I recently bought a Xiaomi device. The moment you turn it on you notice it's filled with spyware and bloatware. I thought I couldn't be more surprised after seeing the clock app ask for permission for "personalized experience", but they got me, in the calculator app. Other than that, the hardware is great, the themes look good, and overall it's a good experience. It's a pity I'd have to switch to a custom ROM because of this "personalized experience" MIUI nonsense.
I'm using a Play-Store-less microG LineageOS on a Google Pixel 1, and all my banking apps work (Revolut UK, German Post Bank authenticator), as well as a Swiss online health care app.
I haven't found an application yet that I couldn't use on LineageOS due to lack of SafetyNet.
Regardless, Google already has enough information on me to profile me quite well; avoiding Google Pay will not meaningfully change that, and I get enough value out of it that the trade off is worth it to me, at least for now.
However, for people who want to use Google Pay despite the privacy implications, I'm not sure running a privacy-preserving Android distribution is even meaningful. At that point, why not just run stock Google Android?
Isn't that like 99% of their revenue i.e selling user data?!
Samsung is the only rival in terms of hardware. Google lacks the attention span to execute. Everything else is even less baked.
I’d experiment with nerdy Android distros with a tablet. I used to have a Linux smartphone (whose name escapes me, which is driving me nuts) back in like 2006/7, it was fun but not a “daily driver”.
Why would I settle for an expensive device that makes browsing the internet painful? Why would I limit myself to only the software apple will approve?
It isn't even in the running and as long as their software policies remain as is, won't be in the running.
And the forced curation is dumb but if they're approving everything I'd want to use anyway, Android can eat it until they sort out their problems. What do I even need? Signal and Firefox with uBlock, that's really it.
On iOS, Signal can't do SMS and there's no uBlock. Of course.
That's up to Qualcomm, not Android. And Qualcomm needs to sell new chips every year, therefore planned obsolescence by tying the drivers to a version of Android works in their favor.
Samsung is also leaving a competitive advantage on the table by not doing this with Exynos.
And the planned obsolescence is pointless. Even if you could run the latest Linux kernel on a phone you bought ten years ago, a phone from that year might have a 3G radio and less than a GB of memory. Which can still make phone calls, or be used in place of a Raspberry Pi, but it's hardly competition for anything currently commanding significant margins.
How?
>Samsung is also leaving a competitive advantage on the table by not doing this with Exynos.
How is Samsung different than the rest? They also make their money from selling as much hardware as possible as often as possible. They don't have a way to monetize users post-sale through subscriptions, services and AppStore cuts. All that infrastructure is owned by Google and that's where the money goes to.
In general the same way they get ~every Android phone to ship with Google Play.
The most aggressive way would be to design their own chips like Apple does and put the drivers in the kernel tree, make the chips available to other phone makers and then require satisfactory open source drivers from everyone as a condition of using Google services. Qualcomm publishes the drivers or loses all their hardware customers to Google's chips.
> How is Samsung different than the rest?
Qualcomm has been a near monopoly. The next phone you buy will likely be one of theirs even if you're dissatisfied with the existing one, so they can screw you and still get your business.
Samsung is the underdog here, and hardware brand loyalty is weak. If they could sell more phones by giving the people what they want, their overall sales go up even if people keep them longer, because the latter is more at the expense of their competitors.
They also don’t work with non-Safari browsers (e.g. Firefox).
Please do source your claim that this has been possible for 7yrs, as that’s not my experience.
People bash androids for privacy like all are from china, but Korea (and Japan and US) makes some fine devices too and as european I prefer them to US (and obviously China).
I even have european exynos crap version, which is slower but some claim exynos models on previous models were much more stable/reliable after few months compared to snapdragons. Can't say, what I want works, there is absolute 0 broken/annoying things for me, no bloatware, no ads etc.
That being said, when wife was looking for smaller phone few weeks back, I went through reviews and opinions and suggested iphone 13 mini. She always loved iphone photos of other folks and I think she will enjoy phone UI smoothness and long term reliability/security. It will be an interesting experiment.
