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I'd much rather have to switch to Brave or Vivaldi for a video phone call, or keyboard configuration, or NFC, than install half a dozen of outdated third-party XXX-only apps with full permissions and questionable security practices or distribution methods.

The better question to ask here, is, why would you NOT want to have a CHOICE to have these things in a secure browser by SEVERAL distinct major vendors like Google, Microsoft, Brave and Vivaldi, and Yandex, and Opera, and others?

Again, I don't even use Chrome. I replace it even on Android. So, I am not concerned with Google taking me over, because they clearly aren't.

But how am I more secure when I have to install lots of dodgy apps to get the most basic things like video conferencing working?

I'm typing this in Firefox on a Mac; I usually uninstall Chrome even from Android, usually after first using it to install F-Droid, then Aurora Store; then it's disabled promptly. Why should I not be allowed to disable Safari?

Apple's iOS monopolies are a far bigger issue than Chrome. These issues you guys talk about, don't really exist for me. I use YouTube regularly without Chrome, I use Android without a Google Account, I use all the banking apps without Play Store. None of this is possible on iOS. On iOS, you cannot preserve your privacy at all, because everything depends on having an Apple Account, and being monitored by Apple. Hence, I don't take iOS or iPhone as a serious contender for a daily driver for me.

Personally, I uninstall Chrome whenever I see it (on Android, I first use Chrome to download the F-Droid app store, then I uninstall/disable Chrome promptly).

But if you do agree with the author that Safari is so poor that noone would keep it, if other browsers were available on iOS… Isn't that a pretty weak argument against browser choice? You're basically agreeing with the author that Safari is so poor noone would use it if it wasn't mandatory? How's that a good thing we're all forced to keep using such an uninspiring piece of software?

I feel like that's already explained in the originally linked article here.

If you don't want Bluetooth from your browser, you can always install Firefox on Android.

I feel like it's 2005, and you're arguing that web browsers should not have access to a camera.

Or is camera access by a web browser still not a standard today in 2025, either, thanks to Apple, I may guess?

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to install Apple's Safari on Google's Android because of Google, but that's not the case, either, it's actually Apple that has discontinued Safari outside of their own ecosystem some 10+ years ago. Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move; but this is not the case, either, because you can easily sideload F-Droid and Aurora Store, and side-load any of the free Play Store apps as published and signed by Google, without any Google accounts, and uninstall Chrome, YouTube and most of the other pesky apps, yet still have access to your banking apps, to YouTube through free clients like NewPipe or PipePipe, and to lots of other stuff, all without any signs of any Google Accounts. Can you even install a third-party YouTube client on iOS? Ironically, you can on Android. In fact, you don't even lose any major functionality by foregoing Chrome and a Google Account on an Android; even the experience of watching YouTube is actually superior with PipePipe. I have several extra phones without a Google Account, and they're fully usable without any unexpected limitations; sync is the only thing that's missing.

Yet to the contrary, NONE of these things are possible on iOS.

On iOS, you can't even use even the "premium" pre-installed apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand or iMovie, without assigning them to an Apple Account first. You can't install any apps or stores, either. You can't do anything without at least an Apple Account. Yet it's Apple that's the last bastion of our privacy?! How?!

It's hard to believe anyone would defend a time when you had to have a separate charging cable for each device.

Yet evidently, every iPhone used is happy to do just that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For example, who else can deploy WebNFC?

Mozilla, for one, cannot, because Apple won't let them.

An app without a rendering engine is not a web-browser, it's far more akin a skin.

You've conveniently omitted the wider effects of Apple's monopoly from this analysis. There's plenty of evidence of the actions they've taken to wall-garden anything and everything possible.

