I.e the gatekeeping my government wants to prohibit is the reason I’ve been recommending these things. I guess I’ll have to switch to recommending AwareGo security training for everyone
In what respect does any phone currently on the market have "mandated side loading"?
"Simply not buy Apple things" means "buy Google things." There's no way around that if you want a functional smart phone. You either pick red or blue.
If there were 5-10 full-featured phone OSes out there, your point would make more sense to me.
You can like the hardware and not care for the software. It really is A/B at the moment. It's difficult for the average user to choose C. You either allow Google to peer into your life, or trust that Apple's marketing isn't a gimmick and a lot of Apple is e2e encrypted.
From what I read, iCloud backups are finally getting e2e encryption. I see this as the biggest reason to stick with Apple. I trade off full-customizability for better security/experience.
If a jailbreak was available for my iPhone, I'd be on it though.
Yes, but only as secure as the passphrase you use to unlock your phone. Except actually less secure than that; your phone will rate limit attempts to guess your passphrase, but encrypted iCloud backups turned over to a government won't and can't rate limit attempts.
For the average user with a relatively short passphrase, iCloud backups will be trivial to crack. Still, it's an improvement.
This is why you can casually change your pin code in your phone's settings without it chewing through your battery and data plan reencrypting and reuploading gigabytes of cloud data.
No big corporate support, less commercial apps packaged by default, but that’s a feature in itself.
Bonus points for supporting contactless payments, banking apps, and airline apps.
The hardware should have decent battery life and get great cell reception, and the UI should be smooth.
You are prohibiting from crying or complaining about this by your own logic.
You are free to not install an alternative app stores, and cannot use any arguments at all about how your choice is restricted.
You answered yourself. Most people are not Linuxy in the sense that they buy an iPhone and don't want to know how everything works.
If this would push that other 20%, I might even consider switching from Android.
As it stands, Android has a lot of free trash on the play store, and Iphone has a lot of paid trash on the app store because apple charges them hundreds per year for the honor of developing on their platform.
On Android, when I need an app with basic functionality, I already check fdroid first for a simple OSS implementation. I don't need my voice recorder to do anything except record audio. I don't need my heart beat monitor to do anything but check my pulse.
I'm hoping this change brings the type of innovation early jailbreak app stores brought that basically test drove features that Apple would copy years later and call "innovative".