Everything that matters works: the phone is fast, never crashes, and you can install browsers with AdBlock.
That's an unusual take.
See the following reference:
Leith, D. J. (2021). Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google. URL: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
I think most enquiring minds would disagree that there isn't much between them on this matter. You're staking out a fairly extreme stance on this topic. Nothing wrong with that - but don't sound surprised when people disagree.
Referencing the paper I linked, they both collect IMEIs, hardware serial numbers, SIM serial numbers, phone numbers, device IDs, telemetry, cookies, and MAC addresses of nearby devices. iOS additionally collects your location and local IP address. All this data is transmitted even when opted out of telemetry.
I'm not a fan of expensive phones though - I'm scared I will break it and lose $700+ in the blink of an eye. Been using cheap Motorolas for the past 10 years, no complains.
One thing you'll lose with the older phones sooner than iOS updates is AppleCare support, but if you get a good bargain to begin with....
https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/23/apple-releases-ios-12-5-5-for...
Phones over 200 bucks are a serious liability, I agree.
Fortunately, that also happens to be the price of the fourth-fastest phone on the market, that being the iPhone SE (Gen 2).
The fastest phone on the market (that being the Gen 3) is twice that price, but I have an easier time accepting a premium for that that's closer to 100 than the 1000 you'd have to pay to get the most capable Android phones... and they're still 4 years behind the iPhone technology-wise.
Have you considered OnePlus? Their cameras aren't the best, but they're usually as good as the other top brands in everything else.
Amusingly I was thinking of getting a Pixel 6 until I saw this thread, and thought "Oh well, back to OnePlus." Now I don't know what to get.
Or untested buggy Google shovel-ware?
If the Google SW is so buggy, there's no compelling reason to buy one just because of the HW.
Also, OnePlus doesn't have a good track record when it comes to this particular issue: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40656034
Repairability is super high, it's easily flashed to eg LineagOS and has been promised software updates for many years if you want to stay with Android.
> Currently, we only sell and ship Fairphone products to countries within the EEA and to Switzerland, the UK, Norway and Croatia.
GrapheneOS.org
Take 30 seconds and ask in the channel?
Due diligence and personal responsibility for what is likely your most important computing device, instead of contracting that out to firms who would stab their grandmother to improve their quarterly numbers.
To be clear, this is not meant to disparage the GrapheneOS devs, but there’s an obvious difference in available resources, so I don’t really expect them to fix hard-to-find bugs in AOSP.
You don't know what you're missing, stability-wise!
Hardware runs a gen behind but it's fine enough with stock android.
You mean like Google’s recent CSAM controversy? At least Apple never proposed using ML to find new CSAM and report you to the police with a single violation…
It was a controversy created by a poorly written Apple press release that unveiled two distinct features, and subsequently ginned up by an even worse EFF blog post.
CSAM scanning was all about iCloud, just like every other vendor, and the benefit was a roadmap to E2E storage.
The more confusing thing was the explicit content notifications for parents for their minor children in family plans.
So instead, just like everyone else, you almost certainly have CSAM scanning happening in iCloud directly. All of your content is just a subpoena away. Thanks EFF.
So this is a big red line. If you want to upload to iCloud, ok, scanning there is a fair game and you can always not upload to iCloud. But your device should be your device, respecting your privacy.
As a parent, I may want to opt into a service on my managed, family device so I know my child’s fellow 9th grader girlfriend is sending pictures that may be a crime to possess, or vice versa. That is exactly what Apple did.
Like I said, you’re conflating two things that are not the same, because you’ve been fed a steady diet of bad information stemming from Apples unusually poor communications and the EFFs inaccurate blog post.
Google scans your content for potential CSAM based on AI.
One can imagine the false positive rate for the Google approach is likely higher.
Google scans files on their devices, using their resources (storage, compute power).
It is you who decided to upload files to Google's cloud.
However, it is difficult to use your own device if you don't have privacy there.