For example, let's talk about NFC. It's been acknowledged that NFC adoption by major third-party apps on Android is severely constrained by the notion of feature parity with iOS; meaning, since NFC cannot be done on iOS in an app, it's almost pointless to support NFC just on Android. About a decade ago, I could pay at Trader Joe's and other NFC terminals for my groceries directly with my Wells Fargo app; but, today, I cannot do that, because Wells Fargo no longer supports NFC in their app. Many other vendors in many countries went directly to the QR codes given the realities on the ground. (If Apple had unrestricted NFC access, would Walmart forgo NFC?) Yet now you're telling us it's Google's fault that "noone" wants to implement WebNFC, depriving it of the standards status, due to the lack of the independent implementations?

Now, let's talk about Mozilla. You're implying that Google is Mozilla's master, because they pay them half a billion a year. But is Mozilla allowed to ship a proper browser on iOS? And, even if they did, would they have a capability to access NFC, and implement WebNFC? Whose fault is that if not Apple's? So, who exactly besides Apple and Google are even capable of implementing WebNFC given the realities on the ground? Because clearly that's not Mozilla, since Apple won't let them, in more than one way.

And, BTW, what actual solutions or alternatives do you propose? Simply not have any standards for these things at all, since security and privacy?

Because without these "proprietary" "standards" that no other vendor wants, or has the capability, to implement, what exactly are we left with?

Are you serious in implying that Apple's fully proprietary APIs are better than Google's open standards that noone else wants to implement, simply because of the Apple/Google duopoly, since noone else is big enough, and since Mozilla has abandoned Firefox OS and Boot2Gecko?

I'm not a fan of Chrome, or some of the choices they made for ChromeOS, but if they're willing to provide "proprietary" hardware APIs, that are fully documented and open-source, and can be used free of charge, and free of mandatory centralised control mechanisms like on iOS, then I'm all for it.

Mozilla had the opportunity to do the same with Firefox OS; but, of course, now they don't quite have the resources to do that anymore, so, instead they get to tell us that we cannot have nice things?

> The internet's most consequential designs took competitive markets as granted.

In the old days, you'd stop reading the article if it had typos or obvious grammatical or other mistakes.

Today, we're more intrigued to read one, simply because it's an indication that it wasn't blindly written by AI?

BTW, consider this: on Android, you can install any browser with any rendering engine. The only reason you cannot install Safari, is because Apple won't make it for Android.

On iOS, the only rendering engine available is Safari's WebKit. Apple won't allow any alternatives. It wouldn't be a problem if Safari was perfect, but it's clearly not.

I've been charging my Android with my Apple's 96W USB-C charger from my work's 16in MacBook Pro for "free". What's exactly so nice about not being able to do that with an iPhone? Why would you carry a separate cable/charger just for the phone, when you could share with an Android?

BTW, there's no Firefox or Chrome on iOS, either; the stuff you'd find in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, and they have the exact same rendering bugs as Safari does, so, there's little reason to use either one on iOS.

The first thing I do on an Android is skip the Google Account screen (bypassing the Play Store), open the pre-installed Chrome browser to install F-Droid, and then uninstall/disable Chrome. You can then install any other browser from F-Droid, or through Aurora Store through F-Droid, without any login credentials for any service.

Can you do that on an iPhone or iPad?

Can you install any app without having an Apple Account?

Can you uninstall Safari and replace it with any other browser? (For those unaware, Chrome and Firefox on iOS in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, having the exact same rendering bugs and issues as Safari; so, there's actually no way to install any other browser besides Safari on iOS.)

Which means that targetted attacks are trivial if the attacker possesses the resources.

It's virtually impossible to sideload anything on an iOS device without extensive developer know-how; but for Apple itself to do a targetted attack, would be a trivial task.

Android is the privacy heaven by comparison.

It's relatively trivial to get started with F-Droid and Aurora Store, and then you can install whichever apps you need, without providing any identifying information system-wide, without needing anything beyond the Android device itself.

No PCs, no mandatory 0days, no exploits, no specific software/hardware requirements, no warez, no copyright infringement, just pure free software and a few warning dialogues from Google about the dangers of installing the third-party apps, before you can do whatever you wish with the hardware you paid for, on any Android device of any vendor.

An iOS 0day would be far more valuable, confirmed by the rest of the thread above.

