Abysmal battery life in comparison to Safari, different font rendering than normal, lack of correct rubberband scrolling (a ~10 year old bug), and more.
Let me be clear: I like Firefox. I've committed patches to Firefox on iOS. I'd use Firefox on any other platform, but it is not a good citizen of macOS. I don't believe it'd be good on iOS given the room to use its own rendering engine.
This does make a difference, but macOS is in many respects a "death by a thousand cuts" platform due to the UI/UX bar being fairly high. It notably clips in many areas where Chrome and Safari simply don't, which leads to a jarring experience. Scrolling and resizing is still not smooth, even after tweaking it behind the scenes - although to be fair, the post above calls out that they're aware they can make this smoother with CA.
Firefox on macOS also still has issues with hardware acceleration. Comparing the following URL across browsers I can achieve 60fps, no drops, on Safari. Firefox on my Mac averages 45fps.
I love Firefox (and the associated lineage) - I really do. I've kept it installed since the Mozilla Suite days. I still check every damn release to see if I could switch back. I'm sad every time I find I can't.
Choice does not necessitate an up-front decision to be made by the user. It simply means, at some point, I can choose an alternative. Safari fuckin’ sucks and I am forced to use it to have access to certain features on iOS - like webcam - which is bullshit.
Yes, Safari is far behind the other browsers in standards support, and at this point of being so far behind for so long, we can say that it will always be so just to kneecap the web as an alternative to the app store.
> why would be conclude that they are doing this with Safari?
Marketing a device as private or secure gets customers who don't verify the claims. Marketing a device like a luxury fashion item gets customers. Marketing a device as having a browser that supports PWAs does not. Once it has the buyers, it's better for Apple's bottom line to milk them by blocking out competition for the App Store.
The evidence is that they're so far behind the other browsers and have been for years, despite consistent demands from developers. What other explanation is there for it? They certainly have the resources to implement these features.
> Considering how poorly macOS runs Firefox, I'm actually quite glad that Webkit is enforced.
Given that Webkit is available either way, why? If you prefer Webkit you can use Safari independent of whether actual Firefox is available or not. Having the choice doesn't force you to choose it.
But it gives other people with different priorities an option. And then more people use Firefox, and it gets better, and Mozilla ends up with more support and resources to address your concerns even before you actually start using it.
It doesn't, as I noted in another comment - "absolutely fine" overlooks notable issues with the macOS system experiences.
Furthermore, while this is a point to be debated... the thread here is not about Firefox on macOS, but on whether it'd run fine on iOS.
Given the performance of Firefox on Macbooks in general, I maintain my position that it would not fare well. The iMac has little to do with this. Given that they'll eventually need to have this running well on Apple Silicon, though, I'd be happy to eventually be wrong.
I don't think it's irrelevant to speak to the fact that the latest Firefox runs well on my 2013 iMac. Anecdotal, sure, but I'm tired of seeing the generic "Firefox is bad on macOS" complaints because I just don't think it's true across-the-board anymore. 10-15 versions ago? That was a different story. It has come a long way. I abandoned Firefox back in those days, but lately I returned to it as my browser of choice on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
However, in terms of iOS, I am not certain how either of our experiences (both on macOS) would really be relevant at all to how Firefox would perform on iOS. As much as Apple has tried to make them similar lately, they are still different worlds.
> An efficient browser engine needs to run with security privileges
The ability to dynamically generate code is not "security privileges"; security should be enforced by the platform sandbox and not by the ability to JIT code.
You never know. Perhaps Apple is working on public APIs to mitigate those issues?
What if Apple released APIs that let you write an all-new, high performance browser engine and let you publish your own browser on iOS, but the APIs weren’t compatible with Firefox or Chromium, so a rewrite would be required?
Apple has all of the APIs needed. You can compile and run chromium on iOS today (or at least it used to be possible - I work for an enterprise that did it for internal apps) - it'll just never make it through AppStore review.
A browser's JIT needs permission to dynamically generate code and then execute it, which is the primary permission Apple doesn't grant to third parties.
Other browsers on iOS just wrap Safari's WebKit in a different UI.
Many sites only need light JavaScript usage and would not run significantly slower. wasm is not supported in jitless mode. Link pulled from twitter link in sister comment by rictic.
Code generation is not a safety issue. If you have the privileges to run code then generating code should not cause more problems unless the OS has significant vulnerabilities.
Allowing a 3rd party browser engine will significantly undermine Apple's control on its ecosystem, so won't likely happen anytime soon. This is more of running a show for the recent on-going antitrust case against Apple.
Aren't third party browsers still just gimped webkit webviews? I'm not sure the worse performance is worth having a different browser chrome around the web page?
