<story><title>Google Fights Back</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2019/google-fights-back/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdimitar</author><text>I fully switched from Android to iOS when iPhone X came out in November 2017.&lt;p&gt;I realised in the next months that the perceived &amp;quot;freedom to tinker&amp;quot; on Android is something hugely overrated. I could achieve almost everything I wanted on my iPhone -- it just took a bit of time to find the proper apps. Later Apple added the Shortcuts which is a very solid automation app.&lt;p&gt;Many Android users also lament the lack of a visible filesystem but that&amp;#x27;s a huge plus in my eyes. What are Android apps doing with that? You guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users). iOS&amp;#x27; sandboxing is not a bug. It&amp;#x27;s a feature which I appreciate a lot.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll not shy away from the fact: there are areas that I miss from Android. For example, I could have inspected WiFi strength signal with an Android phone and I cannot with a non-jailbroken iPhone.&lt;p&gt;Again though, as a guy who used Android phones for 4.5 years before switching to an iPhone, I found that the uncomfortable feeling of switching to an entirely new (and supposedly more &amp;quot;locked down&amp;quot;) ecosystem is mostly an illusion created by our brain&amp;#x27;s unwillingness to endure big changes. You get over it very quickly. Don&amp;#x27;t trust your brain on these matters, it floods you with non-truisms to avoid cognitive shock.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;P.S.&lt;/i&gt; I too loathe the notch. So after 15 months with the iPhone X I switched to iPhone 8 Plus. Easily the best phone on the planet to this day (plus a bigger screen and a slightly bigger battery). Now I dread the day the device will no longer be sold.</text></item><item><author>loudtieblahblah</author><text>Google is already not Google.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t Be Evil&amp;quot; corporation that valued open source rather than open-washing, that valued openstandards over &amp;quot;oops, we didn&amp;#x27;t mean to break that for you!&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t here anymore.&lt;p&gt;The company that bends over backwards, much farther than the law requires, to enable the surveillance state.&lt;p&gt;I despise Apple.  Especially on mobile.  No SDCards, no headphone jack, walled garden app stores. Ugh ugh ugh.&lt;p&gt;I have applications that does E2E for contacts and calendars that I&amp;#x27;ll have to find an iOS solution for.&lt;p&gt;I loathe the notch.&lt;p&gt;But my next phone will be an iPhone.&lt;p&gt;Google collects so much absurd amount of data - that all the Proton-mail, DuckduckGo, Wire&amp;#x2F;Signal, Firefox (loaded with adblocking and tracking plugins) apps in the world can&amp;#x27;t keep you totally from it as long as you&amp;#x27;re on Android. You disable things, you opt out of stuff and it just keeps on collecting anyways.&lt;p&gt;And i don&amp;#x27;t believe for a second the data they&amp;#x27;re allowing you to &amp;quot;autodelete&amp;quot; genuinely gets deleted. It just gets removed from your view.</text></item><item><author>areoform</author><text>Google owns my soul. Their boxes know when I sleep, when I wake, how much I exercise, what I listen to, my innermost thoughts, my chats with loved ones, what I watched on Netflix last night, what my company does, the flu I have at the moment, what the hypochondriac in me looks up in the middle of the night, what I buy, whom I call, what I spend money on, where I spend it...&lt;p&gt;I nominally pay for these services, but I suspect it makes me a vassal instead of a serf. Google consumes. Google contemplates. Google cognates. Google knows. Google sees me while I will never get to see it.&lt;p&gt;At face value, as long as Google is Google, everything is okay but what happens when google is Google no more? When it goes to join the great corporate farm in the sky? What happens to the exabytes of data they’ll have gathered by then? Who will own it once Google is Google no more? What will happen to our lives once the data changes hands a decade or four from now?&lt;p&gt;Are there any contingency plans for the largest dataset on Earth? Do we get to know these plans?&lt;p&gt;Who the fuck owns MySpace now?&lt;p&gt;Say what you will about Apple (and I’ve said a lot), at least I know where we stand. I have switched to iOS and I recommend that you should do the same. At the very least, Google will no longer know when you sleep.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nirvdrum</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know if it falls under &amp;quot;freedom to tinker&amp;quot;, but having a microSD slot saved my vacation once (well, the pictures of it anyway). We were out at a children&amp;#x27;s amusement park in the mountains with poor service, so just moving things to the cloud wasn&amp;#x27;t an option. Deleting apps from my phone to pick up space is of course an option, but also a silly one. Swapping out the microSD card, however, was simple and I just got back to taking pictures and videos.&lt;p&gt;I went iPhone -&amp;gt; Android -&amp;gt; Windows -&amp;gt; Android. I&amp;#x27;d really like to get back to an iPhone for privacy reasons, but the storage situation really doesn&amp;#x27;t work for my family. Traditionally, it&amp;#x27;s been a low capacity entry model and then ~$100 to upgrade to each new tier, paying Apple&amp;#x27;s wildly inflated markup. The pricing is also way out of line with our budget. I was really hoping for a new SE model for my wife.