quite credible laptops from ~2013 or 2015 no question, possibly even a few years later. Very capable nowadays.
A lot of Android phones are capable of this (OnePlus, Samsung) but for reasons I don't understand Google disables it on the Pixel devices. I was infuriated when I tried to plug in my Pixel to a USB-C to HDMI cable and went down the troubleshooting rabbit hole only to find out that something I used to do all the time on my OnePlus wasn't possible.
It makes sense for the user but then you've just killed a lot of products you've convinced users to buy. It's ridiculus when you consider how many redundant computers people have in their homes. Smart TV. Watch. Laptops. Desktops. Phones. Even cars. In a perfect world you'd just have a central server that all of these dummy screens just tap into perhaps, either a handheld dock or a little thing in your closet. However, that would stop us from spending a grip on all these different product lines, all the different redundant things.
Garmin has made a brand of themselves doing this. Every sport activity, there's a running watch, a golf watch, a whatever the hell watch, a gps this, a gps that, a bike computer, whatever, all bespoke and siloed for a few activities, when really they could just sell you a single slab that connects to a gps and could do whatever. But then, they'd only be selling you one product and not dozens.
> "redundant computers people have in their homes. Smart TV. Watch. Laptops. Desktops. Phones. Even cars. In a perfect world you'd just have a central server that all of these dummy screens just tap into perhaps"
This is a nonsense, how is my phone going to tap into a central server at my home to do the image processing of taking a filtered video while on holiday? Stream MBit/sec over international cellular networking at my cost? Why would I want my car to tap into a handheld dock which I have to remember to bring with me and means my home computer is unusable by anyone else for the duration of my journey? How is my watch benefitting by having a long range wireless radio constantly running instead of a low power internal processor?
Maybe there's a lot of different devices because there's a lot of different ergonomics for the different tasks, all of which are improved with different kinds of computing devices? Like, if all I want is a running watch, I really don't care about it having a heavily rugged design like I might for some kind of hiking watch. I probably also don't care about connectivity to bike sensors. I probably also don't need a large satellite antenna on it. Nor do I need a big display and a mount for it and the ability to attach a sonar fish finder on it. I just want it a small and light as possible while still tracking heartrate, maybe connect to a wireless chest band, and an average quality GPS to follow my tracks.
But at the same time, if I'm on a boat and trying to look at charts and trying to find the fish, I don't necessarily care about it being small and light, I want it to be pretty big, and it needs to plug into the sonar fish finder and depth sensors on the boat.
But the ergonomics defines the needs for those computing devices.
I want that running watch to be pretty tiny, so it can only have a tiny battery. It doesn't have much of a display, so it doesn't need much graphics capabilities. Since it's barely interfacing with other devices it doesn't need a lot of peripheral support. It's not really going to load a lot of data files and doesn't need much RAM.
That fish finder is going to run a high resolution display as it's main duty so it needs a decent GPU. It's probably going to be connected to the boat's 12V system, so it doesn't need to be concerned with power usage. It's going to do a lot of reads from data files and need to hold chart data and overlay other information. It needs a lot of connectivity options for all the accessories I'm going to hook up to it.
In the end the needs for the compute are pretty different based on the different tasks. I don't want an ESP32 as a desktop and my watch doesn't need dual 3080's and 128GB of RAM.
> There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc...Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more.
Because many people can do everything they need on their undocked phone already.
For me, my phone is an auxiliary device and my preferred device is the computer. But I'm sure I'm in the minority.
Apart from dev work, almost off the other apps I use has a tablet and phone version. But I wouldn’t want the phone version other than staying on top of things. I’m typing this on the iPhone only because I’m laying on the couch and too lazy to get up. Even reading an ebook is a pain on such small screen.
This. I liked the idea from HP with there X3 phone and the Lapdock so much. All the CPU power and memory was i the phone. You could connect it to the Lapdock wireless or with a cable. The Lapdock was just a monitor, a keyboard and a battery. The idea was so cool. Sadly when it came out, Windows Mobile was already death.
From a hardware point of view, your average iPhone is definitely fast enough for many types of development.
What's really missing is an easy way to connect to peripherals, plus OS support. Samsumg has something in this direction, though I heard it's not quite mature:
I believe iOS and iPadOS both support standard HID devices if connected through a USB-to-Lightning or USB-C adapter. I've used a Logitech MX Ergo on an iPad Mini and thought that was pretty neat.
I thought about getting a Magic keyboard and pairing that and the Ergo to the iPad as a lightweight SSH solution for traveling.
Indeed, developing directly on the smartphone would be ridiculous. But, to be honest, I have similar feelings to developing directly on a laptop. There's no position I can place it at to have an ergonomic position; I always end up feeling like I'm hunched over a tiny screen. Which is why, when I get into work, I dock it and use an external monitor + kb/m.
So why can't I use my phone as that intermediary 'compute brick' I bring around? Sure, it's significantly less performant, and it would require incredible development work to make a mobile OS than can transition seamlessly into desktop. Well, that's exactly why no one does it.
It really wouldn't require that much work. Just expose the unix tooling these devices are running under the hood anyway. Expose the actual file system not a toy one. All of these complaints kind of go away when you simply jailbreak your iphone, expose the filesystem for yourself, and can do whatever thanks to the built in unix ecosystem the device already runs, but walls off from you normally until its jailbroken.
You're missing the point. The point is _NOT_ whether _ANYBODY_ would use them, the point is that you should own your device and be able to install any software on it that you want.
...plus I'm sure some people would use it, at least sometimes.
> The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development.
I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
> I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
why? my oneplus has 12 GB of RAM, 8 cores, and 256 GB of storage (plus expandable with SD card). It's plenty capable for development/desktop use. I've done dev on a raspberry pi with 4 GB and 4 cores, I don't see why the oneplus wouldn't be a more than acceptable "laptop"
People have been developing code for the last 50 years with command line ides. So long as the device has a command line and privileges its as fine of a platform as any, and orders of magnitude more performant than the hardware a lot of developers historically made a career out of. IO should be easy considering these things already have bluetooth and could interface with a keyboard. You don't need a mouse for command line work after all.
I’d choose to use Xcode on Mac, but you _can_ write apps in Swift Playgrounds on iPad, and even upload them to App Store Connect for publication in the App Store.
Isn't that just a thin client though? the actual "machine" is the server and you're just remoting into it? I don't think I'd consider that "developing" on an ipad since without the server it's totally dead in the water. I'd call that developing on a server
If there were iOS dev tools on the iPhone, I think they’d probably be built around Xcode’s Interface Builder and resemble something like a touch friendly version of Visual Basic or REALBasic, simply because the smartphone typing experience is so ill-suited for writing code.
On iPad there’s Playgrounds, which is kind of an Xcode Lite that supports Swift and SwiftUI but to do anything substantial with it you’re going to want a physical keyboard of some kind.
You know what though? Shortcuts exists on iOS. What is shortcuts? It’s a visual programming language for making apps on your iPhone. It allows you to interact and program your phone in a sensible manner for a small screen. Yeah it doesn’t give you keys to the kingdom, but the types of things you might want to do to automate using your phone are there.
I've seen those but never fully comprehended what it was about or experimented. I need to watch some Youtube videos on the subject and take a bite into that world.
"e-waste consumption slabs" really does a disservice to all of the art that has been created with these devices (visual, auditory, textual), all of the communities that have been built by information sharing and network effects, education that has come from looking up anything at any time, and the exploration that apps like Maps, Weather, Translate, etc encourage and enable.
"I can't compile from a command line, so this is e-waste and only used for consumption." - give me a break.
Unless and until we get real competitive markets in technology the enormous potential will lay dormant in the machinations and "visions" of a handful of power centers.
Techies just dont realise how extremely concentrated this domain and how this deprives from unlocking possibilities.
With billions of users there are potential markets for all sorts of devices. You are not going to see them for as long as the dinosaurs stomp on any sign of competition.
Capitalism endgame is monopoly, any sufficiently old market ends in a n-opoly. Competition doesn't work, we've been trying that for centuries already and this is where we are. Companies' goal isn't to better people's lives, it's to widen their profit margins. What do you think will change if we add more competition that hasn't worked until today ?
At least on paper, capitalism is not synonymous with oligarchy. All these corporate entities rely for their existence and "profitability" on a legal system, a security apparatus, on vital for their operations utilities such monetary systems, educational institutions etc. etc. that are bankrolled by the collective.
Corporate legal entities are merely granted a license to operate within defined sandboxes. If society and its politics refuses to design sandboxes that will serve it well we should not expect to see the benefits of the invisible hand or whatever positive attributes might be associated with the design.
It is not rocket science. The first and most powerful rule which is related to this discussion is simply: don't give any toddler too big a sandbox. It gets on their head and the outcome is that the entire family suffers.
This supposes that the sandbox (ie the State) is somehow neutral and independent, which it isn't: in all democracies, the State has always been made by the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie. Only the fact that it needs people to consume made it so that it appears to be a democracy, where people think they are in control when actually they must relinquish their power in the hands of someone else who hopefully will do the right thing.
To think, in 2023, that Capitalism doesn't lead to oligarchy is being voluntarily blind to history
I'm not sure I understand the allure of running an OS that has so many distros that are almost hostile to non-mainstream platforms. When the volunteers tire of keeping their mini-distros up to date (and they often do, given enough time), owners of older devices like these are left with just a few options: not care about updates (and possible security issues), try to do the work of applying updates themselves, or abandoning the platform. I don't see the attraction, except for those who enjoy the challenge of updating things themselves.
Another option is NetBSD, which doesn't eject platforms because they're not popular. It's one thing if the toolchain requires extensive work, like VAX or ns32k, but if there's enough interest, it happens. Otherwise, most code is portable, so what's written for popular architectures works for less common ones.
I'll have to test the latest NetBSD 10 on my Jornada hardware, both ARM (earmv4) and SuperH (sh3el). There're even good sets of pkgsrc binaries for these less common platforms:
I think projects like Gentoo are philosophically similar to NetBSD and therefore might make for a good place to start for Linux on older platforms, but the number of directly supported platforms is quite a bit smaller than NetBSD's.
Modern technology sucks. Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. That hypertext document requires more RAM to run than I used to have total in hard drive space (for operating systems that also had hypertext document viewers, that rendered the same visual result as today). All new protocols have to run over port 443; I doubt there's been a new protocol port registered with IANA in 5 years. Smart devices have no keyboards and rely on swiping on glass. Everything runs off an internet connection so you can't really leave your house or a major city and keep things working, to say nothing of vendor service outages. Android could run regular old Linux and apps and give you a desktop, but it doesn't, because we are not holy enough to receive a useful user interface. Samsung had DeX in their phones like 10 years ago but apparently that's done for, and good luck finding any modern devices that support the standards needed to do things like output video, audio, ethernet, etc via USB-C. Bluetooth is still total garbage. We still have no audible user interfaces other than shitty cloud-vendor-specific "assistants" (even though I made my own audible user interface 15 years ago for a Car PC with nothing but open source tools). We still pay the same amount for a computer today that I paid for one 20 years ago (although adjusted for inflation I guess those older ones were more expensive). Computers today do exactly the same thing they did 20 years ago: save a document or image or video over a network, display it, print it. The only difference is they now do it in a much slower, more wasteful way. And programming is still a thing. To make a new program, a bunch of humans have to sit around typing out lines of text into a screen, and going through a laborious process to compile and test it all, and it's still full of bugs.
We could have much better technology. The proof is right there in the article, from 24 years ago. We don't have anything better because we just suck at making technology. We have resigned ourselves to wasting time and making crap.
I have a 20 year old laptop. Literally, I bought it for $1700 in 2003. It doesn't run any software better than the $20 raspberri pi I also have. It certainly doesn't run software better than the $1200 desktop I built recently - that one can play games on one monitor while web browsing on another (sometimes I'll kick of a compile on that machine between matches and neither seems to be hurt too bad by both things running, if I tried that on the old laptop I'd probably have to call the fire department).
Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) - it just shows me windows and pops up a pretty menu to choose apps when I press a button. It has 32GB of ram, and even when running games and lots of browser windows and tabs I rarely use more than 16GB of them -- including the fs caches.
When the old laptop was current, I would use it for dev, and send compiles off to a distcc cluster. Using that cluster I could get a linux kernel built in a couple hours from scratch - I can do the same on my single desktop machine today, but in way less time (and there's a lot more code). Similarly, I would rip CDs and queue up the wav for each track so the cluster could pick them up and encode them as flacc and mp3. I'd rip a stack of CDs until my drive was mostly full, and go to bed. In the morning the encoding was almost finished. Last time I had a device that could read CDs a few years ago, the bottleneck was reading the CD, and a whole stack of CDs would finish in less time than just ripping would 20 years ago. I have "slow" internet at home, so saving them to some internet drive might make the whole process take the same amount of time as the ripping process in the past.
I'm sorry you're disappointed we don't have flying cars yet, but it's a bit absurdist to claim tech has gotten strictly worse and that the old days were better - because the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better than it was 20 years ago.
>Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor)
A desktop full of icons was great. It was actually very convenient to have your most-used programs and most-accessed directories easily accessible in a grid on your desktop. Menus are worse. They're linear. To access something from a menu you need to move your mouse to the corner of your screen, click, wait for the menu to load (this often takes literally 20s on Windows for some reason), then move your mouse to click on a quite-small area of the screen in the menu. Or you could search in the menu, but for some reason that escapes me this also takes multiple seconds to process on Windows and even when it has processed half the time its search just doesn't find what I'm looking for, and wants to open my search query in a web browser instead.
On a desktop, you have things arrayed out on a grid. If your mouse is in the middle of the screen, then it's in a sense O(sqrt(n)) time to get to something on a grid. Each icon can be larger (easier to click on) because they're not constrained to all be in a linear menu. And because you can choose the order they appear in, it's easy muscle memory to just click the same icon in the same spot every time.
Desktops were great. I really hate this current trend of denigrating "files" and "folders" and "desktops" because their names are skeuomorphic. I blame Apple for this. They made such a big thing about removing the skeuomorphism from their notes app and replacing everything with bland samey flat design. People seem to have latched onto that and decided that anything remotely skeuomorphic must automatically be bad. Nobody is actually thinking about the top of their desk when they see a computer desktop. Maybe they did in the 1990s but not today. It's just a convenient grid of shortcuts to applications, files, and folders.
Why would i use a mouse to open apps and navigate a menu? I press a button and get a new terminal. I press a different button and launch a chrome window. Another one brings up a curated menu of common apps navigable by keyboard (either iterate through or search by typing the name). It all happens in under a second (except launching chrome, but that's mostly chrome not my system).
Im not denigrating files and folders. Im not upset that desktop is the name, its fitting for the metaphor they were going for, its just a silly use of my screen - most of the time the "desktop" should be under actually useful windows that are doing actual useful work. Hell if i wanted a grid of clickable things I'd install something like EWW and have a button that poped up that grid instead - the problem with the desktop (besides being a bad metaphor) is that it's functionality should be overlay not underlay.
When I use a real operating system instead of an entertainment kiosk I use dmenu to open programs. But most people find using the mouse more intuitive than the keyboard.
I think it's actually quite good that you get back to the desktop by clicking the 'minimise everything' button. It reduces cognitive load to switch tasks by making everything currently open "go away" and then starting a new task, rather than just loading up every new task on top of the old one. It's like opening a new window for a new task vs just opening 500 tabs in one window. Better yet are systems with multiple desktops where you start a new activity ("Okay checking my emails is done, time to do some budgeting") by going to a new desktop and then clicking Excel or GnuCash or whatever.
The desktop is for most people just a generic collection of random stuff. That seems chaotic and bad and messy, but I think it's actually really powerful. It's like the filesystem. Probably for every type of document there is a better way to browse it. Photos are best browsed in a photo browser. Videos in a video browser. Documents in a document browser. But a traditional file browser is the best generic browser of things. Similarly, an overlay application launcher is probably better for quickly starting a program, and a 'recent files' launcher might be better for that, and a 'favourite folders' thing might be better for that, etc. etc. But in practice people tend towards a kind of 'managed chaos' that intentionally-designed systems don't handle very well. It's the backup, the default, the catchall. Every system needs something like that. That's what your desktop ends up being.
Go to an office. Is everything filed perfectly? No, most stuff is and then there's always, inevitably, a 'miscellaneous' section. Everyone has that little jar with random screws and twist-ties and rubber bands and those little tags things that go around bread bags when they're twisted and a couple of coins. Everyone has that drawer which has USB cables and old phones and permanent markers and foreign coins from that time you went overseas. You need a 'random miscellaneous shit' category.
> the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better
The hardware is.
The software has trended in the opposite direction. Software made today can't run on old hardware - not because the architecture is different or incompatible, but because the old hardware doesn't have enough resources to waste. The software is doing literally the same thing it used to, but slower and more bloated.
> Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications.
During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthought, and the naming after Java was a careless mistake.
In the 2000's decade, Google in its wisdom decided to make Javascript in the browser a first-priority effort, and they threw money at the best optimizing compiler engineers they could get their hands on.
This settled a long-running debate in the industry over how client/server computing would work, that is, do you keep the UI logic on the server or push it to the client (this goes all the way back to the async vs. "intelligent" terminal debate in the 80's).
The Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing era would not be what it is, except for Google deciding to make Chrome a first-class client platform, not just a trivial hypertext document viewer. The first thing people noticed was Google Maps, but that was just the tip of a much deeper iceberg.
Most of what you are complaining about came later. Web 2.0 begat social media, which turned into a new form of television (i.e., scrolling your IG feed to look at mindless T&A).
For a while I was optimistic about the gaming explosion fueling the development of GPU technology, but then that turned into Crypto and so-called "Web 3.0" so now we're back to cynical again. But I do like that the average affordable laptop these days will still have a strong onboard GPU, even if I only use it to play retro 80's video games using emulation. That still makes me happy.
I had one running NetBSD together with a Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving purposes. With the driver for the WiFi card patched to enable monitor mode. Had two different antennas, a quarter wave dipole, which I made myself, and also an Andrew QD-2402, a 16dBi antenna (!) that could receive WiFi APs from more than 20km away, when on high ground.
You could even develop software on it, compile programs with GCC, write Perl scripts to do various things, e.g. automatically scan for and connect to open access points as you walked around town. I think that script even tested if the access point had Internet access or not, and blacklisted ones that didn't. Worked really well, there were so many open access points back in the day. Also had the "links" / "eLinks" web browser, that was text only.
And you could also overclock the bus to the Epson video chip, to allow for faster display updates. The video chip had 2D acceleration, I might have written an XFree86 driver for that, but cannot be sure about it.
I also wrote a flashing tool for the WiFi card, that let you alter the regulatory domain settings to enable full 100mW power output, and also change the MAC address stored in Flash. I think I have the source code to that somewhere...
It's just so amazing to see that the functionality of that enormous WiFi card has now been shrunk down to a tiny QFN chip, an ESP32.
I have the exact the same feeling with Steam vs iPhone, iPad, Vision, or whatever they advertise as the next computer. What SteamOS has is a desktop that allow user to run real browser with proper ad blocker, has a desktop that user can set whatever shortcut the user like, run whatever script to process the user’s file. The next computer doesn’t do those things.
SteamOS is Google Play Services for desktop linux. For a while you couldn't use the touchpads without running the steam client. They break existing dual boot setups every firmware update so in some ways are more hostile to alternative OSes than Windows. The hardware of Steam Deck is generally more open though if you forgo SteamOS itself.
It seems that very important use case for the author is developing/programming and compiling software on the phone.
I work as a software developer for living, and ignoring the part that there are other things other than actual programming that can be done on any phone, I never had the urge to program on a phone. None of my friends or colleagues wishes to do that either.
I prefer a monitor, but laptop would do. But using smartphones for 15 years, I never complained that I cannot program on them.
That's strange, my latest Google Pixel has enough computing power that I could easily do my frontend development on it if I connected screen and keyboard and if the OS supported it.
I wouldn't be keen on writing the code on touchscreen, but I would love to have one small device that I can "dock" when I need to switch to poweruser mode.
You can. A USB-C to HDMI cable with any Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse. And install `termux` from the official app store. Vim/Emacs and every imaginable build chain work fine. You can even setup a vscode server to open in the browser if that way inclined.
Leaving aide the software and abilities side of things, I wish devices with this form factor were still available.
I used to own a Philips Velo, Psion 5mx and a Nokia Communicator. The keyboards were good enough be useful, great for typing something up whilst on the train or as a pocket-able computer to take with you on trips.
There are some mini laptops on the market which are certainly a lot more versatile and powerful, but they don't have the narrow rectangle form factor of all those 90s devices. They are small, but not really suitable for throwing in your pocket.
Yes, I know you can get Bluetooth keyboards for modern smartphones, but they just aren't as convenient as a single device you could fold up and put in your pocket.
How hard is doing development on Android, really? You can just build the app and run it, can't you? Equating that with Apple's genuinely awful stance is lazy and hurts the cause.
I originally started a reply to you to tell you why you're wrong, but after thinking through the contemporary process, I agree. It's pretty trivial to install an app and do dev on android without any external machine, and you can easily plug in a keyboard and/or mouse and use that too. I agree much with OP but I think he's being a little too hard on Android
Note to the author: I'm not sure if that's intentional, but if it isn't: the "cursor: default" rule in CSS for the html element creates a weird effect where hovering over text doesn't change the cursor's shape to indicating possibility of text selection (vertical bar), instead keeping it as the default triangle shape.
It's so cool to see modern workflows and software on old devices. I chase this through my retro computing hobby, seeing how far I can take old machines.
Do any HN users have a recommendation for a lightweight distro that would run on an SSE1-only Pentium III CPU? The most recently supported Ubuntu distro is a little too heavy for it.
Yup. I always wanted to develop, compile, and run programs on a small screen device that is meant to be a personal communication and media consumption device!
Just because a device's hardware is capable of something doesn't mean it makes sense to implement it. The whole article feels clickbait to me TBH.
> Yup. I always wanted to develop, compile, and run programs on a small screen device that is meant to be a personal communication and media consumption device!
I don't even know what this means. Why wouldn't you?
And who should have that power of implementation? You, because of your opinion? The companies? Or the people who bought and paid for the devices?
It is emphatically not the case that there exists any meaningful difficulty or cost to do the implementation. Just open/root the devices for those who choose to do so and let them go. Or would you rather limit freedom?
Opening up a device just because a very niche user base (HN isn't representitive of general public) has a proof-of-concept use case that isn't productive in most cases, that would bring maintenance issues and possible attack vectors?
I'm glad Apple doesn't do that and focus on what generally matters.
I mean, I feel like I've heard this argument a lot...
"HN isn't representative of general public"
"We don't need file browsers because the general public doesn't use it"
"You shouldn't be able to install Emulators because the general public doesn't"
If we follow this reductive line of reasoning, nobody would ever do anything on an iPhone besides buy stuff. The iPhone supports hundreds of features that aren't representative of the general public, Apple chooses to deny you this one because they are afraid of it hurting their bottom line.
I think the point is that these are all general purpose computers at their core but some have unnecessary barriers erected in userspace to narrow what the user can do.
I wouldn't code on it as-is but perhaps I could plug it into a hub at a desktop or find some other use for it.
Meant by whom? To some, device they carry in their pocket is meant to be a light hacking tool. That modern devices can't do that even if the owner wants it is a travesty.
> Just because a device's hardware is capable of something doesn't mean it makes sense to implement it.
I disagree. If a device's hardware is capable of something, it should be implemented as soon as possible. Now, it shouldn't be forced on everyone, but having options available has traditionally improved software quality a lot. Even if that capability is bad, exposing it sooner is better than realizing it too late.
It seems everyone has forgotten the point of writing your own tools.
It would take some serious effort making the gui usable for others, effort cleaning up my code for review and last but not least it should have at least some documentation. It even had buttons for functionality that either isn't implemented or behaves oddly but it is just for me, I can use it just fine.
Or say: I need a static phone app with a bunch of family recipes, an index, each one a shopping list and a start button that counts down for each task involved. It should have pictures of grandma, ideally with the dish. That I have to do that from a website is just silly. It should work for 1000 generations without payments or reviews and have access to nothing outside the app.
If you think the prison computer is a great platform to migrate all our things should you be entitled to an opinion? It seems like one doesn't want to have any? People need to experience more platform shitification or the platform ripped from under your feet. It just happens, everything starts out nice. Enough of that and you will see the point of languages or protocols that lack an all powerful ruler "protecting", even a benevolent a creative visionary may eventually make place for a simplistic money man.
haha, I accidentally pictured apple under Mitt Romney...
The form factor and the fact it is basically a standard pc, just very compact make me think if this is pretty much equivalent to the pocket computer in the article?
(The company has some other interesting products, the DB9 RS-232 on some makes me wonder if I might actually buy one sometime)
I think the Gemini (https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/gemini-pda) is probably a little closer to the Jornada that I remember. I've been trying to find a justification other than "ooh, shiny" for a while, it would be perfect for throwing in a bag to do some hobby project work whilst at a coffee shop and with wifi you can off-site the compilation to a remote box.
They also have gained an incredibly bad reputation in the Psion community (hardware, shipping, support, etc.). That has kept me from considering them...
Forget side-loading, the fact that I can't develop and run my own applications on iOS without having to ask apple for permission every week is infuriating.
I always wanted a Windows CE clamshell laptop, but I just have not had the time to look at ebay. The small laptops were always interesting to me.
Is there a 3D printable case for the Raspberry Pi that is like one of these? I looked at the DevTerm but I heard that it's not that good, and anyways it's not exactly the same as this.
I love my Sony Z4 Tablet with its bluetooth dock (which is actually attached like a laptop, unlike the floppy covers popularized by the Surface Pro that are around these days).
Unfortunately they never made a successor and its Android version is getting so old I can't run most modern apps anymore :(
So... sections of the comments here have made some assertions about the history of Unix and Mach (and I guess Leenucks by extension) which aren't supported by the factual record. As a service, I have posted a link to the Wikipedia page on the history of Unix over here:
It might be useful to ask questions or make comments about Unix, Mach, Leenooks, Solaris, HPUX, IRIX, ConvexOS, AIX, A/UX or plain ol' SVR4 over there. Or heck... keep doing it here. I'm not your mother. Just seems off topic for this discussion so I spun up another thread over there.
