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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

>Apple's customers generally have more of a "save us from ourselves" mentality.

FWIW, this could also be described as a "My phone is a tool and not a hobby project" mentality. That is half of what prompted me to change daily drivers from Android to iOS.

I do not get as much freedom for my apps to do whatever I want - but I don't need to do as much work vetting developers or tinkering either. It's a tradeoff of time priority.

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This is not about tinkering. My phone is a toolbox, the apps are the tools and Google keeps breaking them in order to make their tools seem better. I need to get real work done using my phone and being able to sync files with a server is a critical part of that. I can't use Google Drive instead for many reasons, but that's besides the point, because this is illegal anticompetitive behaviour.

As far as I know, Apple also doesn't let you sync folders like this, so that's not a solution. And regardless, Apple cripples many other tools that I rely on.

Your use case is not tinkering. For many others it undoubtedly is.

The person you’re responding to is seemingly just pushing back on the weird idea that iOS users don’t have technical acumen or whatever.

I strongly disagree. The difference is "I control my phone vs. my phone is controlled by the vendor".

Or "My phone is a computing device vs. my phone is vendor-specified use-case tool".

> I strongly disagree. The difference is "I control my phone vs. my phone is controlled by the vendor".

How many Android phones can be used without Google services?

Most of them? You trade off a lot of features, but you have the choice and can install/do what you want. Sure, I don't like the reliance on google play services but at least there is more choice.

No, Google Play services are baked into Android by default. You have to install an alternative operating system to go without them. You cannot use Android in a way Google does not want you to without hacking on it.

I don't know if I agree, my Android phone is a tool just fine. I can make it a hobby project, if I want, but I can just keep it a tool if I don't.

Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to have free for all alongside secure by default. Apple is doing the latter, the various non-Google Androids focus on the former.

Why isn't it? I think Android is doing a good enough job doing both, and Apple could have simply allowed unlocking the bootloader. Nothing else would need to change.

Perhaps the ecosystem has changed now, but when I made the switch in 2017, having an Android phone felt like a hobby project. I was regularly dealing with flagship phones stuttering and lagging, apps crashing, media formats not displaying properly, etc.

Isn't the process of vetting a developer a subset of the process for finding a good app for doing a certain task?

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