But is there a realistically better alternative? Pinephone with a personally audited Linux distro? A jailbroken Android device with a non-stock firmware that you built yourself? A homebuilt RaspberryPi based device? A paper notepad and a film camera and an out of print street map?
Gnu/linux phones have nonexistent security, other than being niche (so security by obscurity at most). And also, they are not yet usable as a daily driver for me personally, at least.
https://puri.sm/posts/defending-against-spyware-like-pegasus...
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
Whether or not I am allowed to check that my entrance has no locks whatsoever doesn’t make it harder to open it. And the reverse, even if I don’t know the details of the lock in my door, it will not let others pass through.
You absolutely can not make that assertion without being able to verify the lock.
For a fact we know that ios has strong sandboxing, secure bootchain and apps are revokably verified.
Not sure about that. No source code. Also, Pegasus.
Can you expand on this point a little bit?
Basically Micay is a legitimate security researcher who created the project and it was later hijacked by the company funding some of it. That company since then try to badmouth Micay at any place they find and is doing shady things on top of the still open source code base. Micay was so professional to destroy the verification key at the time of the forking.
Even if you don't personally audit it, you still benefit from other people doing it. Especially if the software is reproducible (and many packages are).
no idea what the situation is now, but i wouldn't consider a phone that doesn't get those patches (project mainline) on time to be a serious option.
Realistically now we have Tizen and Jolla OS, which had backings from Samsung but nobody gave two damn about it.
I bet even if any of these vanilla mobile OS gets big enough they’ll get bought by the 3 giants and suffocated to death just like how Microsoft sniped Nokia.
Were there any recent examples where they failed in those?
They'll happily do evil shit, and execute it poorly. Samsung are _way_ more likely to leak the unnecessarily and possibly illegally collected personal data they hoover up than Google are.
My hope is that those of you that share my viewpoint will call your legislators and demand regulations or a break up. There are forces of good within the DOJ that are putting together an antitrust case against Apple, and the more of us that lend our voices, the louder and more compelling the argument.
The DOJ is really the last lever we have, and that's pretty good measure for the power Apple wields.