Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by echelon » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:08 PM UTC

notriddle wrote: post #207

echelon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Destroying an open, low barrier to entry animation and application platform that was used by teenagers to develop and share interactive content? Destroying a way to deliver native-like, cross-platform applications without an app store was good? Jobs did it for control. He didn't want interop between Android and iPhone, and he didn't want any web browser with enough flexibility to do anything sophisticated.

Android had Flash. It stank, and the blame for its stinkiness lies entirely on Adobe.

Better than the neck brace we wear around our throats today.

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

#402

Post by filoleg » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #290

filoleg wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. If you try doing it for any PC games released over the past decade, you are more likely than not gonna have a disk with some installable files and a Steam code in the box. Without that Steam code, there is no way for you to play the game. At this point, there isn't any difference between buying directly from Steam, as opposed to "walking into Best Buy…

Steam does not take a cut from steam keys sold off steam. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

Even if what you say is indeed the case (which is very possible), it still leaves a major question on the table.

What's the point if you (as a customer) end up paying the same price at the end of the day anyway, and you still have to use Steam DRM? The only difference in your case is that the cut is going to Best Buy instead of Steam.

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

#403

Post by sellyme » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #372

sellyme wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are in a teeny tiny minority Minority? Probably. Tiny? Absolutely not. Here [0] is a breakdown of 70 popular Steam games by the source of purchase for their reviewers as of a year ago. About 28% of all Steam purchases happen outside of Steam itself, with Valve getting a 0% cut. Note that for many games a majority of reviewers did not purchase it on Steam itself. 0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1IC…

Reviewers are a tiny minority of users and there's no reason to suspect they are typical.

Do you have better data sources that you're not sharing or are you just making things up and asserting it as fact?

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

#404

Post by sellyme » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

nanna wrote: post #369

sellyme wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've 100% completed about 2500 of them, so I don't have a great completion rate but it's not like they're just there for show. I've probably played around 6000 total. A very large number of them I would not have bought individually, but they came in a bundle with other games I wanted.

Maybe not a great completion rate respective to the amount of games you've got but probably (surely?) with respect to other gamers! If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

> If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

HyperRogue, Hollow Knight, and LOGistICAL.

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

#405

Post by qwertox » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

Google234 wrote: post #386

qwertox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to both of you.

Can you see how this feature might be useful for those with hearing problems? everything is not malicious..:

I'm not saying it is malicious. But it has a high potential for misuse.

Let's say this starts getting normal, because we've had it for 5-8 years. AI accelerators are in every device, making this functionality a non-issue in terms of battery life. It's then in TVs, in cars, in phones. It's just a toggle to turn it off, but it's software, it can turn itself on without notifying the user. Google won't do this.

How long has it taken Android to start notifying users that an app is accessing or has accessed the microphone? Notifying the user hasn't appeared to be some high priority thing.

The closed caption button in the virtual volume slider, I've played with it a couple of days ago. I was wondering what it was. Toggling it multiple times did nothing, no notification, nothing. I just got a bit annoyed that the state of the image when the diagonal line is missing appeared to leave some marks in the horizontal lines. Now I know that these are supposed to represent sentences. I thought it was just a buggy design and had no idea what this toggle was there for. Long-pressing it did not popup a tooltip indicating its function. I must have explicitly turned on that feature in the settings without remembering. But this is not the problem.

The thing that is concerning is simply that it is there, in common hardware, that there is a proof of concept that these devices are perfectly capable of doing this offline. Hardware manufacturers which tweak the UI can very well just pretend that the button is toggled off and not show the overlay, while the device is transcribing. Possibly only do it after a short FFT analysis has shown that there may be interesting content going on, like speech which doesn't come from a TV, but from a discussion among people. No detectable data stream will be noticeable over the WiFi connection.

It is in fact awesome that people with hearing problems have this solution at their disposal. I'd maybe even like to have it transcribe my phone conversations and store the text in the contacts app.

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

#406

Post by realusername » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #392

realusername wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which competitors? They aren't any. I expect anti-trust laws to be applied, as simple as that.

What anti-trust measures made Blackberry give up and switch to Android? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft bought Nokia and Nokia imploded with Symbian and Maemo and inability to compete with iOS? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft went from Windows CE to Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8, each incompatible with the previous, and they couldn't attract developers because they couldn't keep a stabl…

> What anti-trust measures made Blackberry give up and switch to Android? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft bought Nokia and Nokia imploded with Symbian and Maemo and inability to compete with iOS? [...] ?

The history of the mobile OS market is beside the point, I'm only stating facts about the current landscape.

> Apple have 27% of the mobile OS market.

And they are in a duopoly with Google with absolutly zero competition. If you want a proof of that, the only time their tariff ever changed was because of Epic Game's threat... of an antitrust lawsuit, you can't even make this stuff up.

> Simple as what? What do you expect, what do you want, anti-trust laws being applied to do? Magically conjour up a competitor from nowhere? Or just smash iOS in resentment for its success so you can have avoid having to suffer Android?

Yes exactly, smash both iOS and Android into multiple independent companies so that this broken market blocking the tech industry can function again.

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

#407

Post by yazaddaruvala » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

salamandersauce wrote: post #378

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone can’t run an IDE or compile code, can’t run solid works, can’t be shared with multiple people, can’t render CGI, can’t mine BTC, and can’t run office, etc. If this is a personal computer, solely because it runs a browser, then the goalposts have shifted dramatically.

