[Jerry2]

Just go into Settings and disable "Background App Refresh" for all the apps you don't want running in the background. And also check your Battery section to see which apps use the battery the most.

I'm a recent convert to iOS (I've used Android for 7+ years) and I find that it "phones home" a lot less than Android. You can easily run a Wireshark and confirm it yourself.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/idle-android-ph...

[caprese]

I like how “a lot less” is the new standard, compared to “at all”

[Jerry2]

Well, if you look at the study [0] you can see that you can get rid of the most of the tracking by disabling App Background Refresh, removing the Google apps and by running a content blocker. If you do all those steps, Big Google won't be getting much identifiable data about you.

>Both Android and Chrome send data to Google even in the absence of any user interaction. Our experiments show that a dormant, stationary Android phone (with Chrome active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35% of all the data samples sent to Google. In contrast, a similar experiment showed that on an iOS Apple device with Safari (where neither Android nor Chrome were used), Google could not collect any appreciable data (location or otherwise) in the absence of a user interaction with the device.

>While using an iOS device, if a user decides to forgo the use of any Google product (i.e. no Android, no Chrome, no Google applications), and visits only non-Google webpages, the number of times data is communicated to Google servers still remains surprisingly high. This communication is driven purely by advertiser/publisher services. The number of times such Google services are called from an iOS device is similar to an Android device. In this experiment, the total magnitude of data communicated to Google servers from an iOS device is found to be approximately half of that from the Android device.

[0] https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...

[Phlarp]

It's a shame google maps is so much better than the alternatives, but it's probably somewhat related to the amount of data they collect.

[sjwright]

But think about that for a second.

Apple spends something like 1 billion dollars a year on Apple Maps. There is no strategic reason for them to do maps. They aren't making money from it. They are anonymising the statistics they gather. They chose to spend this insane amount of money doing something completely foreign to them just so their customers don't have to use Google Maps.

Let that sink in.

It's incredible.

As for the quality of Apple Maps—yes, it was rubbish when it first launched but today it is usually (depending on your city and your specific usages) within cooee of equally good. In fact I tend to find Apple Maps often superior for walking and public transport directions in an unfamiliar city.

[Phlarp]

Apple's motivation to grow Apple Maps is the same as Google's motivation to grow their maps product-- commoditize the complement.

They both spend lots of money on maps in the hope that users will use those maps on each corporations platform. The difference is Apple makes money selling the device and services, Google makes money selling your attention to advertisers.

The real driving force for Apple to spend that money was Google restricting features in their iOS app.

[sjwright]

Commoditising the complement is a compatible thesis to my aforementioned point.

Also, it was leaked somewhere that Google was willing to give iOS all the features as long as Apple would allow all the user tracking. I can't speak to how reliable that is, but it wouldn't surprise me.

[JohnFen]

> It's a shame google maps is so much better than the alternatives

I don't need the best possible mapping application, I just (occasionally) need one that's "good enough". More and more, for me, "good enough" means keeping a static image of the maps of the area that I'll be in.