The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
If you are talking about the marketplace, yes, but if you as an individual want google out of your life, there are multiple android distributions without Google included by default.
iDOS 2 will be gone soon
281–290 of 419 posts
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Yes, but only if you're foolish enough to install the apps If you won't install any apps why bother with a smartphone then?
It's hard to even find a good feature phone these days. At least I'm looking for one now because my Nokia E5-03 died yesterday so now I have to figure out what to get. I want something small, that I can stick in my pocket and not worry about the screen, with days of standby battery life, and where I don't have to read and "agree" to pages of legalese. In the heyday of feature phones, I could pick one up for $20. Nowa…
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#283The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
If you are talking about the marketplace, yes, but if you as an individual want google out of your life, there are multiple android distributions without Google included by default.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#284Build web apps and free yourself from the tyranny of closed ecosystems. It's Closed vs. Open. Only the web is open. 99% of apps on both the Play Store and App Store could be implemented as web apps with no loss in functionality - in fact a very large chunk of them are web apps, simply wrapped in a web view.
Users want a local app for no real reason, as evidenced by the thousands of apps that are nothing but a wrapper around a web application.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#285This just opens opportunity for “makers” devices (you can do something uniq) and companies. Ie some cheap phones with OS targeting market in Africa. This also means a new type of VCs / ycombinators.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#286Build web apps and free yourself from the tyranny of closed ecosystems. It's Closed vs. Open. Only the web is open. 99% of apps on both the Play Store and App Store could be implemented as web apps with no loss in functionality - in fact a very large chunk of them are web apps, simply wrapped in a web view.
How does this solve the problem of letting customers run a fat app without forking over for the corresponding server horsepower to run it? I know that JS is high performance when written well, but it takes time and money to do it right.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#287The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
I'm able to use all the standard apps (Uber, games, etc) without a Google account. I use Aurora instead of the Google Play Store, local maps as my GPS back-end, and my phone only contains the apps I actually used instead of pre-baked vendor bullshit. It's all super smooth and completely stable. I really can't say enough nice things about it.
If you're looking for the third option, I would really give aftermarket android roms a try.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#288If they put half as much effort into eliminating real scams as they do in eliminating proven useful software , what a different platform it would be.
As users, we only have any visibility into three numbers:
A. The number of good apps that make it through the filter. (True positives.)
B. The number of good apps that are caught by it. (False positives.)
C. The number of fraudulent apps that make it through the filter. (False negatives.)
B may be larger than C, leading to the perception that the filter does more harm than ngood. But we are getting caught in a base rate fallacy. To really understand the filter, we need one more number:
D. The number of fraudulent apps caught by the filter. (True negatives.)
My impression is that average people have no idea what a huge sea of garbage, fraud, and bad actors is swirling out there on the Internet. The number of bad people is relatively small, but the volume of malicious hot garbage they are able to spew out is incredibly large. I wouldn't be surprised if every false positive (a good app like the one here getting caught) was balanced by a thousand true negatives (bad apps being filtered out).
With rates like that, the filter is clearly vital. But we don't see the full picture, so we never really know.
One piece of anecdata we do have is what unfiltered ecosystems look like. And they seem to universally descend into roiling cesspits of porn, hate speech, warez, etc.
So while it's very important to continue being critical of gatekeepers because they wield disproportionate social power, it's also good to be mindful that they aren't all bad. Notice how these days hacking always seems to be about phishing or email attachments? Everyone seems to have forgotten the days when worms in executables downloaded from the web were a major attack vector. That dwindled because the major OSes put these filters in place.
As usual, when something is working like it's supposed to, people incorrectly think it's doing nothing at all.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#289The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
Re: Android, I tried to log out of YouTube on my phone yesterday. It said "Sure, as long as you don't mind logging out of GMail too." I was taken aback by this -- I didn't realise this was a hostage situation.
Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon
#290That's fcking my mobile. I paid for it. I own it. If I want to install something on my owned device, who the f is Apple to stop it? Think about it this way: A chair supplier telling Apple to only allow it's employees to sit a certain way. Or architects telling it to only build their HQ's a certain way. Not as an advice, but, enforced. How ridiculous is that!
> How ridiculous is that! Not as ridiculous as being well aware of the limitations of iPhones wrt to installing applications outside of App Store and still buying one. People should vote with their wallets. Me personally I do not mind the limitations, but if you do - don't buy it.
That only works in efficient markets, which, obviously phones are not. An oligopoly where the barrier of entry requires like a billion dollars to spin up new phone hardware, a new OS, and an app ecosystem is not a place where effective competition is going to occur.