The existing adblockers for iOS are OK but they aren't comparable, it's mostly OK since I use my iPad's at home and control the network but it's (one) of the reasons I won't be buying an iPhone SE even though it's price (~£400) makes it almost interesting to me.
The only option would be to VPN into my home network and filter that way but yeah that seems silly when I can just install Firefox on Android which I like well enough anyway.
I use AdGuard DNS. https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html No connection with the company, just happy how it's worked for the past month with all of us (Dad, Mom, 3 teenagers) at home and zero complaints from the family.
I had set up one PiHole and was trying to decide whether or not to do another Raspberry Pi or on a Mac since the router wasn't happy with just 1 IP for DNS. Decided to try the AdGuard route and it just works.
I'm curious: what websites have ads that an iOS adblocker can't block? I've had very good luck with Ka-Block! on my iPhone. There are some others with user-editable blocklists.
I've worked on anti-ad-blocking tech previously. Safari's content blocking is the weakest on the market and can be easily circumvented.
And I'm an iOS user and the ads on the websites I visit are unbearable and have tried many content blockers. Nothing worked until I switched to DNS blocking. Not perfect but better than what Safari can do.
TV Streaming ones mostly, worse than porn sites these days since those kinda went more legit.
There are a tonne of technical solutions to the above if I could be bothered to set them up on the linux mediaPC but honestly, I don't watch a lot and most of what I do is on Netflix and Prime anyway.
Dear Google. If I promise to set Gmail as my default email client on iOS, will you then let me keep Safari as my default browser when clicking a link in that app?
This is possible on Android today and has been possible since Android launched. I use Firefox as my default browser, and Gmail opens links in there. It is up to iOS to provide APIs that make this possible.
iOS may not have a central browser setting yet, but apps can still invoke other apps directly. Gmail on iOS uses that to offer a choice between Chrome and Safari, and offers to save your choice.
It just tends to regularly forget that I told it to save my choice of Safari.
On iOS, it also has no way of knowing that you have installed Firefox to give you that choice, which makes using Firefox on iOS even more of a nonstarter than it already is.
That's not true, "Safari" for iOS Gmail means a shitty in-app web view, not sharing cookies, history or UI with actual Safari, Gmail itself acting as the "browser".
This shady behavior (calling a web view "Safari") is one of the reasons I gave up on Gmail.
Finally! Now if someone will build a browser that will add the missing push notifications feature to PWAs, web apps on iOS might have some semblance of parity with Android.
Apple will only add push notifications to PWAs if enough people move away from Apple devices for lack of PWA push notifications. Once the quality of PWAs improves to the point that they're indispensable (and I believe we're getting there slowly), Apple will have to comply.
I feel like Apple is incentivized to move slowly on PWAs.
The pros for bringing more features to PWAs: a small subset of users care, and an even a smaller subset of them care enough that they might leave the platform.
The cons: a direct competitor to the app store (imagine Hey as a PWA), undercutting their 30%. For the independent developer, sure, the app store may be great distribution, but I can imagine paying for your own marketing beats the 30% you lose to Apple.
My understanding is that iOS Edge "kind of/mostly" supports push notifications from PWAs. From what I recall seeing, the experience isn't particularly great (notifications are always from Edge itself so you have a hard time filtering them by individual PWA "app", for instance). PWA parity on iOS has seemed an interesting focus of Edge, and it's interesting to see if it will be a losing battle or not.
I’ll give them $ for push notifications alone! Not 30% but it’s worth something if their servers suddenly now must process notifications from hundreds or thousands of new Web apps every year.
Hold down on the link and choose to open in a new tab. It will remember the behavior and stop opening the link in the app, until you hold down another future link and choose “open in Amazon” or the equivalent.
Browsers other than safari will give you a prompt to either open as webpage or in the dedicated app. But then you have the 2nd stage problem of the web page with an obstructive in page pop up asking you to download the app or open it in the app.
I don't actually now how that works on iOS. With Android, it will ask first time if I want to use the specific app or my browser always (or a just this time option), push me to Android settings/app manager to enable that within the app settings itself, then let me go back and try the link again. I'd prefer if it remembered the link and went forward but I'm surprised there isn't similar options on iOS. I guess its closed-ness is one reason I'm on Android.
Can I change my default phone app? I'd really like phone numbers to come up in Google Voice. Yes, I know I can long-press and sometimes that lets me choose GV, but it doesn't always work.
What about my default maps app? That would be nice too.
Second the default map app. I hate when I click a map link and it opens in Apple's map app, it looks just enough like Google maps that I don't immediately close it, then once I realize it's worse that I remember, I say, "oh, they tricked me again!"
