The problem here is we are wholly dependant on Apples goodwill. It is not required in anyway (hence Googles behavior). At any moment Apple can revoke said goodwill and exploit us to our hearts content and we will have no fallback what so ever because we decided to let the market codify our freedoms rather than preventing companies from being ruthless.
While waiting for them to latch you down tight, you could have already been enjoying the most consumer-centric and privacy-conscious mainstream mobile OS since 2007.
Just because Apple is playing nice at the moment, there is no reason not to force them, and all the other players to have a legal requirement of playing nice. I mean, the hog that is fattened for slaughter thinks its life is great, right up until its not.
If it's a benevolent dictatorship, it's undeniably been a good one to me over nearly half my life. If they ever do turn, I can always just leave. But what is and/or was my alternative? The less-benevolent dictatorships of Google or Microsoft? Spending inordinate amounts of time and effort making a hodgepodge of various Linux devices work together (often unsuccessfully)? I'll pass.
The question could be less if Apple should be trusted, and more if phone makers in general should be allowed to be dictators.
Say I make the Avocado Phone:
- my entire shtick is that "you can only run apps we make, and we vet the source code of every one of the few thousand third-party apps we allow on our device. We will pay you $10,000 if you get compromised using our phone"
- Of course, to achieve this, the phone can't be susceptible to "informed" evil maid attacks (as in, say the hotel's cameras capture you entering your passcode and Avocado ID Password) that replace your OS with an identical one preloaded with Malware. This means that, even as a user, you literally can't load any other software onto the bootloader or OS that would touch the operating system.
- it also takes every opportunity to prevent third-party apps from gaining access they don't need, which includes disabling JIT compilation (ruling out third-party browser engines, unless they want to use a slow javascript interpreter).
At what point does my phone turn from a product that services the security-conscious crowd with a completely bulletproof device, into something that people want to be able to preload software onto, because they didn't realize that security comes at a price? Is it when I sell enough? Is selling 10 million a year enough to where my market presence becomes a problem? 100 million a year? Why would people buy it if the government forces it to be 'open' at the cost of invalidating its entire use-case of being a secure device?
First part is, fundamentally these devices are sold. You could eschew the very notion of property and make it a pure rental, but it’s not the point we are now.
The second part is, as you point out, your idea is completely valid until your service becomes life critical, a huge portion of the country’s population relies on it day to day, you killed any competitor that had a significantly different value proposition and it would have catastrophic consequences if you were to screw it up badly. Basically you became part of the infra. Is it 100 million units ? It’s up to your regulators to decide.
In any case, I don’t see how using Apple products is at odds with supporting better privacy laws. If anything, they are perfectly aligned since it demonstrates a $2 trillion alternative to surveillance capitalism.
Chinese customers don't need to wait. Apple flipped sometime in 2017 and gave up all user emails, photos, messages, etc. to the CCP to stay in the market.
People complain about TikTok spying for China, but Apple is one of the biggest CCP spies around. That runs counter to the brand headspace they keep investing in though.
People have this expectation because other companies have done this.
For example, Google employees revolted when dragonfly was leaked, and got the CCP search-spying project killed. It's weird to think that Google cared more about user privacy than profits than Apple does, but that's how weird the branding works here.
Apple was revealed to be a participant in 2013; there is no reason to believe they are not a part of it now.
the fact you believe this is true today is most telling, I do not find them to be "consumer-centric" they have very draconian policies and if your use of the device fits in their narrow band of use cases then it is find, if it does not you are SOL
0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.move...
For instance if you've been on iOS for a few years and bought a healthy amount of music, those are virtually gone after moving to android. You can mitigate that by either
- forever keep paying Apple through an Apple Music subscription
- somewhat extract the tracks and DRM free them (tracks were DRM free when bought from the Mac, but not when bought on iOS last time I tinkered with it). Of course Apple will make as hard as they can to block this route.
Same for movies and books, and for games/apps as well if they don't have a multi OS pricing scheme.
Switching cost is not just time spent to get used to, more often than not it"s a non significant amount of money lost in the process.
Same deal the other way round of course: Google is more diligent on exposing their content on iOS, but there will stil be paid games and apps to be lost in the process.
This has to be satire.
I've enjoyed 15 years of a wonderful and privacy-first device ecosystem. They're evidently making it even better. And you want me to be upset?
