I don’t care if anyone has a Xiaomi, Oneplus, Samsung, etc. Each brand is using a modified version of Android, and they chose to be compatible with each other. But for example the “blue vs green bubble” drama is a thing specifically because of Apple locking their unsuspecting users into a closed ecosystem. And it sure isn’t Android’s fault for not being compatible with it.
The more power a company like this gains, the worse will it be for the whole industry.
iPhone vs Android has always been more about trendiness than practicality in the social groups I’ve been in. We’re all still Penny from Inspector Gadget walking around with most of the world’s knowledge within arm’s reach.
I don’t get buying flagship models of either type for $800+ then only using them for texting in the default messaging app, taking photos that are marginally better than the photos three models ago, and social media/spotify with earbuds. And then paying like $90/month for service. Even the “budget” iPhone SE is still over $400.
You can get essentially the same setup on a $150 Android with service for $20/month. If you are in the small group of people who actually want to do more things with a phone like use unofficial app repos or turn it into an actual server that self-hosts all kinds of shit (web server, media library, a couple offer one-off applications all backed up in a cloud service) you can then do that much more easily on an Android phone, and for much cheaper. In fact, I don’t know anyone who is doing any or that on an iPhone anymore.
And when they stop releasing updates for your model, you can still install custom firmware that stays up to date.
Your phone privacy is owned by your isp and the OS maker. You arent doing the world any better being on android. Google is fucking awful too. Both are awful and should be broken up. They are way too large and powerful and only having 2 phone OSes in the world everyone runs made by 2 greeeeedy ass corporations is the problem neither of you can solve gloating about which evil corp you give money to to interact with modern society.
Install GrapheneOS , it is degoogled, and security focused. if you want play store it runs inside a sandbox so Google isn’t in all your biz. Also has Mic and Camera shutoff options for the paranoid types.
This was exactly my point, I’m not lining up for an iPhone or an android. The lack of choice is what drives me to buy apple because when the time comes for a new phone it’s one or the other and I prefer the experience on iPhone. Really I would rather not give my money to either but there are no viable alternatives. I would not criticize anyone for buying android or apple, it’s a matter of what kind of shit sandwich do you want to eat, and it’s terrible.
I have one of each. I guess I’m Chaotic Evil.
So i support Google by using an open source OS? Just because your phone uses Android dosent mean it has any Google services included. Since Android itself is open source, there are many Android OSs that dont include any Google Software.
Technically, you support google when you buy a phone that ships with licensed android including all Google’s shitware preinstalled
Yeah, but unfortunately it is impossible to buy a phone without that
Thats my point.
Network effect. Same reason why you should use firefox (or alts) as much as possible over chromium (or alts).
I do miss Symbian smartphones. Nokia was the shit back then
As a person who has never owned anything but android…you can’t possibly think Google is any less evil.
https://slrpnk.net/comment/6754380 Nobody is forcing me to buy their phones or their stock version of android though. A lot of people manage to live just fine with fully de-googled roms, installable even on google’s own phones.
And do those phones that have been degoogled solve the issue of all the slave labor along the production chain?
And even if you install a ROM… You’re still supporting them. You’re funding Google.
I’m sorry dude but you’re comparing apples to apples. They’re both horrible disgusting companies, and there really is no picking the morally correct side.
The FBI demonstrated during the San Bernardino shooting investigation that Apple must purposefully put backdoors in their devices, as the FBI was able to independently crack the phone, which isn’t possible without a backdoor or a security flaw so poor that a third-world hacker could access it with some level of effort or knowledge.
Do not trust Apple with your privacy, even less so than Google. At least Google will allow you to see everything they’ve collected on you and prevent random bad actors from accessing your data, which is something we can’t be sure of with apple. This isn’t about which is the more moral company, it’s about which is more dangerous to the consumer. Complete lack of control over your computing environment will only make sense in cases where you’re expected to have a complete lack of knowledge of computers and someone else does the thinking and manages your device.
The fbi contracted a third party to defeat the limit on passcode attempts so they could brute force the lock screen by having someone just sit there trying every possible code. My understanding is that it involved physical access to the device and the way that process is handled by the phone was reengineered shortly afterwards to prevent it from happening in the future.
