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Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

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Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#41

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My PiHole is a must for my iOS devices. Yes, there’s a reader mode.

Typically I use my phone when not at home since at home I have a computer to browse the web of course. Is pihole installed on your iphone? Does it work when in a train, in a restaurant somewhere, etc...?

You can use pihole over a vpn.

One common example is setting up Tailscale on Pihole and your phone and then you can set the dns on whatever Wifi you’re on to the Piholes private IP

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#43
post #21
post #12

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It's pick your poison. The only reason I'm still on android is because at least I can (still) have root there. I'm saying still because of safety net. But if apple let me have root, i'd probably prefer an Apple over Google. Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage tha…

Is it seriously worth it for people to do stuff like this? I remember when stallman said he was giving the one laptop per child program a shot. Since the drivers for the wifi were non free he used some USB device instead. Last I read that lasted a few months because he got sick of it. I can't imagine adding all those steps to use a smartphone is any less annoying.

I think you're genuinely asking, but just FYI it might seem to some people like you're perpetuating the common trope of "Stallman radicalism" or nothing. By far more people on Linux are willing to run some amount of "non-free" software depending on the situation. For example the Nvidia proprietary drivers are one of the most popular packages for many distros.

The only real problem right now is just lack of apps. Devs build against Android/iOS-only SDKs and use native features that aren't cross platform, so running those apps is mostly out of the question (although I have seen some people running Android apps on their Pinephones!! Need to look into that more).

So GP is saying for apps like that they'd keep an android around but do everything else in a browser.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly as a word isn’t meant to describe any successful company that achieves decent market share. I’m really tired of people throwing that phrase around, iOS and Android are fiercely competing with each other for market share every year so yes there is fierce competition.

Quoted post unavailable.

The initial comment was quite snarky too, implying that there cannot be any competition in a duopoly. If anything, duopolies have some of the strongest competition compared to a situation where there's only one winner or one where all the 5-10 companies just stop competing because there's no way to win.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#45

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Question about that: What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins. To me browsing the web is unus…

Safari has extensions you can get from the App Store including ad blockers, overlay removers etc

Does it also have extensions like redirect to old.reddit and such? If so, then it sounds like it would allow more user control than the latest versions of firefox of android, is this really true?

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#47
post #23

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Not sure what you're talking about. I have zero issues using my FLAC files from elsewhere on my iPhone.

Try using a custom ringtone that you do not purchase through the Apple store.

This used to bother me, but I haven’t used a ringtone at all for 10 years so I really don’t care anymore.

Although before that, I made my own ringtone using GarageBand off a ripped mp3 and didn’t buy anything through the apple store.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#48
I've been heavily considering getting an iPhone because of how terrible the Android experience but my problem with Apple is that you are either fully in their ecosystem of you aren't a worthy enough customer in their mind. I have no desire to use iCloud or Apple mail or have an AppleID. I just want a small phone that gets updates, has maps, and has a decent music app.

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question about that: What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins. To me browsing the web is unus…

Yes there's a reader mode built in to the browser. Ad blockers are available since 2015, although these are declarative ad blockers. Custom web extensions are also available more recently; these can actually run custom JS.

I'm not sure what the implications of "declarative ad blockers" are. Do you need to manually block them or something?

Re: Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

#50
post #12
post #7

I’m not surprised. I used Android devoutly, had a Galaxy S4, then an S8 when that started showing its age. I upgraded to an iPhone 12 when AT&T ran the promotion to get a free one. I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me: - Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in subst…

It's pick your poison. The only reason I'm still on android is because at least I can (still) have root there. I'm saying still because of safety net. But if apple let me have root, i'd probably prefer an Apple over Google. Mobile phones and their user hostility is a cancer. I'm seriously considering using a full GNU/Linux handheld for mobile things i can do in a browser, and keep an android phone for app garbage tha…

Call me crazy, but I think there is room for a third platform.

Especially if this platform was bootstrapped in a smart way, for example with an emulation layer to be able to run applications from Android.

Or perhaps WebAssembly will make it viable to do more things from a (mobile) browser.

I really miss the N700-N9 series with Maemo and Meego. It was so elegant and simple.

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