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I'm surprised you say the Apple ecosystem is terrible. It's arguably the best, most complete and integrated ecosystem out there currently. Of course it's not g

I'm surprised you say the Apple ecosystem is terrible. It's arguably the best, most complete and integrated ecosystem out there currently. Of course it's not going to work well with Windows. Apple wants you to buy a Mac.

smoldesu 5y ago
It's hard to call the iPhone complete when it makes egregious concessions in it's capabilities in the name of "safety" (which turns out to be a moot-point anyways, as sufficently funded state actors have proven to us over the past few months).
- jolux 5y ago
  Security is not moot just because state actors can break it, that's basically expected. The idea is to give everyone below the level of a state a harder time.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    If all that effort didn't come at the expense of user agency, I'd be inclined to agree. Instead, it looks like an increasingly toothless justification to prevent people from undermining the App Store's profitability. The security theater isn't as convincing when their puppets are falling apart in their hands.
    - jolux 5y ago
      But it's not security theater. Sandboxing and strong isolation is one of the oldest techniques around for increasing security. iOS has the least malware of any OS. The security measures it contains would appear to be extremely good at keeping out threats that plague many other platforms.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Sandboxing and strong isolation are not mutually exclusive with allowing third-party sources to install apps. If their sandboxing is as good as you say it is, there should be no security threat imposed by allowing other apps on the device. The two should be distinct, separate threat models, but Apple conflates them.
        jolux 5y ago
        > If their sandboxing is as good as you say it is, there should be no security threat imposed by allowing other apps on the device. No, because it's part of a defense-in-depth strategy. Sandboxing and isolation is meant to catch what app review misses, without app review people would be attacking those mechanisms directly at a much higher frequency.
        bitwize 5y ago
        Allowlisting is also one of the best security practices you can implement, because allowlisting significantly reduces the problem space of executables you have to consider (and dangerous executables, if found, can be removed from the allowlist). There's always a chance that a piece of malware which somehow breaks the sandboxing and isolation can find its way onto someone's device; allowlisting greatly mitigates this possibility. Endpoint security is everyone's problem now, because everyone has one or more always-connected devices. The future of computing is a signed, remotely attested path from power-on to user application code, all checked against an allowlist of approved binaries. For most, this will be a good thing.
- fortran77 5y ago
  What state actors? They are compromised by a small, private company.
Clampower 5y ago
After 7 years of android I switched over to iPhone. Largely due to the Google hate I experience here on hn. There is so many small annoyances on iPhone. Some things like hide my email, password management are brilliant, even if I need to use Safari, which I hate because I want to use Firefox for ad blocking. But iOS is objectively terrible. Notifications are so horrible. Support for my Garmin watch is awful. The jarring system sounds and don’t even get me started on the awful alarm sounds. Siri is unusable and the fact that I can’t change to another assistant is terrible. Apple Maps doesn’t even have biking directions in one of the most bike central cities of the world, amsterdam, lol!! Useless. Dutch is not supported in system wide translations feature, again I need to revert to Google translate. Keyboards for multilingual people are really really terrible. I need to switch between 4 languages every day. The fact that I need to switch between keyboards and then still have autocomplete fight me whenever I dare to use a word form a different language ( even simple ones like “yeah” which I want to use in German or Dutch as well ). The keyboard is so terrible as well. And then just things that make no sense at all. Why can I not see a battery percentage on the icon of the battery? I need to swipe control center down to see that. Why can I not see seconds in the time? Why can I not set two timers????? I really really really hate iOS. It has things that are nice and better than android. But for anybody to think that it is a “complete and integrated” ecosystem makes me … laugh. Like it’s just objectively terrible.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  > Why can I not see a battery percentage on the icon of the battery? Settings :: Battery :: Battery Percentage Siri, Keyboard, and Maps gripes granted, but not really what people mean when they talk about "ecosystem", I'm very happy with how I can copy paste between my phone and laptop, and how my homepods and airpods and appletv all hand-off to each other.
  - jonas21 5y ago
    > Settings :: Battery :: Battery Percentage Yeah, that would make sense, right? But Apple decided not to include that setting on iPhones with a notch (which is basically all of them these days).
  - 5y ago
vicda 5y ago
And for those of us who don't want to live exclusively in their walled garden, it's an ecosystem rife with friction and sludge.