That’s not a backdoor, that’s sawing the front door into pieces to avoid triggering the anti-tamper system on the hinges and lock.
If you want backdoor worries, look to the generations of apple chips with undocumented memory mapped io registers that were in development during that time period. But don’t think too hard about how arm chips are developed or why that got left in there or how. You may come to the undeniable conclusion that a natsec cutout is licensing slabs of arm feature silicon with backdoors built in.
This is not a defense of apple. Only a clarification that there wasn’t a backdoor found in the San bernidino phone, and that if you wanna be freaked out about back doors there’s better stuff to get crazy over.
Gotcha gotcha
Thanks for the clarification
Yes, because not all Android phones are made in the same factory. There are brands with next to no slave labour.
More than you are implying. An Apple product means you have to buy from Apple. At least with android you can order a Fairphone. Which, while not perfect, is significantly better in the “slave labor” category.
Google is not a good company by any means, but when you buy their Pixel it’s your device. You can unlock its bootloader and install whichever OS you like. And even with the stock Android you’ve always been free to do anything. There are no features built into Android that lock you in and force the other side to buy one as well. Whereas Apple’s iMessage is available on iPhones only, peer pressuring others into buying one. Saying that buying an iPhone and an Android phone is morally the same is dishonest at the least. Especially since Android is just an open platform and each manufacturer is using their own modified version. Brands such as Xiaomi or Huawei went even beyond the software skin and optimized their ROMs to run especially well with their own hardware. If you buy an iPhone, you are forcing those around you into buying a specific device made by a specific company that loves playing Monopoly a bit too much.
I will admit the openness is why I chose one disgustingly evil company over the other. You do have a point there. But there is no getting over the fact that Google is doing serious damage in many ways and just because you managed to uninstall all their spyware when you bought a pixel or any android device you are still funding that. You personally help them grow and become more of a problem for the Internet at large.
And I like that you completely glossed over the biggest point… That they both profit off of slave labor. And of course child labor.
But hey open software means slaves are not as bad right?
Like I said, an Android phone does not equal a Pixel made by Google. If you are concerned about where the resources used to manufacture your device are from, get a Fairphone and flash Lineage/CalixOS on it. That way you are “supporting” Google in the smallest possible way and you can still use a smartphone.
Things you buy aren’t moral choices. If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism there must neither be any moral consumption under capitalism either.
Lol seriously. He’s literally trying to frame Google as the morally correct choice as opposed to the teensy bit less evil choice.
I‘ve had both and I hate both for their own specific reasons. But you can‘t be living with a dumb flip phone these days.
Or… can you?
In 2020 I tried to buy a burner tracphone at a Walgreens, and the clerk was just shocked and incredulous that someone might really want to pay money for such a thing.
@mkwt @SternburgExport I got one for my son for emergencies, not like the old days though the minutes expire after 90 days
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Only if user isn’t using encryption ( which is standard these days ) or has developer mode usb debugging left open
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So I see a company thay duplicates phones, with no source on cracking encryption, other than their own company got hacked. And if you have a GrapheneOS phone you can shut off external USB. like connecting a cord , headset to computer does nothing unless you can login to phone and turn the USB option on.
Much of your data can just be subpoenaed and then provided to law enforcement without physical access however. Apple complies 90% of the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/23/apple-user-data-law-enforcement-falling-short
Also, there are ways that LE can bypass your iphone’s encryption. Just doesn’t work all the time.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ag5yj/unlock-apple-iphone-database-for-police
GrapheneOS, based on AOSP, is really the only truly private and secure option. Android offering interoperability is not a downside and Apple having a walled garden does not mean it provides increased security. Apple is decidedly not transparent and this is ultimately not a good thing.
You’re talking about data stored in the apple cloud (I think without the account recovery turned off, but I’m not 100% on that). The same is true of googles cloud services.
Agencies haven’t been focusing on getting the actual texts that say “here I go, doing something you don’t like!” For quite a while because of the amount of variability involved. What I hear spooks talking about is building enough pc for a rubber hose interrogation with unsecured parallel data streams like push notifications.
Shows cop a PinePhone with main partition encrypted with LUKS
They don’t need to. They have the keys.
NOW it’s the end of discussion.
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Yeah, defnitely not a thing in Brazil. We get rich idiots bragging about their iPhones, sure, but the text bubble thing never came over.