Luckily, my prediction wasn't correct and the app stores on PCs didn't gain much traction. So there's still a way out. But, admittedly, the relative ratio of phone users vs total computer users are growing and so the mindset I was afraid for is indeed dying out. Cyberpunk novels featured people who can't even read any more just click icons. Are we getting there? Maybe but luckily much slower than I thought.
While previous machines had those possibilities enabled to allow the user to do much more, it also means those possibilities were wide-open to any third-party software that was installed on the machine.
It's not that modern machines can't do those tasks, but that they generally shouldn't do those tasks.
It's not unreasonable for device manufacturers to sandbox and restrict access to functionality to protect the majority of their users.
Even despite these attempts the app stores are full of malware, just imagine how much worse it could be if these apps could also compile their own variants and then abuse Bluetooth/Airdrop to spread it.
You don't have to "imagine," you're basically describing most of the history of viruses and Windows. So what?
I'm entirely unconvinced by this sensationalist take; I'm quite certain we've lost more than we've gained from turning general purpose computers into nanny-state locked down devices.
I work with undergraduates sometimes and its amazing what we can take for granted in terms of computer literacy these days. Some of these kids haven't touched a desktop OS until they get into college, at which point they are just using like google docs and sheets and the filesystem within those webapps. They don't really get what files are, what file types are, what folders are even, and look at me like I have two heads when I say copy and paste some text to a document, save it, send it over.
You think they'd be hamstrung for life but honestly, there isn't much computer literacy in the workforce from what I've seen, either. They'd fit right in. It just sucks to think about all the kids who might have gone further with computing if more of it was exposed to them, instead of locked up basically until they get into college and demoralized by a crushing CS curriculum, since highschools and middle or elementary don't really teach this stuff either.
I teach IT at a university, undergrads and grads. All of this is exactly correct. The oddest thing is explaining to people my age (I'm 46) how many of my IT students are likely less knowledgable about those kinds of basics (despite having other, to me odd, skills, like fake instagram accounts and such)
If apple was concerned about these protections they'd just put it behind some sort of toggle. Right now its kind of an extortion situation since they change you money for a developer license, and void your warranty for jailbreaking. If it was all for the users benefit then they'd offer to reset a jailbroken phone back to factory settings at the genus bar instead of refusing service.
I have to admit that one of the best computers I ever owned was a pink netbook I bought in a hurry when I was short on cash. It was great for ham radio because of the long battery life (log your contacts when you are operating out of a tent.)
Once i swapped out the HDD for an SSD, it became a great car computer (for the passenger) because it had a power supply that would plug into the cigarette lighter. I'd use it to play music and, with a Bluetooth GPS and Microsoft Streets and Trips it was a much better navigator than any handheld, car or phone navigator I've ever used.
Yeah, Office 2003's live collaboration tooling is just fantastic.
I'll take having a single document shared with my team that we're all able to edit live than having _v2_draft_v3_FINAL_v2.doc getting shared around in a massive email chain or getting mangled on a shared drive, thank you.
The lack of modern devices having development environments easily accessible (ie. can access within 30 seconds with no setup needed) is severely hurting the supply of 'hobby' programmers.
The end result is programming as a profession will stagnate. Just like the rail industry stagnated in the early 20th century, the car industry stagnated in the 80's, the aviation industry stagnated after concorde, etc. Industries stagnate when the influx of new people with new and wild ideas gets drowned by old timers who have 'always done it like this'.
Don’t worry, the industry has at least one more act in it. That’s when the stagnant industry that is nonetheless critical to daily life is taken hold of by a new generation and relentlessly optimized for maximum profit extraction. Hope you like car seat heaters as a service, Spirit Airlines and precision scheduled railroading!
He is so right. When everybody is on iPhone / iPad - who develops the apps then? Back when i was young, computers encouraged curiosity, today these devices encourage to watch tiktok.
> Otherwise it is e-waste the moment it leaves the factory.
This statement left me contemplating this biasing to e-waste in our production lines, which is to essentially ask how much easier is it to repurpose old devices that permit root administration vs those which do not? This isn't to confuse that every old admin friendly device becomes a repurposed computing tool but the fact that the fraction of those old devices which do, which percent are admin friendly and which are not. That's an interesting question.
Actually now that I read more into the article his post makes me regret donating my old PocketPC to the Goodwill some years back. If I had known this capability and appreciated it back then I could have used it for some kitchen inventory roles I've been contemplating getting a junk tablet for.
Much as this makes me happy (I started at hp when this thing came out) I have to say that a phone is not the same as a PDA or other embedded device. A lot of the difficulty of developing on a phone is that the appstore model and ubiquitous connectivity pretty much mandates a much higher level of firewalling and sandboxing. If you get a separate phone you won't use for making calls and texting then jailbraking and doing on-board development isn't that hard.
My 10 year old BlackBerry Playbook was light years ahead of the iPad in functionality with standard features like mouse support (which iPad only received a few years ago). The QNX-based OS v2.x was amazing. In fact, QNX is now used on over 200 million automobiles.
The iPhone is popular because of what it can’t do, not because of what it can.
Power users need their own ecosystem, but as always they are too segmented to get it to any usable level, so some old devices are still as good as it will ever be so someone tech-savvy. Many people still think that mobile devices peaked with Psion 5 or N900.
> they are too segmented to get it to any usable level
No, the problem is always firmware, hardware, drivers... If everybody were required to publish specs for these SoCs and peripherals, we'd see competition and vastly different outcomes.
> N900.
The N900 would have had continuity with any number of subsequent devices, it certainly had the coders and the community. The problem was constantly having to reverse-engineer everything, so all of the projects got sick and died. Governments have made a special effort to preserve the monopolies of mobile carriers, manufacturers and OS vendors. They even carved out a mobile exception in the US for guidelines about net neutrality.
I think that governments, OS vendors, and telecom have entered into a partnership because they have a shared goal of limiting user control over mobile devices as much as can possibly be gotten away with. The OS vendors and manufacturers are interested in a captive customer base that is subject to their whims and policy changes. The government wants monitoring and editorial access to communications. Open hardware that runs standard Linux is absolutely impossible to tolerate if you have those goals.
I was rummaging through my junk and came across Sony Clie PDA - I'm going to boot it up and write a post about it soon - I do have a font memory of buying this expensive toy thinking I was so busy that I needed an electronic fancy to-do list only to find out later that I was just playing games on it.
I read a lot on my Clie, and I recall it having a Scheme (?) implementation I played with in my CS classes. At least until its battery crapped out and by then I had a laptop which was much more pleasant to use. I think mine got tossed in a purge 6 or 7 years back.
I used to be able to do something similar on my Sharp Zaurus SL5500 with the stock rom: there were various interpreters and compilers available for it and the built-in keyboard had mappings for the needed characters so I could write small programs and then compile and run them right on the device.
I daily drive an obscure Linux distribution on a Thinkpad. I value free software and customisation.
But I still use an iPhone.
Why? Three reasons.
One: reliability. I rely on my phone for payments: I no longer even carry a wallet most of the time. My phone has to work. And my iPhone just works. Over the years Apple have earned my trust - a trust that was repeatedly shattered when I ran Android.
Two: security. I trust my phone with my entire digital life. Apple’s walled garden is inherently significantly more secure than Android’s ecosystem.
I also trust Apple more than I do Google on hardware and software security. For example, see the recent Pixel lockscreen bypass. Apple quite simply don’t fuck up like this. It just doesn’t happen.
Three: ergonomics. Android and other free phone operating systems are not in the same league.
By the way, I can do everything mentioned in this article with iSh on my phone.
Rasberry Pi and some other SoC-based embedded boards allow on-board development but it's never as much fun as it should be. At the end of the day I prefer some mixed model where I run VSCode or similar on the PC and download/remote-debug on the target.
Those old palmtops sure bring back memories. I'd probably still have one as a hobby device, except for the fact they all came with ghosty, smear-y DSTN screens whose black-white response time is better measured in seconds instead of milliseconds.
You could alter the video timings on the Jornada a bit, by writing to the video chip registers directly. That would slightly improve its abysmal contrast ratio.
You could download and run gcc and any app on iphone for 15 years now, implying it is the same iphone from 2008. Just jailbreak it. Online.
Only iphones you can’t just download and run gcc are from 2018 onwards. These make you need some other device to upload gcc signed (by you) that can compile and execute code in the sandbox of own process. And, you can get windows or linux emulator (in fact, for ANY popular architecture) and run anything you want. Can your ancient device do it? Can it do anything useful? Because recompiling old trash over and over for amusement soon be banned in EU as part of global warming effort (along with eating bugs).
I’m so glad all over my elderly family members have locked down iPhones and iPads. Remember all that tech support you had to do back in Windows 98 days?
Modern devices are too complex for most people to really grok. The only sane solution is to lock them down.
I had one of these and a Psion when I was a kid. These days I have an Android phone. I know about the Astro Slide but my phone is already great. I have a pocket Bluetooth keyboard but it's not an optimal size. I'd love a 4 row scissor switch Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket with my phone. I get such retro feelings.
I'm not entirely stuck in the past. Maybe I'll make use of an old phone as a remote touch screen keyboard, with Gboard on an old phone and WiFi keyboard on the new one. I feel like hybrid physical/swipe keyboard could be interesting though.
"Boy do I miss the good old days, where devices were programmable by their owners instead of just e-waste consumption slabs."
Boy I miss the good old days when you had to build the board in your computer before these interlopers could buy pre-built computers.
Ugh. Not everyone wants a science project. I know this is hard for many techies to understand but not everyone loves tech for the sake of tech. For many these are just tools no more special than any other tool and if they don't do useful work they are a burden.
The first iPhone didn't have copy & paste. That wasn't a mistake. iOS has by design been a dumbphone OS favouring vendor lock-in, with some progressive enhancements over the past 15 years.
It only took them a decade to release have a local file manager app! And unlike say, Reddit, they didn't allow any 3rd parties to build one for them, because apparently only Apple could get this groundbreaking technology right! /s
> Connect via USB to a PC as a mass storage device
... if you want a mass storage device... buy a mass storage device?
Personally I'm happier with the cloud though. I want all my files in the cloud anyway as an offsite backup, and the internet is generally fast enough that I can access the remote copy whenever I need it.
> Be switched on immediately when plugged in, after the battery runs out
My battery never runs out though.
But seriously iPhone CPUs are pretty power hungry with 3.46Ghz with six cores and aside from just booting up there's also some pretty high decryption going on to decrypt and verify the operating system hasn't been tampered with. I'm pretty sure a USB cable can't provide enough watts.
> Want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor to control your phone instead of your thumbs
USB and Bluetooth keyboards totally work with iPhones, and iPads. I use a mouse and keyboard all day long every day with my iPad (I'm happy with my thumbs for my phone, but I could use the keyboard for that too).
And you can absolutely connect it to an external screen too, with HDMI or over a network connection.
> if you want a mass storage device... buy a mass storage device?
Eh, I bought a 128GB device that is practically always with me which already has a lot of my important files on it (my phone). It can be pretty handy to just be able to plug in as a mass storage device, but tbh these days I mostly just use things like OneDrive or Google Drive for keeping files accessible on the go. But when I'm wanting to shuffle a big file around between machines that aren't networked, its a handy thing. That, and being able to poke around the actual filesystem on a full-sized computer is handy.
> I'm pretty sure a USB cable can't provide enough watts.
I've got a 65W USB cable in my backpack, it came with my laptop to charge. Its not even the most powerful USB cable I've used, my friend's thunderbolt eGPU dock can do like 100W or so. I can't imagine my phone could pull 65W for more than a few seconds without literally melting.
Does this not give the OP eye strain? I don't even type very long comments on HN/Reddit on my phone, let alone write code. I switch to my desktop set-up as soon as I can. I can't stand low resolution and low refresh rates, let alone a tiny screen—it has 1/54th the resolution that my monitor has.
I suppose this is one of those 'I'm doing it just because I can' things.
Get rid of the Windows key, and give me a ctrl and alt key on the right side. And some way to do "right-click"; usually S-F10 works, but I'm not sure those keys at the top are "fucntion keys".
To me it seems like it would be a major hassle to code without both of the ctrl and alt keys, but maybe the keyboard is so small it's not a factor anyway?
It's disgraceful that the iPhone went out the door without this basic, standard feature. But it's straight-up petulant and insulting that Apple has refused to fix it this entire time... but did add repeating alerts for TEXTS, in a settings screen that is otherwise the same as the Phone app's.
I code widgets in JavaScript using Scriptable on my iPhone. There's full development environments (e.g. Pythonista), web servers (WorldWideWeb), virtual machines (UTM) etc without jailbreaking. Otherwise, SSH and VNC let me access the best machine for a particular job while using a very reliable phone that will receive years of upgrades.
Ah the memories! I used to run JLime and NetBSD on Jornada and MobilePro machines. While definitely not perfect, they were really nice and useable, and far more portable than contemporary laptops.
You could run X11, they had PCMCIA (for wifi and extra storage), and were just such a wonderful mix of weird and useful.
I wanted one of these so bad back in the 90s. I'm surprised I didn't buy one but I think it cost about $1,000 CAD (stuff here is much more than in the US). That's about $1,700 today but really $1,700 now doesn't really compare to $1,000 in the 1990s. It would probably be at least a month's pay for me back then.
Title: My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things your modern iPhone still can't do!
Then in the article: can do one thing your modern iPhone can't.
It turns out that one thing is root access. But they're gaining root access by installing an entirely new operating system. There are a few hardware-secured parts of an iPhone (I Am Not A Hardware Expert, but at least the Secure Enclave and maybe the Touch ID/Face ID hardware), but beyond that, there's nothing stopping people from creating/installing a new OS on iPhone hardware, is there? So it's not "The HP Jornada can do things an iPhone can't do" as much as it is "people have done things for the HP Jornada that no one has for the iPhone"
And that is (I think) mostly because the iPhone is ridiculously more complicated hardware than the HP Jornada is. I'm making these numbers up, but: it seems likely the team creating iOS numbers in the thousands, while the Jlime team has 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime
Outside of a handful of special ultra-unlocked iPhones Apple sells (or loans maybe? Don't remember the details) to security researchers, no, you cannot reliably boot your own OS on iPhone hardware. Apple's secure boot ROM only trusts bootloaders cryptographically signed by Apple's private signing key.
Short of finding a flaw in that ROM or a jailbreak good enough to take over from the booted iOS, there's no path to booting something else. While people have found such boot ROM and jailbreak flaws in the past, recent hardware and iOS have no known vulnerabilities good enough to take over (AFAIK). (and note also that Apple guards against rollback attacks on iOS devices - once you've upgraded a device to a new iOS version, there's no going back to an older version with a jailbreak.)
The complexity of Apple's hardware is not a barrier. Apple Silicon Macs run essentially the same hardware as iPhone, only more complex (because there's more stuff to support in the bigger SoCs they put in Macs). When Apple updated their secure boot to work well for Mac, they chose to explicitly support that which is forbidden on iPhones: they give users an interface allowing them to locally sign a bootloader and store a cryptographic hash in the Secure Enclave so that the boot ROM will trust it just as if the bootloader had been provided by Apple. Because this path exists, people have been reverse engineering Apple's SoCs and there's a working Linux distro (Asahi Linux) and a BSD port. Not everything works yet, but a surprising amount does.
It seems you're right -- I'm not in the "install other OSes" business, and I didn't know about the bootloader restriction. I was going off the fact that jailbreaks existed at some point, I didn't know that more recent iPhones have gotten harder/impossible to break.
And certainly, since the concept of hardware lockdown pretty much wasn't a thing twenty years ago, the Jornada probably puts up no intentional barriers.
I think the complexity issue holds -- it doesn't make it impossible, but surely it's easier to implement an alternative OS for something as simple as the Jornada. Although playing devil's advocate, the Asahi page only lists 8 people (compared to the 5 for the Jornada) so it can't be that much more complex. And it's irrelevant because of the bootloader thing.
It appears from some quick reading that the bootloader is a security technique -- that same lockdown that prevents alternative OSes also prevents malware. I understand if people disagree, but that seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.
Is is possible to boot iOS devices into an alternative OS? Googling around I found OpeniBoot but it seems to only support older iPhone and iPad models (and iPod).
I would legitimately use this or anything like it as an SSH gateway often. It would be very neat to have. Does anyone know just how bad the version of Devuan they propose using runs, how slow? If you aren't using graphics I assume it's probably fairly quick... fluxbox can't be that bad either, right?
My iPhone shouldn't handle laptop tasks. I do think the iPad is really silly, like an intentionally gimped laptop where people for some reason jump through hoops to make it work almost like a regular laptop, even spending $300 on a keyboard. But that's fine cause I simply buy a MacBook instead.
My Dad had one of these when it was still new. With a pcmcia NIC and JLime I was able to then ssh into it. Realize this was long before PIs or Arduino's existed.
I distinctly remember the feeling, while holding that Jornada in my hand, when I first SSH'd into it. I was inside the machine held in my hand.
I bought a GPD Pocket 7 when they crowdfunded it. To me it felt like the first mobile general purpose computing option that continued where palmtops of the old days left off. For me personally, its predecessor was a Toshiba Libretto 110CT.
Netbooks were kind of a step-backwards middle phase for me.
Wow, I'd forgotten about netbooks! What a brief craze in hindsight - but it was a craze, they were hardly niche. Like if the iPhone 3G and 3GS and the Nokia N95 and something else came out, but then that was it for 'smart phones'.
2007-2008 suddenly about half of everyone in grad school had some form of Asus Eee PC. There was a cheap one around $399 and a much more expensive one that was around $899 and you could easily tell the difference at a glance due to the screen size and resolution. The small one was like 800x480 whereas the higher end model was 1024x600.
I remember being fascinated by them and really jealous. But then, I never took my laptop anywhere. I really didn't even use a computer outside lab workstations up until 2010-ish I think. The frequency at which people started using devices outside their home really changed dramatically between 2005 and 2010.
Can’t you develop and install anything your heart desires on your own iPhone if you join the Dev Program?
Obviously this doesn’t let you distribute and sell content on Apple’s store. But that’s above and beyond having the ability to run what you want on your own device.
while it's a cool feature, i don't think it is a fair ask. walled garden or not, each company decide the tradeoffs of features they assign to their consumer technology.
clearly apple has made theirs with restricting what apps can do in ios. even with them being forced to enable sideloading, it would probably take a lot before a termux alternative can be possible in that ecosystem.
regardless, if one was a future model of the other and the feature was removed, then i could understand the argument.
Is there something modern buyable in 2023 that provides the same experience as this guy has? Just a neat pocketable linux "box" with decent battery life (5 hours sounds awesome)
AFAIK you have to be 18 years old to apply to Apple's iOS developer program. This is a huge problem within teaching. Please do tell me if there are legal ways around this.
For me the most amazing part here was the briefly mentioned spec of having a CFL backlight. I would have never considered that, but for the era it makes perfect sense.
iPhone software quality and performance is way ahead of Android. I am all for open source, even partial, like in case of Android, if there is no other choice. But the Android architecture and code quality, especially apps, is absolutely horrible. We need something like iOS but open source. Even if it runs on top of Linux kernel, just with a proper system and user-level environment.
"Soon after HP's merger with Compaq in 2002, HP discontinued its Jornada line of Microsoft Windows powered Pocket PCs, and continued the iPAQ line that started under Compaq."
"But then HP encountered the grim reality faced by anyone trying to compete with Apple in mobile devices: making competitive hardware is difficult, and attracting developers is even more so. It's the Catch 22 situation I spoke about in my earlier webOS analysis: no apps = no customers = no developers = no apps." https://web.archive.org/web/20110925012246/http://mobile-dev...
was in the android camp for a long time, many of my friends wasted hours with android modifying and breaking the phone, it was fun but now I have an iphone that just works.
One data point on this whole debate around Apple walled garden. It's basically my own opinion, not a blank statement. It won't be very popular here but whatever. Here it goes:
The reason why I'm personally sticking with the iPhone is exactly the walled garden. I had a 3G, the 5, and now the 8 for last 5 years (there goes the argument about buying a new phone every year). I bought all of them knowing very well what I'm getting into and I want it to remain that way. If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.
This is a false choice - there's no reason the iPhone can't be both a walled garden-type device and support alternative OSes/software, just like a computer.
We know because this exact strategy works just fine on Apple's other computer platform, the Mac. Personally, I hate that our phones, which increasingly are our personal computer, are often no longer just a general purpose compute device to use how I want, if i want.
The walled garden also relies enormously on Apple - a publicly traded for profit enterprise - being a benign benefactor, which to date has been (relatively) true. The future on a long timescale may not be so nice. Were this to change, you don't easily have a say in alternative software.
Why shouldn't you be able to install a linux distro and turn your old iPhone or iPad into a really power-efficient home server-type appliance, if you want to? My old MacBook is doing exactly this.
I'm not saying that Steve Jobs wasn't successful, or wasn't a visionary, or didn't save Apple. I'm just saying, the Apple II shipped with AppleSoft Basic. The Mac had no such language or built in compiler.
I remember my friend back in college had an Apple IIc, and someone actually wrote a C compiler for it. He used it AFAIK all the way through college until the mid nineties, 12 years after it's original release date roughly in 1984.
What I miss about computers from this time is that the Apple IIc had a joystick port. When I was like 12 (1985ish) I discovered I could get a DB9 connector and got a CDs cell which acted like a light sensitive resistor. This allowed me to play games that needed only a X or Y axis movement just by hovering my hand over the sensor.
Edited to add:
To this day, I don't own an Apple computer. The mac's were just waaay too expensive. Around 1996/1997 after college, I enjoyed Unix style operating systems more than windows or mac, and promptly got a PC and ran linux on it when I got a full time job out of college. And linux back then installed a C compiler typically too!! Windows and mac did not.
Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode, and the associated tooling, without forgetting that until recently, every Mac came pre-installed with Perl, Python and Ruby. I will concede that Objective-C is not AppleSoft Basic, but how useful is that now? And aren’t the previously listed languages a more powerful version in many ways? Also didn’t all Macs after 1986 come with HyperCard? I know NeXT machines all shipped with Project Builder.
My point, your link is, like your theory, fiction.
> Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode,
Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment, in a time where every other personal computer had one built-in. As a matter of fact the only way to develop software for the Macintosh was to drop $10,000 on a Lisa
Also a fact: Steve Jobs spent the first half of the 90's trying to sell NeXT machines specifically on their dev tools for quickly making custom applications. From the late 1980's on, whenever he spoke of his visits to Xerox PARC he would mention the GUI, networking, and object-oriented programming as the three equally world-changing technologies shown to him.
Side note: For some reason Jobs insisted it only have an optical drive instead of a hard drive. Which I'm sure many engineers advised against. Hard drive was like 2.5k extra. What a decision.
Fact: the link the OP provided was from a Hollywood movie, a know reliable source of historical accuracy. /s
That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs."
Edit: Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...
"Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode..."
when he pointed out that the mac DIDN'T come with CD or any dev environment. you responded with "That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing"
The OP point was that Jobs hated users having access to programming tools and not wanting to ship them with his computers.
The original 1984 Mac on release not having a dev environment was just an example he used to make his point.
But the example can be correct, without making the point valid (as numerous people have answered here).
Especially since the same Jobs had shipped tons of computers with development environments, including things like PBX, XCode, all kinds of scripting languages, the whole NeXT suite of dev tools (that were one of its strong points, and became the later basis for OS X dev tools), and so on.
If the parents point was "at the point of the release of the original Mac in 1984, and only then, Jobs didn't want to give users development environment" he might have a point. But Jobs of the subsequent 20+ years agreeing to ship development tools just fine, makes the point moot.
can't you see how wrong his point is and how irrelevant the example?
I did point out that "Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode...", and in the same post pointed out that "Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it..."
So you're annoyed that I pointed out that every version of Mac OS (including System 7.5, 8 and 9) all shipped with some kind of dev environment (and I concede that Hypercard is applying that loosely) and pointed out that the 128K Mac did not have an OS shipped on a CD or a method for reading the CDs at the time (were CD-ROMs even a thing in 1984 - I can't remember)?
I tell you what it doesn't prove either way; programable computer were "despised by Steve Jobs". That is what I was taking umbrage with.
> Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...
Right. No python. No C. No Perl. No Pascal. No Ruby. No C++. No Basic. Even the Apple IIc with it's puny 64k of ram had a decent Basic in it for the time. Talk about a feat of engineering from Microsoft!
One thing I was able to do with my AppleIIc was control the serial port through Basic (1984 ish). Hypertalk released support for doing that in 1992 -- a full 8 years (!) after the original mac was released.
Not really a surprise there was no Python (1991), Perl (1987), Ruby (1993), or C++ (public-ish in 1985) on a computer released in 1984.
Apple had a basic Pascal compiler on the Apple II/III, but it would have been an unbelievable feat to stretch that into a product with solid links to the System 1 OS, including the new GUI API, on the first few Macs.
Sample applies to BASIC. It would have been possible to squeeze the old MS Basic into the Mac but it would have had to run in some kind of Apple II emulation mode - not the point of the exercise. If you wanted BASIC you could buy an Apple II and carry right on.
Your point is clearly wrong. It took a few years to develop good tools for the original Mac because it was - you know - actually quite hard.
But when Jobs returned good, or at least adequate, free dev tools for MacOS were included almost immediately. And have been included ever since.
I don't know what you're trying to prove. Your original point, which you laughably attempted to prove with a clip from a movie, was that Jobs "despised" programable computers. This is demonstrably false.
I, and several others have done precisely that in this thread.
Next time, don't use a Hollywood dramatisation to back up your stories. They aren't real! Woz is on record as saying that the conversation never happened. Fundamentally, you're making things up to reflect your own biases and doubling down on them. It's clear that Apple, the business, doesn't see iPhone and iPad a general computing devices. That, though, is a very different point to the one you have failed to make.
> Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment
The programming environment for the Mac was a total shitshow in 1984, and continued to be so for a couple of versions after. You needed a 128k Mac, a Lisa, *and* an Apple II to make it work *at all*.
You're absolutely right, how could I miss it! Steve Jobs hated the thought of programmable computers so much that he stopped these languages being included a full 3 years before any of them existed! /s
What you think you've "proved", you haven't. I'll repeat myself; that there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs."
Maybe you're angry or maybe you're pissed at being called out on this. I don't know.
But there were two issues with the Mac release in 1984.
1. The price.
2. It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user.
In fact it was such a complete flop, it forced out Jobs by 1985.
The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic.
Yeah, I was there. At the time, Apple was making a ton of money selling the bit, 6502 based computers.
These machines were a completely open book, featured slots to plug anything you could imagine into (and people did, using those computers as quite capable 8 bit workstations: test and measure, cross dev, business, publishing, and so many more...)
I will stop there as the story of the 8 bit Apple computers is well known.
I will say Jobs hobbled the 16 bit machine so it would not spank the Mac silly.
Delivering serious use value to users is what funded the Mac and then some.
The only people I knew who wanted a Mac back then were ones that would never write a program.
Funny enough, many of those went on to use the crap out of HyperCard.
> It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user.
That depends on what you mean by "out of the box." It's true that no development tools were included, but they were available from third parties. I wrote the code for my masters thesis in 1986 using Coral Common Lisp on a Mac Plus, so if you wanted to program a Mac you certainly could.
Not angry about anything my friend, just incredulous that you seemingly cannot separate Hollywood from what is front of you. Your definitions, as demonstrated by lisper, are at best debatable.
> The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic.
Interesting. Where are they now? It's as if in 1984 a paradigm shift happened. /s
Also, DOS didn't ship with basic. Some vendors may have bundled it, but DOS never had it built in.
> "Some vendors may have bundled it, but DOS never had it built in."
I'm partially incorrect. It clearly was bundled, and not as I said may have been bundled. The OP was alluding that it was built in like it was for the CBM64, ZX81 etc. Being bundled and installing it as a separate process is subtly different IMHO. But I will concede that I was wrong to say otherwise.
It's complicated, not only by the fact of BASIC being available in ROM originally, but by the fact that there were OEM versions of MS-DOS that didn't come with BASIC. The DOS that came with one's PC was rarely vanilla MS-DOS. I had a couple of PCs where the only programming tools that came in the box were EDLIN and DEBUG.
I may very well be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was a Compaq thing. I certainly don't remember BASIC coming with any version of DOS or Windows out of the box in 1984. May be later on in the decade.
Best I watch 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' to check a reliable source... /s
> Also Fact: The original 1984 Mac did come not pre-installed with Perl, Python, nor Ruby.
It would have been quite extraordinary, considering that none of these languages existed. Also fact: it did not come with Go or Rust built in, and did not have a CUDA-compatible GPU.
That’s a really strange hill to die on. I know I learnt Pascal as a teenager on a Mac Plus. It had several third party development environments and there was a thriving shareware/freeware scene, developer tools were there. In the end what harmed the Mac was that it was much more expensive than PC clones.
Even when a BASIC implementation was built in, getting a better one from third parties was very common on all platforms. You can look at magazines from the time if you don’t believe it. The Mac was by design more of an appliance than the Apple ][, but it was not the black box some people here seem to think it was. This whole thread is full of assertions that are demonstrably false in about 10s worth of Google search.
Up until the 1984 Macintosh every "home computer" came with a BASIC interpreter and could be programmed out of the box. It was quite a while before dev tools were out for the Mac (I think you were expected to use a Lisa to do development for the Mac) and people found it very hard to write GUI applications at first because it was different from anything anyone had ever seen before.
That's scary. This post illustrates where we're headed with 'facts' and 'fact checking'.
A false statement (Jobs despising programmability) being backed up by a media clip that shows a made up account of events (according to Woz) based on aforementioned false statement.
A lot of small computers during the early days were seen as programmable things. Then it became a user interactive interface more than something to hack on. Maybe the shift of influence between Wozniak and Jobs explains that.
early 80s machines were what I had in mind, I remember my aunt having bought a tiny tiny amstrad niche typewriter and the manual was 50% BASIC programming which surprised me a lot. Only later, when GUIs started to pop, the spirit changed into a user friendly app platform and not something to hack.
We want a simplistic, managed, fuss-free device that isn't another source of malware, viruses, dark patterns e.g. unsubscribing and where basic things like uninstalling requires a Terminal.
If you want a computer then there are plenty of companies that satisfy your requirements. So why not encourage and support them instead of trying to turn the iPhone into something a lot of people don't want.
Like the GP said, this is a false dichotomy. Something as simple as accessible sideloading or a "let me do unsafe things" switch buried deep in the preferences app can give people who want it greater control and let those who prefer the walled garden keep the benefits.
I'm torn on this, on the one hand I would love to be able to hack on iPhone hardware.
However, we have Epic. No matter how deep the option is buried, they will try to get people to enable it so they can install their games without going through the app store.
I wish I could agree with you, but the bad actors here are large corporations who are incentivised to make even those who want to be safe, unsafe.
My point being, that some companies will try to convince you to enable side loading and Epic is an example. They do it on Android now.
I don't mind having a hackable system, I think it should just be a little more complex than a hidden setting that Epic will try and get you to switch.
Perhaps a ROM which you have to download and wipe/reload your phone with, maybe it also removes the App Store so that it's obvious that you are moving to an unsupported model. I'm not sure, but just having a side loading toggle will lead to Epic abusing the matter.
If Epic wants to sell you a piece of software to run on your computer, and in order to do so you need to perform special actions (special with regards to all the other software you use on that computer), and you decide that the software is worth it so you perform those special actions, this is somehow a worse scenario than if nothing else changes but you're not able to perform those special actions because the computer doesn't allow you? How is Epic a bad actor? They're selling you a piece of software that (presumably) performs as advertised. If there's a bad actor, I'd think it's the manufacturer of the computer that doesn't let you use it however you prefer.
The point is that my parents have an iPhone because they are idiot proof.
Yes, they had the tool bars in Internet Explorer. Yes they had viruses.
I do not want a situation where I now have to support their phone because they followed some instructions to unlock side loading and installed Bonzai Buddy.
I suggested an alternative, something that would be just a bit too technical for idiots. A switch in iOS will generate support requests to Apple as the average user is an idiot.
> I'd think it's the manufacturer of the computer that doesn't let you use it however you prefer.
Are you this vocal on Sony for not letting you install your own homebrew on a Playstation or Nintendo on the Switch?
I still don't see the problem. So you enable side loading, install the apps you want, and then what's the problem? It's not like other apps will start installing themselves now. I think some people are working under the mistaken belief that a side loaded APK can bypass the OS permissions system, which is not true. Enabling sideloading is a far cry from rooting or a custom ROM
It’s that some companies will force most people into enabling sideloading to turn the phone into something useful, until the field is level again - effectively getting rid of the walled garden.
If every app you need requires sideloading; you’re going to enable it or be left in the dark.
And yet we don't see that happening on Android at all, where companies have literally all incentive to convince people to sideload their apps instead of getting them from the Play store. And yet....it just doesn't happen. There is literally zero reason to believe that this would happen on iOS either. Epic might want to try it with Fortnite because of its popularity, but anything else? No, far too much hassle and you know 99% of users wouldn't bother.
Google is more permissive in their app store (e.g. with tracking users or accepting out of band payments), Google developer accounts are a one time payment, etc., etc. Overall there's less incentive to push a separate app store on Android than there is on iOS.
There is the only incentive that matters - google, just like apple, takes 30% cut off every transaction in your app. Everything else is secondary. And yet even though pushing custom APKs would get you your 30% back, companies aren't doing this(with the exception of Epic). So no, it's not about permissions or tracking users. Even Amazon had to stop offering sales for their digital content in the app because Google is actually and in fact strict about this.
And also - as a simple matter of fact, alternative app stores do exist and they haven't caused the collapse of the ecosystem. You can still stay in your walled garden if you wish.
So no, it's not about permissions or tracking users
Based on what?
And also - as a simple matter of fact, alternative app stores do exist
and they haven't caused the collapse of the ecosystem.
Sure, because the Play Store is already a colossal mess. Not even two weeks ago there was another high profile malware incident (SpinOk) with something like 30 million installs. I begrudgingly use an iPhone but I don't want the Google experience in any way shape or form.
Based on the simple fact that nearly all companies care about the money first and foremost. 30% of your sales is a larger motivator than being or not being able to track your users(and I'm not even sure that argument even holds with Android 12 and beyond, it's been really reined in). Or would you disagree?
>>Sure, because the Play Store is already a colossal mess.
I'm not sure I understand how that's related to what I said. Again, corporation like Amazon has all the incentive to push you towards their own app store, yet it just simply doesn't happen at all. If they don't do it, why would smaller companies do it?
>>I begrudgingly use an iPhone but I don't want the Google experience in any way shape or form.
I get the impression reading these comments that people seem to think that if you are on android you just randomly go on the Play Store and install stuff almost without thinking? Yes it's a problem that malware sometimes slips through. But 30 million installs is nothing compared to the userbase. And most people just get a phone, download the regular set of apps they use every day, and then they never ever open the play store again - why would they? The existence(or lack of) of 3rd party stores doesn't matter to majority of people on the platform, because they just never install any extra apps at all.
Yes, fortnite is the only exception of a major product. Amazon was forced by Google to halt the sales of any and all digital products through Android apps because they didn't want to give Google their 30% cut and I'm yet to see any push from them to install Kindle or Prime apps through a direct APK.
It seems to me that it can't both be true that (a) the appeal of the walled garden is wide and (b) sideloading or other uncurated channels are an irresistible force that will inevitably obliterate the walled garden. If people find value in it, they will not migrate to uncurated channels, so there will remain a population that's only reachable via the garden, so developers will have an incentive to continue to sell there.
And as far as I can tell, this is what's borne out by observable results in places where there are options. macOS has preferences which let you choose between (a) app store only and (b) app store + signed apps from other channels -- and lets you override both choices if you really really want (as well as having a unix command line from which you can run arbitrary things and the ability to acquire dev tools by which you can build and run untrusted source). Some people take safety into their own hands and use those things. Some people don't. This hasn't eliminated the Mac App Store as an option for people who want to rely on Apple's curation. It exists side-by-side with independent but still signed/trusted distribution, and both exist side-by-side with free-for-all. You can walk freely between the well-patrolled walls of the fortified city, the ring of civilization just outside it, and the wild west outside that. None of them stops the other from existing.
Are there any platforms where that's happened? If macOS isn't a place where that's happened, why would it happen to iOS?
I don’t want Apple to allow sideloading, that would be harmful to all the kids and grandmas. But allow booting another OS, there’s no way kids or grandma will want to flash Linux into their iPhone. I guess they just don’t want competition, maybe because some gaming company will make a gaming-OS for them.
> No matter how deep the option is buried, they will try to get people to enable it so they can install their games without going through the app store.
So you think the bad part is people being able to control their devices if they want to?
IMO, there isn't much importance to sideloading at personal levels. It's necessary for open and democratic society. I'm not realistically auditing the whole Debian package repository, and that makes it almost indistinguishable from App Store walled garden if viewed in a strictly personal scope, despite the reality being almost a polar opposite.
> IMO, there isn't much importance to sideloading at personal levels.
As someone who has jailbroken iOS devices in the distant past, the conveniences and user interactions supported by Activator and SBSettings more than a decade ago are still not on iOS yet (and will likely never be). I believe there is a lot of value to have sideloading while also recognizing that there could be a higher chance of malware and the lost.
Ah yes, "instead of getting a feature added for free that I won't need, and the presence of which would not impact me or anyone like me in any way, shape, or form, how about everyone just buys another $1500 phone?"
Maybe because getting a feature added for free that you won't need, and the presence of which would not impact you or anyone like you in any way, shape, or form, won't impact you or anyone like you in any way, shape, or form.
Just go "I'd never need that, but power to you if Apple ever adds it. Which we can be pretty sure of they won't". Don't hate on folks for wanting things that you don't want, but also won't affect your life in any way if they got it.
> Maybe because getting a feature added for free that you won't need, and the presence of which would not impact you or anyone like you in any way, shape, or form, won't impact you or anyone like you in any way, shape, or form.
How do you know that allowing sideloading does’t effectively mean opening a bunch of backdoors on the device? What if the the tight grip over the hardware + software is the best way to ensure that millions of users stay reasonably safe? Isn’t this basically a way to prevent supply chain attacks? I don’t know… do you know? How can you say such things with so much confidence?
Sideloading means that apps can (and will) migrate from appstore to other store with relaxed taxes, privacy and security, and all users will face app serp hijacking and permission extortion. Not only those who want their android experience on iphone for some bizarre reason.
It is entirely plausible that iOS cannot remove all the security restrictions that would be necessary for a useful sideloading, without exposing attack vectors.
I would love to hear some ideas about how it could be implemented without jeopardizing the security. A technical analysis, without words like "probably", "maybe". I'm fairly technical and ready to be enlightened.
Allowing sideloading means allowing third party developers and large corporations to make their app force sideloading. If large companies like Uber, Facebook, et al require sideloading it will make it more acceptable for smaller companies and developers to do so. Pretty soon everyone would just say "sideload", including unscrupulous smaller developers. At that point since everyone is sideloading, no one would bat an eye to yet another sideloaded app. Not to mention why would anyone not choose to sideload to avoid the Apple tax?
But there's something to be said of getting a phone that specifically can't do certain things, whether that be for privacy (Facebook says: download the FB App Store to get Instagram!), security (evil maid attacks), or giving it to my great grandparent who just needs to use some social media apps and the phone app.
No, this doesn't enable evil maid attacks. If your evil maid has the means to unlock your phone in order to enable sideloading, then it's already game over, because with that same access they can get your passwords and your 2FA second factor. Please stop trying to suggest that evil maid attacks are a concern here.
One time opportunistic and potentially brief access to the phone is different to installing spyware (during that brief access) which reports all activity forever more or allows Mitm on your data.
An APK is an APK. It's beholden to the same mandatory permissions system and has no extra abilities whether sideloaded or from the Play store. Sideloading != rooting
Since about iOS 6, iOS exploits have started with a sandbox escape exploit, since the attack surface is so large with native code running on the device (only one since then, the Checkm8 exploit, used a USB exploit instead). Getting native code on a user's device for "free fortnite vbucks" is step one to silently jailbreaking phones and running adware/malware/spyware.
We’re over a decade into having smart phones. At this point, you’re going to have to weigh up what your priorities are and get the phone that does what you want.
Not argue on the internet about the way things should be.
I want a phone that is as fast as a flagship phone like an iPhone, with a keyboard, daylong or better battery life running fullblown Debian. What shall I buy? It doesn’t exist. Nor can I put Debian on most flagship phones; takes time for them to get rooted if they ever do. And then they don’t support half of the hardware. So best option is Android. Or anything, including iOS, with vnc. Now that 5g is everywhere here and I have fiber to my house, I opt for VNC; ideal, it is not.
>I want a phone that is as fast as a flagship phone like an iPhone, with a keyboard, daylong or better battery life running fullblown Debian. What shall I buy? It doesn’t exist.
Have you ever paused to consider why your mobile unicorn doesn't exist?
You’ll find that virtually everything you buy does not meet your exact specifications. If you are not filthy rich your home will not be to your exact specifications, your furniture, your clothes, your car, your luggage, your kitchen.
What most people do is work out what they can afford, prioritise features, and try to buy they can afford and maximises the features they want the most. Maybe they decide, it’s not worth it and get nothing at all.
Same thing with your phone, you may be forced to buy something, but you can get the minimum thing to get by. Maybe you are a rich tech worker and you can run a separate phone that aligns best with your needs and wants.
What will 100% not get you what you want, is complaining, giving the company you don’t like $1500, and then giving the company that might one day live up to your dreams $0.
Yes, I am in the waiting list. It does come close. I have the previous version which is a great keyboard, but just not there yet in the mix between phone and ultra-portable. I have high hopes.
Don’t make it sound that Android is “iOS without walled garden”. I want ecosystem without bloat, that doesn’t spy on me and where I’m not the product that’s not the state of Android at the moment (unless you’re willing to bother with custom ROMs).
I’ve paid 1,5k for this thing and have every right to complain.
But the companies involved show no signs of changing, and you keep handing them money and your complaints are toothless. And you won’t support a project that is more aligned with your goals.
> I’ve paid 1,5k for this thing and have every right to complain
I agree that removing freedoms from the users is unethical and counterproductive. But at this point the only reasonable action is to give money to companies intentionally respecting your freedom.
Apple has no incentive to listen to anything at all at this point. The only reasonable action is to give money to those who do, i.e., support good alternatives.
Oh dear, heaven forbid we keep wanting features that should have been there from day one after the ten year cutoff! Good thing you reminded us of that expiration date.
People are happy with the way things are. Why are you trying to mess with their things? If they want to use a phone that’s restricted to a walled garden App Store, that’s none of your business.
Will you be taking responsibility if there are unforeseen consequences to side loading?
There plenty of other phones out there that allow side loading. Go use one of those if it’s that important to you.
P.S. My pet theory why Apple is so controlling about what kind of apps are allowed is to prevent “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics. Imagine if MS created dev tools for iOS that produce apps that use a specific runtime and it gets super popular. Now MS has a say in iOS’s ecosystem, Apple has to maintain compatibility with that runtime (and will need MS’s cooperation) and if MS decides to cripple support for those dev tools it will impact iOS app creation.
That explains the JIT ban and not much else. It doesn't explain the obnoxious morality clause, the ban on entire classes of applications, and so forth.
What part of the phrase “unforeseen consequences” did you fail to understand?
I really don’t get it. So this particular product doesn’t meet your wants. Big deal. They are millions of products that don’t mean my wants, you don’t see me crusading on the bloody internet asking for them all to be changed. I just don’t buy them.
> What part of the phrase “unforeseen consequences” did you fail to understand?
Sorry, I didn’t see need to address paranoid fears.
> I really don’t get it. So this particular product doesn’t meet your wants. Big deal. They are millions of products that don’t mean my wants, you don’t see me crusading on the bloody internet asking for them all to be changed. I just don’t buy them.
I really don’t get why me wanting product improved mobilizes internet on a crusade against my valid complaints about absurd limitations of platform.
Except, of course, there aren't millions of phones. There are two. So yeah, complaining that there are features missing for a large part of the target audience is rather perfectly rational behaviour for a customer base.
Honestly, if you think this is in any way a reasonable response to the layers of commentary above elaborating on why this isn't a zero-sum game and doesn't have to take anything from you, maybe someone should take your iPhone.
The exact reason being unable to do something you weren't going to do anyway, rendering the difference moot? You're not required to leave the garden because the wall has been removed. How is an extra option harming you?
> If such a switch exists, EVERYTHING will use it.
The switch exists on macOS already, and this is not true. Software is available from the app store. People can and do choose it. Signed software is available outside the app store. People can and do choose that. And those who want to ignore warnings or flip the switch can install unsigned software and it doesn't take any option away from those who prefer not to.
These options exist alongside one another on macOS. There's no reason to believe that iOS wouldn't remain the same, and good reason to believe that via force of habit the dominant "culture"/practice around iOS apps would remain much like it is today.
There is not literally zero software on the macOS app store, but it's pretty close. I don't think I've ever installed a non-Apple program via it, and I would do so if given the option. The iOS app store being reduced to the state of the macOS app store would make the iPhone significantly worse.
All the teenagers will be doing it. They'll say you get the first hit of sideloading for free... It starts just playing a simple game. Next thing you know you'll be mapping pages as writable and executable.
You'll think you can just use a little JIT at a party and it's no harm, but you won't be able to stop.
The scene: street corner. "Hey kid, you want to load some third party code?" Just say no!!
Thankfully Apple only sends tasteful ads, like the pop-up Apple Music modal when you put on headphones or that friendly perennial reminder to Try The New Safari. Then there's the total non-advertisement at the top of Settings encouraging you to try iCloud, along with the native and beautiful builtins like Apple News and TV+ that totally don't exist to upsell you on more services.
> Because for Meta at least it literally cost them $10b in revenue each year.
Is there any reason to believe Apple cannot stop them at an OS-level rather than a store-level?
> Then there's the total non-advertisement at the top of Settings encouraging you to try iCloud.
Just looked at the settings on my phone, can’t see any ‘ads’ for iCloud at all. Am I doing something wrong? And since I had to open the settings app to check, if there are ads, are they modal and stopping me doing what I wanted to do? Do they force some kind of call to action to get past? A action blocking modal? I’m genuinely asking because I have literally never seen what you are describing.
> …along with the native and beautiful builtins like Apple News and TV+ that totally don't exist to upsell you on more services.
Never knowingly opened them so I can’t comment, but what is wrong with upselling services? Is it any different to YouTube being native on Android devices? I mean, if I use YouTube in my browser, iPhone or otherwise, I literally get a modal on any new tab I open with YouTube pushing me to subscribe to the premium feature - even with an ad blocker. Does this happen on Google’s own devices or platforms? Again, I genuinely don’t know.
The thing that I see everytime this comes up is that “advertising bad m’kay, silly little Apple user”, which was never the argument. User tracking and identification is what is bad. Targeting ads based on this in places like the settings app would be bad. Is there any evidence that this is happening? The same goes for telemetry from apps. I have no problem with Apple, Google or anybody else gathering telemetry about how an app is used, just so long as they don’t identify me based on it and use the data to sell me shit. There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising services, what is wrong is the how, when and where that takes place, and what the advertisers are basing it on. The condescending tone that is employed by the anti-lobby here doesn’t help the discussion either, but that is the whole “I know better” Orange Site phenomenon.
> Just looked at the settings on my phone, can’t see any ‘ads’ for iCloud at all. Am I doing something wrong?
For one, it's on macOS and shows up for anyone who doesn't log into the App Store with an Apple ID. It will be a red notification badge in Settings that does not go away unless you log in.
> if there are ads, are they modal and stopping me doing what I wanted to do?
I mean, yeah. This is the default behavior for Apple Music on Mac - when you put on your headphones, it auto-launches Apple Music with a modal blocking the app and asking you to try subscribing to Apple Music. I haven't seen default system behavior this sycophantic or contrived since Windows 8 came out.
> but what is wrong with upselling services? Is it any different to YouTube being native on Android devices?
No, it's not. Both fucking suck.
When people pay for a device (especially a premium experience) they expect that cost to get recouped somehow. I used to daily-drive Mac because I expected a premium experience, but you cannot look at the past decade of Mac releases and say there have been less advertisements. The desire for you to pay for more services is now an intrinsic part of MacOS like it is on Windows, and honestly that's the worst.
> what is wrong is the how, when and where that takes place, and what the advertisers are basing it on.
What a shockingly vague and nonspecific example of what "wrong" looks like.
Hitchen's Razor. If we cannot hold either company accountable for their data usage (we cannot), then we're fighting over which fairytale we like better.
Only a fraction as much malware on the iOS App Store, where xcodeghost infected hundreds of millions of users out of a smaller number of total devices.
This makes sense because the Play Store applies the same review that the App Store does and has additional automated checks on top. Meanwhile, no devices have been infected with malware from F-droid, which Apple will not let you use.
No it hasn't. Play store is still utterly dominant, and very very very few apps are only available through other channels (I couldn't name any, but there probably are some open-source ones on F-Droid that didn't want to bother with the Google processes, and maybe some vendor has some exclusive apps on their store?). Side-loading is very much a niche thing.
There used to be a significant enterprise "Bespoke iOS app for inventory management/POS" market but I think that pretty much all migrated to Android in the past few years.
> It is not a false dichotomy, it's called herd immunity.
> If such a switch exists, EVERYTHING will use it. Absolutely everything. There will be some "cool thing you can do" that requires sideloading, like pirating games, and at that point every fucking teenager on the planet will be sideloading. At that point it's not the "weird minority usage"; it's the real API everyone uses.
> This is exactly how you get a tragedy of the commons.
> Your decisions do affect me, and I hold you in hostility for the same reason anti-vaxxers get held in hostility. I have had family members get hacked and have their drives ransomwared because they're on an insecure-by-default platform, and using the equivalent of root access is the default way to do anything (windows + run as admin). Those who consistently advocated for "libertarian computing" brought this tragedy on me by proxy. It doesn't matter how careful I am, and how disciplined I keep my own stuff — other people I care about exist and I cannot protect them from what SHOULD be harmless actions.
I hate the logical end state that such a decision ends up at, as it demonizes the exploration of a device THAT YOU OWN. I SHOULD be able to learn how my devices work. I SHOULD be able to repair it by my own efforts. I SHOULDN'T have to rely on the manufacturer as the sole source for repairs & maintenance of something that I SHOULD OWN.
Just like how you demonize that my stances on "libertarian computing" brought this tragedy onto you by proxy, your stances on walling off such access brought upon me the tragedy of the manufacturer being the ONLY WAY that I could fix something THAT I OWN. Your stances against self-repairability, *as a consequence of wanting such access walled off*, contributed to the unrepairability of modern appliances & the tech landfills that have ballooned from such a decision.
> Network. Effects. MATTER.
Yes, they do matter. Including yours. What's being signaled from your network is that you don't want repairability, even if you say otherwise.
Why are you so desperate to break the iPhone experience? Because you can have that. You can have a Pine phone, you can have an Android device, you can have Sailfin. Why are you unhappy with all the choices for phones that provide everything you say you want?
Except every large player in the space is then incentivised to drag their audience out of the walled garden.
"Want the Facebook app? Follow these three easy steps to sideload our app." -> Now the rest of the iOS users lose the nice payment rails that Apple setup which result in higher privacy and lower fraud.
"Want to play Fortnite or any other Epic game? Get it in 3 simple steps."
>Facebook doesn't use sideloading on the android platform, neither does any of the other big companies.
1. Epic.
2. Unlike Google, Apple each year pours thousands of hours of developer effort into making it harder for Facebook to track users without their consent. The difference between "what is allowed in the store" and "what is possible on the device" is greater on iOS.
In the case of epic it was not about the privacy settings but about the percentage they had to pay for on every transaction which is a different issue.
