• Google search results lead to AMP pages. When Jailbroken, I can load a userscript that turns this off.
• Random apps have stupid names on my homescreen. Either the name is in all caps, or it's too long and Apple puts a big ellipses in the middle. I can't rename them unless I'm Jailbroken.
• Stock iOS has two separate low-battery alerts, the first of which occurs when there's still a fifth of my battery left! I'm well aware of the red icon at the top of my screen.
• The stock iOS keyboard has a dictation key I always hit accidentally. I can disable it when I'm Jailbroken.
There are many, many, many more examples, these are just off the top of my head. It's been long enough since I set up my Jailbreak that I don't actually remember most of them, but I use a ton of let's-call-them annoyance fixers, and I don't think I could live without them.
General > Keyboard > Enable Dictation and then disable dictation.
The microphone on the keyboard disappears.
I agree, there are a few little things that are annoying. And I wish iOS was more like Linux, in that you could just change anything if you actually cared to. But personally I rarely run into these edge cases on iOS these days. In the early days jailbreak was mandatory.
Aside: I find the concept of a voice "text" amusing and somewhat redundant with voicemail, though I can see an argument that the use cases are slightly different.
Here on HN, mentioning Dropbox makes the circle complete.
[1] https://www.expressvpn.com/webrtc-leak-test [2] https://test.webrtc.org/
Let's not deceive ourselves: Apple deliberately cripples standardised data exchange mechanisms to push iCloud and aht Apple ecosystem.
wires
and dongles. It's IOS device after all.
Not sure but I think moving files within the same share also takes a round-trip to the iPhone.
The one downside to jailbreaking which I never found a working solution for was numerous apps that had jailbreak detection which caused the app to stop working, like Pokemon Go.
change your search engine?
(my setup on all devices: ddg, and when results suck, i try google by adding "!g" to the search. It open my eyes when i see both suck for a few terms, but when using google i don't question the engine)
On desktop I use Startpage but, hey, that's another thing I can't set on stock iOS!
I appreciate everyone who uses DDG, and perhaps that's the route I would go if I couldn't use my userscript. But I greatly prefer my setup.
!s - start page, a google proxy !yt - youtube search !w - wikipedia etc.
Almost all I use I just figured out because it's obvious. !az = amazon, !ebay = ebay, etc. Usually just guessing gets me there 90% of the time, and then I can learn to use it again.
But again, that's just my workflow, not for everyone if you don't care if you use google for 99% of your searches.
Recharging after the first 20% alert might significantly prolong the useful lifetime of your battery. Li-Po cell can provide a couple thousand 80%-20% cycles, but only less than a thousand 100%-0% cycles because working at the ends of the capacity range degrades the battery faster.
I get my battery replaced yearly. I would upgrade to a newer phone instead, but I value my headphone jack too much.
Install SwiftKey and never look back
You go to Settings and turn Dictation on. (Yes, I know, bear with me.) THEN, you turn it off.
And that should cause the button to disappear. It's really unintuitive, I know.
I 100% understand why Apple does this, but a keyboard that randomly changes to a different keyboard under some circumstances is completely unusable to me. My brain needs consistency.
When I did jailbreak, it was never about apps and rarely about high-level features (I did use NC settings before that was an official thing, and I installed a torrent client and some emulators, I think).
I jailbroke because I wanted to have access to a local terminal and write and execute arbitrary code on the phone - nothing major, mostly small bash and Python scripts and some C code when I was learning how to program.
It was also a philosophical thing: I want to have full ownership over my phone, whether I need that on a day-to-day basis or not.
I moved to Android when iOS jailbreaks started to become rarer and slower to appear, and more and more jailbreaks started to be tethered-only. There are only so many hoops I am willing to jump through when I can instead buy an Android phone that officially supports unlocking the bootloader and rooting it.
I need to jailbreak to get music off it. Lost the orginal itune laptop hard drive where the music is on. Don't want to install some no free iMyPHone type of software to do the extract, don't want to run them on my computer, seems a bit fishy. I really just need root access and then I can scp off the music.
EDIT: iOS 10.x, old iphone.
Android and iOS are really not equivalent here. Similarly you can install apps from outside the play store normally. No root, no unlocked bootloader, no funny business. Just a big difference in how each OS treats its users.
Also termux is going to be a thing of the past, because its developers refuse to use the newer Java based APIs in recent Android versions, as Google is closing down the API space available to the NDK, as means to close down on security exploits.
As an Android user having to help family members with their i devices from time to time, iOS devices frustrate me to no end.
iOS might have a good user experience if you're already used to it. But as someone who is not familiar with it, but uses it from time to time, I find it an horrible experience.
It looks good tho, gotta give it that.
Im not entirely sure what triggers it, but I think the fact that she doesn't get the "toolbox" view you can swipe up. I've had to help her with turning wifi back on, or screen becoming to dim.
