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Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by Valkhyr on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:16AM (#25196108)
I used to jailbreak. I now use Android.

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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by 0df8dkdf on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:56AM (#25196273)
Same here. I jail broke the first iphone to use it as a handle held video camera.

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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by jrsj on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @11:58AM (#25200293)
I did this at one point as well but now I prefer not to have root access for security reasons. I'd rather have the ability to remote into a user with limited privileges on a more secure server, given how big of a target mobile devices are. That and it turned out I had no real practical reason to be fiddling with most of my devices -- I mostly work on server & web code, anything outside that the closer it is to 0 configuration the better it is for my sanity.
Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by jiofih on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:51AM (#25196248)
Moving to Android so you can jailbreak your phone to run a terminal sounds like a much, much larger hoop than just using a VM.
Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by opan on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @03:19AM (#25196395)
Android just has a working terminal without bypassing anything. You can enable one in developer options or just install a third porty terminal like termux.

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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by pjmlp on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @06:52AM (#25197611)
You can also install a third party terminal in iOS, in fact the development options for coding on the go on iOS are much more mature than then hacky versions available on Android.

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.

[dead]
Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by Okawari on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @05:36AM (#25197200)
Guess its a matter of perspective.

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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by sgt on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @06:12AM (#25197399)
Interesting. My whole family is on iPhone and I remember that my mother had an Android phones years ago (Samsung), and she never fully understood it. Nowadays I have no "support cases".
Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by Okawari on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @10:24AM (#25199258)
We originally chose iPhone for my grandparents because they were intuitive and easy to use. I have to help her more than before. It does seem that either iOS is sending her more notifications about various things which she is scared to touch.

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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by fauigerzigerk on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @06:59AM (#25197650)
All my main devices are Apple, but I also have a cheap Android phone, which I bought because I needed to use an app to read my passport chip at a time when Apple hadn't yet opened NFC to third party apps.

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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by thebruce87m on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @03:02PM (#25202433)
Oh god, the Android back button. You just triggered my PTSD. You got all of the iOS “back” variations plus an extra “surprise me” hardware button that would sometimes even exit the app.

Hopefully that’s changed in the 5 years since I’ve tried android.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by underlines on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @04:39AM (#25196843)
I am Swiss and for many countrymen the wallet is big enough, that we're even called an iPhone nation. But I moved to Android after iPhone 2, because I was fed up with the funny limitations Apple imposed on me, for "consistency" and "security", like:

- 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.

Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by sgt on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @06:15AM (#25197417)
I understand and appreciate your argument, but I would like to point out that those limitations are no longer an issue. I find it more annoying to help someone in the Android world to so basic things like finding an app or changing settings, because the UI is so bizarrely inconsistent across versions of Android and models and makes. To give a recent example, a friend could not figure out to toggle WiFi on/off on his Lenovo, because when swiping the screen from above, only other things appear. One has to swipe twice, then the status bar grows and shows the WiFi symbol.
Re:A new jailbreak for a new era by mindslight on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @10:07AM (#25199083)
Yes, those of us who choose Android to gain some control over our tracking devices are likely to carry more cash for the privacy and autonomy benefits it brings.