I do think that it is a rare case that a company decides to not use the official appstore and the risk of all companies switching to their own appstore is minor.
Android does restrict more and more things you can do and there seems to be no strong movement to alternative appstores, which makes it difficult to know what impact the strong privacy settings on ios would be with an alternative appstore.
I kind of agree that less privacy protection this is a concern, but I think that should be solved by additional privacy laws.
>In the case of epic it was not about the privacy settings but about the percentage they had to pay for on every transaction which is a different issue.
The claim wasn't that nobody was sideloading for privacy settings. The claim was "Facebook doesn't use sideloading on the android platform, neither does any of the other big companies."
>I kind of agree that less privacy protection this is a concern, but I think that should be solved by additional privacy laws.
Oh, that's a great idea. We should definitely rely on laws alone for this. VC-backed technology firms are well-known for willingly abiding by the spirit of laws—especially privacy laws. They definitely aren't filled with people whose entire job is finding the slimist things they can get away with.
Or—and I'm just spitballing here—we could have both the additional privacy laws and also a competitive marketplace where at least one vendor decides to use privacy as a market differentiator while leaving people free to choose to buy from other vendors with other priorities.
You should have multiple options, but third parties should not be required to provide you with an option that gives you 100% of what you'd like to have.
"I get to choose" does not mean "I get to have a bespoke solution."
Epic miserably failed on Android and you think they will somehow succeed on iPhone? Are you out of your mind? If it’s not in AppStore it might as well not exist.
> Except every large player in the space is then incentivised to drag their audience out of the walled garden.
That's an interesting point. I wonder what other levers Apple would then adjust to keep them in? Maybe lower the Apple tax a bit, maybe something else. Probably a few possibilities that we haven't thought of too. :)
Allowing sideloading increases the potential for exploits in IOS to be found, that could then exploit other IOS users.
If I had a well designed bank vault I still wouldn't want would-be burglars unrestricted access to probe the lock design which could then be used to exploit other vaults of the same design. In this model, I would put a cage or bars or say, a walled garden around the lock mechanism to prevent unwanted hacking or characterization.
With nukes I don't have the device in my hand, or a hotline on which to try every possible launch code.
I can purchase an iPhone and a developer account and find the same exploits I could if sideloading was enabled. The "obscurity" doesn't exist to begin with.
> I can purchase an iPhone and a developer account and find the same exploits I could if sideloading was enabled. The "obscurity" doesn't exist to begin with.
Obscurity DID exist - you said yourself that you have to get a developer account. That's a barrier to entry, which is defense in depth. Dev accounts are a tiny proportion of iOS users.
Also, if alternate app stores were permitted, any exploits discovered via sideload could be deployed at scale. By not having alternate app stores the risk is reduced.
As well, assuming no alternate app stores exist and you managed to deploy your 0-day in an app on the original App store, Apple could discover it and have the means to remove the app quickly to mitigate damage. If alternate app stores existed, it adds additional red tape to get the exploit app removed and potentially allowing more damage to occur.
While I personally agree that defensive in depth does have it's real world uses, I'd be really surprised if having an Apple dev account is a real world barrier for anyone doing iOS exploit development.
Maybe script kiddies wouldn't, but they're not the kind of thing to be worried about anyway.
Ahhh. Sounds like it's mostly fear of potential loss rather than something easy to pin down and fix.
Yeah, I'm not aware of any good way to counter that kind of fear unless Apple wants to do so.
Unfortunately, countering that fear is 100% the opposite of what Apple want, so they're likely going to try and amplify it to the maximum extent instead.
My business depends on my phone. If I can’t call clients or pull google maps up, I’m screwed. I have both an iPhone and an Android. I’ve never had an iPhone die for no good reason. Every single android phone I’ve owned prior to my OP 8T has died in under a year. I got hit with the LG bootloop bug on my first android phone and it just went from there.
And that’s just hardware. The other day I realized my 8T had bricked itself. I hadn’t used it in a few days, and an OTA update broke something. Wouldn’t flash back the normal way either, I had to go and dig up specialized software and a copy of the ROM from XDA. I’ve never had an iPhone have a bug that a simple reboot wouldn’t fix.
The same thing extends to computers too. I think macOS is an abomination, but the hardware they put out it leaps and bounds ahead of pretty much every other manufacturer. In comparison, my surface book 2 has been a steaming pile of shit from day 1. I built my desktop, but my laptop is a MBP. I’d get 3-4 hours of battery on the SB2 with brightness all the way down. The MBP will literally last all day unless I’m running Thinkorswim. Whoever thought that its performance was acceptable should be shot. Even on my desktop it will routinely use 5gb+ RAM alone.
This started with my LG g3. That was a flagship when I got it. My HTC M8 also died. I had a galaxy s3, s4, s6, and a note. The note 8 was the only one that survived longer than a year.
Meanwhile, my iPhone 7+ was in service for 6 years. I owned it until I upgraded to an XS, and a family member used it up until last year. I used the XS until I got a free upgrade to the 13.
I wasn’t sure if your comment meant that you look forward to owning it or you look forward to Lenovo making one but there is already an ARM thinkpad, the x13s
A couple years back, my $3000 MBP randomly died. It was around a year old. I had to take it to the Apple Store. They couldn't fix it. They had to ship it some place else for repair. I was out $600 and a week with no work computer. If you depend on a computer for work and can't afford to be without for extended periods of time, it seems to me that you'd want one that was actually repairable.
Nobody knows how to build a non-computer that does what people expect phones to do. It's going to have to be a computer or nothing. The only question is whether it's your computer or someone else's.
Yea. That's the problem all along with walled gardens. Twenty years will go by and you'll find yourself unable to do the most basic thing becaused corporate control over an environment is a slow creep.
>To get a blue bubble you must give up control over your mobile life to Apple.
As someone who has never used Apple products (well, except for the OS on an Apple II I built from a kit as a high school project in 1983), I don't understand why a "blue bubble" is important.
Would you mind explaining that to me? Not being snarky here, I just really don't understand what value there is in a "blue bubble."
It is a huge status symbol among the youth. Kids will discriminate against and even sometimes bully people for not having it. And there are certain features that only apple users can use over messaging that has no reasonable excuse for not allowing other mobile platforms to participate in other than to push kids into buying iphones so they aren't excluded. Effectively pushing kids into buying devices far more expensive and powerful than they actually have any usage for. And for kids of poorer families buying an iphone is a fairly large financial burden.
Wow. I never knew as the rest of the world uses WhatsApp. That's the most stupid thing I've heard in a while, I can't believe people give it any kind of importance. I've never owned an iPhone, stuff like this makes me even less likely to.
They will find another status symbol, like e.g. does their prey’s phone have an actual apple logo on it. Or see it on a screenshot, in clothing, accessories. This blue bubble argument is utter nonsense, fix your youth, not the phone.
To a first approximation, no one pays full price for a phone up front. They buy it through a carrier.
Even the low end carriers like Metro give you a “free” iPhone with a contract. Even if that’s not the case, the price of a iPhone SE over two years is not that much higher than an Android.
You can get a perfectly functional used iPhone that runs the current OS for under $200. One only has to spend a lot if one wants the latest and greatest.
That still doesn't solve the issue that to get a blue bubble you must give up control over your mobile life to Apple. Almost nobody carries around two phones.
Why is it important? The world communicates through whatsapp, signal, telegram and some other stuff in China. The blue bubble argument is a red herring.
It's not the color of the message bubble, that's just a shorthand for the actual problem: it's that iMessage has more functionality than SMS, and inviting a SMS user to a iMessage chat works but degrades the experience for all participants.
It is both awkward (for instance, using a reaction generates a "so and so liked your thing" message) and insecure (now every word in a chat gets blasted out over the known-insecure medium).
Those reactions seem to work for me in Aus., on Android.
And as for group chats, you should understand that if you start one on iMessage, you shouldn't be surprised that it doesn't work cross-platform. It could, but Apple deliberately doesn't want to make an iMessage app for Android.
Understand the implications of using a proprietary system.
Its getting to the point now where I'm never going to buy an iPhone simply because getting excluded over a green bubble seems like a good way to filter stupid people out of your life.
> This is a false choice - there's no reason the iPhone can't be both a walled garden-type device and support alternative OSes/software, just like a computer.
Biggest difference between iPhone and Android is this; I can put any .apk file on my android phone that I want; the ability to do so is just turned off by default; it's a walled-garden out-of-the-box, but the hurdles for "opening the gate" are relatively minor.
> We know because this exact strategy works just fine on Apple's other computer platform, the Mac. Personally, I hate that our phones, which increasingly are our personal computer, are often no longer just a general purpose compute device to use how I want, if i want.
I think this is the heart of the disagreement between people who like the iPhone walled garden (I’m one of them) and people who agree with you. I think it’s where reasonable people can disagree (except of course when it comes to broad legislation protecting or prohibiting such walled gardens).
I don’t think the iPhone is comparable to a personal computer like a Mac, even though of course the hardware and software architecture is very similar (and increasingly so). I still think that smartphones are, for most people (especially people who are aware of the key differences between iOS and Android and still make an informed choice to use iOS), much more like “integrated consumer electronics devices” like gaming consoles, or car infotainment systems, or heck even a microwave (your microwave probably also contains at least one Turing-complete stored-program architecture computer).
All devices you listed, including iPhones, would have no downsides from being open. Quality of software has nothing to do with user restrictions. Even the opposite: the more open a platform is, the easier users can improve it and find/fix bugs. It's security through obscurity versus openness all over again. I would gladly hack my microwave to get rid of a stupid, long, loud sound at the end of its work.
What about following counter-example. There're many tiny apps that are next-to-required. E.g. mass transit tickets, paying for parking, banking apps. With the walled garden, they've to stick to at least some standards. Now if we open up the platform, what stops them from making shitty malware-ridden apps offered on scammy 3rd party stores? I won't move my mortgage to another bank because my bank app now requires me to install a weird-looking altstore... Or would I?
My buddy had to install an (android) app for his boiler control few years ago and the first thing it did was to demand access to AB and SMS and later sent an actual SMS to an unknown number. This boiler company doesn’t even want to screw you directly, they just slap a partner library on top of their app that does what a third party decides to.
It wasn’t F-Droid, but that’s because PlayStore already allows that behavior. AppStore doesn’t.
Traditional "linux repositories" are kind of walled gardens though. I mean, the software is vetted and controlled by the bistro's maintainer, is it not? Isn't it also true that sensible advice is to not add repo's from unknown sources?
I find it incredibly hard to believe that customer satisfaction would not go down if Apple were forced to, for example, allow third-party app stores onto iOS. It’s easy to say “customer choice is the top concern, and if customers install bad app stores or bad apps that’s on them,” but the important question to me (and probably to Apple) is whether in practice customers are more or less satisfied.
I have to disagree. I moved from Android to an iPhone because I WANT a walled garden.
I need you to understand that I build my own PCs/gaming rig, have been in IT for years, and I've been a full time developer for decades.
The thing about the iPhone is that I DON'T have to think about it. Malware is VERY rare, MUCH more rare than Android, and I DON'T have to worry about...basically anything.
This is coming from a guy running 2 desktops and a laptop. A Windows desktop for gaming, a Linux Desktop for productivity, and a Macbook Pro for the day gig. Oh and I also have a Windows laptop for a mix of everything on the go.
You disagree that users should have a choice? The comment you replied to didn’t say the walled garden shouldn’t exist, or that it’s bad, just that people who own the device should have a choice, i.e. you can stay on iOS with the walled garden, or you can flash it with whatever the hell else you want. The second choice doesn’t invalidate the first.
>Good, switch to it for a couple of years, use multiple vendors and then let everyone know how Android is a viable alternative to iOS.
"I want Apple to be forced into making the same choices that its competitors made because those competitors' devices are, collectively, a miserable hellscape," isn't the winning argument you seem to think it is.
>Completely missing point of what I said and making a straw man out of it isn’t the gotcha moment you seem to think it is.
Okay, so what's the point of what you said? For reference, you said:
>Good, switch to it for a couple of years, use multiple vendors and then let everyone know how Android is a viable alternative to iOS.
What, then, is the point of what you said? You seem to believe that Android is not a viable alternative to iOS. What specific actions do you believe Apple should be required to take here?
I've been using it for years. It has its issues, but also has its strengths. The biggest issue these days is that Apple has built a walled garden around their messaging system. I can't fault Android for that.
Yes, I do. There is literally no choice for people who can't afford Apple or for any reason don't like it. In this sense Android is almost a monopoly, which allows it to stay popular and terrible. This is classic duopoly.
If you think Android is "almost a monopoly" then how do you figure that Apple is responsible for breaking that monopoly? Surely it's Microsoft's responsibility. Or perhaps Blackberry's. Or is it Nokia's?
If Android really is a monopoly, perhaps the solution is to break up Google — not to force someone other than Google to turn their product into an Android clone.
In a duopoly, it's the fault of both sides, isn't it? They both misbehave, even though in different ways. I would be happy to break up Google and also (at user's choice) remove the Apple's walled garden.
Between android and ios you have choice between $50 and over $2k of phone prices. You have quite a big choice in terms of smartphone prices/capabilities.
One of iOS key features is it's walled garden. If you don't want that don't buy it. It's like complaining that Ferrari doesn't make Corrolla priced cars. They just... don't. They also don't make 3 cylinder cars making less than 200hp. Buy what fits your needs don't ask Ferrari to make a Camri competitor.
Maybe you could be less cryptic? You could start by describing what you'd hope we'd imagine when you said "Imagine there was only Ferrari and Corrolla..."? Because I imagined that and you told me I imagined the wrong thing. That's not how it works. I did exactly what you asked. If you wanted me to imagine something else, you would need to tell me what I should have imagined. Be less cryptic if you want to be understood.
> I'm asking them not to prohibit me to replace the engine after the warranty is over.
Wait, all you want is for Apple to not stand in your way when installing a different operating system on your iPhone? Sure, I'm all for that. I wouldn't expect Apple to be obligated to document the hardware or write drivers for you. You're probably not going to get Apple to give you the source code for Face ID or the secure enclave. But I agree that there's no reason why Apple should make it difficult to install an entirely different operating system.
That's got nothing to do with what you've being saying though.
yes, because that option will be exploited. most of the people are not tech savy, if some app tells them to change a config, they will do it without any afterthought. i don't have to support the ipad i gave to my father, which is not the case with his android phone, that has a lot of crap/adware/malware installed.
why do you guys deny so much that this happens? i am happy that andoid exists, but i just want the ios experience to continue to exist, we all have a choice.
Have you ever unlocked the bootloader and installed a custom rooted ROM on Android, which is what the original author requires?
I have. For most vendors, it involves putzing around with adb commands in a terminal and copying image files around. GrapheneOS is the most user-friendly, thanks to a WebUSB installer that holds your hand - but it still involves hitting key combinations in the recovery screen and other scary stuff.
Even for that best-case scenario, unlocking your phone always involves a factory reset, which wipes all your apps and data.
The idea that Epic and Meta will quit the official store and ask their users to go through that process is hilarious.
> Malware is VERY rare, MUCH more rare than Android,
Until your phone stops getting security updates. Then what? You toss it in the trash? Can you jail break it? Can you run something like postmarketOS on it?
Isn't that kinda the point of the original article? To get off the cycle of buying a phone every few years just because Apple decides it belongs in the trash? And to prevent e-waste from going in the landfills?
I love when people say that and apparently think it's admirable/amazing that a device would still work 6 years after its release.
But most devices used to work a lifetime. My motorcycle was made in 2009 (14 years ago) and is in pristine condition. The previous one was over 25 years old when it got stolen (by someone, presumably, who thought it was worth the risk). Blenders from the 40s still work. Not to mention non-electrical tools like hammers and such, which last for generations.
Parts of my home desktop computer are over 15 years old; the case itself was made in the 1990s.
It's one thing to get newer devices that do new things, and quite another to have to throw away old ones that should still be working fine.
Phones have no moving parts, there's no good reason they should become obsolete.
Well, the iPhone from 2009 was an iPhone 3GS, it had a 320x480 screen, 256MB of RAM and only supported 3G - a networking standard that has been turned off by the major carriers.
If your motorcycle only supported leaded gas could you use it?
> Phones have no moving parts, there's no good reason they should become obsolete.
You’re right, Apple should have made it so the cell radio supported wireless standards that didn’t even exist at the time.
>only supported 3G - a networking standard that has been turned off by the major carriers.
Remember, the US is not the world. What major carriers do in the US is not necessarily a global fact. Where I live 2G and 3G is still a fallback if 4G or 5G doesn't work. It will continue to be that way until 2025.
>If your motorcycle only supported leaded gas could you use it?
Google lead replacement additive or think about whether the engine could be rebuilt/replaced on a motorcycle. I certainly would prefer an engine rebuild/replace over replacing a modem in an iPhone 3GS.
>the iPhone from 2009 was an iPhone 3GS, it had a 320x480 screen, 256MB of RAM
The iPhone from 2009 wasn't that impressive in specs compared to other phones at the time. My even older 2.5G dumbphone had higher PPI on the screen and could run useful j2me apps. In 2010, the iPhone 4 came, had a 640x960 screen and 512MB of RAM. The fact that the specs could be doubled within a year shows that the earlier 3GS wasn't pushing anything spec wise.
> Remember, the US is not the world. What major carriers do in the US is not necessarily a global fact. Where I live 2G and 3G is still a fallback if 4G or 5G doesn't work. It will continue to be that way until 2025.
And it’s two largest markets - the US and China don’t support 3G GSM. What’s the market share of iPhones in your country?
> even older 2.5G dumbphone had higher PPI on the screen and could run useful j2me apps
J2ME games weren’t nearly as advanced as App Store games. The App Store was introduced a year before the iPhone 3GS came out.
> If your motorcycle only supported leaded gas could you use it?
Yes! It was the case with the previous one (the one that got stolen); all I had to do was add a few drops of a special liquid every time I filled her up. No problem at all.
That graph shows iPhone sales year on year. I’d be interested to see recycling stats as I know Apple will recycle iPhones for free but I couldn’t find much with a quick search.
How many Android devices are still in use after 7 years? And receiving updates?
I suspect these are generating e waste at a much higher rate than iPhones but would love to see some comparable figures
I'm in complete agreement here. All phone makers should make their devices last for a minimum of 10 years after purchase. Not just Apple. But Google too.
I too would like to know those stats for both Apple and Android. I suspect it's rather low though. I'm pretty sure e-waste just gets sent to China these days.
This is a shame because there are a lot of old tablets and phones that would be useful as general computing devices.
> All phone makers should make their devices last for a minimum of 10 years after purchase.
I don't think it's necessary. They should just allow full user ownership and let the community use the phones as they wish. Including the Android's closed drivers, which should become FLOSS after 10 years or so.
I have sent at least 8 Android phones to the landfill over the years. They either lost support and had no alternate path to a new OS or a catastrophic hardware failure that made them a paperweight.
I'm on year 2.5 with iOS and all three of our phones are as smooth as the day we bought them and I expect to receive at least another 2.5 years of support.
Well, the iPhone 5s from 2013 got a security update earlier this year. It’s the first iPhone that supports LTE and the older networks are being turned off.
My 14+-year-old laptop not just receives security updates. It runs the latest Debian without any problem and I see no end to this. What's the problem with phones?
My understanding is the chip makers, not just Apple but for Android that's Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.
Apparently only the chip makers have the necessary info to release the drivers for the latest Linux kernel, unlike your laptop where newer versions of Linux can always be recompiled for your hardware without help from Intel or AMD.
This is also why 3rd party Android distribution have to provide separate images for each device, while Debian can distribute a single image that works on any x86 machine.
You are not wrong, but the phone manufacturer could search for chips respecting the users if they really wanted. My GNU/Linux smartphones (Librem 5 and Pinephone) will work just like my laptop, with indefinite software updates.
Apple intentionally chooses proprietary chip designers not respecting users' freedom. It forces users to regularly buy new devices and brings a lot of profit to Apple. (Apple doesn't care about the respective damage to the environment.)
My phone is a general-purpose computer, which can be used to communicate without a mobile carrier if necessary. Also it allows to replace the modem with another one: it's on an M.2 card.
Who else are they suppose to choose that can make a performant 5G chip?
And users don’t “regularly” have to buy new devices. The 2013 iPhone 5s is the first iPhone that supports LTE and it just got a security update this year.
And how much larger and less battery efficient would a phone with a card be? What about the surrounding hardware? Could you just throw a 5G chip in a 2009 iPhone 3G?
Most people don't run 14+ year-old laptops. The market share of those people is too small to care about. You are just lucky somebody still writes drivers for your outdated tech. I wouldn't use a laptop older than 5 years if you paid me.
Why the hell would I torture myself with a laptop from before 2010? The screen quality must be horrendeous. Speakers absolute trash. Battery life also garbage. What is the point of doing this to yourself? Just to be able to show off on HN and other nerd sites where everybody still uses cassette players because they were "tOtAllY cOoL BrO".
This is a strawman. It's not your business why I need an old laptop. This is wrong to prevent me from using it on the grounds of my own (dis)comfort. Did you hear about thin clients or security through isolation? I don't want to throw away a working device if I can find a use for it. Unlike Apple, I care for the environment.
No one is preventing you from using it. Let me put it the other way: why should people work to support your old device? You are causing discomfort for others by forcing devs to pollute their codebase with code to support your obsolete technology.
What if after a number of years (<= 10 years) you would have to pay devs to support your hardware? That seems more fair to me than simply expecting your stuff to still be supported for free. Except I'll tell you what will happen: you will buy a newer device. Because it's cheaper than paying devs' salaries.
I fully expect after a number of years of using a device to receive a message: "Your device is unsupported as of now. Buy a newer one. We won't waste our lives supporting your stuff for free. Sorry, but not sorry."
How much wasted time is there in the linux kernel supporting old devices I wonder? At some point they will surely go for a great purge in the kernel to get rid of the old stuff. The thing is just getting more and more bloated.
Yea. But it still requires carrier support and often carriers won’t allow you to connect a phone to their network if it doesn’t support a compatible standard. I guess you could use Google Voice over wifi.
Apple creates and sells a catalog of products. They choose to tightly couple their hardware to specific operating systems and software.
Lots of others have tried to copy Apple's hardware approach, but leave their hardware uncoupled. Some have done a great job, and in some generations surpassed the quality of the macbooks etc.
Similarly, some of Samsung, OnePlus, and others' phones are great bits of hardware and are open. Some have better cameras, better overall specs.
There's plenty of choice, and no reason for Apple to have to open up and support the complexity cost of any operating system on their platform, just because some of us passionate tech folks want Apple's specific design language in our pocket but running idk Arch.
I've already read the same fallacy in several replies. Why would Apple have to supoort the (supposed, not true in my opinion) complexity of any operating system on their platform? They wouldn't!!! It would be Arch's job to be able to work properly on the hardware.
I don't understand why everybody is assuming that Apple leaving the door open for people with advanced tech knowledge to install alternative software, would mean that Apple has to provide supoort for that software to run properly.
I actually agree with this. This is the status quo on Silicon Macs. But let's not pretend that there will be untold levels of caterwauling when Apple choose not to document any of it. Also, in my experience, the majority of people with "advanced tech knowledge" (that is as iky as the phrase "power user") are exactly those who I'd want to keep out. They'd likely be the ones doing stupid things for their friends and family to make the device "better" (read "work how they want it to).
If you look around a bit, it’s not their users who are making noise about wanting it. Why should they care about a competitor’s users?
As one of their actual users, I’ll tell you this. I am sick and tired of all these loud mouths being outraged on my behalf. I made a rational decision to buy an iPhone, knowing full well what it means. In the end all that matters is that it works well, and most likely will for a long time, as for now I’ve my successive iPhones have been used for at least 5 years (apart from the 3G which was unbearably slow after 3). I don’t hate openness, customisation and tinkering, which is why my main desktops run Linux. I just don’t want to be a sysadmin for my phone, which is something you really often see actual iPhone users say, including in this thread.
Because the scale of these companies gives them immense power and control over people's devices and (digital) lives. The size of the corporation leads to a geometric increase of power through network effects.
Now that you have an answer, what are you actually trying to ask? Do you have an issue with megacorps providing more control to users?
I have a problem with any kind of absolutes. I also have a problem with a self-appointed tech commenters deciding what is best for everyone else due to their own biases. There is essentially a Google/Apple duopololy, but let's not pretend there are no other choices. Neither company is stopping anyone buying Fairphones, Pinephone, or whatever other libre devices exist on the market if that's what the individual wants.
> "I also have a problem with a self-appointed tech commenters deciding what is best for everyone else due to their own biases."
This sounds like you.
> "but let's not pretend there are no other choices."
Nobody is confused by the current choices. Saying that the iPhone can't do the thing today that we want it to do in the future is just repeating a fact that is literally the reason for the discussion in the first place.
And yes it's strange to take the side of a trillion-dollar megacorp instead of users, especially considering the size and power of such a company.
"Trillion dollar corporations should give their users all the choice and flexibility they want, not the other way around." is an absolute.
> "This sounds like you."
My 5 year old would respond with a better comeback than "I know you are, but what am I?"
> "Saying that the iPhone can't do the thing today that we want it to do in the future is just repeating a fact that is literally the reason for the discussion in the first place."
Who the fuck are we?! Have you asked iPhone users? Or just your immediate circle? No. We is the arrogant, opinionated "power users" and tech-commenters that think that the know what is best for everyone else.
> "And yes it's strange to take the side of a trillion-dollar megacorp instead of users, especially considering the size and power of such a company."
I'm not. I'm siding with the status quo, which is a considerably safer environment for the vast majority of iPhone users (yes, including me, a actual user of the software and hardware made by the megacorp) than that of what your are espousing.
At least I know not to invest in your fund, especially given your aversion to businesses that make money.
> "My 5 year old would respond with a better comeback""No. We is the arrogant, opinionated "power users" and tech-commenters that think that the know what is best for everyone else."
What are you doing? Why is this discussion so triggering for you? You made the initial accusation and failed to see that it describes you.
