I saw the writing on the wall in 2008-2009. A developer created a podcast app that downloaded directly to the phone without syncing through a PC running iTunes. I was running Linux, and I really wanted to buy that app.
But Apple rejected it, so the developer lost out, and I lost out. I could not accept that Apple was preventing me from running an app on hardware I "owned"! I never bought another iPhone after that.
I've been an Android developer since 2010. But now I've realized that Android has similar flaws because it is controlled by one corporation:
=> 30% Play Store transaction fees!
=> Apps delisted without any explanation
The freedom on open platforms is vital; so I will invest more time in them than in closed ones.
As a user, I agree and cannot wait to exit the ecosystem.
With all apple's talk of privacy, I would love to be able to firewall the phone, see what apps are doing and prevent some of them from doing it. This includes apple apps.
But apple doesn't allow these sorts of things.
I installed adblock ios which allowed this (vpn though 127.0.0.1 which blocked things), but then apple changed their conditions so the developer had to cripple their app further.
Further back, I had an app that could show wifi signal strength which was incredibly useful -- but then apple banned it.
Even as someone with heavy "tech nerd" needs (e.g. a mosh session that is always open to my server), there is very little I want to do on an iOS device that I can't do with tools provided by developers via the App Store.
The OP said "want to do," though, which is pretty subjective, right? I don't actually care about not being able to use a different browser engine, but I do care about not being able to set a third-party mail client as my default. There are things that I want to do on my iPad that I can't, but not all of them have to do with Apple platform policy -- UIKit's lackluster text editing components are undeniably contributing to the relative suck of Scrivener and Slugline on iOS compared to their Mac counterparts, for instance. (Although one might argue developers might be motivated to work more on homegrown components if the App Store was structured differently; personally, I think Apple's 30% cut is not the worst problem.)
>> I don't actually care about not being able to use a different browser engine, but I do care about not being able to set a third-party mail client as my default.
Has anyone actually noticed that if you use Gmail on iPhone and you’ve got Chrome installed it will use Chrome by default?
Location data can also be used to help prove your innocence.
It sucks that this innocent person ended up suffering. Hopefully law enforcement will become better at figuring out false positives before arresting someone.
I do like that the gov. doesn't have direct access. Seems to me like the more independent parties required to access the data, the lower the chances of abuse.
> Location data can also be used to help prove your innocence.
Well not really. If that were the case and if someone was going to commit a crime they could simply place their phone in someone else's auto (let's say without them even knowing) and then have that data be the data that is 'them'. This would quickly unravel. Besides I don't think it's so much that the data is useful other than it gives clues and points in a particular direction whereby the police can then narrow down or look further into a particular suspect.
I'm a little confused here. It turned out that it was his mother's ex-boyfriend, who had taken his car without permission. That explains the car, but how does it explain the location? Did he just happen to also leave close to there and was moving in a similar pattern? Was the phone inside the car?
Really, the issue here was the car, without which they wouldn't have had enough evidence to get the person's information in the first place. Are you not partly responsible to whom you give your car to?
From the article: "...Mr. Molina had sometimes signed in to other people’s phones to check his Google account. That could lead someone to appear in two places at once, though it was not clear whether that happened in this case."
If this is how it really happened then the investigators didn't even bother to crosscheck the data with the cell tower information (assuming the telco logs this info). Sending false location data to google shouldn't be that hard, but it should be a lot harder to fake the cell tower connections.
If someone steals my car and uses it when committing a crime, I can accept that may well lead to questioning me. But I don't think it justifies keeping me in jail for a week.
It's not just the social interaction but the feeling of growing together. I like working on a team because we're all learning from each other.
It's just not the same with freelancers. When everyone's a full-time employee, there's a permanence to that, and it encourages everyone to invest in each other and invest in the team. With most freelancers, they could quit at any time, so there's less incentive to take time to teach them. And the power dynamics are weirder so it's much harder for freelancers to tell me I'm doing something stupid, whereas peers or people senior to me felt much more comfortable doing that when I was an employee.
The claim that he is receiving 5400 Euros/month welfare is false. It was investigated by journalists. Other claims made on that webpage are also false.
It ain't so difficult to analyze the code of Chrome Extension [1]. I did (I quite often do this before installing extensions that do not have published source) and as much as you should trust random guy on HN there isn't anything malicious in the code.
On the other hand it is not very effective as the block list is quite limited. 33 entires if I have counted well.
Isn’t it a problem that Chrome extensions have been purchased by others who then update the code to add spyware to them? I’ve never been notified about updates to Chrome extensions; they’re quietly updated in the background.
Google controls the extension, they can swap a new version under your radar at any moment. Happened to me a couple of times (ImprovedTube for example "upgraded" to remove features I used). Not any more, I keep all the extensions I use as a local unpacked copies.
They have the app data on the Android side which is probably a decent proxy for the iOS app market, but Crashlytics gives them direct visibility into a sizable chunk of the ios market.
But Apple rejected it, so the developer lost out, and I lost out. I could not accept that Apple was preventing me from running an app on hardware I "owned"! I never bought another iPhone after that.
I've been an Android developer since 2010. But now I've realized that Android has similar flaws because it is controlled by one corporation:
=> 30% Play Store transaction fees!
=> Apps delisted without any explanation
The freedom on open platforms is vital; so I will invest more time in them than in closed ones.