It seems like this is something that Apple plans to relinquish control over time with. I hope that Apple finds the move to be a net positive for their ecosystem and decides to make more "defaults" changeable in the following releases.
A lot of internal text editing APIs, a lot of accessibility stuff - you can see Electron having to rip it out every release for the Mac App Store version. iOS will likely be even worse in this regard
1 - Apple doesn't focus on "first". More often, they are usually focused on a better integration of something than being first. Obvious exceptions include things like 64-bit phone chips, but usually not first.
2 - most Apple users (note that I am saying users, and not developers or power users) prefer it that way. They prefer simplicity over raw power - sort of the revers of a linux command line user.
3 - Even the power users tend to like something that keeps them in the Apple camp. For me, it's the ecosystem an approach to privacy and security - I can help my parents be safe easier on an iPhone/iPad/etc than I could on an Android phone.
4 - For many (most?) people, the apple email app is better than most alternatives. Personally I run gmail, outlook, and apple, and prefer Apple in most situations (not all, but most). Think of this as "I can't believe that Lexus doesn't have an electric car yet" - most Lexus users don't really care because they are happy with the product as is. Would some subset prefer it? sure, but not enough to outweigh the reasons they bought the Lexus in the first place.
5 - I'm not an Android user, but I agree - it is a funny headline in 2020.
Oh I totally get all of this and I agree that it's fair to characterize Apple's bent as being UX at the expense of user freedom and that many people _specifically want_ this, but at this point it's overstated as applied to some of these features. For example, default browser - Apple doesn't need Android's complicated system whereby you choose whether this app opens up links of a certain type always or just this once, etc. Apple could just have a setting where you choose your browser. Unless I'm just naive, this should add no overhead in terms of UX. Same applies to email client.
I wonder[1]. Not disagreeing, and I'm not a systems programmer, so I can image that there are aspects of things to make something truly secure[1] that you have to chase down all these rabbit holes.
I look at OpenBSD and see how long it takes them to do something fairly "simple", and use that as a guideline for security development integration timeframes. Of course, OpenBSD isn't backed by a trillion dollar company either.
Oddly, I fall into the Mac + Linux camp. I love using MacOS (yes, even Catalina works for me), but I love that doing development/server stuff on Linux is so clean. What both do for me is minimize the brain clutter (and that's one reason I can't grok the idea of doing server development in Xcode).
[0] - I don't think you're being naive. Also, being a fan of guys like Krebs on Security makes me realize that doing this right is not so much hard as it is painstaking.
[1] - no, I definitely don't think iOS is totally secure, but I think it's harder to screw up as a user than competitors.
I stick with Apple for the privacy. There are features on Android I wish to use, but I can’t bring myself to use an Android phone or putting the effort of cleaning it from all of Google’s trackers.
Apple doesn't surface the information they collect to third parties. If you are talking about in app advertising tracking, I reset my tracking advertiser ID pretty often too.
In the Ad Exchange, Google surfaces the full url, geo, and all browser identifier information under the RTB protocol.
When tracked through apps, Google is equally open. Apple tries its best to combat tracking, but most apps will still do their best to jump through the tracking contention measures.
Well, MicroG is meant to be a drop-in replacement for closed-source Google libraries on your phone (i.e. Google Play Services / Google Services Framework) but obviously it will still have to connect to Google servers if needed (although you're able to control for what purposes). For instance, push notifications for apps often use Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging platform and MicroG allows the user to still receive those notifications in the absense of Google Play Services / Google Services Framework.
I suggest you have a closer look at the MicroG website where this is explained, too: https://microg.org/
I personally use microG and disable all of the features that call home to Google, except for those anonymized by microG. Works flawlessly, except for some apps that don't work but are easily replaced.
You can build LineageOS yourself if you want. The procedure is on their website. Then you can also read the code to make sure nothing funny is going on.
Google auctions the promise of showing ads to relevant users. Google would be eliminating themselves as a middle man service by selling the data they've curated.
Can you provide a link? Is this the cut they take for their App Store? If so, that isn't even in the same scale of selling your browsing history. For example, if I knew your cookie, and had access to the Google Ad Exchange, I could get your full browsing history as seen by Google trackers.
The third parties know how to tie your cookie to your other information through identity graphs.
And what if you had access to the iCloud servers, where Safari history is stored without end-to-end encryption (unlike Chrome sync which is encrypted end-to-end)?
I and any other third party can buy their way into the google Ad Exchange, but nobody can buy their way into iCloud's servers; for example, China had to ask Apple to create a segregated iCloud to support iOS in China.
