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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

What's the point now that we have Android?

GarageBand. iMovie. Both of which can have their projects opened in Logic Pro or Final Cut, an irreplaceable workflow for which there is no Android equivalent. Audio Bus. Not Google. For me, ARkit is huge for some hobby projects.

If Apple would sell me one of their dev phones that gives me root, I'd switch from Android in a second.

I don't understand why this is such a big deal for them. They could even charge more for it, or make it so tech support is excluded from those phones, or whatever they need to do make money.

They'd bring all the hackers back to their platform. Do you realize how much effort is spent on Android mods? Can you imagine if those people were busy making iPhones do more thing? Because that's what'd happen if they'd sell me a rooted phone.

Meh, there’s a small but dedicated community for mods, but they can affect system stability and that’s not a compromise Apple wants to make.

Not having root has never affected my almost ten year iOS dev career.

Lower latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag

So far, only iOS can run on iDevices, which means if you want to use Apple hardware you have to use iOS.

I hardly see any compelling reason to stick to Apple hardware.

Well it appears Apple are really working towards user privacy as their main sell where android is locked in with Google Play services so though I do not personally have a preference I do know why some people choose Apple devices.

You can disable Google Play Services on a rooted Android. Besides I'm pretty sure all baseband CPUs have backdoors the carriers can tap into at any time.

On an iPhone (and probably a good number of Androids) the baseband is just a USB peripheral.

I keep hearing this argument, but if I'm buying an Android device I'm still supporting Google and Android. The thing is, I don't want to support them at all.

Apple is marketing privacy while storing encryption keys in China and becoming a services business. The more their revenue shifts away from hardware the more they'll be compelled to collect data to improve their services. There's no way around this.

I don't even know where to start with this comment.

"Storing encryption keys in china" could mean anything, it could mean having edge services with private TLS keys for instance. Which means semantically you're correct, but it doesn't mean anything.

In fact I'd argue it's no different than hosting in the US or UK.

The UK for example has laws that forbid you from withholding encryption keys or passwords. And there is an equivalent of the NSL (National Security Letter) which forbids you from even telling anyone that you have complied with a government or law enforcement request.

So how is this relevant?

That would be an argument for apple software. The question above was, if you don't care about the software why would you buy apple hardware?

Before this exploit there were other Bootrom exploits that allowed for running alternative operating systems (albeit on obsolete hardware).

Android appears to be about to lose the ability to run downloaded executables (see Termux), but this also has nothing to do with the discussion.

Are you talking about this?

https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/655

Or is there some new development I [1] should be concerned about?

1. Just a regular user of Termux.

iOS doesn't sent your every click to Google?

https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...

as the paper notes, ios itself doesn’t send much to google. it’s primarily installed apps that send data to google, and that’s primarily advertising related. google apps will additionally send all your location data to google.

moral of the story: don’t install any google apps and limit the number of apps you install.

I'm not going to ruin my phone experience just for that. Why should I care that my apps have telemetry for ads. It keeps them free.

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