The "we" is the commenters here talking about features they want, representing themselves and others, just like millions of other users who also have their own specific needs. The discussion is about why these features should exist, the benefits they bring, and the effects they might have.
Do we need to poll a billion users to discuss any functionality? Isn't Apple itself also just a few people deciding on changes that affect billions, while adding features that might only support a small minority? If someone says they want bigger buttons or slower animations, is that invalid because they're saying "what is best for everyone else" or are they just talking about what they want and why?
> "I'm siding with the status quo"
Cool, so just say that and make your argument. Many others have said similar things and there's been plenty of discussion about how this would affect the vast majority. But why get upset and call everyone arrogant because they have a different need or opinion? That's neither helpful nor productive.
> "At least I know not to invest in your fund, especially given your aversion to businesses that make money."
This is juvenile. Maybe take a break from the internet if you need to make personal attacks over this. We're also not open to outside money, perhaps if you weren't anonymous we can help you with investments more fit for you.
> The "we" is the commenters here talking about features they want, representing themselves and others...
That's not the case here, and never has been. "Others"? Please. Were that actually the case, I have less of a problem, but it isn't.
> "Do we need to poll a billion users to discuss any functionality?"
Not at all. Never suggested we did. The issue at hand is speaking on behalf of "everyone".
> Isn't Apple itself also just a few people deciding on changes that affect billions, while adding features that might only support a small minority?
They're the ones making the device in a free market. They get to choose what goes into the product. They offer it for sale in an open market, selling at the price point they have set. If people didn't want the devices as they are, they wouldn't be a "Trillion dollar mega corporation". So there is clearly a market for this small group of people to sell product into. Given the price point of iPhone's, I'd strongly argue they are a deliberate choice, much like any "flagship" device. It has been ever thus from Apple, and they have done rather well off the back of it. For those that want other features, as we've established, other options exist, one is significantly more successful. After all, the more open Android handsets outsell Apple 4:1 or 5:1, depending on the quarter.
Here is where I take umbrage with your assertion. Clearly, there is a choice. In fact the individual that you replied to made this point eloquently, but here you are essentially demanding that this trillion dollar megacorp be forced to bow to these requests by people that clearly don't use the devices, and that already have a choice not to use the devices. The issue as fas as I see it, is that you seem to want to punish a company that is successful because you don't like what they offer, and that they should offer whatever you (disguised as "users") want, despite being catered to by a segment of the overall market that is 4-5 times larger, that offers significantly more choice. When there is push back, the retort is always along the lines of thinking of the children.
> If someone says they want bigger buttons or slower animations, is that invalid because they're saying "what is best for everyone else" or are they just talking about what they want and why?
Absolutely not, but that is very different from "Trillion dollar mega corporations should give their users all the choice and flexibility they want..." and is not what is being discussed. No business, trillion dollar valuation or otherwise, can cater to, or indeed please all the people all the time. It's a pointless endeavour to pursue. Neither should any business be forced to produce products to cater to everyone.
The argument made here, as illustrated by the start of this particular thread, is that the "walled garden" is bad for those whom are choosing it and it's a false choice anyway, because "walled garden", lock in, etc. This comes across to me as arrogant. The tone is very much "I know best", and the reasons of dubious benefit. It almost alway boils down to "because that's what I want", which inevitably circles back to the choice discussion.
> "This is juvenile."
You are, of course, absolutely right. Genuinely, I can only apologise.
> This is a false choice - there's no reason the iPhone can't be both a walled garden-type device and support alternative OSes/software, just like a computer.
I actually just had this discussion yesterday at length, en-mass, most day-to-day regular users will not focus on their apps, or even care to check the update status of the OS, in the regard iOS offers more 'out of the box' security and thus overall is a better option.
If you allow any other OS for example, you can't manage the security of that device anymore. So no it's not a false choice. It's just a choice.
> If you allow any other OS for example, you can't manage the security of that device anymore.
Sure, the original manufacturer can't manage the security anymore, but that's kinda the point. As an Android user, when my manufacturer stops shipping security updates I can switch to a custom rom that is still updated.
An android is famously more secure and suffers from less malwares / viruses / ... than iOS due to custom ROM, sideloading etc being available on the device.
These people are perfectly able to do it right now, just by buying another device. If you don’t like that something lacks features you think are important, you just don’t buy it. How does it matter to you what other people do with their phone? It’s not like Android is in danger of disappearing or anything
If you’re upset that something you bought does not do something that it was never advertised it could do, and in fact is notorious for not doing, then the problem is squarely on your side. Plenty of people did know what they were buying into.
Complaining is one thing, saying that their users, overall, are unhappy with the product requires at least some serious references and a good narrative.
Nobody here is confused. We know what devices we bought, and we know what they do and don't support today. That's the point. Otherwise there wouldn't be a discussion in the first place to talk about what they can, and likely should do.
And that's what this is - a discussion (on a discussion forum). If you're upset that you people don't share your views, the problem is squarely on your side. Plenty of people can understand and discuss the topic though.
Using vague terms like "the platform" are not useful. What does an operating system like "iOS/iPad OS" have to do with the "iOS/iPad ecosystem"? You're not clear even in your own reply. Please try to be more precise.
I'll assume what you're really asking is from the perspective of Apple since the benefit for users is clear - it'll help make more apps available which has network effects of more Apple devices and usage.
This is part of why they are being forced to allow sideloading in the EU. As it turns out in the real world, the interests of corporations are often at odds with the interests of every day people.
I’m not so sure that “I can choose” to stay in the walled garden, if, for example, Spotify decides to only be available through another App Store that I don’t consider trustworthy.
>I’m not so sure that “I can choose” to stay in the walled garden, if, for example, Spotify decides to only be available through another App Store that I don’t consider trustworthy.
Sure you can. You can decide which is more important to you: "Having an iPhone" or "Using Spotify on my mobile phone."
> The walled garden also relies enormously on Apple - a publicly traded for profit enterprise - being a benign benefactor, which to date has been (relatively) true.
Only outside China. In China, you'll find protest apps banned [1], websites blocked at the system level [2], VPN apps banned, and more [3]. One could say they're just complying with Chinese law, like any other company doing business in China would be forced to. But that's misleading - other companies have not put themselves in the position of jailers of their users, so when they are forced to follow the law, their users are much less harmed.
Opening the walled garden doesn't simply add more choice. Here's one example, the Mac App Store. It's a ghost town. Even probably the most downloaded app ever, Chrome, isn't on it. If the iPhone allowed non-App-Store apps, you'd soon find yourself required to download each app from a random website. Which is fine on a Mac but not necessarily what people want on iPhones.
That’s not the argument you think it is. Chrome isn’t on the Mac App Store because it’s not compatible with Apple’s walled garden. So while you might need to go to a separate page to get Chrome on Mac, it can’t exist at all on iOS, and would have never had the opportunity to thrive in the first place if macOS originally started out as locked down as iOS.
I can personally guarantee you that people download Chrome because they want the sync, the UI, they have to in order to access work documents, etc. Not because it's running blink.
Play store is more permissive than App Store, so there's less reason for publishers to leave, but there's also more junk on it as a result. They can't act strict like Apple without fragmenting it.
Still, it's starting to. There are already multiple stores, Google Play and Samsung Galaxy at least. Fortnite for a while was only standalone from Epic's website (but is now on Samsung too).
More junk is fine. Here we are having a great discussion on the most permissive platform of all time. In spite of the amount of junk on the web, I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sifting through "junk" is just a search and curation problem, and those problems have been solved for decades. Using multiple stores is no worse than using 15 different messaging apps, which we all seem to have no problem with, in spite of the walled garden utopian paradise imagined by some folks.
I'm guessing you're typing this on a PC. iPhones are all about quickness, not having the kitchen sink with you. Idk if most Android users care about the openness, but they have it.
It's all-around, but the ones I can name... Apple has some very particular rules about how you can direct users to external places to purchase things, which I don't think are present on Play Store. Also more strict about apps requesting permissions they don't make a strong case for needing. And rules about offensive content, and restrictions against apps they believe there are too many of. No game emulators allowed either. The ban on third-party iaps was pretty recent on Android, like 2022.
For instance:
- I made a simple news-sharing app. App Store pushed back against me a few times about the offensive content policy and reporting mechanism not being up to their standards. I never heard back from the Play Store, they just OK'd it the first time.
- I made a college-only dating app. App Store said they won't allow any more dating apps that aren't different enough (mine wasn't), Play Store said ok.
- A startup I knew was making an NFT app with a beginner-friendly way to purchase using USD. Apple objected to purchases not going through IAPs. They escalated a bunch of times and eventually got it through. Play Store didn't care at all.
Apple enforces the rules that applications must only harvest data in the ways that they describe. That's behind Facebook's tantrum about the App Store.
Google said it would introduce an equivalent policy, but then backed off, and does not enforce it.
How exactly would allowing a third party operating system on the device negatively impact your user experience?
Can you explain why you believe that allowing access to the hardware, only after explicitly and deliberately enabling access via some sort of hardware switch or whatnot, in a way that does not alter the default experience in any measurable way, conflicts with your preferences?
I can understand liking the software that it comes with by default, I just don't understand how allowing a different OS to be installed, if you choose to install it, conflicts with anything.
> How exactly would allowing a third party operating system on the device negatively impact your user experience?
I'm all for Apple allowing third party operating systems. If some world government wants to force Apple to allow users to install Debian, Android or whatever onto their iPhone hardware, that's great. No downsides. Write the referendum and I'll vote in favour.
As for the more common refrain that developers should be allowed to distribute apps outside Apple's walled garden, that does negatively affect me in three ways:
1. Unless Apple is allowed to make side-loading at least as unfriendly as it is on Android, many apps I use today will stop being distributed through the App Store. Want the Gmail app? Download Play Store for iOS. Want Lightroom? Download Creative Cloud Store for iOS. And suddenly all of these apps are no longer subject to Apple's strict privacy/tracking policies. That sucks.
2. I provide tech help to a dozen family members. I can't control what they do. I've had enough of dealing with Windows XP machines with Comet Cursor and a dozen other bits of malware on them. These days I've moved the worst offenders to iPads and providing them with tech support is no longer a source of tension headaches. No fucking way I'm supporting anything that has even the slightest chance of kinking that armour. It doesn't matter what I say. These people will follow any instruction provided by Google or Epic to install whatever app they've heard about.
3. Maybe I want to develop my own device and I want to write libraries for others to write apps for the device. Why should I support governments forcing device makers to give those libraries away to others and not respect license terms? I'm all for people hacking into devices they own, but if I distribute something with a license, I want my license terms to be respected - just as someone releasing under AGPL wants that license respected.
> 1. Unless Apple is allowed to make side-loading at least as unfriendly as it is on Android, many apps I use today will stop being distributed through the App Store. Want the Gmail app? Download Play Store for iOS. Want Lightroom? Download Creative Cloud Store for iOS. And suddenly all of these apps are no longer subject to Apple's strict privacy/tracking policies. That sucks.
That’s a lot of speculation without any data behind it.
We have the biggest OS in history of the world and what you’re describing is absolutely not the case there.
One of the biggest game developers with arguably the most popular game at the time tried to push for it and eventually returned back with tail between its legs.
Epic had their tail between their legs because the law wasn't on their side. The whole point is that if the law is modified, and these aspects of Apple's operating systems are designed by legislation, Epic would prevail in court. And there's no reason to think Apple could make side-loading onerous, because Epic will complain to the courts about anything that stands in the way of a seamless install of the Epic Games Store on an iPhone.
That's not equivalent to the status quo on Android.
1. You are right that it probably won't happen if Apple is only required to make side-loading technically possible but not seamless. But somehow I doubt that if Governments force Apple to permit side-loading by law, entities like Epic won't repeatedly abuse the courts to ensure Apple makes side-loading as seamless as possible. This is OS design by legislation and court order. Therefore the analogy to Android is obviously absurd and irrelevant.
2. Your lack of empathy is noted. But thanks for acknowledging that what I described is a real problem.
3. There are government regulations, therefore there should be more government regulations. Is that an argument?
I never said that. But if we are already discussing this. How do you know that opening the hardware doesn’t mean significantly dropping iPhone security stance? I don’t know, I’m asking. I’m fine to be convinced it’s possible but that would require a real technical analysis how such hardware switch can be implemented, without words like “maybe” or “possibly”.
Because through experiance I've never heard of anyone or been myself ever hacked by a third party through the internet using an Android phone over my entire tech career. I've been using Android since 1.0.
But I have personally hacked Android phones before by exploiting a zero day on an early firmware of my device that has since been patched and it was a huge pain requiring physical access to the device and a computer with a USB cable.
And I know that iPhones still have the exact same flaw because Cydia still exists.
So why do you believe you are secure if someone comes into physical posession of your phone?
Cydia mostly only exists for devices before the iPhone X that are susceptible to the Checkra1n USB exploit. Past that, jailbreaks are few and far between, with the latest A12+ jailbreak being Dopamine for iOS 15 - 15.4.1, and that was only released in May of this year. There is no iOS 16 jailbreak except for on those iPhone X or earlier devices.
I agree, and I find it frustrating that people assume that the only way you can make an argument in favour of Apple's walled garden is ignorance. No. I'm a software programmer by trade. I use Linux extensively. I automate my home with Home Assistant and micro-controllers running Arduino and ESPHome. I'm not an idiot who doesn't understand the "but you can just choose to stay in the walled garden" argument. I understand the argument. I think it's naive, overly simplistic and fundamentally wrong.
I like my iPhone the way it is.
If you don't like it, don't choose it. Surely Android isn't so terrible that you're having difficulty deciding between it and Apple's walled garden? Surely it's not THAT bad.
> If you don't like it, don't choose it. Surely Android isn't so terrible that you're having difficulty deciding between it and Apple's walled garden? Surely it's not THAT bad.
Let’s make deal, shall we? You’ll use Android for a year and at end of 2024 you’ll let me know?
We use iPhone for corporate business. There are obvious advantages of locked phones as there are with standardized OS compared to customized linux system. Sensible arguments that make a lot of stuff much easier. But none of these arguments apply to private usage, it applies to a third party wanting to configure the phone for you.
Can you elaborate what you find naive, simplistic and fundamentally wrong? I just want to understand some of the considerations. Is it because you would use the unlocked features and ruin the ease of use for yourself?
The walled garden forces app developers to comply with Apple’s consumer-friendly privacy restrictions. Many larger developers absolutely detest these, not least of which is Epic, whose campaign against Apple started months after Apple announced their crackdown on tracking. A crackdown which, if you recall, was universally commended by the Hacker News community.
If the iOS walled garden is torn down by legislation, the result won’t be akin to Android. It will break down the status quo that any app I want is available from the App Store, and subject to Apple’s rules.
The status quo with Android is Google wanting the appearance of being open, but without being a commercially viable channel. This is because it was their choice, not dictated to them by legislation.
If company makes a widget which doesn't perfectly align with your opinion about how widgets should work, I think it's selfish to think you are entitled to force them to change their widget to suit you.
True, if Apple gets to decide how inconvenient sideloading is. They'd make it as seamless as it is on Android. In which case the outcome would be similar to Android.
False, if we're talking about Apple's hands being forced by legislation and court order. Epic will sue Apple repeatedly until anything standing in the way of a seamless install of Epic Game Store is stripped from the process. A seamless sideloading/alt-store experience means apps I use today stop being distributed in the App Store. Why would Google distribute the gmail app in the App Store where they're unable to track user activity, when they could distribute it in the Play Store For iOS and not have to comply with Apple's pro-consumer privacy policies?
> In which case the outcome would be similar to Android.
And what’s that?
> False, if we're talking about Apple's hands being forced by legislation and court order. Epic will sue Apple repeatedly until anything standing in the way of a seamless install of Epic Game Store is stripped from the process. A seamless sideloading/alt-store experience means apps I use today stop being distributed in the App Store.
Absolutely, we’ll end up a situation where checks notes Epic returned with tail between its legs to Play Store, despite your absurd claims.
> Why would Google distribute the gmail app in the App Store where they're unable to track user activity, when they could distribute it in the Play Store For iOS and not have to comply with Apple's pro-consumer privacy policies?
This is the reason Google pays 15 billion to be default search engine on iPhone, so that they’ll remove their already marginal apps (expect for maybe maps) from dominant store on absolutely fanatical ecosystem.
>This is a false choice - there's no reason the iPhone can't be both a walled garden-type device and support alternative OSes/software, just like a computer.
There are a few reasons.
E.g. allowing sideloading amounts to basically allowing any third party with clout whose apps users want to use (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc) to mandate the use of their own apps bypassing all related protections and integrations.
It also enables smaller malicious third parties to demand the same (but at least there the user has to be duped into installing them. Whereas with big-name apps, even users who know what they're doing could have a legitimate need to run those apps).
So, what about supporting alternative OSes/software? So basically, Apple not to sell a phone (with OS and everything), but a generic target phone hardware, that comes with their iOS preinstalled? Isn't that a quite different demand?
>The future on a long timescale may not be so nice.
On a long timescale you can change devices. It's not like something you buy now you'll have to run in 10 years.
> our phones, which increasingly are our personal computer
To me a phone can never be a personal computer because it serves a different master. My computers (so far anyway) do what I want the way I want it. On a phone I'm a mere untrusted user, not the owner of the device (even though I have to pay for it).
> This is a false choice - there's no reason the iPhone can't be both a walled garden-type device and support alternative OSes/software, just like a computer.
In theory... but in practice if you allow it to not be a walled garden, then it will tip one way over the other. You suddenly give companies the ability to say "bring down your walls or don't use our app." While you technically still have a choice, it's not much of a choice if you depend on a certain app. The fact is we are all subject to the choices of other companies, developers, users, etc, so for those of us who prefer the walls it won't do us much good if everyone is living outside of the walls.
>This is a false choice - there's no reason the iPhone can't be both a walled garden-type device and support alternative OSes/software, just like a computer.
Correct. There is no reason the iPhone cannot be both.
There is also no reason why Apple should be required to make it both simply because that's what a vanishingly small number of vocal malcontents wish for.
> We know because this exact strategy works just fine on Apple's other computer platform, the Mac
And Apple sells around 20 million Macs a year and 250 Million+ iPhones/iPads. It’s not exactly a mass market product with around 10% market share or less.
> The future on a long timescale may not be so nice. Were this to change, you don't easily have a say in alternative software.
In the long term your phone will be useless as a phone. Right now, the 2012 iPhone is the oldest phone that you can connect to modern cell phone networks as older protocols get turned off.
How much software do you really have that’s iOS only or that you would have to buy again if you wanted to choose Android.
But the answer is really not that hard. If you don’t like Apple’s “walled garden”, buy an Android like 85% of the world.
In 2007, the iPhone multitasked with the built in apps - the only ones available - until the App Store in 2008. It was 2010 when Apple introduced multitasking for third party apps.
The feature phones definitely didn’t multitask J2ME apps.
> Why shouldn't you be able to install a linux distro and turn your old iPhone or iPad into a really power-efficient home server-type appliance, if you want to?
Why didn't you buy a phone that allowed you to do this?
This sort of argument seems to me to be fundamentally inconsistent. The only reason to pass a law which will force Apple to do something is if there is a "Moloch trap" [1], in which Apple can take advantage of crowd dynamics to do force the crowd into doing something which most people in the crowd don't actually want to do.
But the argument for a walled garden on phones is precisely the same: The argument is that without a walled garden, you get a "Moloch trap": because they can't collect the Apple Tax, the only way for them to make money is to spy on you and sell your data -- something you as the consumer don't want, and that maybe Apple doesn't want either.
(And before you say, that Apple can simply treat the phones like they treat their computers, where they simply sell the hardware and don't make extra money either from the Apple Tax or from spying on you -- there's another "Moloch Trap" with shares and capitalism: If Apple's phones are significantly less profitable than Google's, then shareholder will rebel and replace the CEO with someone who will be as profitable as Google. If you forbid Apple from collecting the Apple Tax, then Moloch will force them to spy on you -- unless you manage to forbid anyone from spying.)
If Moloch Traps don't exist, then there's no reason to force Apple to open up their phones, because the Market will provide you with a good alternative. If Moloch Traps do exist, then there's a reason not to force Apple to open up their phones, as the walled garden helps them prevent a different kind of trap.
Comparing an iPhone to a Mac is a false comparison.
Mac is a development machine for some and I want to do things on it that I do NOT want to do on my phone.
Also, my phone is more important than my Mac. It has most of my personal info and I can call emergency services and others can call me during an emergency.
So I really like Apple's thinking on this. Lock down the phone but give enough controls on the Mac to enable development.
> Why shouldn't you be able to install a linux distro and turn your old iPhone or iPad into a really power-efficient home server-type appliance, if you want to? My old MacBook is doing exactly this.
I don't wholly disagree, but there are good reasons.
1. Warranty and repair:
I once went to the Genius Bar because the speakers on my iPhone 6 were crackling and popping. I expected them to do an in-warranty repair or swap. Nope. They told me that they couldn't help because I had a developer beta of iOS installed. They recommended I go home and downgrade to a GA build and see if the problem persists. It was very wise of them not to help me do that, because I had compatibility issues with my backups and lost a bunch of data, but lo and behold, the downgrade fixed my speaker problem.
Software updates can brick phones, such as in Apple's own [Error 53](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205628). This is actually really prevalent in home-brew/jailbreak installs. I'd bricked a couple Xboxen myself, and didn't dare seek help via Microsoft, but others surely have.
Keeping a lithium-ion battery at 100% is not the best for it's health, so now most Apple OSs will try reach a peak battery charge just as you will likely begin using it, and normally holds at 3/4 capacity or so.
Software can cause permanent hardware problems, or ones that neither you nor support are equipped to fix. It can exponentially increase complexity on support staff to try. Replacement would affect their bottom line, so they need to then find a way to see if you tampered with the software and deny support or replacement, but what if you did this and then sold it? This all gets complicated, unfriendly, and costly quick.
2. "It just works"
This idea that Apple products "Just Work" is core to their marketing. I've used hackintoshes for years, and know there are many, many things that "Just Won't Work" (one of those things is power management). Maybe you're willing to take a chance on a linux distro anyway. There is still an outward impression others can glean while noticing you using a product. This is why franchises have standards. They want to maintain a level of quality for those that may patronize or even glance at the product.
To Apple, the business works better if they force a single, well supported experience.
The reason I have the iPhone is that they make better choices for a lot of things, not specifically that it is a walled garden. I still wish I could take a system with that design, then sideload, or root, at my own discretion, without every update being a risk that the root will be broken. It's a rather expensive computer and I wish I could use it as a more general purpose computer for certain things.
Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind? Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to?
Apple fucked Facebook because iPhones only allow Apple the power to fuck Facebook. Meanwhile software history is full of examples of abusive corporations being put in their place by casual side projects. I don’t think this dichotomy is real, I think we could both have control of our devices and prevent facebook from stalking us, maybe even more effectively than Apple.
People seem to forget the history of cellular. Apple refused to let carriers bloat up phones with uninstallable shovelware that had been on every phone before them, and they only relented because it represented a market opportunity too big to ignore.
It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. And it’s not as if many have not tried and failed to break the phone OS duopoly; the walled garden aspect of iOS is a fairly small obstacle.
Apple Pay had a similar uphill battle. So were OS releases - carriers would blame it on “network compatibility testing”. Apple fought them at every turn. If carriers had their way, iPhones would be irrelevant after 2 years because Apple can’t update the OS. Similarly if side loading was allowed, companies that skirt the rules would simply list them outside and incentivise people to use that version. Once they have enough traction they’ll kill the App Store version. Although Android apps surviving so far would be a counterpoint. (I personally prefer it and want side loading. I’m just saying I understand the need for the wall).
> It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations.
Wouldn't it be great if we had one of those? An organisation powerful enough to boss companies around, making it so companies didn't have to race-to-the-bottom to compete with each other, and we'd get to tell it what to do?
The logistics might be a bit hard, though. We'd have to have some kind of large-scale organised vote, probably on a schedule of some kind. That might take a lot of resources to arrange, so either a lot of people would have to volunteer to work on it, or it would have to acquire money through some mechanism… We could vote on that, too.
Hmm. There are actually quite a lot of things we'd have to vote for, thinking about it. Including which things to vote for! Most people wouldn't have time for all that, leaving the people who would as the ones calling the shots. So we'd need some mechanism for people to delegate their vote to somebody else: a representative of some kind. And those representatives could form groups – councils, perhaps? – to discuss and vote on matters relevant to the people they represent.
Once we've got all that set up, though, it should be easy enough to get uninstallable bloatware banned from computation devices. Right?
Coulda, shoulda, woulda. We can’t even get the deluge of spam effectively addressed by the government, and that is absolutely despised across the aisle. The same government that has enabled the concentration of wireless carriers is now expected to effectively prevent them from doing something?
So far, resigning ourselves to failure has created capitalist horrors on all sides of the aisle. Everyone but Big Tech hates Big Tech.
Utilizing our government to effectively curb abusive market practices is overall a good idea. It's how we scare predatory markets like cryptocurrency into submission. It's been harder to do with domestic inventions like the NYSE or the iPhone, but its increasingly relevant as the rest of the world cries foul. Whatever the case is, masturbating shareholders for infinite profit is not how you progress common interests.
Because governments are completely incapable of regulating minute details like how tracking IDs on phones should work. The best part of the current system is your choice of phone isn't tied to how education is funded or what the immigration rate should be. You can make micro votes on every product you buy to get what suites you best.
They are capable of empowering other bodies. The UK has the concept of "secondary legislation".
> You can make micro votes on every product you buy to get what suites you best.
Iff you are wealthy enough, and the market hasn't race-to-the-bottom'd that option away. No amount of "vote with you wallet" can get rid of leaded petrol, for example.
AFAIK, the Treo was just a Palm PDA with phone functionality. IIRC, what you call "sideloading" was the only way to install applications on Palm PDAs (including the Treo).
Irremovable bloatware was a big reason I stuck with Apple. I hate that crap so much - so much of it is poorly written trash that does nothing but advertise the carrier’s other services every freaking day for the device’s life span.
