If your mom is suffering the buggy, slow, bad UX of an android phone, be a good child and buy her an iPhone. It’s objectively better unless you are harboring some irrational grudge.
The walled garden is Apple’s thing. They have no reason to interoperate with Android unless they are legally forced.
And why are you sending SMS anyway? There’s a universe of messaging apps that are far more feature complete than iMessage.
I mean if your mom is texting with SMS, she’s in North America. If she’s texting with a lot of iPhone users your family is in a certain economic position already. If you are on this site you are in a certain economic position and get called in for a lot of family tech support. If your mom has an android, supporting it is probably not worth your time in terms of the hourly rate you usually get. On top of all that, an iPhone SE is one of the best deals in phones and its long support life will save money over a parade of crap cheapest-available androids.
I am just speaking to my audience.
> It’s objectively better unless you are harboring some irrational grudge.
That seems absurd. I'm in NA, and economically could buy an iphone. Most of the text messages I send are automated in a ruby script that runs in termux. I also have a few apps that I use that make my life easier, but require being side loaded as well as rooted.
Are you really saying that iphone would be objectively better for me? Unless things have radically changed in iOS, it seems like I would lose a lot of features that I currently rely on to save me lots of time and give me a much better UX
The context of my comment was important in that it was a response to Cook’s response about buying the questioner’s elderly mother an iPhone. It is an objectively better UX for that person. It is a product obsessively made for that person.
The context in language is important. It is impossible for me to have been giving a universal axiom because Android developers exist and an iPhone would not be objectively better for that.
I've also used it for other things like automating the downloading/unzipping of audiobooks, pushing photos/videos (or metadata about those) to my web service, and more.
Basically, I use it for whatever I want to automate. I don't think of my phone as an "appliance." To me it's a general-purpose computing machine that conveniently can sit in my pocket and go with me everywhere.
I've never understood why people want to embrace the idea of them as appliances. They are fully capable of being general purpose, they are just (intentionally) limited. Makes me think of a bird (born with wings), where someone intentionally ties the wings down so they can't fly even though they have all the hardware needed for it.
I currently use it to access my PC via Tailscale and ssh.