… Broadly because we don’t. Text in Brazil. We use WhatsApp or Telegram.
SMS/MMS was never really a thing here.
tell that the social cliques in high school. its marketing and its real.
source: kids.
Who fucking cares what high schoolers think?
its their lived experience and they are the future adults of our world.
if the insane amount of micro-targeted manipulation and pressure these kids face on a daily basis does not concern you, then your lack of empathy is self evident and there is nothing else to be said to you.
Yeah, because we never experienced that as kids ourselves
No, you didn’t, or at least not at this level.
Sure, TV ads and even some old games had ads which were targeted to specific demographics (their audience), but modern digital ads are targeted to vulnerabilities of specific individuals (using location, search, purchase history, etc.). They’re also shown much more often and baked into products which are specifically designed to target your subconscious psychology (using nudging, gamification, etc.) so you use them more.
The kind of data required for the level of ad targeting done now did not exist more than maybe 15-20 years ago.
You’re completely glossing over the fact that there was a whole different set of problems my generation had to deal with in the 90s. But sure, only modern kids ever struggled. We’ll go with that.
Obviously every generation has its struggles, but I was never disagreeing with that. If you treat this as “just another generational problem,” you are fundamentally missing the point. It’s as you say, a whole different set of problems.
Micro targeted ads are hard to ignore because most of the time they’re influencing our subconscious state. This isn’t just another generational issue we’re facing, it’s fundamentally shaping the way people look at the world without them even being aware of it. It’s not limited to just the current generation, because everyone interacts with technology. However, targeting inner psychology will obviously impact people with less developed brains more than it will impact adults, and we’re beginning to see the effects of that already with Gen Z.
If it isn’t the phone, it is shoes, or other stupid shit. people grow up and the realize that none of that stupid shit matters
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oh, understood. just saying that the marketing of social shame has been strategically exended into the colour of your text bubble pixels… from the “think different” company.
signal gets installed on every phone in my house, but the kids are drawn to where the other kids are and Apple snobbery is rife in the area I am in.
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I would say the majority of it is just the usual human monkey brained reactionary garbage that our species has always dealt with. the concerning bit is how our own brains have been weaponized against us with untold amounts of money and time expended in learning how to manipulate enough of us to extract and realocate “value” from the many to the few.
I think we are collectively building a benificial immune reaction to this invasion of our selves, but the attack is so pervasive and so persistent that it is, quite literally, mentally and physically debilitating - certainly by design. will we just exhaust ourselves into submission or change paths and try something that does not culminate in a species ending orgy of consumption and conflict? I have no idea, but very few of our possible futures look particularly hopeful to me at the moment.
I do, however, try to hold on to some thread of optimisim - I need a reason to get up in the morning.
I appreciate the dialogue, fellow internet denizen :-)
It absolutely is real.
Source: my own experience for the last four years
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peers being frustrated because I have an android… being left out of group chats because people don’t wanna break their existing imessage groups… having to constantly bother people about not sending videos/images over text because they become a blurry mess… frequently apologizing just for having an android…
And also a general awareness I’ve developed that I have been left out of things… harder to know because, well, I was left out.
Mind you I am probably in the single worst location for this in terms of mindshare. By my unscientific observation, ~0.5% of students had an android at my school.
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Does the year you were born start with “20”?
Then you are hanging around with highschool kids that care what shoes you wear. I guaranty nobody working and living a proper life gives a shit on text bubble colours
Those colors represent the type of message sent: encrypted or not encrypted. From a privacy point of view it’s important.
If you wamted privacy you would not be using the OS delivered messaging app that IOS can read anyway to flag CASM. And the group can screenshot and share. if you actually wanted privacy you would be using a tool like Session.
They’re kids and plus most of it is subconscious. None of them are mean or anything about it. I can assure if I was to ask them, they’d all say it’s totally fine and they don’t mind at all and they understand, but still they end up sending one less text because they have negative feelings associated with it and thus their brain brings it up a little less.
Maybe nobody working gives a shit right now, but if this is how the kids are growing up, it’s gonna keep becoming a bigger problem
The corporate oligarchy of unmerica working exactly as designed, divide and conquer
It’s really weird that this is what you imagine when someone buys something from a giant corporation that isn’t your preferred giant corporation.
