Skip Navigation

You're viewing a single thread.

214 comments

  • Security theater: All you stuff is encrypted but they have the decryption keys

    Proprietary App Store: The apps and the store itself are proprietary and I don't trust Apple.

    Gaslighting their customers: Images shared with Android users from iPhone are purposely crushed to a unreviewable quality. The idea is to convince people that Android takes terrible photographs.

    • From recent experience: They read your screen which means the government reads your screen as well. Its okay. if you’re doing nothing illegal, you have nothing to hide! All history books that could tell you otherwise are paywalled anyway!

    • About "Security theater": you can enable what's called "Advanced Data Protection" so the encryption keys are only stored on-device for most types of data including photos, backups and also notes for example. Mail and calendar is one exception that comes to mind, but you could also always use a different mail and calendar service. This is a fairly recent feature, so you may have missed it. Sure, it's not your fully self-hosted "cloud" on which you can audit every single line of code and whatnot, but it might actually be the best "compromise" of ease-of-use vs. privacy for many people outside the tech bubble we're in in this community.

      About "Proprietary App Store": the store itself and many apps on there are proprietary, but there are a lot of open source apps on the App Store as well. The bigger problem is the fact that the App Store is the only (hassle-free) way to install apps to the iPhone and only recently the EU seems to change that with alternative storefronts now emerging, but Apple is limiting the use of them to the EU, so they're essentially doing the bare minimum to comply with EU law.

      About "Gaslighting their customers": I'd like to see hard proof on that. I think what you're talking about is the fact that messages sent to Android users using the default "Messages" app are sent as MMS, which is an ancient technology and as such only support tiny, low-quality images. Android doesn't support iMessage and Apple seems to like to keep it that way as it's apparently selling a lot of iPhones this way in the US (and sure, I agree that's a bad thing). It does get better with the just-announced RCS support (a supposedly open protocol which Google added so many proprietary extensions to you can't really call it open anymore) so pictures can be send in full quality to Android users using the Messages app. Also, you could always use a third-party messenger like Signal or WhatsApp and send full-quality pictures just fine.

      I'm not saying there aren't any concerns, but some of the information you provided is at least out of date.

      • Android doesn’t support iMessage

        I think it's the inverse: iMessage doesn't support Android.

        Those aren't equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple's part.

        • You are correct and the person you're responding to is wrong about just about everything they said. Funny to me they think mms is why those images look so shitty when no android users have ever experienced that without an ios device involved

          • MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I'm not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn't have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don't.

            • Well yes exactly. I have noticed for years that every photo or video an iPhone sends me is worse quality than flip phones used to send/receive. Amazing to me that iPhone users fall for this trick

              Like they missed that the whole apple MO is to make them feel superior without evidence

              • It seems like an odd decision to me, as it would make the iPhone look like it has a substandard camera to someone receiving media from one by MMS.

                • The idea is to convince people that things only look good on iPhones

                  • It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.

                    • I mean, it certainly has that effect. The in group "knows" your phone sucks and will shame you into getting an iPhone. That's the idea and it's probably worked millions of times.

                      • Just doesn't seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she's not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob's phone has a bad camera.

          • Android users would use RCS for communicating with each other via the default messaging app on Android.

            MMS has a hard size limit depending on the carrier the sender uses, that's independent of the sender using an Android phone or an iPhone. This limit can be as high as "more than 1 MB", but also as low as 300 KB or even less. Compressing an image down to 300 KB will naturally incur a quality penalty.

            • Rcs is a new thing and not all android phones use it even now

              Photos sent from iPhones look like shit today and they did years ago. Rcs is not a factor.

        • Yup, good point!

      • About "Security theater":

        keep in mind that companies can lie on how their stuff works, also I don't think the nature of the store matters, as much as the fact that you're only allowed to get the open source apps from there which will also run on top of a proprietary OS, with proprietary firmware

        Gaslighting their customers": I'd like to see hard proof on that

        Consider that I have a low standard on what a hard proof should be,.. I consider telling people that : "Privacy, that's iPhone", while literally developing nothing in the open, which is the best and ONLY way to guarantee transparency, instead they went with the "trust me bruh" method, plus they display ads... like.....they have... a.. dedicated.. ad .. platform...

        You don't respect my Privacy while you target me with ads

      • Regarding gaslighting: See Apple’s response on the CSAM backdoor shit show. All the critics were wrong, including the various advocacy groups.

    • And in addition they run big adverts on caring about privacy, while in reality they do the same shit as all the other tech companies, but just use their monopoly power to push out surveillance advertisement competitors.

214 comments