301–310 of 343 posts
Why does Whatsapp allow this? It defeats their whole encryption Spiel.
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Yes, I have an older phone running LineageOS for that matter. But those are typically community efforts, so software support is not certain. It sucks when so many things just expect you to have a working cell phone.
Punkt has a phonen using a fork of grapheneos out of switzerland with some cloud services like VPN attached to make it a completely degoogled 'secure phone', called ApostrophyOS https://mc02.punkt.ch/en/mc02-5g-secure-phone/ https://www.apostrophy.ch/ Can't vouche for it, I just use a flip phone.
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What Gemini should be able to do with WhatsApp: Exactly and only what any other random app on the phone could do with WhatsApp, assuming that you have enabled that in exactly the way you would have to enable any other random app to do it. Google needs to not be abusing its position as the source of the OS to give its software special privilege to reach inside of third-party apps.
Siri does this, but the processing happens on-device so it stays private. Seems like a nice compromise. Google has Gemma? So they could also blow Apple out of the water by competing directly there.
It happens on-device where possible.
"Although Apple attempts to do as much as possible on device, certain features require real-time input from Apple servers." Source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/01/our-longstanding-priv...
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Encrypted backups are "off" by default and need to be explicity turned on.
I haven't installed Whatsapp from scratch in a long time, aren't backups off by default, overall?
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> What company will jump in the competition meat grinder between Google and Apple Purism did. My Librem 5 works remarkably well given how small the company is.
How do you deal with things such as mobile banking? So many services just presume you use either an Android or IOS. At some point I thought I really needed Android Auto, but I can probably just get a MStick only for that. There are other things that keep me jailed to Android though.
One way is to have a spare Android phone sitting at home with no sim-card. Also many (not all) banking apps work with Waydroid. The best way is to switch your bank to one not forcing the duopoly on you.
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That doesn’t provide any nontrivial insights—yes, Siri is built on keyword detection, but it’s also much older. But why are they having such a hard time creating an LLM-based Siri 2.0? Still no clue.
Perhaps cost reason? Unlike Google, Apple mostly rent their servers from the big cloud providers. Rolling this out to all Apple devices must be very expensive.
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Not great for a chat app, which needs ongoing active servers and someone to fix stuff that breaks, even if you feature-freeze it.
Pretty great for a chat app used by a few billion people, a few $billion is enough to keep things running for many decades. e.g. banks do exactly this, with much more critical and complicated infra.
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Assistant stuff. Like you bark "order a pepperoni pizza from Joe's Pizza" and it happens. You take a pic of your fridge and say "order stuff to stock it up to my usual levels". Or book a flight, or buy concert tickets or clothes, or get media recommendations, replan a trip while driving if you change your mind and add a stop somewhere. Ask to summarize group chat message floods. Put on some music. Control smart home…
>Assistant stuff. Like you bark "order a pepperoni pizza from Joe's Pizza" and it happens. You take a pic of your fridge and say "order stuff to stock it up to my usual levels". Or book a flight, or buy concert tickets or clothes, or get media recommendations, replan a trip while driving if you change your mind and add a stop somewhere. Ask to summarize group chat message floods. Put on some music. Control smart home…
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What Gemini should be able to do with WhatsApp: Exactly and only what any other random app on the phone could do with WhatsApp, assuming that you have enabled that in exactly the way you would have to enable any other random app to do it. Google needs to not be abusing its position as the source of the OS to give its software special privilege to reach inside of third-party apps.
The line is blurry. Google is positioning Gemini not just as an app, but as a OS level feature. The OS can by definition reach into any third-app app to do anything it wants. I'll give some more examples of OS-level features in case it's not clear: copy/paste is an OS-level feature and it is designed to extract arbitrary text or content from third party apps (copy) and insert them into third party apps (paste); scree…
Google already violates the DMA in some minor ways (like how Chromebook clipboard sync can alter the clipboard in the background, but tools like KDE Connect and Microsoft's My Phone cannot).
On the other hand, the default "assistant" app is one the user can pick freely in the settings so if whatever API WhatsApp exposes is also usable for Bixby/Bing/Claude/ChatGPT, I imagine things would fit the phone just fine.
As for Siri, I think Apple customers just don't really care about Apple gatekeeping apps like these. For some reason, they seem to like Siri (even though I can't get it to do basic things for me, it's somehow even worse than Gemini) and for some reason they trust Apple to access their personal information, so there's no need for controversy.
