Android similarly has been continually improving the privacy/permissions model of the OS when it comes to third party apps. I am not sure that Apple has any obvious advantage in that department specifically.
Even if one were to ignore Google’s data collection, any non-vanilla android installation would have been butchered by the vendor (Samsung, Motorola, etc) to the point any expectation of security (and in turn privacy) is lost to the least secure app pre-installed.
I had ESFileExplorer installed on a Nexus 7 tablet I barely used. One day I start it to find the charging has switched to “smart charging” where this software shows a banner ad on the home/charging screen. There is no end to the madness of what each app can do or even allowed to ask for.
I often use Motorola devices as I find they are one of the OEMs which applies the fewest customizations to the OS. However Samsung is definitely a problem when it comes to that.
I am not sure what happened in your case with ES or how that would be possible. It sounds like maybe the app just pushed you an advertisement as a notification. Notifications can be disabled on a per-app basis but I think it is pretty reasonable that they are enabled by default.
Apparently it is not new change [1]. I just happened to notice it now since I rarely used it before. Now the tablet functions as a handy Zoom whiteboard [2] drawing tablet. Good thing I didn't throw it out.
I often use Motorola devices as I find they are one of the OEMs which applies the fewest customizations to the OS.
They got worse, also with updates since they were acquired Lenovo. Last time that I surveyed the Android landscape (~2 years ago), Nokia was the place to go for a pristine Android experience with quick updates.
I was running Lineage on the tablet and I am usually very careful about what I allow. I have no idea how it got set to take over main screen at charging time.
Btw, all these distributions (Lineage and Cynogenmod before that) don't benefit from automated updates. So that is another headache to remember to manually reflash/upgrade.
No, and I consider that a feature :) I have Zuk Z2, which incidentally is still the only phone in the world that matches my small list of requisites: reasonably modern, not huge, has Lineage support.
I didn't check properly before I bought a Moto G5... the only Lineage image there is crashes its sound server whenever you connect a Bluetooth headset. I'm trying to get the dev to share their build steps so I can look into what is happening there, but they're not responding :(
I've only ever been an Android user, but for a while I was paying a lot of attention to iOS too. It seems to me like they've been back and forthing, as one side figures out some improvements, the other side more-or-less re-implements them on their next release with their own unrelated improvements.
From my perspective it seems like Apple keeps releasing new privacy features and Android keeps being forced to catch up. What are the major privacy enhancements that Google has put out first?
Sorry, I don't have a history of this here. I'm running off my sense of a fair portion of the time when I hear "this new privacy feature coming to iOS" I think "oh I've had that for a little while", and the rest of the time something equivalent shows up later for Android.
In the beginning, Android showed you what an app could before you installed it, and it was an all-or-nothing approach – if you didn't want the app to do those things, your only choice was to not install it.
In the beginning, iOS didn't have this, and instead it prompted you for permission the first time an app wanted permission to do something. Additionally, app review had rules that apps had to operate correctly if you refused permission and that apps couldn’t ask for permissions irrelevant to what you are doing. So you can install an app, then pick and choose what you grant permission for.
Later, Android added the prompts to work the same as iOS. iOS hasn't changed to include the Android approach.
In the beginning iOS basically didn't have permissions at all. There were some random ones like GPS (and push notifications?!), but there was for example no permission to access contacts. Or photos. That didn't come until iOS 6.
So in the very very very beginning it was:
iOS: prompts for permissions, but almost nothing (including accessing user data) requires permissions anyway
Android: Granular permissions for everything, but only asked at install time.
Since then iOS has become "more Android-y" in adding increasingly more granular permissions, and Android has become "more iOS-y" in those permission grants being on-demand and time-gated.
Android had install time permissions for a long while. The user either had to allow all permissions asked by the app during install or not be allowed to install the app. On the other side, iOS had runtime permissions (nothing during installation) that were prompted by the system whenever the app needed a permission. When runtime permissions were added to Android 6, apps used to crash when not granted the permissions (so much so that some Android versions also started faking location data to apps when the user denied location access).
This took a few years to improve, but even today, there are Android apps that will refuse to work if you don't grant some (unnecessary, in the view of the user) permission. That kind of behavior is very, very rare among iOS apps.
As a checkbox prompt on install, yes. iOS has always and will continue a slightly different model of throwing a modular question up to the user at the moment the action that requires the permission first occurs. This gives the user more context about the question, but also gives more alert fatigue. Which is better is left as an exercise to the reader.
Android has supported piecemeal permissions for ages (only let app X access this one photo, or this one contact), which Apple seems to be starting to copy in iOS 14 (though, as usual, seemingly without a single thought to the long-term UX).
You can send an Intent to request that the user pick a contact, without having the contacts permission. The app gets a copy of the contact that the user picked.
Not being an Android user, one of the negatives that was often talked about (maybe no longer true?) is that a lot of phones could not upgrade to new versions of Android. Is that still a thing, or was that limited to the lower tier phones?
It's crazy that this ever became a thing. When Android first came out I assumed it would essentially be like Windows for the smartphone.
But imagine if Windows worked the way Android does. You buy a Dell Windows laptop and then you receive all your OS updates directly from Dell, they limit you to only 2 years of updates (if that), and put some bloated skin over the whole OS.