It can run Microsoft Office. You can program in a Python IDE and run code (Pythonista). You can create CGI on an iPhone. Most of the limitations you mention like compiling are completely arbitrary and added by Apple. The devices are powerful enough and it's easy enough to do everything on a $300 Android phone.

I really don’t care much about Androids, I haven’t used/been educated about them in 6 years and don’t plan to.

That said, a general purpose personal computer is defined by its advertising not its hardware. My iPhone was never advertised to be able to run any arbitrary binary. The fact it can JIT some version of Python, or run a watered down variant of a program I want does not change what I purchased.

In fact my iPhone was advertised as a multi-purpose, specific device, “arbitrarily limited” to my satisfaction, with a walled garden for my personal protection. This is the device I very intentionally purchased and recommended to family and friends!

Forcing it to be ruined for billions of customers because a few hundred thousand developers are less happy is not only ok with me, I paid for that privilege, thank you.

If “developers” (which I am one of) wanted more open access computing devices, they should have self regulated and ensured viruses, scams, malware, bloat ware, etc were not so common as to drive away every user!

Now it’s time to switch jobs, or be successful with a 30% (which hopefully in the future is 3% - I’m happy for you and anyone to push for a reduction in this value). Now is not the time to complain that Apple is anti-competitive and should be forced to ruin a billion customers experiences, given its users are actively inviting Apple to their defense.

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

#408

Post by yazaddaruvala » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

ntr-- wrote: post #380

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone can’t run an IDE or compile code, can’t run solid works, can’t be shared with multiple people, can’t render CGI, can’t mine BTC, and can’t run office, etc. If this is a personal computer, solely because it runs a browser, then the goalposts have shifted dramatically.

Your phone likely has an order of magnitude more computational power than the machines that were used to code and build some of the programs you mentioned. The fact that iOS/Android prevents you from installing gcc does not mean it is unable to do so. You could use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and output HDMI over the usb/lightning port and have a super portable dev machine if the OS was so inclined.

Hardware doesn’t make a device multi-purpose, the advertising does!

(See more in my response to your sibling comment)

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

#409

Post by jodrellblank » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #334

jodrellblank wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps referring to people who buy and use X's products and services as "X's customers" is unfamiliar to you, but it's in very common usage, and conveys no element of ownership: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22apple%27s%20custome... > " You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons. " The person I was originally replying to is the one who brought up washing machines as having general purpos…

What if Alice lives in a gated community because it has a pool and would like to receive mail that hasn’t been pre-screened?

Why would Alice buy into a gated community she doesn't want to live in, when she can buy an Android community and side-load a pool app and run her own mailserver? Android phones exist, they have app stores - multiple options - Alice could have chosen one, and not only chose something else, but likely spent more money on it as well. What kind of techno-patronising is it to pretend like Alice was too dumb to know what she was choosing, has "been robbed", and needs someone else to step in and change what she bought to "make it better for her" by making it more like the thing she could have bought and voluntarily didn't buy?

More to the point, why should Catarina be forbidden from offering a gated community with a pool and a mail filter service, because Eve wants to send mail outside the filter system?

Is the claim here that if you started a smartphone company with your own AppStore and sideloading, Apple would act anticompetitively and shut you down? (What would they do?) Or is the claim that it's unfair Apple offers a product other people want, which you don't want?

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

#410

Post by realusername » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #391

realusername wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So your problem is Apple solved the customer problem so well with “an Apple experience” that all other phone OSes were abandoned. I don't really care how and why those two companies got their monopoly, that's beside the point. > And as a result Apple should be forced to ruin that experience beloved by their customers, so that the relatively small number of software developers make a little more money? There's hundr…

> " I don't really care how and why those two companies got their monopoly, that's beside the point. " It isn't; over the past decade the tech world has shifted more and more towards telemetry, advertising, and low quality user experience. Popular sites like Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube have added more and more adverts and less and less social connection, become more centralized (Microsoft buying LinkedIn and…

All your talk about scams is just completely outside the topic, you can totally scam people of their bank account on iPhone right now (as you even realized in your message) and it's done daily, you just ask them to create gift cards or wire money for the "taxman".

By the way, in terms of security, the iPhone isn't even the most secure platform right now, you still have tons of private apis, privacy issues and ways to snoop data back, that's exactly why companies ask you to install their app instead of directly going to their website because on the web they can't do any of that...

> And your solution is to drag iOS down to the level of Android or Windows? Who is forcing you? Why can't you use a dumbphone? Is this a "forced because I don't want to change jobs" thing?

Because even banks and government apps are locked down to these two monopolies, that's enough proof as it is.

> Apple owns your device is a lie, you bought it, you own it. Take it apart, take the LCD out and plug it into something else, see if Apple comes at you for breaking "their" device. They won't, because they don't own it. Turning "they didn't build it so I can run Linux on it" is not the same thing as them owning it, any more than Bosch not building a washing machine to let you run Linux on the controller does not imply Bosch own your washing machine in perpetuity.

You don't own your device because Apple can decide to remove everything from it remotely, can decide that you can no longer can switch it on if they wanted to and actively prevents you to see what it does, that's why you don't own it. You should treat Apple's device as Apple's property that could vanish at any point.