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Comment by greenhouse_gas | Hacker News Reader

Downside: 1. Do you really know what your apps are doing? You can't compile from source.

2. You may only use apps Apple approves. So no Firefox for you.

so you know what all the google play services are doing on your phone? You can compile apps from source and put them on your own phone, you just cant distribute your own compiled apps without a paid developer account.

I think you didn't read the article. People are talking of devices without Play Services or Play Store.

I can opt out of using Play services.

Point taken, but Firefox is on iOS FWIW.

iOS Firefox is a reskinned WebKit, unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS

Ah, got it, that's unfortunate. I remember some time ago, Mozilla said that they wouldn't put a browser on iOS unless it could use Gecko. When I saw the app I assumed that the restrictions had changed.

This is exactly what we mean when we say closed garden and extortion. If firefox wants to exist on the platform, they have to play by apple rules. Apple are just fine without firefox so they don't care.

Mozilla has done the best they can, given the restrictions imposed on them by Apple.

This effectively means that Firefox on iOS has no support for extensions or addons like on Android... Because Apple and Safari doesn't allow that.

It's definitely not what people have come to expect from Firefox over the years, but at least I get to seamlessly sync my bookmarks, history and passwords with my desktop browser of choice.

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