What's the equivalent of the FDA but for consumer privacy?
Corporate altruism, apparently
What am I missing? How am I handcuffed to Apple?
There is a Chrome app on iOS. I don't think many people pick their browser based on rendering engine, but rather on actual browser UI and features (like sync).
I'd love to support Gecko on mobile too, as I've moved the vast majority of my desktop usage to it, but Webkit is still fighting the Blink/Chromium hegemony, too, and that's still fighting the good fight.
Not if they treat user freedom as their enemy.
I don't expect you to agree with me. I just want you to know it is a perspective of its own merits. The web has seen what happens when one rendering engine gets enough market share to dominate and that had a decade or more of repercussions, especially in enterprise application development. We're so dangerously close to that happening again. You may think you are fighting the most for freedom of the two of us, but from my perspective you are fighting a proxy battle in the Cold War and I'm much more worried about the Cold War and the freedoms it may lose us in the long run.
I'm much more worried about the Cold War and the freedoms it may lose us in the long run.
I will have to disagree that freedom is advanced by an OS that forbids you from using software that hasn't been approved by a megacorporation.
We're probably all going to keep disagreeing because it is apples and oranges no matter what analogy we try to use. I do think "potential monopoly" is worse than "practical monopsony" (especially when it is a proxy monopsony and people are still free to not buy Apple and thus not buy Apple's rendering engine choice), but you are welcome to continue to disagree. Again, I appreciate why a lot of y'all see the "practical monopsony" as the larger and more immediate threat.
What may sound like "backpedaling" is that I am admitting sympathy for your concern, despite disagreeing with it. I think you've made good points. I don't find anything "contentious" about it. I still disagree with you, and I'm not apologizing for disagreeing with you. I can understand your points just fine, and also still disagree with them. I would like you to consider my point of view, and maybe engage with me on this issue that it is much more complex than a simple "good versus evil". I hope this not to change your mind, but in the hopes of a better overall discussion than just "Apple is evil and doing evil things because Freedoms". The reality is not that simple. I don't blame you for thinking it is, and you are free to continue to do so, just don't yell at me for saying "well I think it's kind of complicated", please.
"It's a free market because I have the choice between two brutal masters!"
Modern human communication, phones, are too important to be held hostage by just two companies, neither of which are acting in consumers best interests.
IMO this is the time that governments should be acting on behalf of the people, and not the corporations with the deepest pockets.
I can’t. I don’t use Apple Photos, and I can’t set Google Photos as the default photo handler, nor default source or destination, nor tell any iOS device to never save photos in Apple’s silo.
> If I don’t like what Apple does with iCloud, I can move to Dropbox.
I can’t either. I wanted to backup my phone elsewhere and there is no option outside of iCloud.
How have you hacked your system and how long will you be able to?
To keep Apple from saving your photos: turn off iCloud Photos, or log out of iCloud.
To back up your iPhone without iCloud: make a local backup on your Mac or PC. You can even encrypt the backup with a password you choose. You can sync these backup files in any way you would like, including via Dropbox.
You can also sell your iPhone and get a different phone if you don't want anything to do with Apple.
> You can also sell your iPhone and get a different phone if you don't want anything to do with Apple.
If you come to that conclusion, it's basically the answer to your "How am I handcuffed to Apple?" question. If you need to give up the system to properly manage your backups, it's pretty much a situation where you're handcuffed or not, with no clear negotiable middle ground option.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I mean, I really emjoy my current Apple ecosystem, and I do have all the devices, and I like how everything works currently. But, a switch is mainly a matter of movies my files and exporting/importing photos, contacts, and email. It might take a few years to cycle out ALL the devices, but I don't feel like there is a ton of friction in switching my data over.
It is more that everything is working so well together that I don't want to switch right now.
I do stay away from Apple home automation though, for this very reason. I want something open and local that I control since that WOULD be a huge pain to try and swap away from.
Thus the privacy claims are just advertisement, there is no way to verify them.
Apple devices might as well be fully backdoored.
This is about trust. If you don't trust the manufacturer of your hardware (or developers of software), that puts you down a very specific path of what you can happily purchase.
There isn't another mainstream product that offers that.
No one (or even the author) has been able to replicate it or find the Apple ID in any other logs calls.
Isn't it fine to install Google Maps, etc, in a separate profile, inside GrapheneOS?