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Comment by quenix | Hacker News Reader

iOS has certainly opened up over the years. Perhaps apart from the lack of side loading capability, what kind of freedom do you seek?

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Sideloading, the freedom to run Linux directly on the device, much better widgets (I use widgets heavily in my workflow, such as showing my account balances, calendar, todo list, habit tracking, etc) are the freedoms I seek.

Widgets will significantly improve in iOS 14.

I've seen iOS 14, it's still inferior to Android. Widgets in iOS 14 will still have to conform to the size of the home screen apps, which is a 6x4 grid. In Android, you can make them whatever size you want and place them wherever, especially with Nova Launcher or similar.

Side loading, ability to access the underlying file system, have their applications like iMessage work across platforms, have better support for cross-OS applications are a few that come to mind.

What part of the "underlying file system" do you want/need to access?

What do you mean by "have better support for cross-OS applications"?

There is now a pretty functional file manager (since iOS 12 I think). It lets you download, upload, zip, unzip, do folder management, export, etc.

What other file functionality do you need on a mobile phone?

> what kind of freedom do you seek

I want spywares/adwares to be allowed without any restriction so I can install a adblock pro to block them.

Could you explain this in more depth please? I’m baffled. You want the bad thing so you can block it and not have it?

I should have added /s

Isn't that one of the biggest issues without which any other 'openness' is not worth that much? By having all software distribution going through a single channel which rather arbitrarily gets to choose what is allowed and what is not the system ends up being controlled by that channel.

Uh, would be nice to be able to change the default browser and SMS app, for starters.

Default browser and mail reader can be set as of iOS 14. SMS app I don’t get why it is critical to be modifiable to be perfectly honest if the OS ships with a decent one. I get it on Android because the default app is shit.

My biggest problem is that, something like a third party browser can't be more than a re-skin of Safari. Apple's App Store guildelines require something like Firefox for iOS to use WebKit, and doesn't allow add-ons period. In this instance, I would argue the default browser can only be skinned and not changed outright.

It's the same gripe I have with iOS keyboards, unless something has changed there. The feel and layout of every third party keyboard is the same as the default keyboard. During my short period with an iPhone I gave Gboard for iOS a try, tweaking it as much as I could to get a similar experience to what I was used to on Android. In the end it still felt like the system keyboard more than anything.

Yeah I did this with Swiftkey but was quite disappointed. I regularly communicate in four languages and the iOS version only allowed two or three simultaneously so had to constantly switch. On Android I'm running four without issues (might be able to add more, haven't tried).

And the "long-press top row for numbers" option wasn't available so had to switch back and forth between keyboard and "numpad" when typing something like passwords or strings with a lot of numbers.

And the default SMS app being fine? Such an annoyance every time I had to use it. Don't remember specifics (as I was just trying to get away from it ASAP) but there was at least some kind of cringy emoji bar always visible.

Horrible experience all in all and I'm so glad to be back on Android.

You can change the wrapper for Safari, but you can't change the actual browser itself.

For a lot of people, it comes down to being to run uBlock Origin/cosmetic and dynamic ad and content blocking (e.g. not a simple blacklist) and running other extensions and customizations.

> SMS app I don’t get why it is critical to be modifiable to be perfectly honest

It lets any third party messaging system become a viable SMS replacement (like Hangouts and Signal does on Android), by making it seamless to send all messages from one app.

Like iMessage and only iMessage does seamlessly on iOS, because Apple has given it a monopoly on handling SMSes.

It’s anti-competitive as fuck.

> SMS app I don’t get

Choosing Signal over iMessage. Signal can serve as your primary messaging app, prioritizing the Signal protocol but falling back to SMS as necessary per contact.

Except that it can’t, because iOS won’t route SMS to it.

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