For like the fiftieth time, no one that matters cares what phone you bought, what OS it runs, or what color your texts are on other phones you didn’t buy. As a person that keeps buying iPhones, I don’t care what you buy. Please feel free to stop caring what I buy.
My sentiments exactly. I cannot possibly fathom wasting mental energy on such a mundane thing.
Ah yes, the classic centrist position. Why does it matter if the government performs mass surveillance if you have nothing to hide? Why does it matter if I drive a huge and inefficient car? I can make all these choices secure in the knowledge that I never do bad things so they never occur as a result of my actions.
I’m not sure you’re in the right thread here, unless ios and android are political identities now.
It’s a phone, man. Not an F-350 rolling coal with a Trump flag.
Swipe on. It’s okay if you don’t understand how this stuff works.
Nu uh, iPhone is going to cure world hunger. Why do you think he’s called Tim COOK?
Guess I’m no longer an Apple fan. Huh. I’m just locked in at this point. Switching would just spread my data around more and I’m already committed to not upgrading for a few years.
On Android you can make a hell of a lot more choices on where your data goes. The vast majority lives on my nas… and i can call back to it any time i want. Personal cloud of sorts.
As an Android user, Android phones with Google Play Services are no better - in fact I’d say they’re probably worse
No at least you can side loade and install other app stores out of the box with android. It`s far from perfect but still way better.
FDroid for open source apps.
News flash, you can do that on iOS too.
Not really, no
Okay! You’re wrong but that’s alright. I’m running custom apps on my device without jailbreaking.
Don’t you have to jailbreak to do that
Nope. You can install any app with developer license
With developer license
Doesn’t seem fair to pay for the luxury of being able to install your own software
Which costs an additional $100/yr for something that’s free on any other platform.
Yeah, the customs apps, for which you pay a developer license for. Which need to be reinstalled every so often because Apple doesn’t want you to use apps like that.
They run so great though /s
I cant be the only one who dreams of apple and all their pattents becoming foss.
Itl never happen under capitalism but damn would it be nice.
I’m pretty much roped in at this point within their ecosystem, it all just talks together and works most of the time. Possibly I’ll regret it at some point in time when my secret history of browsing Margaret Thatcher furry porn is exposed to the world as punishment for criticizing the newest Apple Butt Plug attachment, but for now it just works better than the alternatives that I’ve seen.
Oddly specific
They are all kind of terrible right now, at least for me. I hate what the big companies are doing, and the smaller projects such as Fairphone simply aren’t good enough yet. Guess I’ll try to make my existing one last for as long as possible, though that was already the plan.
the smaller projects such as Fairphone simply aren’t good enough yet
What is not good enough with Fairphone ?
Their 7 (?) years of software support is kind of misleading to me because they stop getting chip-level security updates after something like 3-4 years due to the specific Qualcomm chip they use. Not to mention the chip is on the slower side of today’s phones, let alone phones 7 years from now.
I can see how others might be fine with that though, just my 2 cents.
Display, battery life, performance, supported bands, software reliability, camera quality, etc.
I know I am one of those weirdos that asks for a lot from a mobile device, but I want something that can act as a high speed hotspot for 5 devices and a desktop environment at the same time, while playing back high resolution media and charging fast. This kind of thing has always been possible with Samsung’s flagship, but now every generation it feels like yet more is removed compared to the older one. I’m still on the S21U and while I’m not very happy with it, I haven’t seen anything better, including the new Samsungs.
Maybe I should set my sights lower, but it just frustrates me because these are all things my S9+ could do in 2017.
Power users get screwed over now.
i feel you, the fairphone 4 works well enough for me though. a lot of software/hardware bugs are yet to be ironed out fully, but fairphones are steadily getting better.
although the 6th gen needs to improve a lot, the 5’s launch was disappointing to say the least.
I also have a Fairphone 4, but I have encountered no significant bugs I can remember.
Installed LineageOS on it though, with microG, instead of /e/.
Can you tell me what issues you had?
Honestly, I also don’t like Android. But well, Linux phones are still lagging behind, which is a shame, or else I would have gone for one.
Isn’t android built off Linux?
It technically is, but “Linux” in Android’s case is meant as the kernel.
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In a rather unorthodox way, yes.
Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.
The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.
