The biggest problem that I have is that it's privacy built on a closed source platform that works extremely hard to wall users in and create substantial vendor lock-in.
As someone who has tried multiple times to dip their toes into the Apple world, I can tell you that it's highly hostile to users who try to pick and choose how much they want to be an Apple citizen. If you don't agree to sign up for Apple cloud on the latest iOS, it feels like 80% of the basic functions for a smartphone get locked away from you.
And they have viral aspects to their lock-in as well. Have a single family member who isn't on iMessage? Looks like they don't get to participate in your family discussions anymore.
Their privacy features are a selling point today, but your privacy is 100% in their control. If the executive team made the decision tomorrow to switch Apple into a fully panopticon ecosystem, they'd be able to switch over in a year with little visibility for their users that this transition was happening.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you under heavy lock-in pressure and you are fully putting your faith in Apple that the directions they go in the future will be directions that you are happy with.
This is quite at odds with my experience with my iPhone, so I'm confused.
I don't have an iCloud account. I'm not sure what "basic functions for a smartphone" I'm unable to use, but, I don't want my photos backed up to iCloud - I'll handle that on my own, for the photos I actually want somewhere other than on my local device. Everything otherwise seems to work.
I don't use iMessage. I've ticked the little box that says to use regular SMS and not iMessage. (This was back when there were stories of people getting stuck on iMessage and losing messages when they switched to another OS, and I wasn't sure I wanted to buy into the Apple platform permanently. I could probably switch back now, since I've been a regular iOS user for years and I hear that https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ works.) Multi-party SMS works fine. Multi-party Signal, Hangouts, Slack, etc. chats also work great. Similarly, I don't use FaceTime, but I've got tons of messaging apps that support video calls on their own.
Generally things have been fine, so I'm curious what specifically hasn't worked for you.
I find Apple extremely annoying when you disable iCloud: they keep reminding you to enable it on every occasion (updates, freeing up space, going through photos, etc).
Hm, is that a matter of personal taste? I get the prompt for each major version update, but since it takes a few clicks to get back in after an update, one more doesn't bother me. I don't get it on point releases. There's a message about iCloud photo backups when looking at space usage but it's not even a popup/dialog, you can scroll right past it. So it doesn't bother me.
Looking harder, I think what's happening is I do have iCloud, I just don't use it. I don't have automatic backups of photos, I don't have iCloud Drive (what it prompts me for on software updates), etc. Everything is unchecked except Find My iPhone. I haven't had any downside from having iCloud in this active-but-unused state.
I think the GP meant that without an Apple ID, you basically can't install apps to begin with, and most of the OS's apps also require an Apple ID to work to their fullest.
However, I don't share the same degree of skepticism as the GP.
In practice, if not in theory, I think Android works the same way. Yes, there are other app stores, and yes you can install untrusted, but in practice, most people just use the Play Store (requiring a Google account) and if they allow untrusted or use another app store, it's not the default.
I'm not arguing Apple and Google are the same, far from, but in this area, they seem the same to me for the majority of the population. (Android user)
I definitely have an Apple ID. But I don't have iCloud enabled, and without it, having an Apple ID doesn't bother me.
My Apple ID isn't my normal email address and that hasn't been a problem: people don't contact me through it and Apple doesn't force me to publish it to others.
Lock-in is more than just "not giving you the chance to opt out ahead of time"
It's also "give you the chance to opt out LATER after you've invested some time into it."
Most people don't change defaults. So if they buy an iPhone, they are going to go all in on iMessage, whether they've heard of those horror stories of people losing messages or not.
Then, if they ever think they could switch to another OS, they experience the friction you describe, and decide it's not worth it after all.
You can disable iMessage at any point and it works. New texts from iMessage users get sent over SMS instead. You don't have to do it in advance—I just did so out of paranoia, and I don't think other people need to do the same.
(Of course, one side effect is that you can't use iMessage any more and iMessage-specific features are unavailable to you, e.g., group texts might get weird. I don't know of any platform that has the property that you can quit it and still use its features.)
> You can disable iMessage at any point and it works.
Maybe now, but there was a time when iMessage would continue to hijack your number and divert messages from your phone, even if you disabled it.
Also, have you ever tried extricating your photos from iCloud? It's ridiculously complicated, and Apple doesn't give a bulk "download all my photos and delete from your servers". You have to go photo by photo and download them.
