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Comment by lqdc13 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how you use your iphone or what you would need from a smartphone, but I don't understand the distinction.

Apps like Lyft, Yelp and Uber already know where you are so you can't use those.

You're left with maps and browser. People tend to use google maps and Waze on iPhone anyway so that point is gone as well. If they use Apple maps, I am not convinced that apple doesn't store location history.

So then you're left with a browser. Android lets Firefox run its own browser engine and you can install all the privacy extensions there.

On the other hand, with Android it's possible to take privacy a lot more seriously. Lineage OS lets you have much more fine-grained controls over all the apps and you can forego the whole google services privacy menace.

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You've reduced the problem to only GPS location which is just wrong. Fact is, Android apps targeting 5.0 or lower can still read anything on my phone - SMS, location, photos, contacts, and well, everything else. And any root or ROM based add-ons to stop them are an impractical usability nightmare, where I could just own an iPhone.

Weren't such permissions made explicit when the app was installed?

I'm not worried about SMS because everyone and their mother can see it now.

I don't think apps that didn't require contacts during installation could access them.

To me all Apple products are a usability nightmare. I am forced to do simple things the way Apple wants me to do them instead of the way I want to do them.

Or you could say:

To me all Android products are a usability nightmare. I am forced to do simple things the way Google wants me to do them instead of the way I want to do them.

That line of reasoning just doesn't scale.

Like only learning to type on a Dvorak keyboard, doing things "your way" can have consequences. Rampant, arbitrary customisation of interfaces is, in my estimation, more often than not an exercise in painting yourself into a corner.

Completely agree with you on the interface front.

I gave up on interface consistency though because every app now has its own interface and vendors like Samsung have their own for each product.

I miss the old days of windows apps with consistent menus and obvious ways to use the programs. Now it's like playing some sort of text RPG where you have to try everything to figure out where some setting is.

The problem I have with apple is that things are not there because "art". Google is also very much guilty of it. But at least they don't copy all the apple problems and usually expose more of the internal workings of things than apple does.

>Apps like Lyft, Yelp and Uber already know where you are so you can't use those.

Only when you use them.

You can either not install them at all (problem solved).

or only allow them to "know your location" when you explicitly launch them and only for the duration of you actively using them on screen (problem lessened).

I don't know if they've fixed this, or if was just me not working the phone right, but Disney's park maps kept tracking when the app was closed.

From the "Privacy and Your Apps" presentation on Tuesday at WWDC:

> in iOS 11, users will be able to choose the “when in use” option at all times [when asked for permission to use their location]

> Disney's park maps kept tracking when the app was closed

Closed or in the background?

I was under the impression (in iOS 10 and earlier), that "Always" meant anytime the app was open, and "While in use" is only when the app is in the foreground. So if an app has "Always" on for its Location Services, it will stop tracking when I swipe up and quit it.

If I've been incorrect this whole time, please pass the tinfoil.

Additionally, with iOS 11, it seems Apple has forced the "while in use" option on apps that didn't include it on their own for location permissions.

You're correct. Manually killing an app from the recent apps list will stop it from doing background processing (e.g. tracking location). I'm not sure if they'll be allowed to start again if e.g. they receive a silent push, and I'm also not sure if they're allowed to handle geofences, but besides those two questions, killing the app stops it tracking you.

You can do similar things on Android. You can also turn off your gps in 2 seconds as well.

With the crazy malware and oparque permissions nobody really knows what's fully going on on Android though.

You could turn off the gps but that's too coarse: you might want it for some apps.

But that's how permissions work on Android though. You can grant them to an app when it's requested, or not. Or you can turn it off at the system level with the bug switch in the settings shade. I have an iPad and the permissions models are basically identical at this point.

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