The carriers had an iron grip on the phones and stores. People were cheering when Apple said the App Store only took a 30% cut. The reason the iPhone started on a smaller regional carrier (Cingular, but then purchased by ATT) was because they were the only ones willing to let Apple do Apple and stay hands off. Once the iPhone got traction it forced the others to follow suit.
Of course times have changed, but people are quick to forget what a mess cellular used to be in the US.
The only thing saving your 3390 from irremovable bloatware is its weak hardware.
If bloatware could be install it would be as Nokia like most phone makers will try to curry favour with the carriers to get them to promote their phones.
Apple is probably the only phone maker who didn’t do that. They didn’t need to. Heck it was the other way around - carriers wanted to sell iPhones so they can get an edge over / won’t fall behind their competitors. If carriers have a problem with Apple’s refusal of their demands, they could go screw themselves. Their loss.
Back in the day if I wanted a non-stock ringtone, you would have to purchase it through Verizon, it would’ve likely cost $3-5. iTunes was comparatively a lot cheaper, and also basically allowed any arbitrary mp3 to be used as a ringtone.
Verizon also used to run their own app stores full of games and low quality music; the fact that it was free or $.99 on Apple’s stores was generally a net price decrease.
I mean, the software also worked poorly even if you did cough up. And at least the iPhone lets you move default apps off the home screen, out of sight never to be seen again.
I never asserted that every phone would have it. I asserted that I buy iPhones specifically because they don’t permit anything like that, and that it would be a fairly obvious target for those shenanigans once sideloading became permitted. US carriers already do dubious things like lock SIMs on phones.
I can move bloatware icons off the main screen on android. That's different from uninstalling them.
Your assertion was that Apple disallowed carriers from loading up phones with bloatware. So what? So did other phones. That there exist phones with bloatware does not imply that all non-apple phones are festooned with bloatware and all Apple phones are free of bloatware except safari.
But if your assertion is to be interpreted as anything else it's a distinction without a difference.
> Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to?
Unilateral bargaining power. Facebook is willing to write an app for iOS that doesn't track people as well as they'd like, because Apple is there on the other side of the table, with 40% market share, saying "do it our way or don't do it at all."
Compare/contrast Windows PCs, where everything really is ultimately "whatever the user wants." You can arbitrarily modify the executables that run on your computer, sure. But can you get a modded game to let you play online, without running some Intel SGX rootkit that verifies the game's code signature and watches every HID input you make to ensure you're not cheating? No, you can't — because despite owning the PC itself that the software is running on, you don't have a negotiating position that enables you to tell the company that runs the servers that that game connects to for online play, to allow a non-rootkit-monitored version of their game client to connect to them.
But again... the counter-claim is Apple is telling Facebook they can't track iOS users because Apple doesn't want to share that data with Facebook. But they (Apple) still track users.
Apple made $2B from ads in 2022 from a total of $394 billion, 0,5% of total revenue.
Google made $224 billion from ads about 50% of total.
I still trust the company that makes the vast majority of their money from stuff that doesn't need a profile about me and my personal life to function.
The ultimate negotiating position is law. Simply make what they're doing illegal until it stops happening. Computing freedom must be enshrined into law. It doesn't matter how much money it costs them.
Ok, that's still an option. At any moment governments could step in, but they haven't. So rather than waiting forever while being abused by companies, I'm going to buy an iphone and have a nice experience now.
It's the only option. It's either that or give up. Look at Android. It's honestly a piece of shit but at least we were in control. Well, not anymore: now apps can use remote attestation to see if you "tampered" with your own device. So you're not in control anymore because if you exercise that control you get locked out of every service. Hell my fucking bank's app complains and refuses to run if I have developer mode turned on. Might as well choose the better kept garden if it's gonna be like this.
I decided to buy a Pixel and run GrapheneOS because I literally can't live without Termux anymore but I definitely understand your point.
That would be easier if there was a required nutrition label "Requires root access which will not be revoked on uninstall", "requires background services when app is not running", "shares telemetry with developer".
That is far from the world we are in and the budget tech has to defeat any law that would attempt to implement those protections.
As it is many developers seem not to care if whatever frameworks they use are affecting system integrity or stability if it would generally not be noticed by the end user. Most users are going to need a trustworthy gatekeeper why can make some of these evaluations so you do not need extensive research just to play a game.
Not to say I agree with the position Apple appears to be taking here on not allowing macOS apps to run directly on the device, and not allowing it to function as a display for every device in the home. For single people in small spaces who currently burn wall space for monitors and televisions or just do not like big black slabs in their living space this could have been a useful gizmo.
Nah. We'll defeat their monitoring and have fun on our terms. It's offensive that they even think they can dictate what can or can't happen on our machines. The audacity of these corporations.
I could roll my own or use an Android device that I rooted I suppose.
The problem there is I have to use inferior hardware (IMO) and I won’t be able to as easily interoperate with my preferred laptop hardware and software.
30 years ago I had the time to fuck around with hardware and OSs. Work, kids, and life are more important to me now and I consider the options provided by Apple to be good enough and a solid middle ground for where I want to spend my time today.
- Apple was the most valuable company (founded in 1977)
- Microsoft had been in the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000 (founded in the 70s)
- Facebook was already dominant
- Amazon was dominant in online retail (founded in the 90s)
- Google was the dominant search engine. (Founded in 1998)
Which startup or “side project” has had a meaningful impact since 2010? And been successful and profitable?
Before you mention OpenAI, it’s only surviving because of the deep discount it gets on compute from Microsoft.
As far as phones the current market is littered with race to the bottom barely profitable Android phones. Samsung, the only successful Android manufacture, has been around since 1938.
The entire VC market has been a Ponzi scheme since 2010 where all of the value was captured before the company went public.
2010 is still pretty recent, where was Apple in 1990? If someone said they would become the largest company in the world because they manufactured premium telephones, offered a replacement to cable TV, and were one of the few remaining Unix vendors that would surprise anyone you told it to including any Apple employee or executive.
It kind of isn’t, though. If you compare top companies by market capitalization from December 31, 2010 to today, the only two companies that are in both lists are Apple and Microsoft. You’ve got to go to 2013 for Google to enter the list, 2015 for Amazon, 2017 for Facebook. Heck, Apple didn’t even enter the top 10 until the end of 2009.
The only company still in the top 10 (as of market close today) to remain a player consistently for more than 25 years is Microsoft, and Exxon should get a special mention for being the erstwhile first or second place leader for decades and only dropping out of the top 10 at the end of 2017 (it reappeared at the end of 2022).
> I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others?
All of the workstation vendors: IBM, HP, Dec/Compaq/HP, SGI, Sun. I don't think any of these are particularly popular, but AIX (IBM) and Solaris (Sun) are probably more popular than the others. I wouldn't be surprised if IRIX (SGI) is totally dead.
And funnily enough, Microsoft. Although they sold Xenix to Sco. I think it's in a lot of POS devices (so probably dying to iPad installs).
Edit: Oops - just realized that "Dec/Compaq/HP" probably doesn't belong in the list. I guess technically there was Tru64 Unix, but everyone I've ever heard of who ran Alpha boxes used VMS.
IBM is the only one really left...for now. They just shuttered US-based AIX development and moved everything to India, so the writing is on the wall.
HP/UX and Solaris are barely on life support and basically moribund. I seem to recall a recent announcement that HP/UX goes end-of-support in 2025. As far as Solaris...Oracle is gonna Oracle. Illumios, et. al., won't save it.
SGI IRIX is long dead. RIP.
SCO (the part with a product, not the part that fails miserably at litigation) got sold to someone noone has ever heard of and probably never will. I speculate there's an SMB PoS market out there supporting it and that'll turn out just as well as the OS/2+ATM market did. No innovation going on there, just milking a dwindling revenue stream. I doubt anyone has sold a Xenix license in decades.
> HP/UX and Solaris are barely on life support and basically moribund. I seem to recall a recent announcement that HP/UX goes end-of-support in 2025. As far as Solaris...Oracle is gonna Oracle. Illumios, et. al., won't save it.
I figured as much for HP/UX. The failure of Itanium was the death knell there.
I mostly lump Solaris together with Illumos/SmartOS. Is there a good reason not to (unless when talking about Oracle specifically)?
Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction. I dunno, I'm not so much involved in the Solaris world anymore (having started on SunOS 3.5), but I suppose I take them at their word.
> Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction.
That's fair.
I know that, after Oracle re-closed OpenSolaris, they can't (legally) incorporate the innovations happening in Illumos into Solaris proper, so the 2 siblings will continue to drift apart.
And it sounds like there was quite a lot of bad blood that proceeded the founding of Illumos (unsurprising when Oracle is involved), so I'm not super surprised that users would talk that way.
That matches my perspective. I personally don't get the impression that Illumos, et. al., have the critical mass for a robust long-term future, but I surely don't see all the places it's being used. Fortunately, I guess, a lot of the nifty things Solaris brought to the table (ZFS, dtrace, etc.) have been pulled up into the BSDs and Linux with varying degrees of success.
Square ships iPads, most of the other payment terminals are some brand of leenucks (some are android, some are not.) There are more WinCE terminals still out there than you would expect (verifone's been around for a LONG time and has probably used every embedded toolchain/cpu architecture/rtos that's come down the pike. And that's just one example.)
IBM 4690's supposedly run a SuSe derivative, and Walmart doesn't seem to be replacing them with iPads. I think Sears & KMart also used 4690s, but also a mix of predecessor systems which ran an unholy assemblage of OSes: flex, dos, a bizarre mix of Os/36 and IMS, etc. As best I can tell, they never ran an OS from CMU.
Next time you're in a gas station, grocery store, cinema or chain restaurant look closely at the cash register. It's not an iPad.
Square did a mightily brilliant thing to marry its dongle to a consumer friendly iPad to support small retail, but apple is not in the business of selling PoS systems. Heck, apple stores didn't use apple devices for PoS for the first two or three years after they were launched.
The assertion that iPads are "taking over" PoS seems to be based on an inappropriately small sample.
> The assertion that iPads are "taking over" PoS seems to be based on an inappropriately small sample.
That's fair. I think I notice iPad PoS devices when ever I run into them, whereas the other devices are less remarkable to me.
But my experience really mirrors what you say - gas stations and grocery stores aren't running iPads. It's usually restaurants and small vendors where I see them.
And it's a brilliant idea for small businesses. People are already familiar with it and trust Apple. I mean... I'm a BSD & Leenooks person and generally have a decent opinion of apple products. They just don't do what I want to do. But square piggy-backing on Apple's reputation was a great idea.
Um... what Unix (tm) product does Apple sell. They stopped selling A/UX decades ago and it's a bit of a stretch to call AIX Unix. And Mach is absolutely NOT Unix.
Saying that Apple is a Unix vendor because of Mach/Darwin/NeXTStep and Android/Google, Red Hat/IBM, Ubuntu/Canonical, Amazon/Amazon Linux aren't Unix vendors because they're Linux is an interesting take.
By that logic we could call MSFT a Unix vendor 'cause they once sold Xenix and NT originally shipped with BSD networking code.
This means that Apple has licensed the right to use the Unix(r) trademark, not that they have the right to use code from AT&T or its successors (USL, Novell, SCO, Caldera &c). It means that Apple will not be sued if they call macOS Unix, but it most assuredly did not use code from the SVR lineage.
This is the situation I was attempting to make light of. Apple is not what someone from 1990 would think of as a Unix vendor, but due to paying the licensing fee they are one and there are very few left.
So... if I take Mach and use it as the basis of a product for a different company, does that company get to say it's Unix? Or does the Unix moniker only apply to products released by Apple? If so, why?
> Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind?
Others are capable, they just don't take the same pride in their devices to bother making the effort. They are a mix of happy taking part in the race to the bottom, not wanting to harm stalkers because their own business model is partly or wholly reliant on such stalking, and in some cases both. Not just in the phone market either: look at MS slowly turning Windows into a glorified as platform, the way IoT devices try to lock you in to being followed around your daily life, etc.
I'm no fan of Apple or their devices overall, but on this they deserve credit IMO. Even accounting for the fact I know they'd be playing the other game if advertising were more important to them than their key competitor in at least one market.
Apple did that to Facebook because of their market position. Governments couldn’t do it, yet a hardware manufacturer could. And they could exactly thanks to the tight grip on the ecosystem.
I really don't understand all the government worshippers in this thread bringing up how good the government is at solving problems they haven't solved for the last 50 years.
Apple’s market position had nothing to do with it, just their ability to restrict Facebook’s app. Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?
> Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?
Who is "we" in this sentence?
Apple doesn't have a ton of secret sauce that allows them to screw advertisers over and protect privacy. What they do have is money. Google sells advertisements. Advertisers are their customers and they give their customers what they want. Apple sells hardware that happens to come with pretty decent software.
The reason we don't have a truly open platform that solves this problem through similar technical means is... money. It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone. It costs a crap ton more money to build the software for it. And there's really only two players in the game right now.
…and the exclusive ability to determine what software runs on your phone and how it functions. Facebook can’t collect your data if they are prevented from collecting your data, but no one but Apple can do that because no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook.
> Who is "we" in this sentence?
The broader technical community. Facebook’s app isn’t magical, it uses your phone’s OS features to stalk you and can be prevented from doing so through technical restrictions. Is this not precisely what Apple did? Facebook’s abuse exists at the mercy of its users under an open ecosystem.
> It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone.
That’s why iPhones cost so much. I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
> That’s why iPhones cost so much. I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
Three things come to mind:
1. Supporting a diverse ecosystem is hard and expensive.
2. It's easier to build a seamless platform when you have control over hardware and software. Look at Mac trackpad as an example; it's pretty much beats any PC trackpads.
3. Software sales is where the money is at. I used to work for a dell subsidiary and it was a common knowledge that Dell (and other vendors too) sold servers at a loss and made it up on software and support contracts. Apple has like ~80% profit margins on app store sales which is insane.
That ~80% figure comes from an Epic argument. At that time Apple had argued the number was completely wrong and they were going to refute. I do not see any article online with an updated number, but it is almost certainly wrong. It is super annoying the tech bloggers never pestered Apple to reveal what they said they were going to.
Historically Apple always has adjusted the quality of the product to match desired 35% margins and price points. I would be very surprised if the App Store is any different, although they may have had issues ramping up to eat that much money. Apple gouges users... but they tend to gouge consistently. The other 65% likely includes costs like advertising, cloud services, editorials, legal, fraud costs, WWDC, corporate overhead and the like but it far more than just hosting and evaluation costs. They may be blowing it on Apple TV+ content though. Services is a tricky number to nail down.
> no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook.
There's nothing stopping Google from restricting Facebook other than... pissing off their advertisers.
> I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
I suspect a big part of it is that the intersection of (people who want to run their own OS) and (people who are willing to spend a lot of money on a device) is probably pretty small and would have a pretty high cost to support. Additionally, the secure boot chain end-to-end is part of the selling point here. On the Android side, I definitely know non-technical users that have jumped through a ton of hoops to enable developer mode so that they can install hacked APKs, only to discover later that those were actually full of malware. They followed random guides they found on a search engine to get themselves into that spot. With an iOS device, as is right now, it's pretty much impossible to get yourself into that situation.
Google restricting Facebook tracking and ads would be a good setup for a lawsuit that Google would likely lose. Unlike Apple (who does still have an ad business), Google and Facebook are direct competitors in that space. For Google to block their competitor on their OS would turn into a major boon for Facebook.
So I guess that's a good argument that... if you don't want a phone with unrestricted ads and tracking, you shouldn't buy one from a company whose primary business model is selling ads and analytics.
The original post I replied to in this thread was arguing that Apple restricting Facebook had nothing to do with Apple's market position. You nailed it, thank you. Google's market position maybe does make it impossible for them to do what Apple did. And I guess to the other comments about an open pro-privacy platform, this is exactly the answer to what would need to be done. "We" would need a company that:
- values privacy
- values being an open platform
- has the technical capability to build fantastic hardware and software
- has figured out a profitable business model that doesn't involve selling out on either of those values and can support that technical capability
> Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?
Exactly. Why? Because no other manufacturer who ships millions of devices an stays in control of their ecosystem was interested in this move. Millions of difficult to track iPhone users are still valuable to Facebook because they need MAUs. So Facebook had no choice but bend.
> They have actively thwarted attempts by the likes of Facebook and Google to track me.
They did this because Apple wants to boost its own ad revenue.
"The adoption of Apple Search Ads by advertisers grew 4% to 94.8% year-over-year"
"Apple announced this summer that it will add two more advertising slots to the App Store. Developers will be able to buy ad space on the central “Today” page as well as on individual app pages"
"In order to know which ads to show which users, Apple collects their account data, information about in-store purchases, search queries, news stories they read, as well as the information about their device and location."
"Apple’s Anti-Tracking Transparency only applies to the apps that use third-party data to track users. Since Apple’s tracking stays within its own ecosystem, the company’s native apps are not subject to the policy."
Basically in order to conquer a nation, you need to get rid of its existing rulers. That is what Apple is doing boss, they don't care about you. But naive opinions like yours really do help them in propping up their image.
I avoided being fucked by Facebook by not having a Facebook account or logging onto their website. They still do facial recognition on me and can tell when I'm in a photo someone else uploads, but I don't think having an iPhone would protect me (or you) against that.
Why do I need an iPhone to not be fucked by Facebook?
If you use Facebook, you're asking to be tracked, it's on you. Do you really think Apple isn't tracking everything you do? And yet they're the good guys for blocking FB..
Epic tried to stare down Google, wielding peak Fortnite as a crowbar, and Epic still came back to the Play Store with its tail between its legs.
The App and Play store still offer phenomenal discoverability (warts and all).
Sideloading wouldn’t be a default and thus something only a tiny percentage of users does, probably deterred even further by the myriad of warnings Apple will spam at you.
It's a source of malware and viruses. It prevents the ability to unsubscribe in one place. It allows apps to use private APIs which Apple can't prevent (i.e. Obj-C dynamic dispatch) thus opening up all sorts of attack vectors e.g. "phone" apps that record conversations etc.
And I assure you that it wouldn't be a tiny percentage of users if companies like Facebook would use it to do a run-around Apple's privacy controls. Sideloading could unlock tens of billions in lost advertising revenue to many companies.
You can't have everything. I personally side with a device I can modify.
I think generally in Android there are enough warnings (those with timers and large "SECURITY RISK" warnings that are difficult to ignore) when enabling side loading, and also going out of the way to download malware apks in the first place, that the number of affected users has to be quite low. And you can have default on malware scanning too (which I believe Google Play does). Also you can malware scan before install as well. I think this is low enough risk that the benefit is greater than disabling it entirely.
Same could be said for allowing root and different OS install. I could install something very insecure or make bad choices. But then I want to have that choice, and I think it shouldn't be so easy that users would just do it by chance. We need to remember there are other social engineering attack vectors against the most secure systems (like asking for passwords, or even asking to lend the phone and so on) too. The attacks I hear on Android users recently mostly seem to be related to hijacking SMS auth and so on -- I really don't believe side loading has proven to be a large security issue at all (or other OS images for that matter).
In fact I think they should be making installing alternate OS images and alternate app store easier, if Google wants to earn my vote of confidence (at least as far as Android goes) :)
Those private APIs also mean Apple gets to play favorites with its own apps in a lot of ways, which they have.
> And I assure you that it wouldn't be a tiny percentage of users if companies like Facebook would use it to do a run-around Apple's privacy controls.
This was addressed by my Fortnite example already.
All in all, if you don’t like sideloading, you’ll never have to engage with it.
I hate this kind of attitude, and it’s the same as the office lovers trying to prevent WFH as much as possible. Stop trying to lock us both in the cage because you’re too afraid to step out of it.
Apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc will immediately move because they would be able to side step Apple's privacy controls. Billions are on the table here. Outlook will move because they can tie the app to Edge which will now be able to use JIT.
And a bit hypocritical to say that I should stop locking us both in a cage when it's your choice to be in there. Support companies who allow side loading. Win win for everyone.
> Those private APIs also mean Apple gets to play favorites with its own apps in a lot of ways, which they have.
While I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m always surprised that a technical audience brings up the “private APIs” bugaboo. Once you make an API public, you have to continue to support it warts and all. Apple should dog food their own stuff before they make it public.
On the other hand, do you expect Apple to make every API available to random developers?
Should Apple be allowed to kneecap competitors products (e.g smartwatches?)? They pretty clearly keep APIs to themselves to make their own products seem better. It's one thing to keep an unpolished rapidly changing API out of view and another to prevent competitors from doing the same thing on your platform that your 8th generation product does.
Where did I mention Slack? I say "messages" and you assume Slack? Seriously? Also WTF does that article have to do with non-Apple smartwatches being unable to reply to message notifications on iOS?
You can not reply to SMS or iMessage notifications on non-Apple smartwatches. It's not allowed.
What are you talking about then? Using a third party app that can reply to your iMessages or SMS? Why in the heck would I trust a third party for my SMS messages?
But as far as third party watches replying to SMS/iMessages, they could do it just like you respond to messages from cars before CarPlay was a thing - you support the appropriate Bluetooth profile.
Microsoft did it on computers without official Apple support
I'm talking about replying to SMS/iMessages from a non-Apple smartwatch. For example, with my Garmin watch on Android I can do things like send a canned message like "Yes" or "On my way" or whatever from the watch itself in reply to a notification. This is not possible on iOS with a non-Apple watch.
Why wouldn't you trust it? Yes, in theory a smartwatch could abuse my trust and send my friends spam or something but so could some no name Bluetooth keyboard yet I can use those just fine on iOS. Why should APPLE get to decide what devices I trust?
Microsoft did a hacky workaround with a whole host of limitations that proves my point. Apple is keeping the proper way to do it to themselves to make their products seem better.
There is a standardized Bluetooth protocol called the “Messaging Access Protocol”. Any Bluetooth device that you connect to the phone can work with that protocol and send and receive messages. It worked with my old 2011 Ford Fusion.
The iPhone has supported that for at least a decade.
Ok? Maybe it's unsuitable for a smartwatch (e.g power draw)?
This is a limitation common across non-Apple smartwatches on iOS. If it was SO simple you'd think they'd all do it and wouldn't have taken Microsoft 5+ years since the rollout of Phone Link.
I get that you love Apple but my man they are not the good guy you seem to believe. Have fun living in the reality distortion field, I hope you wake up one day.
So you went from “it doesn’t exist”, “Apple doesn’t support it”, “it’s a hack” to “maybe it’s too much of a power draw?
> Have fun living in the reality distortion field, I hope you wake up one day.
Yes a standardized Bluetooth profile that has been available on iOS devices for over a decade is “not reality”.
And now your excuse is that “maybe Bluetooth takes too much battery life”?
> This is a limitation common across non-Apple smartwatches on iOS
Have you ever thought that Android devices makers who are competing on price decide it’s not worth making the investment in supporting iOS devices since the Apple Watch is so dominant?
I told you exactly how it could be done using an existing Bluetooth standard that Apple has supported for over a decade. You’re really pulling at straws.
You could also at one point send “canned messages” from third party watches before the Apple Watch was introduced.
And I’m sure that’s all crappy Android watch makers with horrible processors and battery life would have to do to convince Apple Watch owners to switch is to enable message replies.
Use quick replies to send customized responses to text messages and messages from certain apps with Fitbit Charge 3, Fitbit Charge 4, Fitbit Charge 5, Fitbit Inspire 3, Fitbit Ionic, Fitbit Luxe, Fitbit Sense series, or Fitbit Versa series. This feature is currently available on devices paired to an Android phone . Devices paired to an iPhone can respond to Fitbit app notifications, such as messages, cheers, taunts, and friend requests.
The app store is a condom (or a covid mask). It's not all about "you"; it doesn't matter a damned sight if YOU are careful, or if YOU are responsible. Other people can make god-awful decisions that screw you over, and you have no power to stop them. Or rather: the app store IS your power to stop them.
I can't count the number of times I've seen windows users get duped by phishing that gives a bad actor root access. If that's your family member, that's YOUR problem; it doesn't matter if you were super careful — if your 18 year old son fucks up because he just didn't realize he was getting hacked, well — you're liable. That's what regulations are about; just like the FDA, just everything else.
I like having a platform where there is no fear. Same reason I like vaccines, same reason I like food safety regulations, etc. It's about network effects.
———
The worst thing about all this stuff is: when tragedies like this happened back in the day (and I remember, clearly, friends having their drives get wiped by script kiddies) — you suffer in silence. You sob and cry about whatever happened to you, and try to "raise awareness" in the open-source community about how maybe we should do something better, and nobody listens.
A lot of this stuff in the OSS community reminds me of gun nuts and school shootings; people wring their hands when a personal tragedy happens, the solution is right in front of them should they dare to actually adopt it, but they refuse to adopt it because it's ideologically untenable. So they just pretend the problem never happened until it personally hits their own family — and the worst thing is watching their friends, around them, engage in the same denial.
The two "real consequences" are losing your data (drive wipes, randomware, etc), and financial fraud (someone getting your CC number or bank access). I personally know people who've been hit by this. It's heartwrenching when it happens.
You know with an operating system you control that's built in an open source community, it's quite easy to have your cake and eat it too. It already exists in desktop land. We have the technology...
> The reason why I'm personally sticking with the iPhone is exactly the walled garden.
Exactly. I can and do buy plenty of general-purpose computing devices that I can install anything I want on.
If I wanted to buy phones that I'd also needed to sysadmin, I could do that. But I don't want that, and I find it a bit silly that the author thinks governments should eliminate appliance-style devices as a choice.
It's a false dichotomy to assume that execution of your own code on a device necessarily implies a necessity to be a sysadmin of your own device. It doesn't have to be this way. iOS and it's devices are great for many reasons, but it still can't do all the things I'd want my phone to be able to do because Apple believes it knows better than I do about what I should be able to do with the hardware I own. It's OK to like Apple products, there are many people who are well served by them, and I realize I'm in the minority when it comes to my gripes with their devices. They're also a billion dollar company, their revenue rivals the GDP of most countries - they're allowed to receive criticism without unpaid support on an online forum.