I have an iphone, but I think a few things would be nice:
- not identify yourself to apple
- be able to firewall apps - be able to determine who your app is contacting and block them
- allow running of your own software (without asking permission from apple)
- be able to turn off location services (even if the Location Services checkbox is off, apple continuously contacts ls.apple.com)
- be able to turn off "side features" of wifi (crowdsourced location of your access points), bluetooth (ibeacons) and nfc (currently you can't disable)
I have an ad blocker app (adblockios.com) that uses an internal 127.0.0.1 VPN. The version I have was yanked by apple and they had to change to a less powerful "dns based solution".
In any case, a true firewall would be my holy grail.
- sideloading
I believe sideloading only allows you to run an app for 7 days (You have to continually ask for permission)
There is some lock-in, but that's because the system integration works so well (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Watch, etc.) that one is loath to switch, not because they actively lock up your data.
Contacts, Calendar, Photos, documents all allow exports to commonly understood formats (and iTunes with some caveats).
I would not currently consider alternative OSes because they'd not work as seamlessly for me, but if Apple became as bad as you envision, I'd be out in short order with basically all my data.
It's not that the system integration is so wonderful, it's that they make it extremely difficult to work outside of it for no reason.
A few years ago I had a friend who wanted a song put on her iphone. I've never used one but I assumed I could do exactly what I've done with every other phone/MP3 player in the universe and just connect it to my laptop via USB and move the file over to some folder called "music" or something. Nope. Needs Itunes. I fire up a VM and install itunes, she has to log into everything and authorize the phone for that machine (with a warning that she can only do this so many times) and then I was able to get the file on her phone but not before it synced her entire library onto my machine (wtf). A few days later her friend is over and she wants the same song on her phone. I still have the VM with itunes installed so we give it a try and it wipes every song on her phone. The whole thing was 100% obnoxious and unnecessary. Really put me off of Apple when every other product "Just Works" while apple requires you to jump through insane hoops for basic functionality the moment you dare to Think Different and do something in a way other than exactly how they want you do things
When was this? Because almost exactly the same story is what stopped me from moving into the Apple ecosystem, around 2010.
The only difference was that the second, wiped phone was an empty "dev" phone, thankfully. It then caused Apple to ask for a series of upgrades to develop for, starting with XCode and ending with my MacBook Pro.
I thought it couldn't have been more than 3-4 years ago, but now you've got me doubting that. I also couldn't say which iphone it was or if it was up to date. I did pull down the what was the current version of itunes at least. Now I kinda wish I hadn't deleted the VM.
Just ask Siri to play that song? Or search for it in the music app? Or was it from some Indy Band which only publishes on its own website? Then yeah, best bet to get it into a iPhone would be a browser with a download manager and Files App support. (iOS 13 will add a download manager to Safari)
The MP3 was a cool solo I recorded that my friend wanted to bring to her singing coach, but it could have been anything. An MP3 from some random CD that's never been available on the itunes, or maybe just one she wasn't interested in buying even if it were available. What you choose to listen to on your devices isn't any of Apple's business.
Streaming isn't a solution for getting media on a device either. It's a nice convenience in a lot cases, but because you're dependent on someone else to make the content available, and someone else to carry it, streaming is always uncertain and you should never assume it'll be available to you even when it has been in the past. As much as I love streaming media, it can't beat having a DRM free local copy you can keep, copy, convert, etc.
The point though is that getting an MP3 on a popular cell phone at any point over the last 3 years shouldn't be complicated. It shouldn't involve logging into accounts, needing to install bloated and intrusive software (itunes installed a service to always run in the background and set itself to start every time the OS was started) or syncing entire musical libraries (and god knows what else) anywhere. It should have been a drag and drop operation, but the internet is full of horror stories about people losing their music collections, collections being merged with other people's libraries, and requests for itunes alternatives just so people can get media onto their expensive devices.
I'm sure if she only ever used an apple computer with apple's itunes software always running on it, and no one else but her ever used it, and she paid for every piece of media she ever put on her device by using the itunes store everything would have worked wonderfully, but any deviation from that very narrow 100% apple-everything set up turns even the simplest things (like putting an MP3 on a cell phone) into an ordeal with 100% unnecessary apple-imposed complications and roadblocks.
The fact that it would have actually been easier (and probably faster) for me to install and setup a web server to host the file so that she (if she had the right browser) could download it to her phone really shows how fucked up the entire process is.
It's trivial to add an .mp3 (or, as I prefer, .m4a) to iTunes and have it sync to your phone. And that's really the model: files of certain types are handled by certain apps (on the mobile device and the computer, respectively), and sync is handled by those, as well. It makes things very simple, convenient, and consistent, and allows for rich metadata, without having to deal with the filesystem (which is really not good enough for that).