I disagree that such protections (at the expense of the power users) are necessary, but, OTOH, you cannot just ignore such issue existing in the first place, because it does exist, and Google already does have the tools to combat it (by scanning all apps regardless of origin, and blocking malicious ones).

Apple has really questionable security as well. There's lots of people who have reported Apple randomly asking for Apple Account passwords all of a sudden in popups, on both iOS and macOS, the same way as malware would; or forcing password resets every day or every week.

BTW, do you know how many customer accounts did Apple terminate in 2024? It's 128'961'839 — nearly 129 million customer accounts terminated in just one year.

I can't really think of anything worse as far as privacy is concerned. Can you?

What Google has recently proposed to trial next year in just 4 countries, is blocking of unverified apps, but all apps you install from Aurora Store are verified and signed directly through Google, so, they will not be affected.

Basically, even if the 2026 trial succeeds, and becomes worldwide in 2027 or later — both huge ifs to start with — as an end user, you could still install F-Droid, Aurora Store, and then any Google Play Store app without providing an ID, as long as F-Droid and/or Aurora Store developers themselves would be willing to undergo the procedure.

Part of the big success of sideloading is that few people are doing it in the US/EU, so the attack surface is smaller as a result.

Hopefully, they'll see just how ineffective their measures are, and abandon before applying the plans to the rest of the world.

On iOS, you cannot install any apps without an Apple Account, and even some preinstalled apps (like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie) cannot be used before you assign them to an Apple Account.

On Android, you can install any app from any third-party store without having any accounts. There's a store called Aurora Store that even lets you install apps from Google's Play Store without an account as well, so, you can even install all the mainstream apps, all without any accounts.

* https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/

I've tried it, it works.

With Apple, it's all far worse. On iOS, I've discovered that even some preinstalled premium apps, like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie, don't work unless you add an Apple Account to the system.

But with Android, it's relatively easy to set it up without any accounts, through Chrome, F-Droid, Aurora Store. (And I usually uninstall Chrome after installing F-Droid, too.)

My fav App Store on a fresh Android is Chrome, because you can use Chrome to install any other app store, or any app directly from any website.

On iOS, there's no such alternative.

In fact, on iOS, you cannot install ANY app at all until you login into an Apple Account. In fact, even some pre-installed premium apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) on iOS cannot be used before you login into an Apple Account.

By comparison, Chrome lets you install any app from any website without providing any identifying information, preserving you privacy. It's very easy to dismiss the login screens when setting up a new Android device, too; something that Apple also makes far more difficult on iOS.

I think the issue is actually the opposite.

With the cloud, the engineers fail to see the actual cost of their inefficient scaled-out code, because someone else (the CFO) pays the bill; and the answer to any issue, is simply adding more "workers" and more "cloud", since they're basically "free" from the perspective of the employee. (And the more "cloud" something is, like, the serverless, the more "free", completely inverting the economics of making a profit on the service — when the CFO tells you that your AWS bill is too high, you move everything from the EC2 to AWS Lambda, since the salesperson from AWS tells you that serverless is far cheaper, only for the bill to get even higher, for reasons unknown, of course.)

Whom the cloud tax actually constrains are the entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs. If you have to pay $5000/mo to AWS just for the infra, you can only go so long without lots of revenue, and you'd need to have a whopping 5k/mo+ worth of revenue before breaking even. Yet with a $200/mo like at OVH or Hetzner, you can afford to let it grow at negligible cost to yourself, and it can basically start being profitable with the first few users.

Don't believe this? Look at the blog entries by the guy who bought Yahoo!'s Delicious, written before they went bankrupt and were up for sale. He was basically pointing out that the services have roughly the same number of users, and require the same engineering resources, yet one is being operated at a loss, whereas the other one makes a profit (guess which one, and guess why).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in

So, literally, the difference between the cloud and renting One Big Server, is making a loss and going out of business, and remaining in business and purchasing your underwater competitor for pennies on the dollar.