Unfortunately, iOS simply does not allow apps like Briar to run reliably in the background[1]. Unless Apple changes its thinking about iOS, Briar or other similar apps would never work reliably.
Switching ecosystems is a huge pain, I started with iPhone and eventually moved to Android and back again to iPhone. When you use a lot of the Apple/Google Services, it's not really easy to just switch over
I guess it's easy if a person cares enough about it? I'm the relative PITA in my family because I prefer to put everything on a paper calendar and mostly use my phone for Signal, iMessage, occasional email, some photos, and internet, including toe-dips into this forum as my social media engagement. I'm in my 40s, grew up with a Commodore64, and am disenchanted with computers now (while still using them for a few things- life's messy, and that's okay). Surveillance capitalism is more of a threat to much of what I care about (includes partcipatory democracy and mutual aid), and it makes sense to both push back and find a better path.
Humans have done okay for a hundred thousand years+ without computers, with some dark ages here and there when people get greedy.
No larger screen has ever had issues with permanent damage from regular use. They just aren’t a good fit for most people in their current durability state. Anyone who totally baby’s their phone can use them, but that’s about it. Also, they’re pretty much all in an extreme price bracket. You could buy a small tablet and a regular flagship phone for the price of one of the galaxy folds.
Surely you jest? There’s oodles of reporting on how delicate the flexible screen is. Fingernails can forever leave scratches on it. There’s plenty of reports of people having their screen randomly break despite no noticeable physical damage. Dust/dirt can get in the hinge and cause damage as well, despite advancements in the hinge design. It’s better now of course, but the physical limitations are still there.
People didn't like the OG Xbox "Duke" controller. They complained left and right.
I'm a tall adult male. Every other controller is tiny to me.
My max phone size is just about right on the ProMax iPhones. They should be a little smaller - but only a little, like 1-2 mm width. I've got big hands, and I love a big screen.
I don't need to do that, despite it not being hard to do, because I know that would be a waste of time because I can clearly see from the pictures in the reviews that it is far from perfect. You can definitely see the fold.
It would piss me off no end watching videos with a line down the middle.
Also, knowing that every time I bend it, I'm one step closer to the screen failing.
huh? Those things are a novelty. I may be aging into fuddy-duddy land, though. If I keep using a mobile phone, I like the smaller ones that easily fit in one hand and most pockets, I want it to last a decade or more (this iphone is from 2018, I think), and I like it just powerful enough for communication, browsing, and photos. Done with games.
To try to see another view, though, if the tech is there and not too harmful (that's relative- I think our venture into computer-land is immensely harmful in many ways) and durable enough, it seems nice to protect the screen? Except if grit gets between the glass?
Android isn't AOSP, and Android isn't open source.
It's safe to assume that every large tech company is spying on everything you do - including Apple. (Remember they're legally required to do so in the UK, and probably in more countries but it only leaked in the UK)
Android is more trustworthy not because of that but because it lets you install apps that haven't been approved by corporate overlords first.
I don’t blindly trust Apple either, but I believe enough of what they say and consider the gaps when they don’t say something. They fight things like the UK E2E encryption requests… but also, having owned both Android and Apple devices, and managing my own iOS devices and the Android devices my parents own, I definitely feel like the iOS devices are more secure and less prone to bad actors via App Store. I think safari is more anonymizing than chrome.
The (US) government already has too much access to us, and I think Android is more open to them than iOS. The government has cameras in public and access to our banking data, I’m not gonna protect myself from them by choosing one platform more than the other, or one bank more than the other.
What I don’t want, though, is to be annoyed to death or scammed. My choice is more front loaded by that consideration. If I find out that Apple accedes to backdoors though, I’d have to live without both Android and iOS.
Whether you want to call it a “restriction”, “a lack of permission without being X type of activity”, or “it works because the app exhibits Y behavior”, it’s all functionally a restriction.
You can run some background activities that are not audio apps, but you’re at the mercy of iOS’s decision to keep your task active or not. If you’re off the charger, all bets are off. iOS’s dev docs make this very clear.
I said NOT(rule in "fundamental restrictions") AND (rule is XXX). You showed (XXX in "restrictions"). It would have been sufficient to prove my statement false if "fundamental restrictions" === "restrictions", but it is not.
I am not here to debate meaning of words. If LLaMA 3.1 8B can understand the difference between a fundamental restriction and a restriction in general on its own, so can you. If you feel like this topic is worth your time for intellectual pursuit, feel free to debate with it: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct I don't feel that it is worth mine. See if you can convince it the definition your are implying is more accepted than the one I am.
You say that, but then you dedicate a whole paragraph to my potentially (I’m not a native speaker, so it’s very possible) incorrect word usage :)
But also, I took your advice and had a chat with an LLM – seems like it's pretty much in agreement with my understanding of the meaning of "fundamental" as a plausible one.
In this context, fundamental just means something inherent to the system, like a thing that can’t happen because of the way the system was defined. A boat fundamentally can’t fly, because it wasn’t made in a way that would allow it to fly. This is different from a plane which is restricted from flying because of a no-fly order. There’s no fundamental restriction (the plane was designed to fly, after all) but there is something keeping it from flying. And maybe one plane get special permission to fly despite the no fly order—that’s a carve out.
So with iPhones, they are built in such a way as to allow background execution (there is no fundamental restriction) but Apple has made it so they cannot do so, with certain carve outs for things that people will want to be able to do while the app is in the background, like listening to audio or tracking the phone’s movements with gps. So there isn’t a fundamental restriction to background execution, it’s just a rule Apple makes (and then makes some exceptions to).
There are other ways you could use the word fundamental, as in something that is important because other things rely on it. But that’s not the way it was being used here.
Hope that helps!
Not sure what you mean with fundamental. As mentioned in the thread parent comment links to, the issue lies in enforced limits and lack* of general mechanism available to developers to allow background execution for any kind of app or/and purpose. No one said iOS itself lacks the functionality for background execution.
*In the same thread, it is noted that this lack is by choice and special-purpose mechanisms are preferred instead to prevent abuse.
It's not an issue of sideloading or censorship in iOS. It's a product decision related to background apps (they kill the running process with no recourse to bring it up again on its own).
In Europe it's been ruled that since Apple makes no pretense of being competitive, they don't have to be, while Google has to actually deliver on their open platform promises.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/685525