Back on reddit, there was a subreddit called non-golfers. It was created to poke fun at atheists, being a metaphor for a community around something they don’t like. It grew, with newcomers not understanding the joke and taking it seriously and unironically being a community about hating golf. (I was one of those people, I’m self aware now). It kinda strikes me as human nature, tribalism, rearing its ugly head once again. I’ll leave you with this relevant video, highly worth the watch.
It’s amazing how many subreddits fell victim to the satire to unironic hate club lifecycle. And that video was great. Especially the part at the end about how groups make their own totem/straw men to keep the anger up.
Yeah. For the most part those communities seemed to have not jumped to lemmy which I’m grateful for. I think hate is like the fast food of emotions, it’s addictive and we love it but it’s bad for you and eating nothing but that will fuck you up. That video really fundamentally changed how I view things on the internet and if there’s one thing I really wish I could expose more people to, that’s it.
Not if you care about privacy and security, the environment (comparatively), user experience, industrial design, and any number of things that are important to tons of customers.
No company is perfect, nor are they beyond criticism. But the lemmy Apple-bad hive-mind is a bunch of people who can’t see past their Linux memes.
There is plenty to criticize about Apple when it comes to anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices…
But if you’re gonna talk on the level of “evil” and “freedom”, Apple’s greatest sin is their supply chain.
And then there’s Google, whose evil I would place somewhere between [Apple’s] pseudo-monopoly and [Apple’s] pseudo-slavery. At least Apple is a tech company. Google is a surveillance company that just happens to make tech so they can monitor you more closely.
Working with the shared-space AR APIs in iOS and Android really drove home the difference in their priorities. The iOS SDK only allowed us to share AR data through a local, SDK-managed connection. The data is opaque, can’t be directly serialized, and doesn’t work anyway if you try to persist/distribute it yourself. Android, on the other hand… They wanted us to upload your AR data to Google-owned servers, where they could do Google-knows-what with the scans of your living room.
It’s sad that we’re at a point where you have to either pay for your privacy, or pay with your privacy. But we can at least not be naive about it. Android is more interoperable, more prolific, and more lenient with third-party code. And that’s because it’s a good strategy if you’re a surveillance giant. Not because it’s good for consumers.
Edit:
Got a couple of comments that are like “Um, actually, Apple is still subject to government surveillance and exploits”.
Let me be clear: You should not expect any off-the-shelf product to shield you from intelligence agencies and state-sponsored hackers. You will have to radically change your life to accomplish that, and “Apple or Google?” won’t even be a relevant question for you.
And I’m not saying Apple doesn’t do shady monitoring for their own commercial purposes.
All I’m saying is that Google’s core business model is shady monitoring, and that directly influences their decisions regarding Android. So painting it as the commoner’s hero against the greedy walled-garden warden is a dangerous proposition.
There are no good guys here.
There’s some hardware, SDKs, and back-end services that you can evaluate on their own merits if you’re capable.
But if you want to just look at business practices:
There’s one company that doesn’t want to integrate with anything outside of their own products – because that’s good for their bottom line.
And there’s one company that wants to integrate with anything and everything – because that’s good for their bottom line.
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.
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.
My FP4 was affected by the “ghost touch” hardware bug, i ended up getting a replacement screen after contacting support. (it never fully went away, it has a few spasms every once in a while)
also the crashing while connected to 5G put me in a few pickles. sometimes when receiving a call while watching youtube the call’s notification bubble will take up to 5 seconds to appear at all.
it seems to also ocasionally forget that it has a SIM card installed, though that sim has been in use for 10+ years, so i can’t say if that’s the Fairphones’s fault.
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.
I once wanted to repair an older Ipad because the screen was cracked. The repair would have cost 600€ at an Apple reseller. A new Ipad would have been about 700€ at the time.
There is a reason why Apple is so against the right to repair.
Even their “self-repair” option nowadays is a load of bollocks. You have to rent the expensive machine, order a new part (which can only come from them of course), send out your part and wait before they will send the replacement part, then hope you don’t fuck up slightly, causing you to break the screen and you having to pay through your nose again to order a replacement.
So it only costs slightly less, but you will not have a phone for weeks.