> I'm sure if she only ever used an apple computer with apple's itunes software always running on it,
That's not required. Macs come with iTunes, and on a PC you can install it. An iPhone is not a hard disk, but a computer with its own operating system, and you need dedicated software to communicate with it, imagine that.
> and no one else but her ever used it,
That's not required. You can have multiple accounts on your Mac easily, and you can also share music by putting it into a shared folder and creating respective libraries, which manage the metadata (rating, last heard, etc.) for each user independently.
> and she paid for every piece of media she ever put on her device by using the itunes store
That's not required. Most of my iTunes library is ripped from my old CDs (when iTunes came out, the motto was "Rip. Mix. Burn."). You can trivially add audio in a variety of formats (and if a format is not accepted, transcode it using eg ffmpeg).
> any deviation from that very narrow 100% apple-everything set up
Well, as outlined, it is rather special circumstances that make it cumbersome. The fundamental assumption, though, is that you get media from your computer to your mobile device using dedicated software, and I agree that that's problematic: not so much the "dedicated software" part, I have no beef with that, but you should be able to add an .mp3 or .epub to the respective library on the mobile device directly. I hope Apple addresses that without destroying the ease of use and powerful metadata we have now.
> An iPhone is not a hard disk, but a computer with its own operating system, and you need dedicated software to communicate with it, imagine that.
Lol so I guess my Android phone isn't a computer with its own OS, since I can just plug it into a computer and copy over whatever files I want without bloatware, or, even better, plug in an external drive and copy over files to my phone.
This rationale of answering "I don't want to use Apple's BS ecosystem" with "Just use Apple's ecosystem" with a side order of "you luddite this is how technology works" snide is so sadly typical of people entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.
I've been using iPhone and MacOS for years and successfully picking & choosing different parts of the ecosystem. Sure, the defaults are usually set up to opt you into their own products so it takes a bit of fiddling but it's not hard to opt into just the set of services you want to use - i.e. sync only particular services like iCloud Notes and password manager, but use gmail for email and calendars (using open formats to sync these natively to your phone), use dropbox instead if iCloud for file syncing, etc. It's very configurable and I don't feel particularly locked into anything.
And iMessage seems like a particularly bad example of lock-in because you can take your identifier (phone number) with you. If you switch from iOS to Android pretty much all that happens from a user experience perspective is your message bubbles are now green instead of blue when you text your friends with iPhones. It's very seamless between SMS and iMessages as far as messaging platforms go. To the extent that group threads with your family become harder, that's because group SMS sucks, not because you're locked in to iMessage.
It really seems like most of the time when people talk about lock in, all they mean is that the feature is particularly good. It does what I want and makes things easy, so there would be friction to change. How dare they build features like that!
You lose a lot more than just message bubble colors when you switch away from iMessage. Multimedia quality takes a nosedive to 2006, reactions don't work, you lose encryption (SMS/MMS is not encrypted at all), and you miss out on all the other little things that make people like iMessage.
Of course this isn't really Apple's fault, we can blame the cell carriers for being categorically uninterested in modernizing SMS or making it secure.
Is multimedia quality between Android phones using MMS much better than iPhone-without-iMessage? I thought it's the same, which isn't lock-in, that's just iMessage being a superior service to MMS, and in fact the iPhone is going out of its way to not lock you in and allow MMS.
On the other hand, if the iPhone is intentionally crippling MMS, that's pretty slimy lock-in.
SMS is just as bad on Android phones as it is on iPhones. The problem is it's an ancient crappy standard and carriers are uninterested in fixing it. That is why Apple created iMessage.
Apple does nothing to cripple SMS on iPhones. The only thing Apple is guilty of is not opening up iMessage to non-Apple devices. With Apple Music and TV+ making their way to other ecosystems, I'm hopeful this might change.
I'm unclear about your iMessage comment, as Android or other platforms can send and receive messages just fine with users on iMessage.
As a followup, how is Android, or chromium any better in that regard, given Googles plans to disallow proper adblocking as it interferes with their business model?
There is a fix but Android users can have trouble being in iMessage groups.
As for how is adroid better... well. It's really not. Just like AMD isn't really better than Intel for privacy and security. For many parts of the hardware stack, if you want to be in control of your own privacy, you pretty much have to drop back to 2000s era technology.
No, your family will have a thread without you, you will never see those messages.
You can create a new thread but unless each of your family
members deletes the old iMessage thread they will default to the old thread, which you are blocked from.
Furthermore, they're based in a jurisdiction that's subject to warrantless blanket subpoenas with zero oversight. They may not be selling our data explicitly to the lowest bidder, but everything they gather is still accessible to whoever sits in the White House and whatever their minions think would be fun to dig up.