It is possible that the US government has some snooping contract with iCloud, but they are definitely not the party I am trying to protect myself from. I am trying to protect myself from businesses using my data to influence my politics, lifestyle and purchases. Look into the business of companies like Liveramp, to see the kind of data exchanges that Google helps proliferate.
Read into the RTB protocol. With every Google pixel, all of the information obtained by the HTTP request + publisher appended data is passed to Google and auction to advertisers.
Full disclosure: I work for one of these third parties. Safari/Firefox are the hardest browsers to track. Google extended the deadline for killing cookies which probably netted us another year worth of easy revenue before we have to start start relying on first party tracking.
Of course they send that information... it is just the information that the advertiser would get anyway when you see their ad. Do they send the tracking cookie though, even before you buy?
The RTB protocol describes the message that goes along with each bid request. So that is the information that all third parties participating in the auction receive as long as they are listening.
To participate in the auction you don't need to win or even bid; you pay an upfront cost for listening, buy a seat in the ad exchange. The whole thing is dressed as an ad-exchange, but it really is a data exchange. If you win the auction you get to serve your own pixel to tag the user, corroborate the data from the auction, etc.
There is a lot of value in winning and ad impression beyond the ad impression itself, but just by listening you can build advanced models of people's browsing patterns, and if you want tie the data with the information from another identity graph, you only need to win one identifier once and serve both pixels, your party's and the third party (cross cookie syncing). This third party identity sync historically happens at the client level, the browser in this case. However, in the future it will happen at the backend level, first party.
PS: Google is not the only exchange btw. There is APPNEXUS, Rubicon, PubMatic, etc.
> If you win the auction you get to serve your own pixel to tag the user, corroborate the data from the auction, etc.
That's not a scenario specific to real time bidding though. You could also just buy a regular ad and do that.
> if you want tie the data with the information from another identity graph, you only need to win one identifier once and serve both pixels, your party's and the third party (cross cookie syncing).
How can you associate the data from bids you didn't win to the data you get from ads that you did win and serve? Even with cookie syncing that doesn't necessarily reveal when a past/future bid opportunity matches a user you already know (unless you bid on it and win)
> That's not a scenario specific to real time bidding though. You could also just buy a regular ad and do that.
With a regular ads (ad words), you don't get to target based on cookie, geo, or other identifying characteristics in real time. Through programmatic ad exchanges you can do it in real time since every auction contains all the information to perform the targeting and enhance your models; the cookie, the url where the ad was going to be displayed, the browser characteristics, etc (read RTB for that).
> How can you associate the data from bids you didn't win to the data you get from ads that you did win and serve? Even with cookie syncing that doesn't necessarily reveal when a past/future bid opportunity matches a user you already know (unless you bid on it and win)
Associating between auctions and wins is simple, they share the same id. You listen to a different stream for bid result notifications. Moreover, your own embedded pixel will give you the information upon impression.
The key here is that the auction, what you get by just listening, comes already with all the information; if you listen enough, you can build the full browsing history of the cookies you track. Using this information you can build models to predict where these specific cookies will go next, and show them ads or alter the publisher context they are exposed to in order to route them where you want to route them. B2C marketing and political propaganda services are all about that.
This is exactly the same for Android though. Both Google Play and Apple App store charge 30%. And they both also drop the 30% to 15% for subscriptions after 1 yr.
It's estimated Apple did about $50 billion in App Store revenue in 2019, and $30 billion for Google Play store.
Now consider that about 80% of Apple's revenue actually comes from hardware, not software or people's data.
But 70% of Google's revenue comes from ads. It's insane to me that you think that in Apple's ecosystem you're the product. The product in Apple's ecosystem is their hardware and they charge for access to users.
Google does exactly the same thing, except without the regard for your privacy. Google's entire business model is selling access to its users.
This is what-aboutism at it's finest. Changing default apps has nothing to do with privacy. How did you connect the two other than "but what about..."?
In fact, forget about Android, every OS pretty much ever has allowed for changing default apps. This is strictly about control, and this current move is strictly about throwing EU regulators a slight curve ball.
People get used to things. I feel the same way about picking up an Android. People who live in New York and people who live in Nome probably would find the other’s lifestyle frustrating and opaque.
I was recently at a party when one person asked someone to take a photo with their phone. They were the only ones there with an Android phone. Not a one of the rest of us could figure out how to do it quickly. The stress of needing to be quick might have also played a part. I’m sure I could figure it out without the pressure, but in the moment, it was impossible to figure out what button did what.
I think someone just took a picture with their own iPhone and sent it via email.
By the same token, if you don't own an iPhone there's no way you'll find "Swipe over on the lock screen to quickly access the camera" because there's no visible indication that it exists.
