this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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That tools doesn’t always work, besides an iPhone comes clean out of the box. No constantly running spyware on the background, no Samsung/Xiaomi apps. Almost everything can be easily turned off under Settings unlike an Android where you’ll be forced into a 3rd party tool or a ROM like GrapheneOS if you want a clean experience.
When you buy an iPhone you’ll also have a guarantee that you won’t be installing malware, even with the new Alt Stores in Europe, all the apps are code-signed and require validation. You also are sure that your apps won’t be able to get system-wide access and run all over your data and battery like we see on Android.
Yes, the iPhone is less open but it provides a level of security, privacy and “cleanliness” out of the box that Android devices can’t just match. If you don’t have much time / interest / tech skills to mess around with a phone then the iPhone is the best phone you can buy.
How does it come "clean out of the box" when you literally just said it requires modifications to the settings to improve its privacy?
Samsung and Xiaomi apps are vendor-specific and can be disabled, even without the use of UAD (which works fine, not sure why you're lying about that).
GrapheneOS is available as an option because Android has an open-source basis. Remind me which alternative privacy OS Apple allows third party developers to create for iPhone? Which iPhone did they allow users to install this imaginary privacy OS on?
Android applications have been sandboxed for several versions now.
iOS comes with reasonable privacy defaults and blocks things such as apps running in the background for long time. Going into the settings is the extra-mile that still easier than having to install a cleaner ROM or deal with 3rd party tools.
I'm not lying about anything here, you know as well as I do that many vendors don't allow you to remove all of their Apps and most install permanently running daemons that you can't remove without UAD or other methods.
Yet the sandboxing isn't even comparable. One key aspect of the iOS sandbox is that is not only restricts filesystem access but also executes applications with way less privileges than Android does.
To complement the sandbox iOS apps are forced to use Apple's APIs in order to access user data (eg. Contacts and Photos) which will apply strict restrictions such as allowing you to limit at a system level what photos an application may access. Since all apps are required to be summited to Apple for review (even on Alt Stores) they'll enforce the usage of their APIs making it way harder to bypass restrictions.
Comparatively, on Android, you can install applications from random sources that typically resort to hacks to get around the sandbox restrictions and access more than they should.