I wouldnt be surpised if it is the swipe gestures that she randomly engages and all of the sudden the phone is doing something she didnt intend that makes her afraid of "breaking it".
Though, I havent actually tried to observe her usage.
Android came with some positive usability surprises as well. For instance, the back button does something far more consistent than iOS's completely disjointed ways of going back. Also, iOS's separation of settings from the rest of the app never made any sense to me. That's fixed in Android.
But I don't think usability is what really matters. A far more important issue is ecosystem tie-in. A lot of great functionality the Apple ecosystem offers is exclusionary. Many Apple services are either unavailable or crippled on other platforms. If your friends, family and coworkers are not all Apple users you lose a lot of the benefits.
I can't even share iCloud photos with my wife or use FaceTime and Messages (beyond basic SMS). Her mp3 player supports Spotify but not Apple Music. She could easily afford any phone she likes, but she uses a 7 year old Nexus 5 because she just doesn't care. The only thing she might care about once the pandemic is over is battery life. But iPhones are nothing special at all in terms of battery life. And on the desktop she uses Linux because contrary to my Mac it supports running PyTorch and TensorFlow on the Nvidia GPU.
So we always look for cross platform options and some of the more popular ones are better integrated in Android than in iOS (such as Google, obviously, but also to a lesser degree Microsoft). I'm not subscribing to any Apple services for fear of not being able to share them with others.
Hopefully that’s changed in the 5 years since I’ve tried android.
- forcing me to sync music in iTunes, with my 500GB personal music library crashing iTunes
- no mms support, back when this was still a thing
- no video recording
- no file access
- no copy/paste functionality
later, owning a MacBook Pro in 2016, reminded me of those funny decisions Apple made for me, like no CMD+X for cutting files, no real full-screen button and regular kernel panics when connecting/disconnecting my multiple screens and MIDI devices for music production.
I since completely turned away from Apple and I am happy. Not because of my wallet, but because of the freedom of choice I gained. As a plus, yes my wallet has more left for other stuff now.
Then at some point I just stopped caring. It's so much effort to keep up with this stuff (same reason I don't use Android devices, with all the alternative firmwares and such). My stock iOS device is about as reliable as a device can get and I'm relatively happy making the complete freedom tradeoff. I'm not sure how bad of a thing that is however.
Occasionally I'll want to do something like spoof my location and get annoyed that it's not easy. But I just...don't care 99% of the time.
It does seem that slowly iOS/ipadOS is getting more fully featured as they try to make the ipad a real laptop alternative.
I remember when I was younger, and I felt this odd moral imperative to having root on any device I had that I knew ran an operating system of some sort. Once I succeeded, then... well, nothing. It was pointless. Oh, wow I got Linux running on my PlayStation 2! Root login, baby! Look, it’s X Windows!! I have harnessed the power of the machine and am finally that much closer to..... well, nothing a PC can’t already do better.
Notable ones I remember where:
1. SBSettings, basically control center before Apple added the control center.
2. Flux, before Apple added Night Mode (or whatever they call it)
3. Winterboard, for theming the phone in ways
4. Gameboy emulator, though now I think this can be done without jailbreak.
5. Unlocking the carrier.
6. File explorer
I'm sure there was more too.
For me jailbreaking is partly a philosophical goal, but also I just like seeing all the stuff people come up with when they aren't restrained by the walls of the garden.
If you read above you'll see most of the good jailbreak tweaks were brought into stock iOS at some point, which is great too. Let jailbroken users/devs try new things and if they work well bring them in with some Apple polish.
Can't remember who did it, but seemed like the consensus at the time was that all you end up with is the worst of both worlds.
Hybrid devices only rarely end up successful it seems.
https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
It's actually really good. I can wirelessly turn my TV into a 4K Android tablet, and with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it turns into a computer.
Same with a USB cable plugged into my desk's monitor to HDMI. If I didn't require a computer for development, I would not buy computers any more.
Wireless Dex is limited to 1080p and wired one goes to max 1440p
The Samsung DeX Station (https://www.samsung.com/au/galaxy-s8-accessories/dex-station...) is no longer manufactured which is a massive let down. It does however still work with the S10+, and I presume the S20. The ability send a network cable straight to the phone was pretty handy for a few situations.
My mom refuses to use dex, I found it to be great as a basic workstation. Definitely removes the need for eg a chrome book. Does not replace your power user machine however
Australia: https://www.samsung.com/au/findastore/
US: https://www.samsung.com/us/samsung-experience-store/location...
Samsung's Dex dock thingy still exists and can be useful when travelling - most hotel rooms you can plug into the TV with HDMI, so a phone and keyboard is less trouble than carrying a full laptop. If you could rely on finding a keyboard (even just a USB one) in any hotel room it would be a lot better. And hopefully with apple shifting to ARM there'll be a lot more desktop software that runs properly on phone processors.
