Their biggest selling point is regulated app stores…

sound of jail bars crashing shut as Android cuts all the indie developers out of the market

It’s shit the government should be doing

The joke of it all is that government does do stuff. But it's mostly to cement the existing duopoly.

Government contractors dump hundreds of billions of dollars into licensing for the dominant OS. Government regulators are fully captured by industry lobbyists, building their rules around policies the businesses have decided on internally. Policing agencies focus almost entirely on small fish, foreign developers, and whistleblowers. Courts use a one-size-fits-all financial punishment guidance, which can easily bankrupt a small business but is barely more than a speedbump for mega-corporations.

Nobody seriously talks about Breaking Up The Tech Companies via Antitrust Laws. Nobody talks about making Open-Source Code more regulatory friendly or investing more public dollars in Open-Source development / deployments. We can't even seriously talk about insourcing chip production or building out competitors to Intel and TSMC.

The Big Lie of modern left/right political discourse is that American political institutions are doing Too Much or Not Enough. The bitter truth is that if you're any kind of threat to the domestic business cartels... well... just ask TikTok what happens next.

They do actually have a pretty decent file manager. Unsurprisingly you can’t access system files, at least as far as I know. It’s not nearly as robust as what you can do on android, but it is easy to use.

I get unbelievably angry using an iPad now. They've completely fucked up the file system and its impossible to know where anything is. By design. I hate modern computing so much.

My sister made some photos for me with her iPad recently. I told her to sent me the photos but she just didn't know where they were. She could access them with some photo apps but the file system was completely obfuscated. She looked to me because I am the tech guy in our family but I had no idea.

There's a program called universal android debloater which let's you delete pretty much anything you want. I've used it and it's like a miracle.

Still once you get to that stage it's so much more tempting to skip that and get busy on trying to get postmarketOS going or something.

Crazy how they even let other manufacturers modify base Android. Even the settings menus are all over the place. Searching for specific settings is basically impossible if you're not on a Pixel or something.

Don't even get me started on the dev side of things. Makes Windows habit of stacking 30 years of shit look like paradise.

Sorry, having unlocked bootloaders is unsafe for the children or whatever. Best we can do is mandatory OS and age verification every 45 seconds. Please do not resist.

I've been an android user since I started using smart phones in the late 2000s. Android IMO has always been more user friendly and allowing someone to create their own "desktop" so to speak. Meanwhile Apple was always the "I don't like technology" phone. There was no customization, the "desktop" was just the Android app page and nothing else. Nothing could be unique to you outside of a wallpaper or a ringtone. Anyone with an iPhone just had an iPhone. It was the same thing. But someone with the same android phone could have different app placements, widgets here or there, and felt different even if it was the same phone.

Apologies for the rant, I am stoned as fuck and I ramble (And have a new keyboard I am trying to break in)

... But what has Apple "caught up to" all the "main android features"?

Context for the non-Norwegians: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree/

We already have phone companies that sell phones with alternative operating systems and not enough people buy them to break the duopoly.