The whole point of the Apple system was to enable end to end encryption so Apple couldn’t view your data on their servers. The only way they could get access is when a threshold of CSAM likely files were met. e.g the keys are sharded.
With the Apple approach you have considerably more privacy.
Modern SoCs have security domains that are invisible to the main CPUs. Apple can run just about anything it wants on the security coprocessor and users will be none the wiser.
The American DOJ, FBI etc do not want end-to-end encryption and use ‘think of the children’ as an excuse. This gives Apple the plausible pushback to say ‘We have thought of the children…’
It goes to show that Apple isn't afraid to undermine their own experience to implement adversarial software services. Combined with the way they "respect" the privacy of Chinese citizens, I don't think Apple actually cares about our privacy. It would seem that instead they're testing the waters for more radical changes[0], like using on-device machine learning to detect suicidal users or terrorists. And who's going to object when that happens, right?
[0] Source: the past century of US political discourse.
The more bothersome thing (to me) is client-side scanning. Apple is setting a precedent that allows any first-party manufacturer to work against the user's interests as long as there's a large enough common enemy. It should go without saying, but that's a horrible idea!
If Google were doing the same thing on their Pixel phones, I'd be slamming them equally as hard. It's simply depressing to watch a company claim they know best, while proceeding to use your phone to run their regulatory compliance code.
(Even if you took a picture to send to your doctor through an encrypted app, it just has to end up in the photo library to be cloud synced, unless you remember to hand delete it.)
The practical difference is nil. The fact of the matter is, either way, if you don't upload you won't be scanned, if you do upload you will be. End result is the same regardless of whether you use OneDrive, Box, Dropbox or Google Drive (who all implement CSAM scanning)
If Apple wants to run that code, they're welcome to do it on their own servers; they pay for the hardware, they decide what software it runs. I shouldn't have to waste my storage space on their NeuralHash model though. I shouldn't waste my CPU cycles on their regulatory compliance. Arguing anything else is paramount to saying that Apple owned your phone from the start, and if that's the case, then antitrust legislation can't come soon enough.
your compute and phone resources are already used for analytics and other things that you didn't explicitly tell the phone to do.
you also greatly overestimate how much CPU it takes to compare a hash, lol
fact of the matter is, you're only scanned when you're using apple services.
I didn't know LineageOS sent analytics, it never showed up on Netguard. Curious!
If you think this is a dumb thing to argue about, then by all means; don't argue about it! If you're satisfied with your iPhone and convinced that Apple can do no wrong, then certainly don't let me get in your way. We're talking about the largest company in the world, though, and if you're unwilling to offer them a little criticism for objectively degrading the iPhone experience, then I don't see the point in discussing this.
> you also greatly overestimate how much CPU it takes to compare a hash, lol
Do I? If it's not such a big hassle, then Apple can just run it on their own servers. They own your iCloud decryption keys anyways, it shouldn't be too big of a deal.
> Do I? If it's not such a big hassle, then Apple can just run it on their own servers. They own your iCloud decryption keys anyways, it shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Privacy is better preserved doing it on device compared to on their servers.
anyway, nothing more to discuss here.
2. It only allows single file actions, no sync/offline cache/etc. Most apps don't meaningfully work well with this - there is no "sync these ten comics to this device at all times"
Most apps still only use their local file sandbox.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S9 at the moment, but Samsung's typo-filled changelogs don't exactly inspire confidence. It has also been bugging me to accept the new Samsung Account terms, which I don't want to do.
Chinese brands (Huawei, Xiaomi, Motorola, etc.) don't inspire confidence for me either.
Apple had the CSAM scanning controversy. I have an iPad, but a bunch of features I didn't want were turned on by default, and the walled garden approach is obviously a downside.
I would prefer to run a privacy-focused Android distribution, but I have a lot of apps and I don't know how much they depend on Google Play Services, so I don't really want to switch over 'cold turkey'. Also, they're still built on the same AOSP base, so who's to say they don't have the same bugs?