Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunalty if our experience from the past with such events teaches us anything, it's that a minority of us will stop using apple products (or keep not doing it) but the rest of the world will quickly forget and carry on as usual.

Worse, if your decision to not use an iphone makes others people life slightly anoying for 2 seconds a week, many will bash on you.

As a FOSS user with no FB nor whatsapp account that ask to avoid photos to be taken of him with smartphones, I can tell you I pay regularly the price the price for what I think is doing the right thing. It's just easier to let the abuse go on.

And we have other fights in life. I didnt pick up smoking (pot of cigarets), stopped drinking alcohol, became vegetarian. They all come with social challenges. Add then you have your familly, job, health and goals that needs your care, attention and time.

At some point you just want to say "screw them", create your own bubble of freedom and let them enjoy their distopia. Except we kind of live in it, don't we?

I'm usually an upbeat person but these types of event arrive in a never ending stream, and today I feel tired.

There is no viable option if you want a quality smartphone.

Androids spy on you already.

Apple will be spying on you.

The dark side of economies of scale.

A Pixel with CalyxOS is a viable option in my experience.

We are not here by accident. Those are symptoms of a public that doesn't care. We have been explaining the consequences of each choice for techs during the last 20 years. I've had the talk with my friends and familly many times. Very patiently. Very nicely.

Nobody cares. It's just an annoyance for them.

And it requires an enormous more amounr of energy to live your live this way than not caring. Even more if you gotta explain.

And so here we are.

How would the public demonstrate caring about this?

Voting with their wallets and a lot of leg-stomping

Acting concerned in discussions would be a start. Choosing what services to use, what product to buy, what media to consume, not just because that's the easiest. Limit their involvment in this, even professionnally, if they can.

It doesn't need to be perfect. People have constraints, and life is hard.

But politicians and busines people don't care about being good or bad. They just follow the wind.

Now being gay is trendy, well, they are pro gay.

More people care about organic, they sell organic.

Just caring a little, demonstarting a little that we disaprove and want something else orient their decisions. Because their decisions are not driven by moral, it's just business.

Also, even if you don't do any of this, and I can believe I have to even state this, not teasing or shaming those who do would be an improvement.

Most people believe they are good and conforming. They don't believe anything would happen to them because of what Apple does and they don't want to be seen as those defending abusers right to privacy.

Yes, as a society we are giving up privacy for convenience.

Android ROMs like GrapheneOS do not spy on you, verifiably.

A good first step, but that the public won't take. We've seen it with linux on the desktop already.

Moving good sense (good sense, not "good" conclusions - abilities, not partytaking) to the median is the massive endavour.

What is to be preserved as core is to have the alternatives. Note: in some areas they are already fading...

(I have this flash of Mr. Pink first trying a "We are professionals, right?", than shielding himself behind concrete.)

Linux on the desktop is pretty viable now, but yeah, still hard to convince the public without marketing shenanigans.

It's non-trivial to unlock, root, and install a custom ROM - unless you are technical, very few people are going to be able to do this.

Also, it's been several years since I used a custom ROM, but I thought rooted devices were not permitted to use the official Google Play Store? (happy to be corrected if I've got this point wrong!)

Rooting and installing a custom ROM are two independent things, you don't need one to have the other.

Rooted devices can use the official Play Store yes, though most people use Aurora Store to access the Play Store because they tend to remove Google Play Services from their phones as well.

Verifiably? Are people still swapping ROMs on XDA developers like its 1990? Are folks still having to dump binary blobs from devices to get the things to work with non-stock ROMs? Are some people still relying on jailbreaking tools they have to “just trust”? Does the modem on all these SOCs still run it’s own network facing machine with full RAM access?

Things might be better, but it’s not all roses.

There's puri.sm, pinephone, fairphone with /e/.

There are multiple open source Android variants. You can use LineageOS with no Google services.

The fact that Apple ordered upwards of 90M new iPhones tells me they took all the backlash from techies into consideration and still found it beneficial.

Something tells me that this could be used as marketing, e.g. "protect your children from abuse", "be aware of when pictures of them are taken", and "protect your children from pornography".

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