Updates are still pushed by the manufacturer. I have the Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite (with Android One) and only got Android 10 last week.
Biggest advantage is that it's a pure Android with no bloatware from the manufacturer. Also you get a guarantee IIRC to have at least two versions upgrades for the phone (my Xiaomi came with Android 8, so 10 should be the last one), and most of all security updates.
Phones only getting 2 major software updates (which are released yearly, so 2 years) is a bit of a deal breaker for me. I understand older versions of Android are pretty well supported at least by apps in Google Play.
Also what bothers me about Android devices: I got a Galaxy S8 to do development for work, and not all manufacturers are created equal in updates of course; IIRC I waited almost a full year after the Google flagships to receive Android 9 — in fact I think I got Android 8 around the time Android 9 came out.
That's only because there are no other vendors to muddy the meaning of "pure". Only one vendor of devices for the OS means only one conception about what "pure iOS" means. It doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's conception of iOS is the best possible conception of iOS.
For some of us, having a locked down, reliable, secure, and pure phone is a great solution.
I don’t want iOS on my random experimental project laptop, for that I have Linux or windows, or vms. But, cellphones are not something I need to hack around on.
Because "unpure" Android barely receives updates and the few occasions where it does, it's extremely delayed. So that's pretty "worse"
You can also choose to jailbreak an Apple device if you really want to be unpure, and luckily doing so won't prevent you from updating your phone in the future.
Fun. My Xiaomi came with ads baked into the app installer and a very questionable use of tracking in the web browser. Yes, Android One is great but not every device is in that program.
It's still true. You'd be lucky to get updates beyond two years (so choosing the brand with this in mind is more important within the Android ecosystem). There are also devices that don't get updates after a few months of launch. Updates are also delayed by several months depending on the brand.
Except for all the Samsung devices that don't, of course. Mine periodically says "security update available", I click "install", it says "install failed" and that's the end of that. There appears to be no way to know what the update was or to retry the install.
Apples vs oranges. With iOS the norm seems to be that apps support 1 version back, if even that. So as soon as your device is no longer updated (or if you dislike the update!), you're stuck.
Android puts much more emphasis on backwards compatibility, with Google moving more and more functionality into app libraries rather than system frameworks. Our app still supports Android 4.4 (released in 2014!).
You can walk into any Best Buy and buy new devices on the shelf that are running versions of Android so old they can't run apps like Netflix -- devices that are out of date now, and will never get an update. This is part of the reason Android developers need strong backwards compatibility.
No, the norm on the iOS is current and two versions back.
It is also worth mentioning that iOS are usually supported for much longer than Android.
iphoneOS 15 will be supported by iPhone 6S: this was released in 2015. If app supports iOS 12 (which most do, as it is only one version below the current iOS 13) it means they support iPhone 5S: which was released in 2013.
And Apple users are likely to update: 92% run the latest version, and 7% are on the iOS 12.
It is true that many vendors abandon their devices more quickly than I would like, but it depends on the vendor and the "flagshipness" of the device. Also, since version 8.0, Google has made a number of improvements to the modularity of the OS which make it easier for vendors to release updates ("Project Treble"), so the problem has been reduced somewhat
While fact checking my other comment here, it seems like Samsung has been slow to roll out major version upgrades _since_ Android 8. Have other manufacturers improved in this regard since Project Treble?
The iPhone 3GS was released in June 2009, and the first iOS release that didn't support it was iOS 7 in September 2013.
4 years is much better than current Android phones, though it's true it doesn't quite live up to the current Apple lineup where iOS 14 is going to support the 6S which will be 5 years old by the time it launches.
Google doesn't sell data, it sells targeted access to users based on that data. Let's be precise if we're going to discuss the practical privacy implications of both platforms.
Meanwhile if you use iCloud backups all your data is one subpoena away from law enforcement.
Correct. But why does google deserve to know everything about you? What does it matter if they can still browse everything about you and they happen to resell targeting. All still bad. I agree the Warrentless wiretaps are a problem for every American company, google included.
My point stands, apples revenue is not from privacy violating advertising and has no motivation for data collection beyond product improvement
Remember the fun we had making fun of Apple Maps? Why in the world would Apple have dropped Google as the back end for their original Maps program, right? Well, it was because back in 2011 or so, Google refused to give Apple access to true turn-by-turn navigation features unless Apple gave them more access to user data. Rather than do that, Apple decided to go it themselves, even though that made the Maps product worse for years. This is consistent with Apple's behavior in other fields. (Hey, Siri!)
There are a lot of criticisms to be made of Apple, but "they're selling your data by proxy" just doesn't seem to be one of them.
Use any application that lets you view your network traffic and you'll see that Apple doesn't phone home anything it doesn't need to. Google phones home for everything.
That's not exactly true. Assuming you didn't mean TVs completely without any internet connection whatsoever then you'll find that pretty much since that ability was added there have been attempts by the very manufacturers to do just that.
Doesn't help much when the OS itself contains a million first party privacy violations, unfortunately.
Both systems have extreme downfalls with the strategy they have taken, Apple's walled garden, and Google's necessity to use tracking because they are an ad company and this is how they make money.
Overall, Apple's certainly the lesser of two evils, but I think I'll be considering a PinePhone next, once the software ecosystem has matured a bit. I'm going to start speaking with my wallet and not conceding to settling.
