6 ms·

“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece. I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my li

“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece. I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business. The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.

jraph 8mo ago
A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts. Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution. A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups. Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
- microtonal 8mo ago
  I think they also provide backups Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore
hagbard_c 8mo ago
What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this? I run close to exclusively free software and have done so for decades and have yet to feel the need to change this. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. I need to run proprietary applications for banking and electronic ID but those are the exceptions to the rule. My server runs only free software, on desktop I sometimes run an older version of Sketchup to start modelling things but that's the only non-free package I use there. We have children, a cat, a dog, 4 horses, a farm, a large forest, the works. We have multi-device backup and restore as well. Things work fine, using free software, not using 'the cloud'. Where are the sticking points for you and what would it take to take those away?
- fn-mote 8mo ago
  The author is technical, but apparently the parents are not. “It works for me” turns into “just spy on my family members”.
- tonyarkles 8mo ago
  For me, “impossible” isn’t the case. I’m deeply technical and could 100% run a setup like you’re describing. For me it’s, sadly, convenience and priorities. I oscillate between Linux and OS X for desktop/laptop use, have used Linux for server use for decades, have used both iOS/iPadOS and Android for tablets “in production”, and have only used Android as a secondary phone for doing development, and only iOS for primary phone use. Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff. Day-to-day: - For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one. - Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant. - ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray! - Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally. - Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing. - Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop. Hardware compatibility: - My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it. - My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac. OS Updates: - My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped. - The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet. - My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine. Occasional new device setup: - Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
dismalaf 8mo ago
95% of what was written in this article isn't required to set up an Android phone. You can literally log into your Google account on first boot and everything is done for you, automatically.
- fn-mote 8mo ago
  The point is that you have to turn off preferences and uninstall apps that come with the phone. (Samsung apps and OneDrive are mentioned.) So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.
- GuestFAUniverse 8mo ago
  At least Samsung doesn't sync folders. Meaning: if they were organized before by topic they aren't there after syncing via their "Samsung Smart Switch Mobile" to a new Samsung phone. A lot gets synced, but it's not like an image with full DSC (desired state configuration) afterwards. Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
- kiwijamo 8mo ago
  Maybe Samsung has changed how the first boot works compared to stock Android, but this definitely has not been my experience across several Samsung devices. Also many apps store their data in different ways which doesn't always survive a device migration/backup. Only cloud-only apps have a good experience, wheras anything that stores data on device can be hit and miss depending on how easy individual apps manage its backup.
II2II 8mo ago
> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business. Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties. While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
- t0bia_s 8mo ago
  that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
  - iririririr 8mo ago
    > Installation of GrapheneOS and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. But other than that, android is not opensource anymore. I mean, it never was because you had hundreds (no exaggeration [1]) closed-binary blobs running (not to mention a whole OS on things like radio and camera, running on their own SoC), but now you cannot get even close to a proper of the userspace since google already anounced they will not be mainlining anything back to AOSP [1] zero source for kernel pieces, even for pixel https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_laguna-kernels_6.6/tree/16-qpr2/grapheneos/muzel https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_laguna-kernels_6...
    - II2II 8mo ago
      > and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. You get improved privacy and security, at least on some fronts. By default, GrapheneOS does not provide root access and recommends against rooting the device. Is there a trade-off? Certainly. Security and privacy are always at conflict with what a completely open platform can provide. Given the amount of access to personal information that goes through our devices and the number of bad actors out there (both behaving legally and illicitly), some people believe it is worth the price. At least GrapheneOS offers more transparency than Android or iOS. The bit about clamping down on open source, that is very much disappointing. I doubt that it is going to go away entirely in Android. On the other hand, hopefully it will provide incentives for companies to explore developing more open alternatives and consumers to explore buying more open alternatives. It won't be a huge market, but many of us have avoided growing so dependent upon the current platforms that we couldn't simply walk away.
adamsmark 8mo ago
iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services. Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible. When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.
- cmiles74 8mo ago
  It took a good while for me to figure out that a family member had inadvertently signed up for an Apple Music account that they were not using.
  - iririririr 8mo ago
    Apple going from being "the new microsoft" to being "the new AOL"
metalman 8mo ago
a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it. this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?
cmckn 8mo ago
To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.
- nomel 8mo ago
  All of those security related screens you listed is why I like Apple: security related things are local to secure enclave, not in cloud.
  - LtWorf 8mo ago
    Keep in mind apple famously never fixes these bugs that let the phone be rooted via a 0click attack starting from imessage, which inexplicably runs with elevated privileges. I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.
- dangus 8mo ago
  And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.
  - alexdbird 7mo ago
    This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.
    - dangus 7mo ago
      Interesting reasoning that I never thought of, though it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of stuff deters my non-technical family members from updating Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.
- Tzk 8mo ago
nazgul17 8mo ago
*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.
EmperorClawd 8mo ago
[dead]
uyzstvqs 8mo ago
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'd argue that installing and setting up GrapheneOS on a Pixel is as-much or less effort compared to setting up an iPhone. And it gives you full freedom and the best possible security while doing so. You can have everything at once.
nradov 8mo ago
Setting up a new Samsung device is just as easy. Everything transfers over in a few minutes.
socalgal2 8mo ago
Apple products are atrocious to setup too. I've wanted to film just how bad the experience is but I'd need a 3rd phone since I have to use the 2nd phone to setup the new 1st phone.
- trip-zip 8mo ago
  I was about to say the same. I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.
Paddyz 8mo ago
[dead]
bsder 8mo ago
> “Android phones” is the key missing piece. iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone. Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone. All the companies want to hold your data hostage.
- winterbloom 8mo ago
  who do you think gets in trouble if her phone dies and all her stuff is gone storing things in the cloud is responsible
  - wolvoleo 7mo ago
    Just back it up once a week on the computer, that's what I do. I don't even use a Google account on my phone. Most apps don't need it! There's only a handful that do, in particular ChatGPT that really insists you have a Google account logged in (why they force you to make an account with their direct competitor is beyond me but they do) But perplexity is much better anyway so I use that.
  - eMPee584 7mo ago
    local backups is responsible
    - winterbloom 7mo ago
      yeah you might do that, but how many non-technical people can be bothered to do so?
  - bsder 7mo ago
    And who gets in trouble when her iCloud account glitches itself and loses everything? Or when the network is dead and nothing works? Local copies should always be primary and cloud copies secondary. But you don't get to extract rent in that case which is why none of the big companies want to do things that way.
NetMageSCW 7mo ago
I find it hard to believe that almost 20 years after copying iPhone, Google still hasn’t figured out how to do backups properly for simple phone migration. What happens if your Android phone is stolen or destroyed? (It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)