Nor would you know that swiping down from the battery meter might give you a camera shortcut, or that pulling down on the home screen icons gives you the search box.
So you'd probably be hunting through the home screen icons on a borrowed phone to find where they put the camera app.
I don't know... my lock screen has a camera icon always visible. When you tap it, you get an isolated camera mode that only shows you photos taken in that session. That's the standard screen now, so I think Apple is doing okay on the discoverability front (for that specific use-case -- possibly the only case where something is discoverable in iOS).
But I still don't know how to take a picture on an Android phone. I have no idea what the Android virtual buttons mean or what they do at all. With similar logic, my wife still has an iPhone with a physical home button because she doesn't like my (now old) iPhone with the "swipe up" home motion. She doesn't really want to learn how to use a new (ish) gesture.
And while I'm on a roll... I also don't understand the buttons on Playstation controllers, preferring the direct lettering of the Xbox or Switch.
> my lock screen has a camera icon always visible. When you tap it, you get an isolated camera mode that only shows you photos taken in that session. That's the standard screen now, so I think Apple is doing okay on the discoverability front (for that specific use-case -- possibly the only case where something is discoverable in iOS).
Huge discoverability hiccup with that camera button on the lock screen: you have to tap and hold the camera button to get into the camera (not long, about 1 second). The first time I picked up my partner's iPhone to take a picture for her, I just about pulled my hair out trying to get that button to do anything. I tapped it about a thousand times before she got frustrated and showed me how to operate it.
It's to prevent the phone accidentally unlocking. But your experience does highlight a big problem. They should show a message when you "frustrate" tap explaining what you should do.
I don't see anything resembling a camera icon that I could tap. I can swipe sideways to get to the limited-session camera, but only because I happen to know that shortcut exists.
It's not as if the 4" SE is too small to fit a camera button on the screen, but there isn't one. Unless I turned the button off and forgot about it, but I can't imagine Apple offering that sort of UI customization.
It's almost invisible against your background photo, but at the very bottom, there are a bunch of dots just like on the home screen, except the rightmost dot is a camera icon. It's not a button you can tap, it's an indicator of what is on the page to the right. It's the same on my 7. World's most subtle indicator.
Apple makes things insanely opaque at times too: I hate to admit it, but I cursed Apple for years for removing the search function from iOS (which used to be predictably located in the left-of-home desktop/icon pane). It was literally several years after the change before I accidentally swiped down from the middle of the home screen (who the hell thought that was a reasonable control?) and discovered that search wasn't gone, it was just so well-hidden that it took years to accidentally stumble across it.
(This wasn't helped by Apple's opinionated approach to UI design, which led me to believe that in their minds, removing search functionality was exactly in line with Ives, et al's then-new "flat" design philosophy of form trumping function. FWIW, finding text on a web page in Safari is another UI abortion...)
> By the same token, if you don't own an iPhone there's no way you'll find "Swipe over on the lock screen to quickly access the camera" because there's no visible indication that it exists
There is though: that side (right) of the lock screen has a tiny camera icon at the bottom on iOS. You can long press that icon directly and open the camera, but it also sort of teaches you that sliding is quicker. (Though it's not entirely consistent because the icon on the other side, for quick access to "flashlight", doesn't help teach you that sliding that side opens the "Today" widget screen.)
It's not for lack of space on the screen, but maybe Apple got lazy with designing for older phones and just deleted it. Once upon a time I think the camera was indicated better.
A friend was driving and gave me her iPhone and asked me to answer to an SMS. It was 2011. I couldn't find a way to do it. She had to guide me as I do with my parents. I had a Galaxy S2 back then and a number of dumbphones and Symbian devices before it.
I honestly don’t understand what you were unable to do. You had to open the sms app and reply... Maybe there was something that has changed and I’ve forgotten about.
iOS finally gets homescreen widgets mixed with the icons, too! But you still have to deal with everything wanting to flow up to the top left, god forbid you should arrange things for easy access to your thumb or to look nice around your background.
I've been on iOS for years and yeah, this is comedy.
I'm still waiting for iOS to steal Android's notification system which has been vastly superior forever. People who've only ever used iOS think I'm crazy when I say this, because iOS notifications are so useless they can't imagine what a useful version would be like.
I'm on android, and I really have no idea what you're talking about -- they're both fairly useless. What apps do anything notable with notifications beyond reply-inline function? Which iphone's have had at least since last year, when I dropped off it
Though I'm on samsung so they might have customized useful features right out (they do have the neat notification bubble thing + non-fullscreen apps, but it doesn't seem to be fully developed -- lots of small bugs -- so I'm assuming that's non-standard android).