I personally would just like to be able to run my own code without having to publish it on the app store or having to deal with recomipiling and reinstalling apps every two weeks. I'd also love to be able to use my GPG keys via NFC, something an iPhone definitely has the hardware to do, but Apple has decided to not allow it.
I understand that sentiment. So a question in response: if you continue buying more of those devices regardless of those limitations, why? Why not an alternative that would give you those possibilities?
It comes from a general ideological belief that the owner of a physical device that happens to be able to run code should get full control over such execution, even if it goes against the wishes of the manufacturer of that device.
I fully understand your argument. It’s the same argument I originally replied to at the top of this discussion. I simply shared my opinion about my conscious choice to stay within the walled garden.
As for your argument, we solve the "government regulation leading to Facebook sucking up your data" problem (if we hypothesize about a future where the user's right to control is enforced through law) with more government regulation (good privacy laws and strict enforcement), not by relying on another private company whose's objectives may change at any time.
At least in the US, because of lobbying and potential constitutional issues (Privacy laws that exist in Europe may collide negatively with the First Amendment if passed in America)
To your point here:
> I'd also love to be able to use my GPG keys via NFC, something an iPhone definitely has the hardware to do, but Apple has decided to not allow it.
This is possible since iOS13 I think. I use my GPG keys in a YubiKey to unlock my Pass for iOS app.
I mean, any modern device such as a Mac or a Windows laptop or an Android phone allows running your own code and it doesn’t require you to be a sysadmin to do that. What evidence do you need?
Years of actual experience with devices, some even with unlockable boot loaders. Non sysadmins don't go around unlocking their own devices if they don't already have a strong desire to do so.
So what happens if the Vision Pro becomes the best interface to general-purpose computing, Apple still insists on "owning the experience", and their patents prevent full competition from devices whose experience you can own?
I lean towards your philosophy but I worry that a near-duopoly on advanced devices plus IP restrictions and the like will keep us who value control over our own Turing machines stuck with laptops and desktops.
> So what happens if the Vision Pro becomes the best interface to general-purpose computing
this is exactly my fear
The people who present Android vs iOS as a matter of personal choice are being slightly disingenuous. They are pretending that this choice is a natural inevitable result and will always exist. Their whole reasoning that iOS is "ok" is based on the fact that Android - another totally independent ecosystem, exists. And let's not forget, it's one which Steve Jobs vowed to sue out of existence.
The "android" of that ecosystem is the Meta Quest devices. At the moment, yes, you can sideload there and Zuckerberg is on the record saying he will maintain an open ecosystem. Yet it's still very tenuous. The sideloading experience is very poor, worse than Android (something you sideload can't appear as a first class citizen on the device - there's no way to have it show up in the main app menu, random permissions don't work sometimes etc). And the Quest OS layer is not open source - only the underlying Android OS.
The technical hurdles required for VR/AR are much bigger than general computing. It's not at all clear to me that an open alternative will emerge. So we are potentially headed into an era where effectively there's no option for general computing that isn't locked down and owned by a Mega corporation. And all these iOS users who are preaching tolerance of Apple's approach will have been the key enablers of this dystopia.
In that instance, I would say the problem is that the laws around patents are preventing competition, not that one competitor chooses to lock down their system. We have seen that more open systems like Android can exist, so I would expect those systems to stick around for the people that want them. Having both types of systems actually increases user choice.
> If I wanted to buy phones that I'd also needed to sysadmin, I could do that.
Is "sysadmin-ing" a phone really that big of a barrier? Ideally, you'd just install Mobian (i.e. Debian Mobile) on a device, security patches would install automatically via unattended-updates, and every two years you would be prompted to initiate a version upgrade. Proprietary apps would be available from Flatpak repos with strong sandboxing applied. That's essentially the same level of 'sysadmin-ing' any iOS/Android user has to do.
Don't you see a problem with that? Sure, if I really wanted to have debian on the phone, I'd get a capable Android device and sideload something. Would my wife do it? Would your average John Doe do it? Why would an average user ever want to do it? One of the selling points of the original iPhone was exactly that: shit is taken care of. The phone will just work.
Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with. A fully supported Debian Mobile device would essentially be a highly reliable feature phone, with selected smartphone features added to it that actually work for the user and not against them.
They're using feature phones which are 100% proprietary and actively fight anyone from sideloading any app at all because they're uncomfortable with Android's ecosystem, which by comparison lets you install pretty much whatever you want if you just enable developer mode on the device?
No. People who choose feature phones do so because they don't want to deal with apps at all on their mobile device. Not iOS apps, not Android apps, not Debian apps, not Ubuntu apps, not Symbian apps, nothing. They're wanting a phone that's just a phone, even more of an appliance than an iPhone. They probably wouldn't care about the phone running Debian at all, and they absolutely won't care about running GCC to compile their own apps on their phones.
Great for them. Leave my walled garden alone. Considering the volume at which iPhones sell I'm pretty confident that's the sentiment from millions of users.
Edit: When I'm somewhere hundreds of kilometers away from home, sitting in the car parked on the side of the road in the forest and trying to connect with people to figure out where I need to go to exactly, I want maps, email, browser, and phone. In that situation I really don't care about debian, flatpak and stuff. I just want the device to do what it was designed for.
Millions of users do not care about walled gardens. This does not factor into their purchasing decisions. Windows XP was never a walled garden, millions of people still used it. iOS could allow for more software freedoms without impeding on one's ability to use good first party map software.
That's not my point either - all I'm saying is we can ask for the cake and eat it too, whereas you're content with just being able to have the cake and believe that somehow having the ability to eat it would be worse?
> Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's super weird to me. Using a smart phone without installing any apps works great. The integrated maps app is such a great feature, I'd get a smart phone just for that alone.
That was meant to reflect the fact that current systems like Mobian are quite far from being daily-driver usable. (Mostly because of limited hardware support, which is a very difficult problem to address.) But the same is true of OP's Hp Jornada: it was sold with a different OS out of the box, and it's way too underpowered to actually run an up-to-date free OS, or for that matter, to develop anything on-device besides proof-of-concept "hello, world" examples.
Agreed. It's not like there's a shortage of general computing devices. To me the insistence on allowing side loading is akin to walking onto a farm and asking to put a saddle on a pig.
(Farmer) "Uh, sorry we don't do that."
(Person) "Well why not? I want a saddle on a pig."
(Farmer) "Because that's not how we do things around here. You're welcome to buy your own pig and put a saddle on it, but you can't do that here."
There's definitely a shortage of general computing devices that I can carry in my pocket.
Your (very strange) analogy reminds me of when I was in 3rd grade, and we were having lunch. There was a substitute teacher that day. I had peanut butter and jelly (packed by my mom), and started putting some potato chips inside it. The teacher came over, asked what I was doing, and said "stop; we don't do that here".
It was a dumb thing for her to say then, and it's dumb to tell us what we can and can't do with our devices now.
Ferrari has a list of rules you must follow in order to purchase their cars. If you violate the rules they will try to take back your car and anyway you will be banned for life from purchasing another of their cars.
For example they only allow a certain selection of colours for their cars.
So no, you are not allowed to do whatever you want with your device. That was never something completely true.
If I was working at Apple I would propose this feature: if you see the user changing the OS or modifying it in ways that are not acceptable to Apple then the user will be blacklisted from support and ideally from buying another Apple product. I would probably make some big bucks from bonuses.
Like that time at the Ferrari dealership when some dumb lady wanted a Ferrari in pink and the dealer told her "No" and pointed to the door: "Don't let the door hit you on your way out".
See? The companies are also allowed to tell you "No!". Freedom and all...
There is a shortage of primary driver-ready mobile computing devices which respect the user's privacy. The choices here are Android devices with custom ROMs + microG and daily prayers that Google doesn't go out of their way to break it (which they can very well do since it breaks ToS) or go nuts with SafetyNet or hardware attestation features and lock you out of a lot of (crucial) apps - or worst case just nuke your account if they detect you use such programs. Or alternatively iPhones.
I'm unsure why side loading would break the dynamics of their walled garden either. All that does is give both customers and developers the choice of forfeiting the benefits like discoverability, comfort and likely a bunch of App Store-exclusive APIs like IAPs and in return allow access in cases where Apple doesn't approve. I can already guarantee that most developers won't budge an inch from the App Store as the lack of discoverability and the annoyance of downloading an app file and clicking through Apple's warning popups just to install it would effectively kill their app.
I mean, how simple is it? You know the deal, everyone knows the deal, and yet you still buy the damned pig and then complain about it afterwards!?
I mean, sure .. advocating for better behavior from major corporations is a fine thing to do, but it's hard not to view that as hypocritical if you still buy their products. If you care, shop elsewhere. That's the only complaining that really works.
Or you could consider the possibility that all available options on the market have downsides worthy of critique, and you're not helping anything (except maybe corporate interests) by painting people in a bad light for choosing one of them and still voicing that criticism. It's the same logic that says "why don't you leave the country and move somewhere else" if someone criticizes a government, or goes "curious, but you still buy food" when people criticize food companies.
... a "clear alternative" that has downsides too, that someone might very well consider to be equally bad or worse. Which they somehow only could point out as long as they didn't choose it?
I think the thing that irks me about this discussion is mostly the tone. The whiny, entitled, "I demand that Apple makes a device that suits me exactly, and if they don't, they're a bunch of fascist assholes" vibe really annoys me.
There are two things that are genuinely productive: supporting alternative phones (PinePhone, Librem 5, Jolla, OpenMoko, etc) and their software, and lobbying governments to impose regulatory constraints. I'd love to see more people doing them.
There's thread on HN, where father tells a story of child bullied for not having an iPhone and gets bullied himself by HN for being bad father, that doesn't want to buy his son an iPhone.
I don't agree that shopping elsewhere is the only complaining that works. When you publicly complain about a corporate policy, you can raise awareness in others and build a consensus. If enough people agree with you, the company may feel compelled to change course, or sometimes even legislation is enacted. Or a competitor will notice the swell of unmet demand and step in with a better product.
But if all you do is keep to yourself and stop buying, then your protest begins and ends with you. So, certainly not always, but at least sometimes griping and grousing works.
“If you don’t like the country’s politics just move elsewhere”. Switching to another ecosystem is not easy for many very obvious reasons. And honestly this “shop elsewhere” argument reminds me of the early iphone days, when iphones didn’t have i.e. multitasking. There were a lot of the similar “go buy a windows phone then” arguments. iPhones got multitasking at the end of the day, and both groups benefited from it.
I don’t care about openness too much. Though, the ability to side load is nice to have, that’s that. I am not going to swap between ecosystems, I want the ecosystem that I am using to change.
The thing I don’t quite understand - why do you bother? Having the ability to side load doesn’t affect you in any possible way.
Do entertain us with your view of the world of operating systems, please. Windows is not the only OS around, this point is completely irrelevant. Anybody can install anything on Linux/Macos/Android system and the heavens did not fall yet.
> why buy
It does meet my requirements, that’s why. I’ve never said it doesn’t.
If you judge “quality” by “the ability to sideload”, an iPhone is not “quality”. I’m sure you also want user replaceable parts. In that case, why spend thousands on products that don’t meet your needs?
My past experience with 6 different Android devices doesn’t support your argument. All of them were Samsung devices with various Android versions. Maybe it’s different with official Google devices. However, if that’s the case then we need to stop making comparisons between iPhone and Android.
I don't understand why your particular experience matters in this argument.
There are billions of people using Android phones, from little kids to grandmas. Essentially none of these people know what the word sysadmin even means.
Why do some people on HN portray Android phones as some nerdy devices when that impression doesn't reflect reality even a little bit? So weird.
Yeah, I don't get it either. The US is very iPhone-heavy, but Android has a majority market share in most of the rest of the world. That'd be pretty impossible if using Android was like maintaining a Linux server.
> I don't understand why your particular experience matters in this argument.
It doesn’t matter. We are having a very enlightening discussion based on my opinion. I’m simply sharing my experiences and an opinion based on those experiences. Nothing more, nothing less.
Perhaps it is; I've used Pixel devices for the past five years and haven't had to do anything even remotely like sysadmin'ing. I had a Sony Xperia phone before that, and I did have to fight with the SD card sometimes. Nexus phones before that, and, again, no sysadmin'ing required.
And my past experience with Samsung devices doesn't support your argument either. I had to use an iPhone for a few weeks once when my phone broke and the experience was abysmal. It's much easier for me to remain on Android.
The alternative to the walled garden of the iPhone isn't a device you have to sysadmin. It's just Android. Which has its downsides! I would love a device that ran Android (and let me have root and sideload if/when I want) but protected my privacy as well as the iPhone does.
I like the walled garden because it prevents apps like Facebook from vacuuming up all the data on my phone without my permission. If Apple didn’t have some barrier against bad actors, things would be pretty dire.
And no sandboxing isn’t the solution here. Facebook will just find ways around it. They did some pretty egregious bullshit and had consumers side-loading privacy-violating apps via their corporate account. Apple very publicly revoked their certificate for it. Without the walled garden, Apple would have no leverage to stop bad actors like Facebook.
And avoiding widely used social apps isn’t a good solution either. The network effects effectively removes me from communities that use it.
This is a weird argument. If I got you right, you argue that walled gardens somehow prevent existence of malware.
But it's not walled garden that's doing it, it's sandboxing that does. Apple holds the keys and distributes the revocation lists, so they have a say in what runs on their devices. Walled garden is all about who has a say in this.
The question is - will you personally download a privacy-violating app in that weird manner via a corporate account or something? If yes, then I can see how exactly you personally want a walled garden for yourself. If no then it really sounds like you want Apple ecosystem rather than a walled garden per se.
(I'm intentionally not talking about some Average Joe, as it's hard to argue about hypothetical figures.)
Apple today can tell Facebook “don’t track our users unless they opt in”, and Facebook has to comply or else. Or else what? Or else they get dropped from the iPhone.
Apple with side loading has no power to compel Facebook. Facebook will say “ok. Hey everyone! You can download and sideload the New And Improved app today!”
If you look at the game theory of it, everyone who wants to track (which is almost everyone) will leave the App Store once two or three big apps do it. So Apple will be forced to loosen privacy rules of App Store apps if they want to keep anyone.
> The question is - will you personally download a privacy-violating app in that weird manner via a corporate account or something?
The answer is obviously yes, because there won’t be any apps left in the App Store.
Considering Meta presumably wouldn't be able to advertise alternative sources for downloading their app inside the app store (which is also the case on the play store) I simply can't imagine them or any of the other big developers doing so. Removing their app from the app store would completely annihilate discoverability and would likely lead to either some third party app taking their spot.
Also I can already imagine Apple throwing a bunch of scary warning popups at the user, requiring them to enable this and that in the settings and likely also not allowing to update an app originally installed through the app store using an app file downloaded from another source to make it even more tedious - requiring a reinstall of the app in that case. Can't imagine many users would be willing to go through that chore.
I may be wrong but considering we haven't seen any similar behavior on a significant scale on the play store I just don't see that as an eventual issue - especially considering Android makes installing apps from other sources very easy, necessiting only clicking on a button in a popup and toggling a switch to allow sideloading from within a specific app and even allowing you to update an existing app installed through the play store that way given that the signatures of both match.
I think developers will still be heavily incentivized to either change the behavior of their app or worst case attempt to sue Apple to force them to allow that specific behavior on the app store before moving their app outside the app store will even cross their mind.
This is the crux of it. App Tracking and Transparency is advisory: when you decline tracking, it simply asks the app not to track. There's nothing to force them to comply other than Apple removing apps from the store. It's a similar story to when Apple banned using hardware UUIDs for tracking a few years ago. You still absolutely can do it, it's just that being caught doing so could get you banned from the store.
You contradict your own argument. You recognize Facebook finds ways around it and previously used egregious bullshit, such bullshit that Apple tolerated for years. Yet somehow you believe Apple will protect you, again despite them failing to do so for years.
Avoiding widely used social apps is a great solution. Stop encouraging people to use such apps and believe in a false sense of security. Facebook on your phone at all is giving them far more data than alternatives such as a sandboxed desktop environment, or using a hardened browser. You are not protected by Apple from Facebook here. You just bought into the latest marketing scheme by Apple in their aggressive move to really start prioritizing Apple Ads as a huge moneymaker.
And I say all of this as a huge Apple fan, with multiple Apple devices in rotation. But this encouragement of using the likes of Facebook because "Apple keeps me safe" needs to stop immediately. It was never true and is harming people from seeking proper alternatives.
I don’t agree. I think if the iPhone was open we’d see numerous ad-blocking efforts that would have made facebook’s data siphoning impossible long ago. In my subjective experience, it feels like these companies have more room to do evil things precisely because we the users have no means to fight it in a walled garden, whereas on open computing systems the community (you included) has much more freedom to prevent these sorts of abusive practices.
> I think if the iPhone was open we’d see numerous ad-blocking efforts that would have made facebook’s data siphoning impossible long ago.
Or it would lead to a bunch of apps which instead of blocking Facebook would either siphon all that data or display their own adverts. Scammers would be happy to have such powers. Thank you very much but I like trusting that only I can use my banking app on my phone.
Recent Android releases are approaching parity and Play Store terms could likewise restrict PII. Incentives are also coalescing as Apple expands to services and Google tries to win over privacy conscious customers.
>Incentives are also coalescing as Apple expands to services and Google tries to win over privacy conscious customers.
It's a lot harder for Google to achieve this, given that breaching that privacy has always been a core aspect of Google's revenue, whereas for Apple it has not.
Edit: Dunno why, but in this context I feel like I should mention I'm posting this from a Pixel device that's on a Fi plan.
I think the distinction is that Apple is consistently pushing the definition of "parity" forward, to the extent that Android is always "approaching" parity.
If Apple weren't pushing mobile privacy forward, it's hard to believe that any other major mobile vendor (who benefit from your phone being a glass house) would be taking it seriously.
Apple is no saint – they still need to make more money in 2024 than they did in 2023 – but their business is so successful because their incentives are better aligned (read: not perfectly aligned, just better aligned) on most axes that are relevant to most people.
> And no sandboxing isn’t the solution here. Facebook will just find ways around it. They did some pretty egregious bullshit and had consumers side-loading privacy-violating apps via their corporate account. Apple very publicly revoked their certificate for it. Without the walled garden, Apple would have no leverage to stop bad actors like Facebook.
Apple could still explictly disallow that behavior on the app store and also disallow them from linking to another source directly from the app, just like on the Play store. Meta could be free to live their desires outside the app store (inside the existing app sandbox obviously) and take the hit on discoverability and willingness from users to budge.
I'm consciously choosing the walled garden. Look, I'm a power user. I write software for 20+ years and I like the freedom of choice on the desktop and the server. If Apple started doing some yanky stuff with macos, I'd switch to Linux, sure. But for my phone, I want that walled garden.
You can't remotely compare how hard it is to get some things on apple hardware vs pretty much anything else. You can get emulators for pretty much everything on android, the same doesn't exist on iPhone.
I don't get the point you make about data retention. On android.i can install myriad blockers, browsers and apps to protect myself.on iPhone, I get whatever apple has deigned to grant their users.
> One where it is comparatively very difficult to drain your full store of data and your wallet by installing shitware.
God forbid we treat other people with respect and not consider your average person is a complete idiot that’s being protected by dystopian big brother knowing better than you.
> God forbid we treat other people with respect and not consider your average person is a complete idiot that’s being protected by dystopian big brother knowing better than you.
Except that, in the specific case of operating and maintaining a computer system, they are complete idiots. People have other things to care about and computers only matter insofar as what they want out of them. If that includes (as it did in the 00s) screensavers that will keylog their hardware, they will download the keylogger. And to be clear that's not a value judgment; there are many things about which I am a complete idiot. I don't try to replace my own brakes in my car. I probably could do it. The cost of doing a bad job would be very high. So I stay within my lane.
In computer-related fields specifically, education rarely sticks. Ask anyone who's ever been tasked with educating users about technological opsec. In one ear, out the other. The only sane path forward is to default to high and thick walls. That doesn't mean that you can't opt out, with more or less difficulty. That is the signaler that yes, you have a clue and are prepared to deal with the consequences, and that's great if you are. People are, for the most part, not, and optimizing for you, while hanging the overwhelmingly outnumbering group of normal people in the breeze, is bad.
There's decades worth of software out there and I have to jump through hoops like this to even get a fraction of it working. A15 is probably the best mobile chip in the world, and I can run barely anything on it. The future is sad.
I'm OK with it being difficult because that weeds out people who lack the technical capacity to do it, and thus also almost certainly lack the understanding to critically evaluate the safety of it.
A below-average software developer is probably still a standard deviation above the mean when it comes to competence with computers, and we're not optimizing for developers here.
TBH, the case I am more worried than most about is that the actual, biggest use of this will be, not might but will, addiction-mongers in the games space suckering people into downloading apps that are uninhibited by even the relatively low walls that Apple puts into place. Even things as simple as "have a standard payment flow so people know when you are charging them for money" is then off the table, and that makes doing evil really, really easy.
So why did you buy it then? There are plenty of other phones which can do this, pretty much any moden Android phone will do. And Samsung phones even have "desktop mode" (DEX) which give a desktop experience.
This is like complaining: "my tractor has 600 HP and yet it cannot even reach 80MPH. Very sad.", or "My Ferrari has 600 HP, why can't it tow that 30 ton trailer. What kind of future is this?"
The iPhone is capable of playing plenty of mobile games downloaded through the app store, but can't play a mobile game that came through some other channel, so the closer analogy is "my Ferrari has 600hp and can go 200mph down interstate A/B/C, since they were inspected by Ferrari, but is prevented from driving on interstates D through Z because they didn't jump through the hoops to get inspected by Ferrari".
Well it depends. Personally I was a flip phone user until my last one finally kicked the bucket and the Canadian telecom monopoly presented me the choice of purchasing a new "network compatible" flip phone for 250$ and paying 25/mo or getting a leased to own phone on a 40/mo plan.
I need a phone - I got a smart phone because it was the only sane fiscal decision... and when I got that phone I was presented with the options of iOS or locked down Android.
This may just be a Canadian thing but I think it's important to not present this as a completely free choice. If you're on a budget and you need a phone to occasionally communicate with the outside world you're going to be forced into getting a smart phone - the only choice is Android vs. iOS.
The market for flip phones isn't primarily the elderly or other people who want/need simplified interfaces. This means they're usually very low volume and have much less price competition. That, and most flip phones are just running android with a highly customized skin, which ups software development costs
When I bought my first iPhone it was the first product that I paid a large chunk of my savings for and which I really hated in several ways, but I needed in other ways. It's a necessary evil.
There are alternatives. The market is open. Maybe it’s just no so easy to come up with a “less shitty”alternative that would appeal to the mass consumer?
If you want to be able to use a long list of apps that many people consider essential, you're stuck using iOS or Android. Sure, you can sometimes make do with the mobile website, but usually the experience is pretty terrible. For some things, like contactless payment, there's just no alternative, on a mobile device, at least.
The reality is that nobody wants the alternative. Another commenter was replying to you pitching a mobile debian version, and went on to explain that said mobile debian version isn't usable ... and that's probably because the size of the community of people actually interested in it is so vanishingly tiny that they can't sustain development.
It's like watching the stillborn OpenPandora or GP2x, and discovering that "devices bought almost exclusively to pirate SNES/SEGA games" have no devs writing games for their market because ... well ... you know ...
———
Woke: using OSS as a dev model because it's inherently more efficient/effective and leads to better software
Broke: using OSS because "muh rights".
I don't think there's any inherent reason that Mobile Debian couldn't be as popular as a proportion of phones as Debian is as a proportion of desktops. Debian itself is niche. Linux use represents what, like 1% of all desktops? Yet even with the effort spread thinly over dozens of distros it's still excellent.
And it is, remember, an absolutely tiny group of people that actually contribute to something like Debian. What percentage of users has even filed a bug report, let alone contributed a fix? It must be well under 1%. You don't actually need that many people. All it takes is a dedicated few.
The fact that even then a 'foss phone' doesn't seem to be viable speaks volumes. It would probably only take half a dozen skilled people to get pissed off and channel their pissed-off energy into it, and that doesn't seem to have happened. Either it's way harder than it has any right to be, or it actually isn't that desirable. Revealed preferences and all that...
The original premise of an iPhone was that closed experience. It was an improvement over the mobile market that existed back then. I remember because I had my fair share of Philips, Alcatel, Nokia, and ipaqs. What I’m afraid of is that some actions and reactions of a—let’s be honest—insignificant number of power users who want to root their phone is going to break the experience for the majority of the regular users. Progress is welcomed but let’s not forget: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The original iPhone had no App Store and thus no way to get third-party native apps at all. I don't know that the original premise is at all relevant now.
Kids who like games often do know about the Apple App store stance on emulation - they find out immediately when their Android using friends have access to a massive library of emulation easily that they don't. I've never owned an Android anything, and this annoys me on long flights where I'd love to just stock up on some old emulated games to pass the time without having to pack another device.
With phones I've stopped caring. I don't do serious work or serious play on a phone, it doesn't have a big enough screen or suitable input devices.
The iPad (especially the Pro), on the other hand, would be a far better device if it wasn't so locked down. The hardware is wasted on such limited 'apps'. Ideally, the iPad Pro would run a full MacOS and be able to quickly switch between desktop mode (when you have a pencil and/or keyboard) and an iOS compatible mode when it's being operated by fat fingers on the touchscreen.
This is my general opinion. My iPhone is not a productive device, even sending an email is a hassle. I'm either at home, or will wait, unless it's urgent. It's basically for social media, maps, music, and keeping in touch via messages. Occasionally phone calls. A walled garden is generally OK for that (my only gripe as in my other comment here is that they make it too hard to access media files directly).
Hacker News, where hackers beg a trillion dollar company to keep not allowing them to create apps on their own hardware without having to go through a bureaucratic process of uploading it to a store. You know, as hackers do.
I like the walled garden. I like the curated experience. As far as I am aware, me liking these things for my phone and subsequently voting with my wallet doesn't prevent someone else enjoying another ecosystem that doesn't have these things (i.e. Android).
That's nice, you can just choose to use Apple's app store then, without imposing your Stockholm syndrome on the rest of us and defending antitrust behavior from a 3 trillion dollar monopoly.
