And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.

I don't think so. They did a bunch of extra engineering work to do machine learning on photos in a way that respected people's privacy. iCloud Photo Library has been working great for me, and the photos are encrypted on my devices before they land in iCloud. The current implementation has the drawback that all of my devices need to do the ML work independently as a result, but it still works okay.

As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.

> As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.

I would also add that Apple is actively working to close the gap. Look at last years hire of Giannandrea from Google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...

According to recent tests, Siri has already improved a lot.

> transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do

I really hope this is untrue. My instinct is that you perhaps can't be a big behemoth of a company if you don't behave like Google and Facebook, but Apple occupied that middle territory successfully for a long time.

If you are willing to take total control of your mobile environment, Android can give you very good privacy. Arguably better than Apple.

Simply buy a Pixel (or any other device that supports AOSP). Build your own AOSP image (which is quite easy). And you are ready to go. Use applications from F-Droid only.

Admittedly it's not as straightforward as running your favorite Linux distro, and there are some caveats, but it's quite close.

This reads a lot like the HN-famous Dropbox comment.

Im sorry man, you are misinformed

https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

Neither of these articles relate to a pure AOSP install without Google Play services, which is what the poster was talking about.

Sorry, my bad.

Both of those apply to iPhones as well. The only difference is that on iOS, you cannot turn off AGPS location collection, while on Android, not only can you turn it off, it's opt in.