There really is no reason third party hardware can’t be installed at the users own risk. But that would mean competition for Apple, and they don’t like that.
Why is it always people that use android bragging about that people that use apple don’t want to communicate with them and completly ignore them. And right after they go play ps5 exclusives.
Playstation or Nintendo have no open hardware or software you can install on those products so why Apple is different from them ? Only because they make mobile phones or PCs ? If they decide they don’t do PC or mobile phone and rename their products to something different, abandon standards that in fact they established and then market their products as it’s not a phone people, it’s not a pc, don’t use it if you want a pc or mobile phone, would this make people feeling happy ? That’s stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
bro, the are android ROMs... there are ROMs whose entire thing is privacy and removing anything google. Saying they're equal is making a bad faith argument "Apple and Google are evil so Android is evil" 😩
Android is much more open than Apple ever will be. They aren't even in the same universe.
Nope. You can install any app with developer license. You can also jailbreak. Don’t bother replying to this comment, I’ve read enough brain dead replies already.
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.
slrpnk.net/comment/6754380Nobody 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
if youre worried about backdoors and spying, its a good idea to start paying attention to the trade publications and training media made for reprehensible spooks.
they’ll say shit that makes you throw up in your mouth but you’ll never look at push notifications or sms the same way again.
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.
My rule at work has always been based around the bears and hikers analogy. You dont have to be the best at what you do. Just dont be the worst.
Also some jobs afford opportunities for non-conventional self-education. If you can learn useful personal or professional skills while at working, do it, and under the guise of work.
Somebody please tell me what’s wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide MMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there’s no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
Edit: MMS not SMS. I didn’t understand the difference.
SMS doesn’t handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of “texting” but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don’t really fix much.
(I guess I don’t know the difference between SMS and MMS.)
I must be using MMS for texting. All of those features work for me and anyone I text with. The only issue I’ve ever had is imessage compressing videos to and from my android.
Wait until everyone and their dogs gets back to MMS…
You know how expensive they were during the upcoming of WhatsApp? Germany paid 0,80€ (at the time. Though the price is probably not much different during the early iPhone/Android 2.3 times) per picture. Compare that to the amount of stuff sent today and at the time you will probably pay 5€ per day just to get some things across.
It’s ironic that Europe adopted SMS years before we did in America because texting was absurdly expensive here. I remember paying $0.25/SMS back in 2003 or so (it dropped to a comparable bargain of $0.10/SMS after you sent 20 messages in a month), plus we had to pay to both send and receive them. I remember having to pay my parents $20/mo extra just to have unlimited SMS/MMS on my line only a couple years later once I was old enough to get a job.
I’m surprised that Europe kept up per message charges for MMS so long, they were basically always billed at the same rate as SMS here.
It’s just that almost every phone plan includes sms (dunno about mms) nowadays. So it’s a no brainer and those that are getting pre paid sims probably only need it for calling anyways.
Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app
SMS is even worse in terms of openness. You won’t find a modem that runs open source baseband firmware. It’s because the radios are subject to several regulations which means customers can’t be able to modify that firmware.
Imma be honest, half my communication involves emojis on discord. Jeb with his arms up is part of my personality now and I won’t apologize. When I started seeing someone a few weeks ago I had to explain that he’s missing out on half of my personality by texting. I substitute by jebbing in person but it’s just not the same 😔
It’s unencrypted and we know with certainly that the messages are stored by federal agencies and cell carriers. It also requires giving out one’s phone number which may be undesirable in some situations
MMS doesn’t have much bandwidth available and it’ll just compress instead of failing to send, so even android to android if you send a long enough HD video the recipient will get compressed garbage. Then, of course, there’s the fact any videos sent over MMS from android to an iPhone(and vice versa iirc) becomes compressed garbage no matter how long or HD the video was, but that’s more Apple’s fault than MMS directly.
If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.
In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that’s a problem. You’d be sending international texts all day every day.
SMS and MMS are literally the worst possible option. Zero security, zero privacy, zero features, dogshit quality photos and videos (especially when messaging an Apple user).
because cellular providers are actually criminals.
Also sms (and mms, whatever the fuck else exists, it’s all terrible, shits all packets flowing through the internet, it’s the same shit) sucks, and is bad, and you shouldnt use it.
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