Android's original openness did attract users, but the flood of poorly-made apps also created real fraud and crime risks. Those of us on HN have high security standards, but for older users, that old policy created genuine security vulnerabilities. Just observing my own family members.
Your phone is about to stop being yours
561–570 of 927 posts
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dumb question, can you explain the benefits of IOS? I've only tried using an iPhone ~10 years ago before I got into tech
It's unbelievably useful within its own walled garden. There are lots of instances where commands, tabs, and other pieces of data transfer seamlessly between your phone and computer. You can bring your phone up as a digital version ON your laptop so you can call, text, etc. straight from it while your phone sits in the bedroom charging or whatever. Everything works really, really well. Their walled garden has always…
So would you say that the value of Apple products increases as you have more of them (higher than just the linear benefit of more products)? I've used them, but always as one offs.
For example, Ive had a Mac(book? The one that you connect periphery to use) as a work computer at a previous software job, the iPhone because of a girl I dated who wouldn't be with a green bubble man, and iPad also in a previous job, so never together or actually adopted in personal life, so I didn't get sold.
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#563On my Android phone's home screen I have 23 apps, 11 of them are my own. If Android prevents me from installing my own apps I will switch to something else.
Tell us more about your 11 apps!
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much any modern phone is also full of blobs that run on the main CPU to ensure basic functionality, with only a handful of exceptions. Just consider how many features stop working or get severely degraded on various phones when you use a clean AOSP build on them (provided that you can do it at all in the first place). Android's driver infrastructure effectively encourages non-free blobs in "vendor" partitions,…
> You can have "some debate" on absolutely anything, but that doesn't yet mean it makes any sense. Sure, but from the fact that anything can be debated it does not follow that any given debate is nonsensical, which is kind of what you did there. > ...whatever debate you're referring to is unlikely to be held in good faith. I don't know which is odder, that assertion, or the notion that two completely different securi…
I have to admit that I had a kind of knee-jerk reaction there, as this "debate" is very often brought up in FUD pieces without much substance behind it.
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real question is whether it affects me as a user. The RF spectrum used by cellular networks is highly regulated, so I wouldn't be able to use it freely either way. The PC keyboard I type on right now most likely has some kind of microcontroller running some code in it, but it's of little consequence to me whether it's free or not. I do care about what runs on *my* system though, as that has tangible implications,…
> Why not go a bit further - the most secure device is the one you can't use to do anything at all. That's not far off a reasonable criticism of Purism's security model, that a device so wholly compromised it requires one to activate all physical kill switches to disable the hardware in order to so much as safely enter one's device PIN (per Purism's own site content), that it's no longer useful. Everyone has to make…
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You're either misunderstanding something or something really needs to be changed in the docs.
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my informed opinion, anybody who does banking on their phone is taking a big and unnecessary risk. I wish I could say more.
I see you suggest you can't say more, but I'll still ask the questions: Is it a privacy or financial risk to have banking on your phone? How is banking on a phone app more dangerous than banking via mobile or desktop websites?
It is a privacy risk, a financial risk, and a security risk.
The issue is the platform. Obviously there are issues with desktop platforms too, but those are easier to mitigate.
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#567This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch. You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that away that ju…
Leaving one abusive partner for another is hardly a win. It's pathetic.
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my informed opinion, anybody who does banking on their phone is taking a big and unnecessary risk. I wish I could say more.
> anybody who does banking on their phone is taking a big and unnecessary risk It is not necessarily a matter of choice. Besides what the other commenter notes about 2FA, in some countries banks have been removing functionality from their online-banking website, and you can only do certain things in the phone app.
This annoys me to no end. I have an old phone that I boot up occasionally because it holds all the apps that I only need once per year for a niche feature that is only accessible in their app. I don't need 200 apps on my main that I would otherwise never open.
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#569This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch. You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that away that ju…
You just proved that the ability of installing whatever apps you want isn't that vital, don't you?
Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours
#570Let me play out a scenario, imagine to use a Desktop Hardware like a complete built rig, you would need a specific OS like Windows 11 and you could not run Linux on it, just because it's a vendor lock-in. Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above? I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
Out of all the things that have computational power, PC is pretty much the only one that comes with a built-in way to replace its own system. Xbox, PlayStation, Telsa, Smart Fridges, etc. don't have this ability from the beginning.
So yeah, the society has largely accepted this. PC is the exception.