[RATML]

Imagine doing all that work to just hinge your fate on the least open, least aligned platform to your app's and app protocol's declared raison d'être.

Do these people really believe that the cypherpunk ethos involves being an Apple bootlicker? I don't get it.

[whywhywhywhy]

Wasting all the money and more importantly time to try and prosper in the iOS ecosystem baffles me in this day and age.

That’s time you don’t get back, lost forever because some one you’ll never meet on a committee says no.

“It has to be an app” is old world thinking. No iOS app in the past 3 years or more has disrupted anything.

[RATML]

^ spitting facts.

[photonerd]

I mean anyone who would work on or with a google platform certainly isn’t. They’re the least cypherpunk, most bland and corporate, evil tech corp I can think of that makes consumer hardware outside of MAYBE Meta.

[lawn]

With Google you can sideload apps, use F-Droid or go for Lineage or Graphene.

So targeting Android makes much more sense than targeting iOS in this respect.

[evandale]

It's known that iOS is the best platform to make money and targeting iOS makes more sense because of that. They probably have an idea of how much they're willing to spend to fight Apple on this because if they win it will be huge for them and they stand to make more than releasing on Android. This is also putting them directly into the news and will reach those Android people so it almost doubles as a genius marketing campaign to fight Apple. I highly doubt they see all this as a waste of money and time and I can see them fighting Apple until they are forced to release an Android app to recoup the money they've lost.

Android users are notorious for not spending money (IIRC Apple users spend double the amount of money on subscriptions vs Android users) and it's unlikely Android users would tip content creators, or even watch the content they're putting out there.

[photonerd]

I mean… you can sort of sideload on iOS right now, I’ve done it myself, and it’s going to be officially supported in iOS 17 later this year.

But irrespective of that, none of that makes it cypherpunk.

Cypherpunk involves advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change.

On that front Google is VERY far behind Apple.

[friend_and_foe]

Android (more strictly, AOSP) is an open source linux based operating system that can be used standalone with no google shenanigans whatsoever. I don't like google either, but at least I can use whatever software I want on my machine. To say android is as restrictive or more restrictive than Apple is to be disconnected from reality. To say that using Android is less cyberpunk than using a completely vertically integrated system like the iPhone with it's thousand dollar accessories because "evilcorp" is absurd.

[photonerd]

Sure. It’s nice to have. I absolutely give google (limited) props for ASOP. Tho it’s “open” in mostly the “you can see & download the code” sense, not the “we’re open to contributors from the community” sense, but still… it’s great they did that.

But it doesn’t make using the “open” software that’s completely controlled by the giant corporate empire any more “cypherpunk”, does it?

[friend_and_foe]

A little more, yes. Of course, ideally, I'd love a BSD mobile operating system that runs TUI applications I made myself. But it's a world of compromise, so I compromise.

From my phone (in Minecraft), I run an IPFS node, I communicate over distributed encrypted channels, I share files over BitTorrent, I probe networks, I zap people on nostr, I do all sorts of things the big powers would rather me not be doing, even though they aren't necessarily illegal. I can run literally any sort of software that I like, period, with nobody's permission or even knowledge of the fact. In computing, I take into consideration absolutely nothing that these corporations would prefer that I do. That's pretty cypherpunk, even if I do it all without google explicitly giving me an AMOLED black theme in their operating system. I use one of those too anyway.

[7v3x3n3sem9vv]

with Google you at least have the option to de-google with graphene or lineage. no open source alternatives on Apple mobile hardware.

[photonerd]

You do. Yes, and lots of things wont work without the Play store (and its subsystems) but you can.

It’s nice that it’s an option, I agree. That’s not really cypherpunk tho, is it?

[api]

It'd be nice if there were a Linux laptop option that didn't sound like a jet engine taking off every time you do anything serious with it.

[photonerd]

Ironically, the best Linux laptop I’ve ever had was an old MacBook.