[sonofhans]

“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece.

I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.

The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.

[II2II]

> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.

Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.

While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).

[t0bia_s]

that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel.

Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.

[recursive]

I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.

[qn9n]

You can actually use most Apple devices without signing in. There are obviously a lot of benefits to the ecosystem but you can enjoy the hardware etc. without signing especially on Mac. For iPhone you'd need to learn to side load apps but it's doable.

[LoganDark]

At least Apple's ecosystem is genuinely better in certain ways. Everyone else wants a piece of the pie that they didn't deserve.

[cmckn]

To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.

[nomel]

All of those security related screens you listed is why I like Apple: security related things are local to secure enclave, not in cloud.

[dangus]

And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.

[jraph]

A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts.

Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.

A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.

Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).

[microtonal]

I think they also provide backups

Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore

[adamsmark]

iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services.

Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.

When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.

[cmiles74]

It took a good while for me to figure out that a family member had inadvertently signed up for an Apple Music account that they were not using.

[nradov]

Setting up a new Samsung device is just as easy. Everything transfers over in a few minutes.

[uyzstvqs]

You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'd argue that installing and setting up GrapheneOS on a Pixel is as-much or less effort compared to setting up an iPhone. And it gives you full freedom and the best possible security while doing so. You can have everything at once.

[nazgul17]

*Samsung phones. Known for a long time for their crapware infested devices. At the other end of the spectrum, Pixel phones are quite easy and smooth to set up.

[bsder]

> “Android phones” is the key missing piece.

iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.

Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.

All the companies want to hold your data hostage.

[winterbloom]

who do you think gets in trouble if her phone dies and all her stuff is gone

storing things in the cloud is responsible

[dismalaf]

95% of what was written in this article isn't required to set up an Android phone. You can literally log into your Google account on first boot and everything is done for you, automatically.

[fn-mote]

The point is that you have to turn off preferences and uninstall apps that come with the phone. (Samsung apps and OneDrive are mentioned.)

So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.

[kiwijamo]

Maybe Samsung has changed how the first boot works compared to stock Android, but this definitely has not been my experience across several Samsung devices. Also many apps store their data in different ways which doesn't always survive a device migration/backup. Only cloud-only apps have a good experience, wheras anything that stores data on device can be hit and miss depending on how easy individual apps manage its backup.

[GuestFAUniverse]

At least Samsung doesn't sync folders. Meaning: if they were organized before by topic they aren't there after syncing via their "Samsung Smart Switch Mobile" to a new Samsung phone. A lot gets synced, but it's not like an image with full DSC (desired state configuration) afterwards.

Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.

[socalgal2]

Apple products are atrocious to setup too. I've wanted to film just how bad the experience is but I'd need a 3rd phone since I have to use the 2nd phone to setup the new 1st phone.

[trip-zip]

I was about to say the same.

I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.

[hagbard_c]

What is it in your life which makes it 'impossible' to use free software, Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions being part of this? I run close to exclusively free software and have done so for decades and have yet to feel the need to change this. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. I need to run proprietary applications for banking and electronic ID but those are the exceptions to the rule. My server runs only free software, on desktop I sometimes run an older version of Sketchup to start modelling things but that's the only non-free package I use there. We have children, a cat, a dog, 4 horses, a farm, a large forest, the works. We have multi-device backup and restore as well. Things work fine, using free software, not using 'the cloud'. Where are the sticking points for you and what would it take to take those away?

[fn-mote]

The author is technical, but apparently the parents are not. “It works for me” turns into “just spy on my family members”.

[tonyarkles]

For me, “impossible” isn’t the case. I’m deeply technical and could 100% run a setup like you’re describing. For me it’s, sadly, convenience and priorities. I oscillate between Linux and OS X for desktop/laptop use, have used Linux for server use for decades, have used both iOS/iPadOS and Android for tablets “in production”, and have only used Android as a secondary phone for doing development, and only iOS for primary phone use.

Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.

Day-to-day:

- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.

- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.

- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!

- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.

- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.

- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.

Hardware compatibility:

- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.

- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.

OS Updates:

- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.

- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.

- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.

Occasional new device setup:

- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.

[metalman]

a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it. this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?