> you can just choose to use Apple's app store then, without imposing your Stockholm syndrome on the rest of us and defending antitrust behavior from a 3 trillion dollar monopoly.
I have chosen to use Apple's app store without imposing anything. You have your choice of using Apple or something else.
On the steam deck you have the option to leave the garden but you don't have too. On the Iphone (and I have one) you don't even get that option. I'd love to install an alternative OS on some of my older phones and an old ipad. Its great hardware, it would be fun, its not supported by apple anymore, but I'm not allowed to.
I've poked around the linux thats installed on the steam deck, but frankly I just use my steam deck with steam.
Yes, and this is also why my "super senior" mother owns an iPhone. Sometimes a walled garden is a good thing. If you want a more open system, there are other options. Please don't destroy something that is actually useful to a lot of people just because it doesn't coincide with your own desires or needs.
My mom who now has dementia couldn't figure out how to use her iPhone but could totally use a Mac. The Mac doesn't really have a walled garden and I'm pretty sure you're using correlation not causation. I'm very sure that a Walt garden doesn't make a thing actually easier to use. It's just what you're familiar with and willing to teach your mom to use.
My mom can use an iphone easily, mac not so much but that's because of her history with windows. I think her mac almost certainly has malware. it's an older one and it probably doesn't support the latest OS anyway sadly.
Or to flip that around, they could keep the walled garden but allow the user to spin up a virtualized environment completely walled off from the main OS, and run compilers and other software without risk to the phone side. Then the author could install a Jornada emulator or a full Linux distro.
I don't know, this can be solved with a parental controls equivalent. If Apple really put its heart in it it could solve all of these issues. But it wouldn't benefit Apple to solve them.
I strongly relate to this. I built my desktop computer and I run arch as my daily driver. For my phone: I just want a device that works out of the box. I don't want to think about it, or need to configure anything from it.
I know the feeling, my Nokia 3360 still works 25 years later. Also doubles as a blunt weapon. No config necessary.
Cool, you can just use your iPhone in the stock config. The proposal to enable people to root their own devices, or bring their own app stores doesn't mean you have to partake. It just means a 3 trillion dollar monopoly has a tiny bit less control over a huge chunk of the mobile phone market. And meanwhile it means the rest of us who do want that freedom can have it.
Because your phone is a binary state. You know, it’s either works out of box, or suddenly turns into Arch the moment there appears a toggle to allow installing apps.
> The reason why I'm personally sticking with the iPhone is exactly the walled garden.
I was thinking about this and video games lately. The Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation; they have some pretty mediocre games if you go looking. But it's still nothing compared to the biggest attempt at a fully open platform for games (OUYA; and long before them, Atari). That went well... and so, even the App Store, you can find bad apps and scams, but every time we have a store that has no enforcement it's amazing how quickly things get overrun.
It's sometimes shocking how some developers can be such lowlifes, that they will take a game and do an asset swap fifty or a hundred times to make a buck by crowding the storefront. Or just release games shamelessly that are completely nonfunctional or have nothing to do with the advertising. It's just stuff you can hardly believe people who program games would ever make. Where's the sense of shame for releasing things that are objectively garbage by every criteria and charging $30 for it? (Again, just look at the OUYA when they tried. 90% of it made Superman 64 look like a masterpiece.)
> But it's still nothing compared to the biggest attempt at a fully open platform for games (OUYA; and long before them, Atari). That went well... and so, even the App Store, you can find bad apps and scams, but every time we have a store that has no enforcement it's amazing how quickly things get overrun.
I think its silly to suggest OUYA or Atari being the biggest "open" platforms - Steam dwarfs them and is a runaway success story across multiple OSes for decades.
Arguably Microsoft isn't "fully" open but Windows PC gaming is as open as it gets, and for all the complaints it is glorious compared to almost all other alternatives, if we're honest.
This choice doesn't really exist with Android either, unfortunately, for those who would like to have this freedom.
I mean you are kind of free to do whatever you want on your device, but then you just get locked out of basically everything. Banking apps, Netflix, reportedly even the McDonald's app will refuse to work on a device with an unlocked bootloader.
This is kind of ridiculous considering people with incredibly bug ridden computers can access the whole web but when it's mobile phones, apparently you don't get to decide.
> the McDonald's app will refuse to work on a device with an unlocked bootloader.
This is exactly what I expect would happen if secure boot would be established on PC. And it seems to indeed be the case with the McDonalds app, so locked bootloaders are unhealthy for you in multiple way.
> If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.
You also have a walled garden on Android, maybe with slighly lower walls but it's still pretty far from a truly open platform.
And that's there we see that the "it's the user choice" argument isn't working very well.
The open platforms are either very outdated devices (this HP, the N900...) or niche Android forks for tech people on a very limited amount of devices. Users never really had a choice in the first place.
About the only place where I think Apple's walled garden approach genuinely holds a platform back is the iPad which should have a much more Mac-like model (honestly it should just straight up have the Mac's flexibility, and the Vision Pro too whenever that ships). My phone is different. My phone absolutely must always work. About the most I want is as much much easier way less onerous way of sideloading Emacs on it, and that's primarily because I find org-mode apps without the Emacs environment to come up just a little bit insufficient.
I have other computers to do other computer stuff, but I don't care at all about doing any of that on my phone.
"I bought all of them knowing very well what I'm getting into..."
No you didn't.
I mean, languaging is important here. You didn't know what exactly Apple would be doing with their walled garden. You essentially went in with faith that Apple deciding things would be better than whatever Android is (and I'm not sure Android isn't just a more haphazard walled garden but still).
> If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.
Fair. This is the exact reason why I have an Android phone. As a matter of fact, it's the reason why I started dabbling in Kotlin a few years ago; so that I can make my own personal apps.
I'm in the boat as OP of this thread. I had an HTC Hero, an Evo, and a Nexus S. I believe in Android. But what I wasn't expecting was that I was never happy, and thrashed my phone many times in pursuit of happiness. So many ROMs to try, so many SMS clients, or automation platforms, or browsers. Choice all over the place. But with that choice was analysis paralysis - what was I missing out on? Wiping and installing ROMs lost me data more than once (despite Titanium Backup and a huge SD card). I couldn't rest, and it drove me nuts. But on iOS, there's just iMessage. There are browsers, but Safari is fine, and they're all basically Safari wrappers. There is iOS itself, and that's it. There is peace in my garden.
I tend to stick with mostly what's in the stock build, but then replace things here and there as desired. I've yet to replace the OS, but I guess I'll get to it one day.
With an android phone you also primarily getting a walled garden unless you explicitly looking to pirate apps or are buying one of the few models with an open bootloader and an active development community which at that point it’s basically a project phone.
The main difference is that the walled garden you get with Apple will be landscaped and taken care off for years and not arbitrarily abandoned and turned into a drug den.
If Apple is walled garden, Android is fenced playground: there are fences and gates, but they are just to keep kids in, any adult can open those easily.
You don't need to root your phone to install random apk files from the web. There are few clicks in the settings, and then it just works. You can have multiple app stores, or download apps from the websites.
There is essentially no reason to use an alt store unless you are looking to explicitly pirate or Google isn’t operating in your area, sideloading APKs from the web is a very good way of turning your phone into someone else’s phone based on how many of the APK aggregators are injecting malware into their downloads.
Android is a viable system however to use it securely as a device that has your life on it you are going to have use it as a walled garden or spend countless hours doing everything yourself.
And the overall experience will be worse especially when higher end devices cost as much if not more than an iPhone.
I hear those points, but none of them make Android "walled garden". "Walled garden" requires lack of user options re app sources, such as what iPhones do, and Android has many non-Google app sources.
The fact that dogma1138 did not find any of those non-Google app sources useful does not make Android systems a walled garden.
I know of Linux systems whose users only ever install apps from default repositories. I know of Window systems which are set to only allow apps from app store. This does not mean they are closed, it just means their users do not need more.
> Apple will be landscaped and taken care off for years and not arbitrarily abandoned and turned into a drug den
Exactly. And to anyone complaining about Apple fees. Get this in your head: running that ecosystem costs money. I get it that sometimes crap slips through, no system is bulletproof. But that's where the cut goes to. Yeah, we can discuss if it's 15 or 30 percent. But you at least get a human to communicate with on the other side.
Sorry, what? Are you talking about the iOS App Store that's been an unmitigated dumpster fire for like a decade? I don't even open the thing, ever. It's so filled with flaming garbage that I will only find and acquire an iOS app via reddit, HN, or AlternativeTo.
I don't know what you are talking about. This isn't my experience and I valued human contact some years ago when I was doing iOS development myself. Not my experience. However, I appreciate that my experience may not reflect the experience of another iPhone user.
It’s also important to add that whilst it does happen that Apple bans accounts from at least my anecdotal evidence is that it’s far more common with Google and then you’re pretty royally fucked.
Hackers don’t complain about fees they complain about the inability to have such fees subsidized by Fortune500 companies.
This is what happened for years when hackers and wiseguys would pirate Microsoft products…up in Redmond they just kept the score and passed the bill onto the big corporate clients who’d never pirate anything out of fear of lawsuits.
This is how things work in every realm, the catious elite subsidise the risktaking poor.
I knew without reading the article that 100% of the replies would be incredulous, offended Apple fanboys xd. HN is so predictable lol
What's actually incredible is how behind the times this website is - amazingly reactionary people who think they're unbelievably smart. It's literally like reading internet comments from 30 years ago
Unfortunately these days Android as pretty close to the iPhone as a walled garden.
There are some open source phone OS based on a more traditional Linux approach (with the usual userspace you find on a Linux Desktop) but so many important apps are only available on the iOS/Play Store duopoly.
So, I agree with you. But here's the thing, you have property rights.
I am no lawyer, but I am a human who can think morally and ethically, and I would say this: a company cannot sell a thing and then restrict the usage of said thing. An iPhone is sold to you. iOS, otoh, is licensed to you. It is my opinion that Apple either needs to make it possible for the purchaser to replace iOS or Apple needs to make it possible to run arbitrary code on iOS. Anything else restricts the rights of the owner of the phone, and essentially violates his/her ownership. In this case, Apple should be able to be taken to court for theft and/or fraud.
What are you taking about?? My mobile operating system preference is iOS. If you prefer android or whatever i don’t care. Competition is good, i’m not fighting for these the battle for these cooperations an neither should you.
You could win gold with the mental gymnastics used to get to your conclusion.
Due to vendor lock-in, and a number of competitive issues with having one company wield so much control over the personal lives of tens of millions of people, I prefer $3 trillion monopolies not to be tolerated in democratic societies. Right to choose an alternative app store and right to side load is a bare minimum for antitrust compliance and consumer protection.
Microsoft was taken to the cleaners in the 90s for far less. Many others including Ma Bell in earlier decades as well.
Lol what. Are you implying your iphone is safer than my Android that allows me to sideload but only if I opt-in and even then on a per-app basis?
Iphone users really like showing they know nothing about Android, or the state of privacy and security on modern Android. Some of these replies are wildly ignorant. Straight up made-up stuff to self-justify not being able to run an emulator on your phone. Good stuff.
Here, imagine I handed you my locked Pixel 6a, or it unlocked with side-loading disabled. What exactly is the "lack of walled garden" going to allow you to do to it? Be specific.
These comments are freaking unreal, and ignoring the ignorance of modern Android, vastly overstate the privacy protection afforded by iOS. Bravo to Apple marketing.
What are the benefits to you? Would you install software or run programs you don't want accidentally? What would you miss if there would be some form of safe mode to be toggled on or off?
To me this argument doesn't make sense at all.
I think iPhones are decent phones and Android devices are just as walled in. So all smartphone platforms are more or less suboptimal. Sure, Android can be modified, but only to a degree heavily depending on the hardware...
I don't know if the walls are what you desire. I'm in it for the garden being more beautiful and better curated. Does that mean I have less choice? Yes, but it's a sacrifice I choose to have a better total experience. Apple's walled garden allows higher quality apps and features that wouldn't be shipped as quickly in an "open" model (whatever that may mean).
I agree that running arbitrary shell commands/apps/etc is "cool", but it's rarely useful to me on a mobile computing device. If the use-case exists and is legitimate, there's usually an app for it. In fact the few times I've felt the pinch of "I'd like to run such-and-such from my phone" is limited by the fact that my employer wouldn't allow me to - not that my phone disallows it. I still could do it since there are SSH apps that will connect to my home computer if need be.
OP's take on this IMO is one of wanting full control over their devices and while it's a great ideal, it doesn't translate into real usable improvements for me.
Same here. I just want it to work which is why I’m with Apple for specific devices. If I wanted to experiment, I have Android and several PCs with different form factors. Apple’s walled garden also helps me with tech support for my immediate and extended family.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that when you get freedom to tinker, you’ll lose stability and lessen security; all while increasing complexity
>If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.
I've never used an iphone, but Apple presumably does walled garden much better than Android. I recently tried to install google messages from play store (which I haven't used in a while), and if you search for messages, the top 5 results will all be different messaging apps that have a blue icon, with the top one being adware. Embarrassingly, I fell for it thinking that this is google messages. Play store makes it very hard to see the vendor of an app. Much like search, this has been SEO'd to death, and google will put some ad before their own messaging app. Then they'll cry about Apple not supporting RCS.
Just tried this experiment by typing "Messaging" in the play store. The top 3 were marked as Ads, and number 4 was "Messages by Google", with Google clearly listed as the creator on line 2.
Yes, you will see it if you are paying attention. If you are on auto-pilot mode and assume that the top result with the blue icon on the play store will be google messages, you will get duped. The name of the vendor for these ads is also designed to confuse and obfuscate. The top ad's vendor is "Text Messaging". A few days ago when I did this, the name of the vendor was "Top Rated App". Play store doesn't say "Vendor: Top Rated App", the text "Top Rated App" or "Text Messaging" will just appear along with a bunch of other useless information.
What is the perceived "value" the walled garden is giving you?
I've always owned an android, and not once had to worry about security or malicious apps. Apple seems to have sold everyone on this idea that Android is super insecure. It's not.
I was an avid apple user, then switched to android about 5 years ago thinking I'd do more with a more open device. I've not really done much with it, I'll likely switch back to apple again and at that point move to apple TV devices and home speakers too.
My wife is an iPhone user. She's not in anyway technical and I think a walled garden is perfect for her and others of a similar technical ability.
Tech is a breeze if you understand it, if not it's a liability.
The iPhone is a tool, not a toy. Most of my woodworking tools are not user serviceable either. Only the simplest are, and you can take classes to learn to care for them properly. They seem utterly simple but proper care is subtle.
I grew up in the era where people stopped trying to do their own car repairs. Nobody talks about that anymore. They very much did at the time, and we call the people who did “grandpa” now.
If you want to tinker, I suggest mini ITX or SBCs.
Imagine buying a tool and every time you want to use it for something else that manufacturer imagined a ghost of Jobs appeared and smacked it out of your hands.
I think people just don't understand that end user API design is a user preference thing, not a universal thing...
And exposing what kind of level on a hardware is just the same as API design... And some people just keep having the ideas of "I'd like API to be like A, so there wouldn't be possible any people liking another API B..."
I wish Apple made a product like that for competent professionals but keep existing devices safe for general public, but it's never going to happen because how can you tell a competent enough professional who is not going to fire guns at own feet? Most people will just be buying such phones to pirate stuff and get their identities pwned along the way.
> If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.
Not just any Android phone to use out of the box though, right? You may need to tweak or even install a different distribution/flavor like GrapheneOS. In other words, different Androids have their own versions of walled gardens.
Nope. They made you think you've stayed in the same garden. Actually you're dragged on ground by the walls each time they moved, expanded or shrink the inside area.
And BTW you are the luck one who survived from that.
How would the ability to install alternate app stores hurt you?
Android allows this, and while there's other parts of Android that are weaker than iOS, it's hard to think of ways in which this specific feature is problematic to the user experience.
There is, but the good ones are usually better on iOS (support, battery life). That's not because iOS is terribly good, rather because Android is unusually crappy and that attitude propagates into apps and the whole ecosystem.
Higher quality applications. Fewer privacy violations. Lower chance of identity theft. Better overall security. Longer life cycles for new features. Even longer cycles for critical/security updates. Reduced effort to maintain and keep secure.
On top of that, but not because of the walled garden aspect: Better parental controls. Consistent user experience (although for this one it helps to have the walled garden). Better device interoperability across the ecosystem.
All of that is still irrelevant. You can not have a walled garden and the exact same requirements for the Appstore.
Android is a walled garden too, up until you flip a switch and allow non-appstore apps, which most people do not do. If there were any benefits to the walled garden, they would be present on Android as well.
I don't want to manage the OS on my phone. I want it to work. Get up in the morning, make a call, read some websites, check weather, mail, maps, have music in the car. That's it. I don't want to manage sd cards, memory, processes, I don't need a text editor, shell, ssh, openssh, ..., on the phone. I rarely buy apps and games. I want a solid OS working for years.
Frankly, everybody keeps saying that iPhones are e-waste. Well, without starting a flamewar. I have managed more Android e-waste for the family than Apple. Just my mother had 5 different Android phones in the last decade. 4 of them laying dead in the drawer next to me.
Not having to worry about shit. There are dozens, if not hundreds of mobile devices I can buy where I can root and have full access to them. I just don’t trust myself to be able to secure them properly. I am happy, no, thrilled, for the opportunity to offload that risk to Apple.
I see this as a weakness of the Unix security model, not a benefit of the walled garden. Personally I’d love a future where apps on my laptop are sandboxed just as thoroughly as iOS apps. I want to be able to install and run desktop software from the internet without worrying about it exfiltrating or cryptolockering my data. Running an application should be just as secure as visiting a website.
And that capability seems orthogonal to the App Store. I don’t see any reason we need a monopolistic app store on our phones to get good security. You don’t need anyone’s permission to make a website. Why can’t applications work the same way?
For me, “it just works.” The amount of time configuring a OSX vs Windows work computer was huge.
For personal use cases it’s the same. Smartphones are so advanced that there’s not that much functionality I’d get. The benefit from customizability of an Android is less than the stability and ease of access of an iPhone. Maybe ad blocking is the only issue, YT on the phone is unusable, but I have a pi-hole for my home network so I don’t mind.
I still have a rooted Android and a jail broken iPad to mess around with. But beyond some nerdy stuff or hacking a mobile game, it’s mostly a gimmick.
"It just works" is great until it just doesn't. Both our iPhones refuse to connect to iTunes via lightning cable. Nothing wrong with the file system, can view everything on the phone fine. I assume this is a software bug but the only option given is to factory reset the phones, which seems a little extreme.
But we can't use a third party app on the PC (you can find plenty to install, but they all use the same underlying iTunes software), or on the phone (some WiFi media transfer apps exist but don't work well for years of bulk data), or even just browse the file system like Android. So our only option is apparently paying for iCloud to get our media off the phone now, resetting, and hopefully putting it back on - which I don't have high hopes for since we had an issue in the past where iTunes bricked a phone when restoring from backup [IIRC iTunes didn't do the right system call to stop the Windows PC from sleeping, so it slept mid-restore, and next time we plugged it in, it automatically backed up the broken partial restore wiping the good backup].
I spent many hours configuring my Macbook for work (including installing 3rd party apps that let you do things the default options don't) and there are many aspects of it I wish I could change but can't (at least without a lot of effort), but I could happily use Windows with very few tweaks. It's mostly personal preference as to what "just works" in both of these systems, but it's certainly nicer to have the option to change things you don't like.
It’s besides the point, but Windows has come a long long way to improve Windows client configuration (Intune, Winget, winget config files are in preview). MacOS is still reliant on third party tools like Brew or consumer oriented stuff like the App Store.
Something very specific to a walled garden is that app developers are forced to play by the garden’s rules. Facebook/Google/etc are forced by Apple to reduce their tracking, spam apps are less common, and generally apps are forced to support the latest APIs. I’m not saying Apple is some benevolent dictator, but it at least has helped curb certain abuses by other megacorps.
Walled garden isn’t much different from living in a country having laws and stuff, border, contraband controls, import tax and stuff. Sound funny right?
Thank you for your concern. I hope you understand that all mainstream news is controlled by a very limited number of corporations and alternatives are full of people with their own agendas and tinfoil hats.
> Apple makes absurd devices that have little benefit over alternatives beyond the performative, with lots of negative baggage to boot. Such an oddball company to have developed a fandom amongst the very people who should reject it (the technically-minded).
Apple makes quite standard laptops and phones, much the same as any other manufacturers. If Apple is absurd then so is Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Samsung, etc. Everything is absurd.
I'm technically minded (developing for 20 years) but couldn't care less about iOS or Android being locked down as I depend on the phone to be a reliable appliance and would hate developing on any phone. I spend all my working days programming on a Linux desktop or Mac laptop and just need the damn phone to work for emails, texts, phone, and maps, without having to deal with any unnecessary technical bullshit. My free time is limited.
I disagree, respectfully (kind of, I'm on notice).
Apple doesn't make standard devices. They make atypical devices that have quirks that only seem to serve the "walled-garden" discussed earlier (I loathe buzzwords). See: Apple ARM chips, lightning cables, right to repair infringements, etc.
You don't need to take my word for it; Apple has lost countless lawsuits on this very topic.
Also, regarding "technical bullshit", I'm a developer. I use Ubuntu. I am not a Unix expert, and I've never had any trouble with Ubuntu being "unnecessarily technical".
That all being said, I have recently actually experienced a kind of personal renaissance doing Linux-related tasks using GPT. This is a domain to which it is suited and is able to perform highly complex tasks trivially without a GUI.
The standardness of Linux makes it superior. Also, it's free and doesn't kneecap you with proprietary nonsense. I don't care about open-source.
There are many other ARM devices. Surface and Chromebooks are some examples. Apple was late to this market. ARM Linux runs perfectly in a VM on MacOS, as ARM support in Linux has been around for years prior to M1. This is nothing new.
> I am not a Unix expert, and I've never had any trouble with Ubuntu being "unnecessarily technical".
I used Gentoo fulltime for several years as my primary OS. I don't care about compiling or configuring technical shit on my phone. I just need it to work like an actual phone, as an appliance, and have free time for doing important/interesting technical things on my laptop or desktop.
> The standardness of Linux makes it superior.
Yes and so I can install Linux on my Macbook, if I choose to.
On my old Intel Mac I could install Linux or Windows. My M1 Mac now has the option to install Linux.
Really not much different to Dell/Lenovo/etc. Same shit different brand.
My work beater for the last year, the HP elitebook rip off (dev one) IT bought me has a horrible screen but is the best laptop I've used because it is an overcharged beater that plugs into a triple monitor setup at home and a double monitor setup at work.
Lots of Hacker news users will do weird mental gymnastics when it comes to Apple. And I honestly don't blame them -- they probably use Mac or iOS simply because it's the best hardware/software suited their needs. However, once you immerse yourself in that ecosystem, you begin to justify your choices comprehensively, even for aspects you may have criticized in isolation. It's simply a natural human tendency.
> they probably use Mac or iOS simply because it's the best hardware/software suited their needs
Funny thing is I don't even disagree with them. The M1 Macs are amazing and if Asahi project is any indication it will have good Linux support soon. Apple makes great hardware and I absolutely want to buy their stuff... Provided I can actually own the device I'm paying lots of money for. Shame the iPhone isn't in that category. It's annoying and sad that we even have to argue that it should be.
That ARM chip isn't "amazing", it's a pretty good ARM chip, which took a herculean effort to even bring to very very rough compatibility par with a standard x64 chip.
The x64 chips shopping now -- those are "amazing".
I own a laptop with one of those "standard" x64 chips, one of those huge gamer laptops with a good processor, a graphics card and three huge noisy fans. Hell I even reverse engineered bits and pieces of it to make Linux drivers. The truth is this thing is a piece of shit. For a mobile chip, it's rather performant in benchmarks. In practice it thermal throttles itself to uselessness seconds after you start a compiler just so it can hover at 90+ degrees celsius. I'm literally afraid of using this thing because it feels like it's gonna melt down. It gets uncomfortably hot to the touch whenever I insist on using it.
That "pretty good" ARM chip Apple made has zero of these problems and higher performance. There's no way such a thing can be simply dismissed out of hand. As far as I'm concerned, Apple put other laptop manufacturers to shame. I seriously hope Intel stepped up their game as you're claiming but I'm not sure I want to take a chance. I really want to see Asahi Linux take off so I can buy one of those M1 macs.
"I don't want controll over the applications on my device" is such an absurd stance by supposedly very tech literate people. You could just not use that feature if you wanted to.
I know very intelligent and tech-knowledgeable people who use Apple devices, zero of them use them because of the walled garden, they use those devices despite that walled garden. (Connectivity between devices and mutual integration is one major point they bring up in favor of Apple)
??? Those are MinGW LLVM/Clang, MinGW GCC, and Cygwin GCC, respectively. I don't count either as truly native Windows, like I said earlier -- Cygwin certainly isn't.
I agree with this to the point that I want to see iOS reverted. I preferred the days when iOS was extremely limited. The features it had were perfected and stable.
Now we’re seeing dozens of new features and changes every year. iOS is becoming confusing, feels less polished, and is full of bugs. It goes against everything iOS used to be.
The title is a bit disingenuous. These are things that the iPhone can do, and have been possible on past revisions. These are things that iPhone won't do.
Fair, I expressed my opinion maybe in the wrong way?
It just seems like a very odd thing to complain about / say. The user is using a very niche device to do a very niche task and then complaining that a modern consumer device that is used by Millions with very different goals, doesn't do the extremely niche task that the niche device did.
Here comes the whining. Listen, nobody is preventing you from buying an Ubuntu-phone or whatever, root it, install Debian on it, play Tux Racing for 10 minutes and let it collect dust in your drawer for eternity afterwards.
TFA says this clearly. The whole point of the article is that the device can be used to develop and build software for the device, on the device, without an external system...
Such as tracking you every moment of your waking life. How modern technology has become so evil, looking back. Nowadays every device we have is clearly spyware, from the point of view of 1999.
But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted.
But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc.
But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.