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Comment by echelon_musk | Hacker News Reader

My deGoogled phone is an iPhone.

Freedom isn't free and unfortunately the time wasted in trying to maintain a high standard of smartphone privacy is time I will never get back.

That and the social isolation from trying use a phone that can't keep up with the activities and communication preferences of friends makes an iPhone a necessary compromise.

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There is nothing free in the Apple ecosystem, neither as n free beer or in free speech. You can't even install an app that isn't approved by Apple on an iphone of ipad

> You can't even install an app that isn't approved by Apple on an iphone of ipad

I thought this was changing? I heard a lot about non Apple repositories recently

Yeah, but to open an alternative store, you need to pay a hefty sum. Even to publish apps on that alternate store, there will be high fees. Open source projects simply cannot afford that.

Has anyone tried asking Apple? I think an offer like:

1. Apps must be FOSS and reproducibly buildable on the store's servers, like F-Droid. 2. No monetization allowed, not even donation links. 3. The store itself undergoes yearly security review by an accredited third-party firm at its own expense. 4. The store undergoes yearly compliance review for these terms at its own expense.

Would be pretty much all upsides for Apple: non of their services are used; they don't pay infrastructure or human costs for app hosting, review, or developer support; and they don't pay these costs for apps that don't make them money anyway.

Aside from your claims being wrong (in my opinion), do you take into account that for large parts of the world, using iPhone is isolation?

For instance, I ended up in way to many text exchanges with iPhone users who didn't even knew they created multiple of them, replied multiple times directly+to a group chat, spammed status messages unreadable to others and so on.

So my point is, this view comes purely from a person in a market where iPhone is majority.

My point is not about iPhone evangelism per se and want to avoid holy wars. I'm saying it's the best worst choice (the constrained vision). I don't want to engage in hypotheticals based on consumer options of countries I'm unfamiliar with.

The essence of my point is that life is short and I don't value the time spent customising a smartphone in the way suggested by TFA.

> That and the social isolation from trying use a phone that can't keep up with the activities and communication preferences of friends makes an iPhone a necessary compromise.

I am still shocked at how much blue bubbles seem to affect some folk's social lives. Does it really matter that much?

You need to take a cab? You'd like me to book it? No problem...

Oh sorry the apk of Uber I sideloaded needs manually updating. I'll just go to apkwtfbbq.com complete some captchas and install the new apk. I've got enough signal and data for that. No problem! Oh, now I need to flash an updated zip file of the service I use to replace Google on my phone because I'm concerned about corporate surveillance. Oh, the latest version of the zip has a bug in it. Don't worry it will only be another 10 mins...

Never again.

If you want to book a cab, you call a cab company. No smartphone needed.

Also, it's no longer 2013. We have OTA updates and the Aurora store now.

All my apps on GrapheneOS update from various free app repositories and are automated. Everything always works.

I don't think it is referring to iMessage (blue bubbles). But to install the messenger du jour on an Android phone with a custom ROM may not be easy or well-supported.

Ah, fair. It is certainly true that not everything just-works on a custom rom; that is a tradeoff of them. Everyone has a different level of tolerance for this kind of thing.

Yes, this.

I would use iPhone, but I like Syncthing way too much.

There is Mobius, which works pretty well. Not as well as on Android, but better than nothing.

From what I remember, Mobius is based on an outdated version of Syncthing and cannot run in the background, which almost defeats the whole purpose of Syncthing.

You are just swapping a tech giant for another one, it's not really a solution

That's why I used the word compromise. I'm aware of the imperfect nature of my decision but I find it preferable to Android with custom roms.

I say this as someone with roughly 10 years experience of using custom roms before giving it up.

I'm one of the few (it seems) that are with you.

When I switched from an iPhone 3GS to Android, it seemed that the trade-off was between control and freedom. These days, the trade-off is between control + ok privacy and not-much-freedom + no privacy.

I also ran custom ROMS for years. It got to be such a pain that I switch back to vanilla Android with throw-away google accounts, and now have come full circle and gone back to an iPhone.

It's a similar story on the desktop - I can't abide where Windows has gone with ads and AI. I have run linux for years (and still do on servers), but need to use software that won't easily run on Linux. So, I have ended up with a MBP.

Apple might be far from perfect, but for me at least, right now they're they best balance between not being actively user-hostile, and not taking a ton of effort to get working.

Using an iPhone is exactly the same as a builtin Android rom, it's all powers to the manufacturer and you are just giving up on privacy and control on your phone.

If you switch because you like the design better than the other one why not but otherwise I don't see much compromise here.

I'm aware that the solutions with better privacy aren't exactly simple yeah.

That is not a deGoogled phone in the sense that Android users refer to. An iPhone doesn't have any of the benefits of a deGoogled phone such as microSD storage, Linux via Termux or alternative app stores.

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