I'm a loyal Android user since smartphones became a thing. I do own an iPhone because I had to write some cross-platform code on one of my jobs, but I can't fathom using iOS in part because of how laughably useless the notification system is. It could as well not have any, it won't make a difference. Notifications disappear when you unlock, badges on icons are always there with some arbitrary numbers on them, notification center shows something from last year but not the notification you received a minute ago, and the best part: some "notifications" are modal alerts that pop up right in your face when you least expect.
And they have the audacity to call this the world's most advanced mobile OS.
Yeah, I just switched back to iOS last year after being on Android for ~5 years. The notification coalescing and types of actions you can take right from the notification blow iOS out of the water.
2. I beg to differ. A completely de-googled phone is not only extremely difficult to achieve but about as useful as a 2009 blackberry. Yeah it runs and will maybe let you check your email with 5+ hours of work just to get push notifications running but it is so completely impractical for anyone that doesn’t want to devote serious amounts of time to it. With Apple you a good balance of privacy and utility imo.
My intention here isn't necessarily to tell you what to use or buy.
1. There is nothing legally binding here, as far as I can tell. Apple software is almost entirely closed source. Zoom told us they were encrypting our stuff, too. I know that Apple can't get away with too much because of their size, but I have a very strong distrust of big tech companies that I'll likely never shake because of the disgusting track record silicon valley has toward privacy and short-sighted profit-making. Take this text for example: "Apple can’t read your iMessages while they’re being sent between you and the person you’re texting." What does it mean that it can't see them while they're being sent? Can they see them once they're at rest? Is this just innocent vagueness of the English language, or sneaky shit? Similarly, they say they can't see your location in Maps. They make no promise with the browser. In fact, they don't promise they aren't snooping on 100% of the stuff in Safari- they only say they try to protect you from other companies tracking you.
2. I don't disagree with you. And I'm just kind of a Luddite because I just don't care if I can run SnapChat or whatever on my phone. I can browse the web with a solid, privacy-respecting, browser (Firefox) with all of the privacy addons I want. I can use that browser to access the things I care about. I do use a closed-source navigation app, unfortunately, but it isn't Google and doesn't require Play services. I lock down its permissions as best I can. I use Signal for most of my messaging needs, which works fine. The one thing I actually do miss is ride-sharing apps when I travel. That's a major inconvenience. But some shitty game or social media app whose entire purpose is to track you (whether you use/trust Apple/Google's OSes or not...)? No thanks, anyway. In fact, I think there's another point in here that most of these apps are tracking the hell out of you, regardless if you trust your phone's OS.
> they say they can't see your location in Maps. They make no promise with the browser
Apple Maps doesn’t have a browser version, just and iOS and Mac OS app. Additionally see above link, all location and search history is end to end encrypted - maps searches (and other location based events that cannot be encrypted due to server side processing) are not linked to your Apple ID.
> In fact, they don't promise they aren't snooping on 100% of the stuff in Safari
Again see above link, safari history and tab sync is also end to end encrypted
I wasn't being clear with the maps-browser comment. I meant that they make no promise that they aren't tracking your location outside of the Maps app.
It's great that they claim to end-to-end encrypt their stuff. And after the FBI standoff around the San Bernardino shooters phones, I recommend that my friends and family use Apple because the options for most humans are between Windows and macOS on PCS, and iPhone and (stock, OEM) Android for phones. They definitely talk the talk and appear to walk the walk. We can never truly know, though.
I know there's no point in arguing further. I fully acknowledge that I have less objective reason to believe that Apple is tracking me than you have to believe that they're not. But all of my friends thought I was the crazy tinfoil hat guy in the period between the signing of the U.S. Patriot Act and Edward Snowden. And after that... they still think I'm the crazy tinfoil hat guy. Maybe I'm a broken clock and was right once, or maybe Silicon Valley is full of corporate scumbag liars and maybe companies lie about their encryption (Zoom) and about their stance on privacy (Facebook). Maybe Apple is the lone shining beacon of privacy in SV. Maybe.
But you're definitely letting perfect be the enemy of good if you think that closed-sourced drivers means that e.g., a closed source web browser doesn't increase your privacy attack surface.
Life is full of choices between imperfect options. And security/privacy is always qualified with "from whom". Sure, closed source drivers are not ideal and I am more vulnerable to privacy attacks from state actors. But why should my response to that be to just willingly give all of my personally identifiable information to Google, Inc?
Yes, that's what I mean. But you're moving the goalposts. I, too, fear that there will not be a usable, open source OS for smartphones in the near future. But that's not what I said above and it's not what you appear to be arguing.
Today, AOSP is absolutely open source. You're acting like it's not.
