this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Lol, srsly, why does anyone use apple devices willingly. Like for work I sorta get it if there's no alternative but it really took government action to compell this extremely basic customisation.
In the US at least, sadly, it’s imessage. It’s a weird social thing - if you have “green bubbles” people really look down on you.
It’s dumb and superficial, but it works.
So they hook you while you're an insecure teen and by the time you grow up you're too entrenched in their ecosystem?
They hook you into an ecosystem. That's it, thats the game. I don't think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don't think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.
Yep. Damn near every tween with a phone just HAS to have an iPhone. If you offered a kid a used regular iPhone 12 with a Crack in the screen, or a new Samsung s24 ultra, they're taking the iPhone.
The solution to green bubbles? Use Signal, which has blue bubbles across all platforms.
Signal lets me customize the bubble (and background) colors. I can still make everyone green if I wanted.
Copying my comment from a month ago -
“Finally!
And you still see folks thinking color is what’s important.”
Honestly, it's the first thing to come out of iPhone users mouths, and when you tell them about Signal, more often than not they say "eww I'm not installing another app".
They'd rather an Android user spend another $1200 than install a free app. It's not features, it's elitism.
I graduated school before smartphones were everywhere but I got a pretty mad when I learned about this. the kids are not ok
Their integration is the best you can get.
You need to buy an expensive phone, watch, computer (would you like to spend another thousand bucks for a monitorstand?) to take advantage of it, which is why I don't have and don't want anything apple. But if you have that, their software stack is superb.
The software is pretty overrated. Especially safari, which is a legitimately terrible browser and has been for a long time.
I had to use firefox for a long time for it's the browser with the highest support across web pages and file formats, whereas chrome and edge will just stop working at times. Firefoxi is, as of 2024, one of the best choices.
Jup, but that was only relevant on iOS, never for MacOS. Also the digital markets act will end even that.
For example you can make and receive calls on your computer instead of your phone when you are working on your PC. That is unmatched by any other ecosystem.
Edit: for the time and effort you need to put in to make it work. Yes, you can do it with anything. Linux and pine phone will for sure be capable - but no normal person will do that. Because it takes a ton of effort. Apple supports that out of the box and because everything is linked to a single ID it just works.
You can literally do this with an android too. Link to Windows. I'm unsure how KDE's app is. But its not just apple that lets you use your phone and all its apps on your pc.
Umm, you can do that on any device. It's called Google Meet, Zoom, Discord, or any other countless othe video chatting applications out there.
Apple software is pretty overrated no matter if it's iOS or macOS. I use a MacBook for work and I use exactly zero Apple apps because they just aren't very good.
I'm on iOS and had Firefox as my default for several years. Probably shit journo meant browsing engine.
No, third-party browsing engines are not a thing that's been implemented yet, and might never be by Firefox. This is about a screen that prompts EU users to pick a browser rather than defaulting to Safari and leaving it up to them to install another.
I believe they meant prompting users to choose a default browser.
Everybody sticks to the default defaults. It’s such a truism that fairness dictated legislators got involved.
The order seems sketchy, that's not A-z. And if they chose to order by application name, safari would be burried way down the list xD.
It’s randomized
Is it actually thats funny as fuck. But a bit sus that safari is still at the top
Just a coincidence. Safari was 8th or 9th for me while Vivaldi was first.
The only thing new is that the first time it prompts you to pick which app to pick as your default (and installs it). Only the prompt is new, manually installing something and making it default has been an option for a while.
Reading through the replies, I'm amazed anyone went through the effort to install Firefox but didn't bother changing the default browser to it. Something in this story smells fishy.
Eh. I have fiddled with many different browsers as my default. Doesn't mean much when it's all WebKit.
Doesn't really seem like the same motivation as what would suddenly lead to a 50% increase in adoption in the EU. I just don't really see the cause and affect between apple prompting you and suddenly firefox uptick. I'm guessing most people who used to install it never realised just installing it didn't make it the default (but they should've when they open any url).
That’s a valid question, and I have a long answer to share.
short version: suitable balance between convenience and privacy.
Long version: I started with Android, because it allowed me to customize things just the way I like it, unlike iOS where ridiculous restrictions was a reoccurring theme at the time (and still is to a lesser extent). Just using a custom ringtone was convoluted enough whereas many other basic things were completely impossible.
Like, does any car manufacturer sell a car where you can’t adjust the seat, open the windows or change the radio station? Well, Apple makes phone in that same style, and it’s completely absurd.
Eventually, I got tired of the spyware part of Google’s business plan, so I switched to to Lineage OS, which allowed me to get rid of most of that nonsense. I was still bothered by GAPPS, so I reinstalled (again), but completely de-googled this time. For several years, I went back and forth between both styles, to figure out what’s an acceptable balance of convenience and privacy.
This went on for many eyars until 2019 when my bank notified me that the paper code booklet will be phased out in the coming years. I was still using the old-school method of verification because the mobile app refused to work with anything other than stock Android with all the Google bloat still in it.
Some other important apps failed a similar way, and various work-arounds didn’t really work. I came to realize, that in the world of 2010, you kinda could still get away with having reasonable levels of privacy, but in the 2020s the world around me had already changed to such an extent that sticking to the same level of privacy was getting harder and harder. So some sort of change was necessary. Either I’ll have to cut down on features and convenience dramatically, or give up a part of my privacy. I chose the latter.
Around the same time iOS 14 came out, which allowed you to change your default browser. As usual, iOS was many many many years behind Android, but at least one of the obvious basic settings was finally made available. At that point I realized that it’s surprisingly difficult to find the right balance between privacy and convenience. I had only bad options available, so I picked the one that seemed least bad to me.
I mean, iOS is still trash, but now it’s barely tolerable trash. It took Apple like 10 years to make the software just barely tolerable, so switching earlier would have been incredibly frustrating.