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Comment by stevenjohns | Hacker News Reader

Extremely happy with my decision to get an iPhone. Events like these are what is going to keep me as a customer moving forward, too.

I unplugged[0] from Google Last year - went DDG for search, went to iOS, dropped gmail for fastmail, etc. As time goes on I’m continually reaffirmed that I made the right decisions.

[0] I still use some Google services, like YouTube, frequently, some of my mail still goes through Gmail, albeit forwarded to my Fastmail account, and I occasionally use Maps.

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Same. I switched recently after an increasing distaste for how Google makes money and have been fairly blown away by how much better privacy is on iOS. Nearly every app that has asked for permissions has explained exactly what they're used for. I don't know if that's required, but it certainly seems prevalent. Then I can do things like only give the app permission to location data when I'm actively using it. These settings aren't buried - they are in your face when the permissions are requested.

Some parts of the walled garden are annoying - having to go to the browser to buy Kindle books for example - but I think the tradeoffs of the Apple ecosystem are more than worth the benefits.

Is getting an iPhone the only reasonable path? I tried this briefly on Android, but various other apps started complaining that Play was not installed.

It's not the only reasonable path, of course. There are heavily de-Googled versions of Android out there as well.

In this case I'm voting with my dollars and paying a premium for a device made by a company that is, at least overtly, pushing for a bare minimum level of support for their customers.

It certainly doesn't hurt that they're nice phones too, though.

There are ways to do it without going to iPhone but they require a decent time commitment and some technical chops. For people who just expect their phone to work, switching to iOS is the simplest answer.

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