smoldesu 5y ago

It's hard to call the iPhone complete when it makes egregious concessions in it's capabilities in the name of "safety" (which turns out to be a moot-point anyways, as sufficently funded state actors have proven to us over the past few months).

jolux 5y ago
Security is not moot just because state actors can break it, that's basically expected. The idea is to give everyone below the level of a state a harder time.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  If all that effort didn't come at the expense of user agency, I'd be inclined to agree. Instead, it looks like an increasingly toothless justification to prevent people from undermining the App Store's profitability. The security theater isn't as convincing when their puppets are falling apart in their hands.
  - jolux 5y ago
    But it's not security theater. Sandboxing and strong isolation is one of the oldest techniques around for increasing security. iOS has the least malware of any OS. The security measures it contains would appear to be extremely good at keeping out threats that plague many other platforms.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Sandboxing and strong isolation are not mutually exclusive with allowing third-party sources to install apps. If their sandboxing is as good as you say it is, there should be no security threat imposed by allowing other apps on the device. The two should be distinct, separate threat models, but Apple conflates them.
      - jolux 5y ago
        > If their sandboxing is as good as you say it is, there should be no security threat imposed by allowing other apps on the device. No, because it's part of a defense-in-depth strategy. Sandboxing and isolation is meant to catch what app review misses, without app review people would be attacking those mechanisms directly at a much higher frequency.
      - bitwize 5y ago
        Allowlisting is also one of the best security practices you can implement, because allowlisting significantly reduces the problem space of executables you have to consider (and dangerous executables, if found, can be removed from the allowlist). There's always a chance that a piece of malware which somehow breaks the sandboxing and isolation can find its way onto someone's device; allowlisting greatly mitigates this possibility. Endpoint security is everyone's problem now, because everyone has one or more always-connected devices. The future of computing is a signed, remotely attested path from power-on to user application code, all checked against an allowlist of approved binaries. For most, this will be a good thing.
fortran77 5y ago
What state actors? They are compromised by a small, private company.

Clampower 5y ago

After 7 years of android I switched over to iPhone. Largely due to the Google hate I experience here on hn. There is so many small annoyances on iPhone. Some things like hide my email, password management are brilliant, even if I need to use Safari, which I hate because I want to use Firefox for ad blocking. But iOS is objectively terrible. Notifications are so horrible. Support for my Garmin watch is awful. The jarring system sounds and don’t even get me started on the awful alarm sounds. Siri is unusable and the fact that I can’t change to another assistant is terrible. Apple Maps doesn’t even have biking directions in one of the most bike central cities of the world, amsterdam, lol!! Useless. Dutch is not supported in system wide translations feature, again I need to revert to Google translate. Keyboards for multilingual people are really really terrible. I need to switch between 4 languages every day. The fact that I need to switch between keyboards and then still have autocomplete fight me whenever I dare to use a word form a different language ( even simple ones like “yeah” which I want to use in German or Dutch as well ). The keyboard is so terrible as well. And then just things that make no sense at all. Why can I not see a battery percentage on the icon of the battery? I need to swipe control center down to see that. Why can I not see seconds in the time? Why can I not set two timers????? I really really really hate iOS. It has things that are nice and better than android. But for anybody to think that it is a “complete and integrated” ecosystem makes me … laugh. Like it’s just objectively terrible.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
> Why can I not see a battery percentage on the icon of the battery? Settings :: Battery :: Battery Percentage Siri, Keyboard, and Maps gripes granted, but not really what people mean when they talk about "ecosystem", I'm very happy with how I can copy paste between my phone and laptop, and how my homepods and airpods and appletv all hand-off to each other.
- jonas21 5y ago
  > Settings :: Battery :: Battery Percentage Yeah, that would make sense, right? But Apple decided not to include that setting on iPhones with a notch (which is basically all of them these days).
- 5y ago

vicda 5y ago

And for those of us who don't want to live exclusively in their walled garden, it's an ecosystem rife with friction and sludge.