this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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In terms of privacy? What's the alternative? I'm sure that stock Android phones are way way worse in terms of privacy than any Apple device ever made.
Android is great in theory but the amount of pre-installed garbage, material design and Google / vendor powered spyware is way too much for my liking. I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t track things, because they do, but at least there’s no vendor garbage and you can go through the Settings and disable everything you don’t need, restrict Apps from running in the background etc. If you don’t upload your data into iCloud it will be way more private than the average Android phone.
Another thing I dislike about non-Apple phones is that, besides the Pixel and a few others, their bootloader and storage security is a joke, if someone gets your device you can assume they’ll get to your data.
GrapheneOS is great, it would be the one and only alternative to the mess that Android is however I can't daily drive that as it lacks features (nice things) I do want to have.
That tools doesn’t always work, besides an iPhone comes clean out of the box. No constantly running spyware on the background, no Samsung/Xiaomi apps. Almost everything can be easily turned off under Settings unlike an Android where you’ll be forced into a 3rd party tool or a ROM like GrapheneOS if you want a clean experience.
When you buy an iPhone you’ll also have a guarantee that you won’t be installing malware, even with the new Alt Stores in Europe, all the apps are code-signed and require validation. You also are sure that your apps won’t be able to get system-wide access and run all over your data and battery like we see on Android.
Yes, the iPhone is less open but it provides a level of security, privacy and “cleanliness” out of the box that Android devices can’t just match. If you don’t have much time / interest / tech skills to mess around with a phone then the iPhone is the best phone you can buy.
iOS comes with reasonable privacy defaults and blocks things such as apps running in the background for long time. Going into the settings is the extra-mile that still easier than having to install a cleaner ROM or deal with 3rd party tools.
I'm not lying about anything here, you know as well as I do that many vendors don't allow you to remove all of their Apps and most install permanently running daemons that you can't remove without UAD or other methods.
Yet the sandboxing isn't even comparable. One key aspect of the iOS sandbox is that is not only restricts filesystem access but also executes applications with way less privileges than Android does.
To complement the sandbox iOS apps are forced to use Apple's APIs in order to access user data (eg. Contacts and Photos) which will apply strict restrictions such as allowing you to limit at a system level what photos an application may access. Since all apps are required to be summited to Apple for review (even on Alt Stores) they'll enforce the usage of their APIs making it way harder to bypass restrictions.
Comparatively, on Android, you can install applications from random sources that typically resort to hacks to get around the sandbox restrictions and access more than they should.