The big thing for me (though there are others) is emulating old games. I realize this is probably not a super high demand use case, but I love playing NES and SNES games on my phone during... down time.

I was an iPhone user for some time, but got fed up with Apple telling me what software I could and could not run (without a jail break / side load.) I'd go back if they free up the app store market a bit. I don't find some of their restrictions reasonable.

This isn't a solution for most, but if you know your way around XCode, you can build https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch for any iOS device without the need for jailbreak. The repo contains working xcode projects (though it still may take a little tinkering...) I even got it running on my appleTV!

Just be prepared to rebuild it every week for no reason other than Apple would really like you to pay them a software development tax.

Local builds didn’t need to have certs updated weekly before at least. Doubt they do now.

If you have never had a paid developer account your provisioning profile is only good for a week. This period used to be 30 days but was downgraded to a week sometime in mid-2016, if my recollection is correct.

Apparently if you have had (or currently have) such an account, the period is longer.

You also can't use all the features of the platform, see the "Apple Developer" vs. ADP columns on https://help.apple.com/developer-account/#/dev21218dfd6.

Don’t local builds get the expiry date of the development certificate?

Yes, but if you do not have a paid account Apple will only give you a certificate that is good for 7 days.

Aah, I misread the comment I was responding to, sorry.

Sure, there are a bunch of ways I could have accomplished what I wanted. You can side load quite a few emulators these days without rooting, but man... just... why do I have to? On android I download the thing and go. Once driod hardware and software got better I dropped iOS and haven't looked back.

You would have to rebuild the app weekly unless you pay Apple a yearly fee.

Minor correction: you would have to resign the app, not rebuild it.

Are you sure? I’ve done local builds of iOS apps in the past and didn’t need to resign weekly. Only sideloading apps requires weekly resigning.

Well not OP, but the reasons I use Android instead of Apple are:

1. Price. 2. Availability. 3. Ability to install apps from apks, & any store instead of only their own store. 4. Many features, like double sim, memory card, otg, etc are only in Android.

Dual SIM is now available in the iPhone XS and XS Max.

2nd SIM has to be an eSIM though, I believe. I'm not familiar with eSIMs enough to say what the consequences of that are, though.

Not all carriers support it. That's the only issue.

Is it? E.g., I haven't found any information on how difficult it is to swap between multiple eSIMs?

>Ability to install apps from apks, & any store instead of only their own store.

I enjoy the ease of pirating apps on Android too.

Agreed, but then there are other reasons for direct apk installing, like not willing to pay Play Store for publishing test apps, orlike tubemate, the apps which are not allowed at store.

> I enjoy the ease of pirating apps on Android too.

This is an unfair characterization–am I a software pirate because I don't get all my apps from the App Store on macOS?

Third party APK installation implies piracy?

For me it is running a browser that does not have to use the Safari rendering engine under the hood.

This position is bizarre to me.

Who actually cares that much about which browser rendering engine they use.

Especially since any new one would likely be almost identical to Safari anyway.

You might want to browse https://caniuse.com/ There are so many features of HTML/CSS/JavaScript that Apple has not seen fit to put into Safari (because, of course, doing so could potentially impact their profits from app sales), but those features exist in Chrome and Firefox on Android. Safari on iOS has become the IE6 of the modern web development era and is really holding us back.

For ES6 Safari has some of the best support of all browsers other than Chrome: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Most features you are talking about are not yet Stage 2 supported. Chrome went ahead and built a lot of these features without full TC29 support. Many service worker features are still Stage 0/1. When it hits Stage 2 safari will gain support.

I think the malice attributed to Apple is somewhat earned due to momentum in the PWA space, but is mostly just do to obeying TC29 stages.

I still don't understand why this matters.

Who cares if Firefox or Chrome on iOS support some new feature if everybody is using Safari since it's the default. You can't ignore half of the mobile market when rolling out your website.

It depends on the audience. I work on a website where we can tell the audience what browsers they must use on what devices.

How about setting a custom ringtone? One that I can't buy from iTunes for starters.

People suggesting I used iTunes on a laptop or GarangeBand are proving my point. Why should I go through such a hassle for something so basic?

I have a custom ring tone I made myself. It is easy.

If you have an m4a file, trim it and change the extension to m4r, then import to iTunes. I did this a lot.

Sure: you can make one easily in GarageBand.