My honest question is: What's the alternative. I'm not an apple fan. Most of my personal devices run Linux, but I feel essentially trapped on an iPhone. It doesn't seem like there's a truly useful open phone out there. I don't like Apple, and I don't trust them or their ostensibly pro-privacy stance much, but I want as little privacy invasion and as little advertising as possible on my phone, and I think as bad as Ap…
My question, building on that one, is: Can there be a true alternative? This is a genuine question, not an attempt to paint Apple as the be-all and end-all or a paragon of perfection (for all that I'm an unapologetic Apple fan, I recognize that they have serious faults). I think there is a strong case to be made that the limitations Apple has placed on the iPhone are instrumental in guaranteeing the privacy and (rela…
It seems to me that it's inevitable that if we let these megacorps control our devices, they will use it against us in one way or another. The only way for us as users to actually have freedom, security, and privacy is if we can control what entities the device trusts ourselves. We must create choice where the corps would rather we have none.
I will also point out that I consider Apple's rent seeking and censorship, that is more or less literally impossible to avoid, to be unethical use of this power they wield over users, and a pretty clear and meaningful way that users are harmed by it. In very concrete ways it can be considered more harmful than malware. But few seem to care enough to ask for control of their devices back, and in many of these threads more seem willing to jump to the defence of these practices than see them as a problem.