What makes Apple different is that since their business model doesn't depend on gathering and selling our data, their infrastructure gathers less data. And it sounds like they've taken active steps to make sure they gather as little as possible and that it's as useless as possible for nefarious purposes.
That takes extra effort in software design and testing, and they're hoping to see the return on that investment by explaining to their customers how that translates to value in our hands. If that's a stance they're actively taking, I think any reversal would eviscerate their image, and that's my reason to actually have a little faith.
It's not as secure as some alternatives, but it's a lot easier to use, and in the real world where not everybody compiles things from source, that matters.
Except Apple went to court and proved that they can't hand over this data even if they want to. US law allows law enforcement with a warrant to require Apple to hand over any data they have, but Apple isn't required to help them crack the users password so they can decrypt it.
Name one Country where it’s way better.
Germany? Wants to ban End-2-End encryption.
Germany was also the first country i believe where they seized an entire ISP and grabbed all its servers just for one file, if I remember correctly it was because of a copyright complaint.
On the surface, compared to Android, iOS is much more secure. It seems they ensure app sandbox is not violated by any app developer. No app can steal another apps data. You can prevent/revoke access to contacts, photos, sms, location, background execution, mobile data to any app from a central place.
They allow 3rd-party apps for doing messaging (replaces iMessage), cloud storage (replaces icloud), firefox (replaces safari), 1password (replaces keychain) – all in a clean and easy way – with no ambiguity or confusion.
But w.r.t end to end encryption claims, we just take them at their word. There is no formal verifiable proof.
Recently we have repeatedly learnt the hard way to not trust corporations at they word.
Without open-source and peer-reviewed cryptographic protocols and verifiable trusted execution models, it is not safe to believe it is truly end to end encrypted and nobody is spying.
I agree. They are sitting on more and more data they will be very tempted to use if they can’t hit their growth rates in the future. It would be better if no single entity had that much data.
Isn't Apple one of the few companies going out of their way to keep as much data as possible on-device instead of in the cloud? I agree that shareholders value margins over principles and that could be an issue for companies who do hold a lot of user data.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a core part of their messaging has been that they don't actually know what users are storing inside their cloud, has it not?
Maybe, but they can change that at any time. If they wanted to have visibility into iCloud data going forward they easily could.
With Apple products, you're putting your privacy entirely in Apple's hands and assuming that their executives will continue to follow the same branding and product strategy that they've been pursuing for the past few years.
That said, Apple is probably the least bad option for phone + cloud for most people. But it's sad that that's the case.
Didn't Apple prove to the FBI in court that they literally cannot access a users iCloud data without their password?
Obviously that still isn't as trustworthy as open source tools you can verify yourself, but it's a far cry better than any privacy guarantee you're getting from Google.
> Didn't Apple prove to the FBI in court that they literally cannot access a users iCloud data without their password?
No. Apple regularly hands over iCloud data to government investigator. In China, Apple handed over its keys, so the Chinese government does not even need to involve Apple to get iCloud data.
feature lock-in, and not feeling empowered to ignore the cloud services associated with the cellular phone you bought, are concerns. they are not security concerns.
it's privacy built on a closed source platform. that's the point you're making.
Your argument is "well maybe they won't be secure tomorrow and you're invested". Ok, but they are secure now and that's more than pretty much other major tech company. Yeah there's lock in with Apple, you don't think there is with Google too? Apple is worst I'll grant you but no one's innocent. Hell Microsoft had to pay 10s of billions for that kinda shit on the 90s. And let's not even get started on Google or IOT where they stop running the service and you're just SOL.
Apple give me privacy. Find a company that doesn't and doesn't have lock in and I'd switch in a heart beat but based on simple economics I doubt that's gonna happen any time soon
As someone who has tried multiple times to dip their toes into the Apple world, I can tell you that it's highly hostile to users who try to pick and choose how much they want to be an Apple citizen. If you don't agree to sign up for Apple cloud on the latest iOS, it feels like 80% of the basic functions for a smartphone get locked away from you.
And they have viral aspects to their lock-in as well. Have a single family member who isn't on iMessage? Looks like they don't get to participate in your family discussions anymore.
Their privacy features are a selling point today, but your privacy is 100% in their control. If the executive team made the decision tomorrow to switch Apple into a fully panopticon ecosystem, they'd be able to switch over in a year with little visibility for their users that this transition was happening.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you under heavy lock-in pressure and you are fully putting your faith in Apple that the directions they go in the future will be directions that you are happy with.
That doesn't feel secure to me.