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Comment by shantara | Hacker News Reader

I also use Pixel 3a as my main phone, despite having an employer-provided iPhone.

The only killer app that still keeps me on Android is Firefox with uBlock Origin. If Apple allowed functional 3rd party browsers, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

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It depends if you want to hack around on the phone.

Android allows app to read gps status, do background stuff that is impossible on iPhone:

- you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

- there are no custom apps that could do phone tracking (it is available to find my device) e.g. like GPSLogger on Android

Can you integrate a ~smart/dumb watch to do action that you want? (e.g. send a http request, make a call)?

Basically iPhone doesn't have Tasker like functionality and for me that is a no go.

Also is there a way to search for an app that is installed or should I still browse a long list and play "finding nemo"?

> Also is there a way to search for an app that is installed or should I still browse a long list and play "finding nemo"?

The iPhone does have a search for apps. Plus they now also will group your apps into categories on the last screen.

And apps like Google Photos on the iPhone do upload photos in the background.

They do upload in the background, but they don't notice new photos while being in the background.

You need to start the app and only then they will notice the new photos. (my life is miserable because my wife has iPhone and I have to deal with strange limits on iOS).

>Android allows app to read gps status, do background stuff that is impossible on iPhone:

You are very much behind the times here. The newer Android (since 10 I think?) behavior for the last 2 years are permission prompts just like Apple. In fact many apps are not allowed to request background location updates anymore either.

But there are still apps that have permission to run location service in the background e.g. Tasker, GPSLogger.

I'm on Android 11.

> - you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

You can. I use PhotoSync to upload my photos in the background to my Nextcloud server via WebDav. Nextcloud and Dropbox have their own special functionality to automatically upload photos in the background.

> you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

You can certainly upload/sync to your personal NAS at home with third-party apps. Many of my beta users use Resilio Sync, PhotoSync, or SyncThing. Synology and QNAP both have their own proprietary sync apps as well.

Nope, it does not work. Tried it, it appears to work for first time and then you notice that if the app is not launched in the foreground after you take a photo it won't notice it.

Content blockers for Safari are basically the same, but with the added bonus of stronger fingerprinting protection from Mobile Safari than Firefox due to the hundreds of millions of iOS users.

You can also combine that with a DNS-level ad-blocking pseudo-VPN running on the device (like a pi-hole but without the pi). That gets rid of most in-app ads and a ton of tracking.

Yep, you could set it up via https://apple.nextdns.io/

Aren't content blockers limited in some regard? I think I read that one content blocker can only have a limited list of blocks.

uBlock on Firefox doesn't have that limitation, and if you use Firefox on desktop you can important synchronization between those.

Yes and no. Content blockers have a limited number of rules and you’re fundamentally limited by the expressiveness of the filtering language.

But:

* The filtering language is basically just ABP rules.

* There is only a cap per “extension” so apps with lots of rules just expose many extensions.

Safari content blockers are significantly limited compared to ublock origin. You're limited to domain allow/deny rules, and a quite small amount of those per app (less than a couple hundred thousand I think) and IIRC can't inject cosmetic filters either. These are critical drawbacks.

Afaik I can block all cookies or advertising cookies, I can rotate my ID, block all pop-ups, and or sit behind a Pi-Hole. Some ideas for switching.

Also, the qualitative experience, subjective as it is, is so much higher for me, having owned both Android and Apple.

That said I wish open source phones with Linux were a thing (not just Purism, but popular in general)

3rd party browser on iOS with web notifications (like android) would translate into a huge profit loss in app sales.

Consider WebKit with 1Blocker: https://1blocker.com/

I use AdGuard Pro on an iPhone and it blocks all ads in Safari.

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