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Comment by mekane8 | Hacker News Reader

Five years ago I believed this same thing, exactly as you described. I went all-in on Google services and left all the options to send them data on, trusting them to be the benevolent system you described. And believing that the benefit I was getting in terms of cool UX would be worth it.

Now with how horrible ad-tracking has gotten, and the decline in Google's products (Inbox especially, for me) the shine is wearing off quickly. I'm strongly considering abandoning the Google platform as completely as possible whenever my Pixel 2 bites the dust.

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I used to share the exact same feeling. Two weeks ago, I finally made the jump and switched to an iPhone. The first thing I did was go back through and take more time in selecting the Google services that are actually important to me and adjusting them tracking levels i'm more comfortable with.

Having spent a few weeks on the phone (from a Samsung S7 before), the biggest difference I feel is that the iPhone is no longer nagging me to interact with it the same way my old one did. No blinking notification light, no Samsung pestering me to accept some changes to their terms and conditions etc.

My biggest pet peeve about my Nexus 5 was the notification banner that would spawn a few minutes before an alarm was going to go off.

Google is bad, but at least they normally let you control your device; Apple lock things down so much that you can't even do that.

I really hope that there's a real market out there for people who want to own their phones and control their destinies. I really don't want to live in a world where my only choice is which feudal lord I serve.

This. Though it seems to be getting harder to root android phones, at least from my very limited perspective. It's also why I'm a bit horrified at the direction Windows has taken, making some things nearly impossible to disable or remove. I find myself having to dig into the registry much more than I used to in order to stop annoying behavior or system-draining processes. (For example: I'm happy to stay updated with the latest security patched, but do not reboot my computer on your own authority when I may be running very long processes on it. Rather annoying to wake up and find a model I was training was aborted because Update decided to reboot)

> I really hope that there's a real market out there for people who want to own their phones and control their destinies.

If there is, I haven't found anyone servicing it. This is why I've been reduced to building my own smartphone. That appears to be the only way I can keep control over my own machine.

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