I think Samsung may have also given it a go.
Of course (as I wrote here three years ago¹), a non-programmable dumb/feature phone without updateability would also be adequate for my personal needs for what I need a phone for.
Application could be very basic (calendar, address book, calculator, alarm, etc.) - by default. Or users could make their own simple apps - nothing fancy, Arduino like cooperative multitasking, simple screen drawing, maybe a few widget helpers.
I can imagine this being a fun thing to use & play with. :)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-8110-TA-1067-2-45-inches-Unlock...
Still, being able to write your own apps for it would be nice. Even if very low level APIs & you would have to handle distribution yourself if you wanted to share them would be fine. But I don't see any information about that after quickly checking their page.
BTW, a simple mobile terminal with cellular connection that you can program could be preatty useful in comparison to hacking a regular Android phone to only do what you need could be useful as well. For stuff like single use online terminals to give to field crews.
Making a smartphone that does not behave as a general purpose computer is stuping and not to mention dangerous (as the manufacturer can always use it as a general purpose computer for its own nefarious means).
> as the manufacturer can always use it as a general purpose computer for its own nefarious means
I can imagine as a thought experiment an ASIC or FPGA based phone that implements a very high level application processor, while what we normally call firmware, OS and libraries are implemented in "pure hardware".
(I agree with your sentiment, but somewhat disagree with your apparent conclusion android phones are any better if you're worried about bad actors -- the baseband and DSP from Qualcomm are processors running code we can never touch underlying the entire hardware. Similarly, almost all other computer hardware have separate CPUs inside the main CPU where the mfc. runs their own secret code which cannot be tampered with or even directly seen sometimes)
What I meant is that on Android There is less being done to actively prevent their usage as a self hosting workstation (though some recent "security" changes communig from Google related to running code that does not come from an installed APK might be a reversal of that trend).
I disagree with your argument that smartphones should be general-purpose computers. I don't think that having a smartphone be a general-purpose computer provides a significantly improved amount of control for 99.9% of the population.
How about being able to not run any code that you don't want your device to run? No DRM, no nag screens, no tracking, etc etc...
A non-rooted phone very much is a general-purpose computer, just not for you.
A feature I really like on Android is being able to block specific notification channels for any given app.
Want to receive notifications when your Uber is near, but don't want to receive marketing notifications? Just disable the Marketing channel in the Uber notification settings.
Of course it relies on devs to correctly mark their notification channels, but I haven't found many apps that don't.
That's their "official solution" to the problem, even if it's somewhat exclusionary.
For the rest of us, a checkm8'ed iPhone X works great.
To be eligible for the Security Research Device Program, you must:
Be a membership Account Holder in the Apple Developer Program. I used to be, I could be again.
Have a proven track record of success in finding security issues on Apple platforms, or other modern operating systems and platforms. I have a CVE in Signal for IOS, and some embedded device shit.
Be based in an eligible country or region.* I am that.
Participation is not available if you are:
In any U.S. embargoed countries, on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals, on the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons List or Entity List, or on any other restricted party lists. I am not that.
Under the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside (18 years of age in many countries). I am not that.
Employed by Apple currently or in the last 12 months.} I am not that.
Android also dropped the ability to do this for a while (the the apps I was using died) and I haven't tried again in a long time. Maybe I'll look again.
I think some folks are starting to match up names and voices, audible fingerprints anyone?
Ultimately it wasn't worth the hassle to keep up (and now as a bonus I'm stuck and can't update or un jailbreak).
The big problem with letting the user decide to do something like this is that distracted driving doesn’t affect just you, but everyone around you. There’s a reason drunk driving is illegal: you’re a danger to others on the road. Hence why being a drunk passenger is fine; you’re not a danger to the other drivers on the road.
So, should Apple be restricting what the user can do with their device? Depends on who you ask. But when it comes to distracted driving, it’s pretty well agreed that it’s wrong.
----
Now, if you still want to watch YouTube while driving, you actually can. Just load up the YouTube app on your phone and hit play. They don’t stop you. Apple just won’t let you put it on your car’s screen.
My issue with this argument though is that the cat is already out of the bag- by blocking youtube on a larger screen, and similarly not allowing Siri to play youtube via voice commands Apple may claim they are doing it for safety, but in reality all is does is make people manually fiddle with their phone or watch a video on a smaller screen. I just don't believe there is any real world safety benefit to the paternalistic blocking.
This kept me awake, and I’d hardly have called it a distraction unless you would rather me pass out at the wheel.
The other reason is to hide obnoxious features I'd never use that serve as screen clutter (such as stories in messenger)
Until iOS14 you actually had no way to set another default browser and email-client.
With that fixed, I find iOS actually half way usable.