And absolutely useless for any company that wants to sell a phone outside of China without Google Play Services. Most phones run with Google’s closed source equivalents not the unmaintained AOSP versions.
You don’t know what the apps on your Android phone is doing because they all interact with Google Play Services. Most phones don’t even use the open source dialer.
That's all true and fine. But is there anything I said that hints that I'm a company trying to sell an Android phone without Google? If not, what are you refuting exactly?
I said that we don't know what Apple software is doing because it's all closed source. You then spent the last several replies trying to convince us that the same is effectively true of Android. It's not. You know how I know? I'm writing this reply from a Pixel 2 running LineageOS without Google Play Services. Is it a pain in the ass to do this kind of setup? Yep. Do I miss out on TikTok? Probably (I don't want it, so I don't know if it requires Play Services). Is it closed source? No.
In any case, refuting my claim that we can't trust Apple by arguing that we also can't trust Google doesn't actually refute a thing.
I'm not looking for a pat on the back from you. Again, all I said was that you (mostly) don't know what closed source software is actually doing. I have yet to understand how in the world you disagree with that.
Of course not. And even if I did, there's no chance I could catch every possible bug or issue or exploitable issue. But, like I said several replies ago: life is full of choices between imperfect options. I try to choose the less bad choice as often as possible.
If you wanted to spy on your users, would you honestly risk publishing your source code? Let's be real.
Location, web searches, app usage etc etc. Try turning all tracking off and your phone becomes a brick. Google Assistant no longer works, google maps can no longer remember where your home and work are (cause that can’t happen on device for some reason). Top it all off and you’ll get constant pop ups asking you to turn it back on.... not fun.
That’s virtually every android device in existence. Just because someone degoogled an android once as an experiment doesn’t mean it becomes the new definition of what android is.
> I am asking how does Android, Google's Android distribution not anything else, tracks users?
And I am saying it is a pointless thought experiment to separate Google from Android. Next you’ll say it’s the hardware that is android, not the software and ask how the hardware directly tracks users.
Edit: Read my original comment again, you are changing the subject. I haven’t said anything remotely conspiratorial, Google is open about their tracking in android. My point is that Google tracks you on android and if you turn it off your phone becomes crippled and in many cases for no reason except that google wants to make it as painful as possible to turn off data collection. Data collection is their business model after all.
iOS too ships with Google as the default search engine and just like on iOS, you can pick a different default on Android too. In fact Android has always allowed for changing all meaningful defaults, not something you can say about iOS. And in fact the world's leading Android makers, like Samsung, all of them ship with different defaults except for the Search engine (we're talking browser, email application, etc).
And all desktops actually ship with a browser that default to a search engine that tracks your searches, including Microsoft's Edge and their integration with Bing Ads. And Google is in fact the most transparent about what they track.
So if your answer is the Google Profile, which is transparent and can be turned off, then it's a pretty shitty answer. Unless you can point to implementation details in Android proper, all of this is just a conspiracy theory, similar to anti-vaxxing.
That's not Android. Those are Google apps. They would track you just the same if you ran them on iOS or any other OS, and you can turn them off very easily.
This is not limited to just those with Google Play Services installed. Even nearly pure AOSP builds like LineageOS still default to Google’s DNS servers, wifi gateway checks, and SUPL server, and replacing those defaults with privacy-respecting alternatives has been made harder due to changes that Google pushed into AOSP.
Google Play Services provides valuable services that need a backend component.
I asked for evidence that Google tracks you in nefarious ways via Android.
Am I being tracked when using their DNS servers, which are otherwise very valuable for people suffering from DNS-level banning of websites?
And what do you mean by "privacy respecting"?
Words are cheap. I hope the privacy respecting apps and services you use can guarantee that either via technology (encryption, open source, reproducible builds), or via contract (and a ToS that can be changed on a whim for a free service isn't a contract that can protect you).
> I hope the privacy respecting apps and services you use can guarantee that either via technology (encryption, open source, reproducible builds)
This is what the F-Droid repository is all about. But again, Google has insisted on changes to AOSP that will shortly make it much more difficult for ordinary users (i.e. those who cannot use the command line) to make use of such free and libre offerings.
You can replace them much more easily than you can on iOS, and you don't even need to install a third party ROM. You can turn SUPL off entirely on any Android phone out of the box, while you cannot on iOS.
On the contrary, iOS actually tracks you far more than Android. This is just marketing-driven conventional wisdom that doesn't hold up when you take even the most cursory look at it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23329646
You are comparing default apps privacy and saying that is OS privacy. I specifically pointed out data collection in the OS (that you can't turn off) that make iOS far worse than Android for privacy.
