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Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

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Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#131

Post by mankyd »

avianlyric wrote: post #111
mankyd wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case, they wouldn't need to report the location back to themselves, would they? The phone would simply check its coordinates, and turn it on or off.

I don’t think anyone is saying that iOS does report back to Apple (and I don’t think there is any evidence that iOS does this). The original concern was caused because iOS would still activate location services and display the icon during these checks, even if you had turned location services off completely in settings.

That is exactly what the article is talking about.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#132

Post by grishka »

jodrellblank wrote: post #101
grishka wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay 30% for all the hosting and listing and payment processing. But then you aren't required to use Steam to distribute your game — you could as well set up your own website. There's nothing preventing you. There's no predatory code signing on desktop OSes. On the other hand, you can't sideload apps onto iOS devices. You HAVE to go through Apple. You either publish on the app store, or you don't have an iOS app.…

You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users. > " That's different. That's very different Is it? Why is it? You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside. What's the specific difference between that and iOS, other than "Apple's ecosystem and customers are desirable, so I want to use it" and "…

> You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.

You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS. Except maybe in India where iOS market share is tiny.

> You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside.

It's an appliance. It's marketed as a device to serve one purpose — read books. Amazon isn't making apps for it either, as far as the user is concerned, there's no notion of application software on these things.

By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically.

Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations.

> What's the specific difference between that and iOS

iPhones and iPads are marketed as general-purpose computing devices. They are not appliances by any stretch of imagination. Yet they are crippled because Apple has knowingly and deliberately put in a limitation so they only run code that was signed by Apple. This limits their general-purposefulness. This forces developers who don't want or need the hosting and listing still go through the app store.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#133

Post by kuratkull »

clairity wrote: post #107
tchalla wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a classic example of how companies collude without direct communication. In that case, let's have that conversation as a society and as a government. "Are companies listed in Table 1 and 2 in collusion as defined by current law?". In most of the Apple 30% conversations, the conversations seem to be about an instance (Apple) instead of an object (Digital Store Tax, Collusion etc). Lets set the frame and be c…

as i understand it, by not communicating directly, companies avoid the most damning potential evidence that they are colluding. it's theoretically possible to still determine that their behavior is collusive, but quite difficult in practice. i personally think anti-trust/anti-monopoly regulations should be tightened by an order of magnitude or so. any market that exhibits such extended, obviously inflated profit marg…

"Fair" and "free" are almost opposite values in regards to markets, what you want is not "free", you want regulation. Fairness means you got to oppress a party in favor of another party.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#134

Post by tobr »

wmichelin wrote: post #115
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…

I disagree that telemetry is inherently bad. As product engineers, telemetry is often our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily. How else can you detect difficult-to-spot bugs in production?

We’re increasing the risk exposure for every user for our own trivial convenience. It is inherently bad, just like other forms of widespread surveillance that is often motivated by some seemingly good cause, like catching terrorists.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#135

Post by nitrogen »

mason55 wrote: post #126
svara wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past. The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibiliti…

You can still do all those things on a computer. And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed. The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way…

And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.

This kind of thing has become a meme. It's basically irrelevant. If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now, and the GPU shortage kind of proves that. It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try. There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#136

Post by PurpleFoxy »

threeseed wrote: post #113
kllrnohj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Apple is apparently doing - they send location, local IP, and nearby wifi mac addresses even when you're not logged in. Similarly Apple is collecting more data types than Google according to the research paper.

Please provide evidence of this because Apple's official documentation says otherwise: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033 They do send nearly WiFi hotspots for crowd sourcing purposes but it is never in conjunction with your local IP address (which is an identifying piece of information).

The wifi thing is fine/good IMO. It allows everyone to get their location without gps. It’s what let’s devices with no gps like the MacBook and ipad to get their current location. Google does the exact same thing although they used street view cars for the initial dataset.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#137

Post by shard »

mlindner wrote: post #119
wmichelin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that telemetry is inherently bad. As product engineers, telemetry is often our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily. How else can you detect difficult-to-spot bugs in production?

Once upon a time fixing bugs in production didn't happen because the product got all the bugs out before production. If it had bugs in production, the product failed.

You used the phrase "once upon a time", a common opening for fairy tales, which seems apropos for describing a magical land where products achieved a 100% bug detection rate before release. I suppose this might have been true 50 years ago, at the dawn of the electronic calculator, but that is now an age of legend...

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#138

Post by Retric »

addicted wrote: post #121
lallysingh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC 50% (60%) was the rate for the app distributor I used for selling my PalmOS app. It was digital download, too. For the Apple case: access to the walled garden is the majority of the benefit. But still, setting up payments, customer service, chargebacks, fees, etc., is nice to have taken care of. 30% nice? Who knows. But more than just the raw payment processor overhead, surely. AFAIK physical boxes are way above…

There were a couple of stores that were more expensive. But there's 2 reasons the comparisons aren't valid: 1) The revolution Apple brought to mobile phones was making them personal computers. So the relevant comparison really should be with personal computers and I doubt any of them had stores that took as much of a cut. 2) More relevant, the vast majority of such app stores which charged 40-50% were optional market…

1) That’s extremely revisionist thinking, the original iPhone didn’t allow any third party apps.

The iPhone was never sold as a computer it was very much just a better UI on a traditional cellphone.

2) Again no, most cellphones at the time where extremely locked down flip phones. Hell, selling ringtones used to be a thing because of how locked down phones where back in the day. Look up what kind of a cut musicians got of that fad.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#139

Post by PurpleFoxy »

livre wrote: post #87
mankyd wrote: post #3

Not mentioned in the headline: When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not. I am actually a little surprised that iOS would gather this information. What use would it serve?

> When the user is _not_ logged in Does this matter? How many people do you know that aren't logged in on their phones? It is literally one the first things Android asks you to do even before showing you the main screen.

I didn’t think iOS even lets you past the welcome screen without signing in.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#140

Post by fbelzile »

mason55 wrote: post #126
svara wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past. The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibiliti…

You can still do all those things on a computer. And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed. The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way…

> You can still do all those things on a computer.

Have you tried to distribute software on macOS out of the App Store recently?

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