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m fairly happy with my Galaxy S9+ now, but I really miss a lot about Windows 10 Mobile. I&amp;#x27;ll never forgive Google for doing everything in its power to make sure another mobile platform didn&amp;#x27;t become viable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Fights Back</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2019/google-fights-back/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdimitar</author><text>I fully switched from Android to iOS when iPhone X came out in November 2017.&lt;p&gt;I realised in the next months that the perceived &amp;quot;freedom to tinker&amp;quot; on Android is something hugely overrated. I could achieve almost everything I wanted on my iPhone -- it just took a bit of time to find the proper apps. Later Apple added the Shortcuts which is a very solid automation app.&lt;p&gt;Many Android users also lament the lack of a visible filesystem but that&amp;#x27;s a huge plus in my eyes. What are Android apps doing with that? You guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users). iOS&amp;#x27; sandboxing is not a bug. It&amp;#x27;s a feature which I appreciate a lot.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll not shy away from the fact: there are areas that I miss from Android. For example, I could have inspected WiFi strength signal with an Android phone and I cannot with a non-jailbroken iPhone.&lt;p&gt;Again though, as a guy who used Android phones for 4.5 years before switching to an iPhone, I found that the uncomfortable feeling of switching to an entirely new (and supposedly more &amp;quot;locked down&amp;quot;) ecosystem is mostly an illusion created by our brain&amp;#x27;s unwillingness to endure big changes. You get over it very quickly. Don&amp;#x27;t trust your brain on these matters, it floods you with non-truisms to avoid cognitive shock.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;P.S.&lt;/i&gt; I too loathe the notch. So after 15 months with the iPhone X I switched to iPhone 8 Plus. Easily the best phone on the planet to this day (plus a bigger screen and a slightly bigger battery). Now I dread the day the device will no longer be sold.</text></item><item><author>loudtieblahblah</author><text>Google is already not Google.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t Be Evil&amp;quot; corporation that valued open source rather than open-washing, that valued openstandards over &amp;quot;oops, we didn&amp;#x27;t mean to break that for you!&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t here anymore.&lt;p&gt;The company that bends over backwards, much farther than the law requires, to enable the surveillance state.&lt;p&gt;I despise Apple.  Especially on mobile.  No SDCards, no headphone jack, walled garden app stores. Ugh ugh ugh.&lt;p&gt;I have applications that does E2E for contacts and calendars that I&amp;#x27;ll have to find an iOS solution for.&lt;p&gt;I loathe the notch.&lt;p&gt;But my next phone will be an iPhone.&lt;p&gt;Google collects so much absurd amount of data - that all the Proton-mail, DuckduckGo, Wire&amp;#x2F;Signal, Firefox (loaded with adblocking and tracking plugins) apps in the world can&amp;#x27;t keep you totally from it as long as you&amp;#x27;re on Android. You disable things, you opt out of stuff and it just keeps on collecting anyways.&lt;p&gt;And i don&amp;#x27;t believe for a second the data they&amp;#x27;re allowing you to &amp;quot;autodelete&amp;quot; genuinely gets deleted. It just gets removed from your view.</text></item><item><author>areoform</author><text>Google owns my soul. Their boxes know when I sleep, when I wake, how much I exercise, what I listen to, my innermost thoughts, my chats with loved ones, what I watched on Netflix last night, what my company does, the flu I have at the moment, what the hypochondriac in me looks up in the middle of the night, what I buy, whom I call, what I spend money on, where I spend it...&lt;p&gt;I nominally pay for these services, but I suspect it makes me a vassal instead of a serf. Google consumes. Google contemplates. Google cognates. Google knows. Google sees me while I will never get to see it.&lt;p&gt;At face value, as long as Google is Google, everything is okay but what happens when google is Google no more? When it goes to join the great corporate farm in the sky? What happens to the exabytes of data they’ll have gathered by then? Who will own it once Google is Google no more? What will happen to our lives once the data changes hands a decade or four from now?&lt;p&gt;Are there any contingency plans for the largest dataset on Earth? Do we get to know these plans?&lt;p&gt;Who the fuck owns MySpace now?&lt;p&gt;Say what you will about Apple (and I’ve said a lot), at least I know where we stand. I have switched to iOS and I recommend that you should do the same. At the very least, Google will no longer know when you sleep.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loudtieblahblah</author><text>&amp;gt;Many Android users also lament the lack of a visible filesystem but that&amp;#x27;s a huge plus in my eyes&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s awful in my eyes.  What&amp;#x27;s more is my inability to browse that file system without a third party application when i want to simply move files to my computer.&lt;p&gt;The only reason I&amp;#x27;m even contemplating the move to iOS, is b&amp;#x2F;c I have a android based, digital audio player that has 2 SDcard slots that I keep disconnected from Wifi (and it does n&amp;#x27;t have a 4G connection at all).&lt;p&gt;If my music was still on my phone, I simply would not move to iOS over this singular issue.  You&amp;#x27;re talking 250-400GB of files, not including my downloads, my pictures, my Keepass databases, my SSH keys, my certs file for my VPN, and files that I don&amp;#x27;t want the OS to index and put in some general library.&lt;p&gt;It stills seem ridiculously daunting to let go of.  Because I use it extensively.  Daily - even without my music on there.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;ou guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users)&lt;p&gt;Except only the apps I trust are allowed storage access.</text></comment>