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Comment by S201 | Hacker News Reader

> The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari.

Seems like a deficiency of Apple products to me. I know it's beating a dead horse, but this is what happens when people willingly buy into a closed system they have no control over.

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Yup. My guess is all the search providers in the list are paying Apple to be there. Kagi will never make the list.

I have the same hunch. Google pays Apple $20B annually to be the default search engine. Thankfully those of us in the EU will soon be able to choose any search engines we like once the DMA comes into effect.

I use the app xSearch, which lets you use custom search engines with Safari. Once you turn on override mode inside of xSearch, it works perfect. I agree that it’s unfortunate, but for the time being anyone who’s going out of their way to pay for Kagi is someone who will go out of their way to install an app like xSearch. Hopefully we see some improvements from Apple with this

Funny thing is, people are buying Apple products because the alternative is Google, and why are you paying for Kagi, because you trust Google?

I don't trust Google, but it's practical. There are tons of ways you can control/limit privacy issues, like a combination of opting out of personalized ads, AdGuard, DNS level filtering, and not using any Google services other than necessary for Android. Many of these require little effort but go very far -- farther than the default experience from a new iPhone. In fact many of these things are unrelated to Android. With these in place I don't see using Android a problem by itself. (On the other hand, if you use an iPhone but have no adblocking or don't block tracking domains, and use Google services all the time, I don't see how it is better)

For what it's worth, I only buy Android phones that have unlockable bootloaders and I can root so that ultimately I have control over my own device.

But yes, I agree on how letting Apple and Google assert a level of control unparalleled in the history of computing has been a massive step backwards for our industry and consumers in general.

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