jraph 8mo ago

A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts. Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution. A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups. Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).

microtonal 8mo ago
I think they also provide backups Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore

hagbard_c 8mo ago

What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this? I run close to exclusively free software and have done so for decades and have yet to feel the need to change this. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. I need to run proprietary applications for banking and electronic ID but those are the exceptions to the rule. My server runs only free software, on desktop I sometimes run an older version of Sketchup to start modelling things but that's the only non-free package I use there. We have children, a cat, a dog, 4 horses, a farm, a large forest, the works. We have multi-device backup and restore as well. Things work fine, using free software, not using 'the cloud'. Where are the sticking points for you and what would it take to take those away?

fn-mote 8mo ago
The author is technical, but apparently the parents are not. “It works for me” turns into “just spy on my family members”.
tonyarkles 8mo ago
For me, “impossible” isn’t the case. I’m deeply technical and could 100% run a setup like you’re describing. For me it’s, sadly, convenience and priorities. I oscillate between Linux and OS X for desktop/laptop use, have used Linux for server use for decades, have used both iOS/iPadOS and Android for tablets “in production”, and have only used Android as a secondary phone for doing development, and only iOS for primary phone use. Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff. Day-to-day: - For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one. - Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant. - ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray! - Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally. - Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing. - Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop. Hardware compatibility: - My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it. - My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac. OS Updates: - My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped. - The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet. - My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine. Occasional new device setup: - Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.

dismalaf 8mo ago

95% of what was written in this article isn't required to set up an Android phone. You can literally log into your Google account on first boot and everything is done for you, automatically.

fn-mote 8mo ago
The point is that you have to turn off preferences and uninstall apps that come with the phone. (Samsung apps and OneDrive are mentioned.) So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.
GuestFAUniverse 8mo ago
At least Samsung doesn't sync folders. Meaning: if they were organized before by topic they aren't there after syncing via their "Samsung Smart Switch Mobile" to a new Samsung phone. A lot gets synced, but it's not like an image with full DSC (desired state configuration) afterwards. Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
kiwijamo 8mo ago
Maybe Samsung has changed how the first boot works compared to stock Android, but this definitely has not been my experience across several Samsung devices. Also many apps store their data in different ways which doesn't always survive a device migration/backup. Only cloud-only apps have a good experience, wheras anything that stores data on device can be hit and miss depending on how easy individual apps manage its backup.

