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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I know a guy who thinks it's great that, when a process pegs his phone's CPU, he can drop into a root shell and kill -9 it from top.

I think it's great that in five years of iPhone ownership that's not a problem I've ever had, or even had to think about. And the only Apple service I use is the app store.

Horses for courses. If you want total control and software freedom, you won't prefer an iPhone. If you want the closest available approximation to appliance-level reliability, you won't prefer anything else.

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The other issue for me actually is that while I might like to drop into a shell sometimes I don't really feel Android phones offer me much in that regard either.

Android is far for a standard Linux/UNIX system. And it's hard to build one on top of Android because of their use of BIONIC rather than glibc.

So, I feel that Android has taken Linux and crippled it to suit their ends. To me jailbroken iPhones felt much more like standard UNIX phones than Android phones.

My ideal phone doesn't exist. But he iPhone is still the nearest match right now.

I use macOS every day, and I love it. And it is me who owns the hardware, and who is root on the device (I can't say I own the software). If I want to kill a process on macOS, I am free to do this. I don't have this freedom on iOS. On my Android phone I have the freedom to root the device (which is sort of supported by Fairphone), and if ever the OS isn't supported anymore I can just run CM or LineageOS or stock Android on it myself. You don't have that liberty on iOS devices. Jailbreaking on iOS isn't very feasible because you end up having to run code to exploit iOS. Which means your phone has a known vulnerability which you want to get fixed. But you can't without the source.

> I don't have this freedom on iOS.

Right. But, to my earlier point, you never really need to, either, because the OS does a good enough job of managing resources that such intervention is not required. I'm sure there exist corner cases, but having never hit one in half a decade of extensive use, I am prepared to argue they are vanishingly rare.

That's the tradeoff: a lower granularity of control over the system, in exchange for a system well enough designed that such granularity is not required for stable and performant operation. There's an argument to be made that the tradeoff shouldn't exist, but that's theoretical unless Craig Federighi is actually on the panel. Here in the world of things that are, it's worth keeping in mind that the compromise is exactly that: yes, we give something up, but we get something in exchange for it, too.

> Right. But, to my earlier point, you never really need to, either, because the OS does a good enough job of managing resources that such intervention is not required.

What do you mean? I'm not aware of any SSH which fulfils my needs on iOS. Or Android for that matter. On Jolla (and MeeGo/Maemo) you had a CLI at your command. The conundrum is you don't know what you're missing unless you had it before to begin with. Case in point: there's an entire generation of children raising up with touchscreens. That exposure has a price.

What do you consider the best browser on macOS? I don't consider Safari the best one. YMMV. At least you and I got the freedom to run another browser on macOS (those versions of Firefox and Chrome on iOS are not the real deal). I got the freedom to run Tmux, Vim. I got the freedom to compile my own version of OpenSSH which includes a patch for additional functionality. I get to decide which browser extensions I get to run (without having to rely on Apple to decide which extensions are allowed for Safari). I get to configure ssh and sshd. I'd like to take the risk myself of taking it for granted when/if it breaks.

I am actually OK with all of this as long as I don't have to rely overly on my phone. However, smartphones have become so important now, and I end up having and needing a MBP to make up for it. There's going to be a time where the computers (smartphones, tablets, etc) running iOS are so powerful that you can easily run a lot more on them. And, with that progress, they become less of an embedded device and therefore the freedom to decide what you run is increased.

Finally, there's Apple who decides who's in and who's out. Americans are totally cool with violence of all sorts and kinds, but as soon as the first thing a baby sucks on is shown its suddenly drama. I find that bollocks, and I don't want to be scrutinised to such a culture deciding on what I am and am not allowed to run on my device. The device I (not an American) worked hard for to afford, the device I bought, and the device I own (not rent). No, Google isn't perfect either; Google earns money via advertising, Google just blocked an anti adware extension in Chrome called Ad Nauseam, and they also don't allow certain software in GCM.

I'm talking about having to sysadmin one's phone. You seem to be roving all over the map, from cultural standards of sex vs. violence to an advertising provider's choices in walled garden curation. I'm confused.

> I'm not aware of any SSH which fulfils my needs on iOS.

What's wrong with Mosh?

https://mosh.org/

Blink is good if you need Mosh support; Prompt 2 is arguably better if you don't. But I get the impression GP has more on his mind than the choice of terminal emulator/SSH client app, although I remain rather puzzled exactly what point he's trying to make.

You say crippled, one might say made it useful for the cause. One huge feature of Android was and is the application packaging, which is a PITA on desktop Linux to this date.

> I think it's great that in five years of iPhone ownership that's not a problem I've ever had

I wonder what it is that your acquaintance and I do differently than you? I've been an iPhone user for a bit less than two years, and I am frustrated with it almost every day. Of course, the same was true of my HTC and Samsung Android phones previously, and even to some degree of the Nokia N900 (still the best phone I ever had).

It is not a common occurrence, but every now and then I do have some issue where my iPhone freezes and I have to reboot it to get it to come back. More commonly, miscellaneous things go wrong, like text in some areas becoming invisible, or opening an application showing me a blank screen for twenty seconds before the application either comes up or silently quits for no apparent reason. Most frustratingly, the sequence of touches I need to go through to do something requires me to react to each individual screen that results, rather than being something that I can do all at once, or even just being fast enough that I'm not paused, waiting, while some application screen takes its time loading.

If the delays were consistent, I wouldn't be very upset about it, because I would expect a certain time in between each action. If the phone could keep up the UI interactions, then that would be even better.

And typing lag... don't get me started. :(

I feel like expectations for hardware that is unrelated to the function of my phone has gone way, way up (thinness, smooth edges, tiny bezels) and the attention to the actual functioning of the phone in a consistent and timely manner is now much worse than it used to be, all around.

Well, I'm running 9.3.5 on an SE, so there's that.

In general I tend to agree with those who argue that Apple's peaked and is going downhill, and I accordingly expect that, whatever the new bells and whistles, iOS 10 will work less well for things I actually do every day (like typing!) than iOS 9 does, which in turn has been a regression from iOS 8. The hardware's not improving, either, and I don't think Apple has correctly understood occurrences like the difference between expected and actual demand for the SE versus the 7 and 7+.

But, as best I can judge from the experience of Android-owning acquaintances and colleagues, for all iOS' and the iPhone's flaws, it's still by far the most solidly reliable smartphone platform on the market, and that's what counts the most for me. Others who feel differently will make different choices, and that's fine. I don't see why people seem to want to make such a big fight about it.

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