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Comment by gryf | Hacker News Reader

I was speaking to someone at the weekend extolling the virtues of Huawei phones and how cheap they were and "I'm never paying for an iPhone or drinking the kool aid". I pointed out the history and security concerns and was greeted with a pfft and told I was paranoid.

I'm begrudgingly iPhone user. But I keep an exit plan and backups of all data. If only someone else made something that actually worked properly. For now I'm happy to use a West controlled company to run my personal infra. I suspect we're on a downward spiral though.

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If you have a iPhone in China you'll find that Apple crippled the air drop functionality that protestors rely upon to communicate. I don't see this action and that one as having much daylight between them frankly.

I'm not a fan of Apple's bowing to China on things like this either but "Limiting AirDrop from 'Everyone' to 10 minutes before you have to turn it on again" and "Deleting pictures from user's phones" are quite different.

Completely missed that. What a cluster of assholes. Guess I should start thinking about the inevitable exodus. The CSAM scanning thing was the first strike off.

Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle between the extremes you posed? Both vendors only lease your device to you; it's ultimately under their control. There's a big open android world in between the Apple and Huawei ecosystems.

The whole android experience is a minefield though. It's like having a needy psychopath in your pocket that after 18 months disowns you.

I'd rather they resurrected windows phone.

Did you know that Windows tracks everything you do? Do you expect it would be different on a phone? Consider using GNU/Linux instead (on smartphones too).

Firstly, yes I do know that. Windows Phone was before Satya and the telemetry ramp up and was a quite marvellous platform compared to the alternatives on the market. Unfortunately they fucked it up switching from CE to NT and burned all the developers in the process.

Would it be different? No. Should it be different? Yes. They had a unique market position and squandered it. Microsoft had the whole world as its oyster and chose the bad path every time.

As for GNU/Linux on phones, only when they make a usable non Android distribution which AFAIK does not exist. Until then I'm going to have to sell a piece of my soul to the devil (Apple) who actually spend enough time making something fit for purpose to make it usable without incurring a major societal disadvantage.

> usable non Android distribution which AFAIK does not exist.

It depends on your own definition of usable. I'm using my Pinephone as a daily driver.

Username checks out. That is to say, I too use Linux full time on laptop / will ignore games just because I'd have to reboot into Windows or fiddle with WINE / advocate for free software free society / use F-Droid instead of the Play Store... and yet for me, a Linux phone just wouldn't cut it. I'm already feeling impaired with blocking Google Play Services on Android, various apps don't run and sometimes I pretty much need them. So I will tend to say you're the outlier here and this is not a good definition of a daily driver for virtually everyone, though ideally you wouldn't have to be an outlier because I fully agree with your ideals.

You can back up your data from Huawei phones, too. Apple had plans to scan the photos on your phone and automatically report you to the police if the algorithm thinks something is off. I wouldn't trust them at all.

There was actually some truth to this around 2014-2015, before the major clampdowns.

I haven't ever heard of any concrete security issues with Huawei phones.

Huawei has been under extremely strict scrutiny for years (and even got hacked by the NSA, as Snowden's documents revealed), so the fact that nothing has ever stuck makes me think there really is nothing there.

As for this story, color me skeptical until some actual details come out.

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