II2II 8mo ago

> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business. Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties. While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).

t0bia_s 8mo ago
that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
- iririririr 8mo ago
  > Installation of GrapheneOS and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. But other than that, android is not opensource anymore. I mean, it never was because you had hundreds (no exaggeration [1]) closed-binary blobs running (not to mention a whole OS on things like radio and camera, running on their own SoC), but now you cannot get even close to a proper of the userspace since google already anounced they will not be mainlining anything back to AOSP [1] zero source for kernel pieces, even for pixel https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_laguna-kernels_6.6/tree/16-qpr2/grapheneos/muzel https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_laguna-kernels_6...
  - II2II 8mo ago
    > and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. You get improved privacy and security, at least on some fronts. By default, GrapheneOS does not provide root access and recommends against rooting the device. Is there a trade-off? Certainly. Security and privacy are always at conflict with what a completely open platform can provide. Given the amount of access to personal information that goes through our devices and the number of bad actors out there (both behaving legally and illicitly), some people believe it is worth the price. At least GrapheneOS offers more transparency than Android or iOS. The bit about clamping down on open source, that is very much disappointing. I doubt that it is going to go away entirely in Android. On the other hand, hopefully it will provide incentives for companies to explore developing more open alternatives and consumers to explore buying more open alternatives. It won't be a huge market, but many of us have avoided growing so dependent upon the current platforms that we couldn't simply walk away.

adamsmark 8mo ago

iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services. Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible. When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.

cmiles74 8mo ago
It took a good while for me to figure out that a family member had inadvertently signed up for an Apple Music account that they were not using.
- iririririr 8mo ago
  Apple going from being "the new microsoft" to being "the new AOL"

metalman 8mo ago

a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it. this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?

cmckn 8mo ago

To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.

nomel 8mo ago
All of those security related screens you listed is why I like Apple: security related things are local to secure enclave, not in cloud.
- LtWorf 8mo ago
  Keep in mind apple famously never fixes these bugs that let the phone be rooted via a 0click attack starting from imessage, which inexplicably runs with elevated privileges. I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.
dangus 8mo ago
And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.
- alexdbird 7mo ago
  This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.
  - dangus 7mo ago
    Interesting reasoning that I never thought of, though it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of stuff deters my non-technical family members from updating Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.
Tzk 8mo ago

nazgul17 8mo ago

*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.

EmperorClawd 8mo ago

[dead]

uyzstvqs 8mo ago

You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'd argue that installing and setting up GrapheneOS on a Pixel is as-much or less effort compared to setting up an iPhone. And it gives you full freedom and the best possible security while doing so. You can have everything at once.

nradov 8mo ago

Setting up a new Samsung device is just as easy. Everything transfers over in a few minutes.

socalgal2 8mo ago

Apple products are atrocious to setup too. I've wanted to film just how bad the experience is but I'd need a 3rd phone since I have to use the 2nd phone to setup the new 1st phone.

trip-zip 8mo ago
I was about to say the same. I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.

Paddyz 8mo ago

[dead]

bsder 8mo ago

> “Android phones” is the key missing piece. iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone. Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone. All the companies want to hold your data hostage.

winterbloom 8mo ago
who do you think gets in trouble if her phone dies and all her stuff is gone storing things in the cloud is responsible
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  Just back it up once a week on the computer, that's what I do. I don't even use a Google account on my phone. Most apps don't need it! There's only a handful that do, in particular ChatGPT that really insists you have a Google account logged in (why they force you to make an account with their direct competitor is beyond me but they do) But perplexity is much better anyway so I use that.
- eMPee584 7mo ago
  local backups is responsible
  - winterbloom 7mo ago
    yeah you might do that, but how many non-technical people can be bothered to do so?
- bsder 7mo ago
  And who gets in trouble when her iCloud account glitches itself and loses everything? Or when the network is dead and nothing works? Local copies should always be primary and cloud copies secondary. But you don't get to extract rent in that case which is why none of the big companies want to do things that way.

NetMageSCW 7mo ago

I find it hard to believe that almost 20 years after copying iPhone, Google still hasn’t figured out how to do backups properly for simple phone migration. What happens if your Android phone is stolen or destroyed? (It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)