[sonofhans]

“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.

[II2II]

> 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]

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.

[n8cpdx]

I tried it, Graphene isn't really a good alternative because the built in apps are so bad that you end up needing to install the Pixel/Google versions anyway.

If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?

If I have to turn Graphene into a Pixel to make it usable, and I did, there’s not much point. And the apps are 90% of the time very noticeably better on iOS, so overall turns into a very bad trade.

[ninjasmosa]

You still get much better privacy with GrapheneOS even if you install Google apps since they are sandboxed; they don't have access to unique device identifiers and you can control what Google can access by adjusting its permissions, as opposed to having full reign to do whatever it wants. Also you don't have to use all the Google apps, plenty of open source and/or privacy respecting alternatives out there. Pixel Camera only needs Google Photos for the photo previewer, everything else works without it or you can install gcam services provider to use any gallery you want

[prmoustache]

> If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?

I am not sure why would you have to install messages has nobody uses RCS these days.

As for calendars and contacts, I am struggling to see the added value over the fossify alternatives, hence I don't have them anymore on my smartphones.

Pixel camera and google photos are nice to get the most out of tye pixel camera but thanksfully grapheneOS lets you use them without access to network. Stock Pixel rom doesn't allow you to do that. That is a major difference imho.

[LostMyWords]

> Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality)

I disabled Google Photos but I didn't notice any issues with Camera except for not being able to open the photo just taken from the camera interface. Am I missing something else?

[popol12]

You can install this to fix it, btw

https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider

[microgpt]

That's basic functionality?

[throw-the-towel]

I replace Google Messages with a FOSS version precisely because it doesn't bug me about RCS.

[wolvoleo]

Which one if I may ask? I'm looking for one to get out of RCS reminders and also to avoid receiving emergency messages which come through even if I turn them off in Google messages. The local authorities overuse it, I get several per month now.

I think it's because they got blamed for not warning everyone with the Valencia floods last year but it's really ridiculous now. Now they blow up everyone's phone just when there's going to be a bit of wind.

[throw-the-towel]

I like org.fossify.messages from F-Droid, but there are other good SMS apps over there.

[t0bia_s]

Benefit is in sandboxing gapps. Less data to collect and more battery to save.

[cyberax]

JFYI, Pixel Camera works without a Google Account. Contacts and Calendar work fine through CalDav and Fossify Calendar.

I avoid RCS like a plague, so I can't comment about that.

[clearleaf]

Unless you live in a place where your phone needs to be a regional variant and there are no custom roms that support it.

[iririririr]

> 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...

[II2II]

> 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.

[qn9n]

You can actually use most Apple devices without signing in. There are obviously a lot of benefits to the ecosystem but you can enjoy the hardware etc. without signing especially on Mac. For iPhone you'd need to learn to side load apps but it's doable.

[zadikian]

You don't need an Apple account to back up an entire iPhone and restore it onto a new one, keeping almost all settings. They've kept the local iTunes method working from day 1. Idk how you do this in Android, sounds like most people sync everything to Google.

[LoganDark]

At least Apple's ecosystem is genuinely better in certain ways. Everyone else wants a piece of the pie that they didn't deserve.

[iguhhyfchh]

Getting downvoted for speaking the truth. HN loves to twist its nose every time someone praises a closed-source solution but falls head over heels for anyone claiming to work for a FAANG. Hypocrisy thy name is HN.

[LoganDark]

I got downvoted one single time. Ow owie ouch my fake internet points.

It was probably for saying everyone else doesn't deserve the piece of the pie. That's incredibly subjective on my part.

[iguhhyfchh]

Ah, well, with that attitude it was well deserved then. Don’t mind me.

[LoganDark]

How ironic...

[recursive]

I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.

[NetMageSCW]

That sounds like Linux users complaining about Windows Server or vice versa. iPad is trivial to get running but it is not the same as an Android tablet, and if you try to use your Android experience you will have issues.

[recursive]

Not so trivial that I didn't struggle with it for an hour. I'm not an Android power user. (I think?) I'm not even particularly a fan of Android. It's just the (hot take) least bad option I've tried.

More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".

[II2II]

> That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge.

If you are comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. setting up pre-installed Linux verses pre-installed Windows, or installing Linux to installing Windows), I would argue that Linux has been in the lead for many years. Setting up a reasonable desktop distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) is no more and no less technical. Linux distributions won't encourage you to create online accounts, try to upsell you online services, or bombard you with questions about privacy settings.

From my last experience with macOS: on a technical front, macOS is simpler to reinstall. The online account setup and upselling is far less intrusive (perhaps to the point where you can legitimately consider it as a beneficial setup step for the end user). Perhaps macOS has the lead, but it is a marginal one.

[pdimitar]

You should do a blog write-up on that, many would find it fascinating.

[recursive]

Believe me, I wish I had documented it. I didn't realize that this would be surprising or controversial until I described the experience later to others. Some people basically didn't believe me.

The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.

I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.

If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.

[cmckn]

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]

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]

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]

And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.

[alexdbird]

This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.

[dangus]

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]

actually you can skip most of these, but get reduced functionality in return. You can skip faceID/touchID, unlock code, appleID. You can’t skip terms, some customization options and, data collection and privacy settings.

In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.

[zadikian]

I think the point is that you can skip all those, but it's still 50 screens. There's no "skip all and go directly to my home screen" button.

[jraph]

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]

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

[bsder]

> “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]

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]

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.

[bsder]

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.

[eMPee584]

local backups is responsible

[winterbloom]

yeah you might do that, but how many non-technical people can be bothered to do so?

[adamsmark]

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]

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]

Apple going from being "the new microsoft" to being "the new AOL"

[hagbard_c]

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]

The author is technical, but apparently the parents are not. “It works for me” turns into “just spy on my family members”.

[71bw]

>What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this?

Play Integrity and Google's monopoly on providing "hardware attestation".

[tonyarkles]

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.

[nyarlathotep_]

> 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 has always been my core Linux desktop woe--there's always, no matter what CPU GPU (including (and most often), no dGPU at all) combo/distro I've used, been sleep wake issues of some variety.

I've had AMD CPUs with both fedora and Ubuntu that would never sleep if they weren't woken to desktop (i.e if not logged in, then allowed to automatically turn off the display) they'd never sleep. On those and any of the machines since, I never get more than a month of uptime without it being unresponsive when trying to wake it or similar, regardless of if Kernel updates have been installed etc.

[jamespo]

I rarely use sleep on my Linux laptop (which I really had to fiddle with to get working) but never use it on desktop. With niri and startup apps going into default locations I don’t feel like I need it at all now.

[uyzstvqs]

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]

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

[dismalaf]

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]

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.

[kiwijamo]

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.

[GuestFAUniverse]

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.

[NetMageSCW]

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.)

[socalgal2]

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]

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.

[metalman]

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?

[nazgul17]

*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.