Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

Would you call tethering your Android phone via USB to your laptop a basic thing? Recently, I was having trouble with my phone's WiFi hotspot and tried to tether via USB. The only solution was Horndis, a 3rd party kernel extension. I quickly became knowledgeable about kexts and csrutil, rebuilt a kernel extension for M1 architecture and gave up after several hours of frustration. It's ridiculous that Apple can get away with being so closed

View on HN

That’s not an Apple problem, that’s an Android problem. The ball is in Google’s court there.

How so? It works fine on Linux, and I hear it works fine on Windows too (I think you might have to install a driver there though). Apple seems to have the odd OS out here, why is it no their fault?

My assumption here is that, as usual, Apple doesn't care about anyone who hasn't fully bought into their ecosystem. If it's not an iDevice, they don't care if it works fully with their desktop OS.

you can just use adb to forward a socks proxy through your phone. not sure why you would need a kext

If a Linux user suggested that, they'd be laughed out of the room. "Yeah, just use this semi-obscure command line tool to forward a port, then set your system to proxy through it" is a technically workable solution, but poor UX.

Exactly! I keep seeing this shit about how you have to fuck around with all these config files in Linux... Then when you have to do the same trash for basic things in OSX, nobody blinks an eye.

Or maybe it's ridiculous that Google leaves this "basic feature" to Horndis and doesn't make a nice way to do it themselves. Which is telling on how "basic" this feature is and how many people actually use it in the real world. I wouldn't call it a basic thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com