Your paper also compares the amount of data sent to Google for an Android device using default apps vs. an iPhone using default apps and shows that the latter sends much more. That's not a very useful comparison. If you compare how much each device sends to Apple, the Android device would win by a landslide, though again, that is not a useful comparison.
Which part of it my assertions did you have trouble following? I'll quote it below in case you have trouble following the link, but I worry this might violate a repetition rule:
iOS having better privacy is a myth. iOS sends your location to Apple every time any the GPS is used, and you can't turn it off. You cannot install apps on your phone without telling Apple which apps they are, and if you want to develop your own apps for your device without having to reinstall weekly, you have to hand over payment information.
Stock Android devices from nearly any vendor do not suffer from these problems, and reputable vendors do even better (like in this case, where even voice transcription does not send data off device).
I find it equally shocking that if I bought an Android phone three years ago, that any new feature Google introduced would be absolutely useless to me without buying a new phone....
This misses the point in my opinion. Android doesn't depend on Google for much of its functionality, unlike iOS with Apple. For example, I can install a command line-style launcher, animated wallpapers, alternative app stores, and other non-Google features without any rooting or other unapproved modifications because Android as a platform is far more flexible. With unapproved modifications, I can also bypass Google services entirely and depend on the open-source community.
Sure, that's definitely a worthy point that I gladly agree with, although it's a different point. I would maintain that older Android devices generally feel less out of date, feature-wise, than iOS devices of a similar vintage because far fewer features need to be handled by the core OS.
Yeah. Tell that to my son who had a Moto G before he “upgraded” to my old iPhone 6s (introduced 2015) that was 3 years older. The Moto 3 was always touted as a good midrange phone. It might have felt better “feature wise” if he had toyed with it, but Android hardware just doesn’t age well. I can’t imagine burdening it with more features from third parties.
Btw, the iPhone 6s is still running the latest iOS version.
For what it's worth as a long time Apple user, I don't have any use for this feature. I think Apple knows this, which probably contributes to they have punted it for so long. shrug
Termux is a pretty much full-fledged linux userland in an app. I've run a Node.js server from my phone and connected to it from my laptop. I've written code in vim. I've ssh'd into many a server. All in Termux. It's the best.
Glad to see that antitrust and bringing them into court has finally pressured them into building a feature that should of been standard for a long time.
But their software is always on the backend of this. I suspect they're letting it happen because webkit (with all their hooks) will be an integral part of all the apps they allow.
Disclaimer: I'm speculating on the reason: There may not be a standardized URL scheme for mapping applications whereas both e-mail and browsers have it already (http(s): and mailto:).
It's possible though! Apple could define a standard and say "that's how you can open maps" but currently it's a moving target as mapping applications support varying features like directions with waypoints, POI searches, general searches, area selections, etc. They'd have to settle on some standard that Apple Maps support which almost is guaranteed to not support several Google Maps features.
Yes let me pay $2 for a feature that should be standard or will likey be built in by Apple eventually after they remove this app from the store.
Same with MacOS. I don't want to pay for a window snapping app so I can quickly send windows to the sides or corners. Windows has done that well for years and upgraded it in 10. Expand that tool, make it built in, and I'll give this old macbook someone gave me another try. Honestly this was a breaking point when I gave OSX a shot last year for a few days. That MacBook is awesome but it just sucks to use coming from Windows navigation, even with Windows search often borked.
I agree that the situation with Apple sucks, but they haven't changed their stance since the start of their app platform. So I'd rather pay $2 to fix my own workflows than to withhold my money in protest of Apple's long term platform vision.
I like iOS for the most part and wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Not having real extensions for privacy and adblocking and other layout/js modifications/tweaks on mobile browsers has been a gigantic hassle for a decade. Hopefully this opens up the market for someone to make an actually great browser for iOS.
They have an API that lets you block some static rules. It's way better than nothing but it is not a true substitute for the kinds of things and dynamic filtering you can (for now) currently do in web browser extensions. It also appears to have a rather low rule limit.
Would be great to change the default calendar and contacts apps as well. There’s a large list of 3rd-party calendar apps, but the user often gets redirected back to the built-in apps, eg when interacting with invitation emails or notification center.
I agree! I would love calendar, contacts, maps, notes, & reminders. All things I use super frequently. I'd ask for default messages/vid chat change (to WhatsApp or Google Duo) but that'd be asking for too much haha
I know that this is stupid pet peeve but my number one thing to fix is not being able to change the extension of a file with the standard iOS tools. (or is there a way to do this?)
The length to which I needed to go to when I needed to do this recently on a video which was shared with me was mind boggling. I'm not sure if this is because the video was in Files and not in Gallery, but it shouldn't really matter. If anything, that would be exactly where I'd expect to have such a feature.
