it's pretty frustrating how "apple people" just don't care that it's apples fault. i routinely hear my wife mutter "i hate google so much!" when a google maps integration is being intentionally hobbled to keep her using apple maps. or when she has trouble managing rcs conversations because somebody in our social world has the gall to be on an android phone.
I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience. It is THE reason I buy their products, I want the curation. Otherwise I'd buy an android device.
> I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience.
The argument is that they don't do it to maintain a secure experience but to stop competitors having feature parity with their products.
Personally, I find it annoying that my Garmin watch cannot reply to text messages on my iPhone.
I also find it annoying that my iPhone nags me to cut access to my watch to stop it getting weather updates. It doesn't even nag me the once but repeatedly.
It would be one thing if Apple even competed on features with Garmin but they don't.
That's their justification. I never had security problems on Android, and I actually find Android to be more cohesive. Just a few things where iOS is uncohesive to me: You can customize the keyboard, but it will not work everywhere the same. Apps will send you randomly through hoops to click some permissions things in settings. App settings are sometimes centralized, sometimes in the app. There is no single way to "back" to the previous screen.
I actually switched to an iPhone some time ago and was expecting it to be like you said. But I was shocked that iOS is actually less coherent and a mess in some places, and the App store could be curated better. To be honest the reason I still use it is because the hardware is really good and because it is pretty.
That's all well and good. Opting into that knowingly is a reasonable decision. Hopefully knowing you've opted into that you aren't then cursing Google when they don't support some functionality blocked by Apple, or when RCS is poorly supported, but instead recognizing this as a trade-off you made opting into the Apple closed garden.
The reason Apple Maps even exists is because Google intentionally crippled their Maps app on iPhone in order to benefit their own OS.
The reason Google loves RCS is because they spectacularly failed 4 or 5 times at introducing their own iMessage competitors.
Competing companies often act in their best interests. And both Google and Apple offer OS’s which have very different value systems. I think that’s good for consumers. If I want open (and all the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy an Android phone. If I want closed (and the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy Apple. If they Apple starts to open up a bit and Google locks things down a bit we get the worst of both worlds and no true options.
The "closed" approach is way better when it involves guardrails rather than handcuffs. Pixels offer guardrails; they're just as secure as iPhones but offer a lot more freedom to power users. Android is a lot more than just Pixels though and some of the other OEMs don't provide security updates quite as timely, creating a bad reputation
I’m not sure I agree. I’ve seen tech illiterate family members screw up Pixels and Samsung devices in the same way they screwed up Windows systems in the past. Even the most tech illiterate family members have done nothing bad to their iPhones. In fact I know one that was still using an iPhone 7 until last year and it was very functional. Two year old top of the line Samsung phones are crawling after two years. All anecdotal of course.
It does work. As I said, I had to go through it with a family member a few months ago. It's hardly Apple's problem if a user forgets their password AND email address.
I don't expect Apple to get someone back into an account they've forgotten everything about, but you shouldn't need to do that just to download a free app. Grandma already knows her passcode, that should be enough.
There are like 10 grandmas in my extended family (in-laws etc), none of them know their Apple ID passwords, none have recovery contacts. They probably forgot because it never asks for that password except when they want to download a free app, cause for some reason that's a highly sensitive thing.
i had the same problem with this behavior from google as i do from apple. i would be just as critical of google zealots blaming apple for google shortcomings as i am for apple zealots blaming google for apple shortcomings.
this is definitely an apple culture thing though. it's such a clear product choice to get apple users to pressure their friends into buying apple products.
RCS on iPhone just sucks though. All I have is anecdotal evidence, but it feels like I only get late or out-of-order delivery from iPhones.
Plus iMessage doesn't allow you to send RCS messages from your laptop, whereas it's easy to do that with Google messages. That makes people with iPhones think RCS is worse than it really is. It's just iMessage that's intentionally hobbled. Not to mention the hostile UI decisions made by Apple, which seems to be the main knock against anything non-blue.
Arguably, that's more to do with the standard and Google's proprietary extensions. The colors thing has been discussed ad nauseum. SMS messages have been green from day one - see https://youtu.be/G8d7E26WLsY?t=1723. If colors were reversed, there'd be the same complaints. If the difference between iMessage and SMS were highlighted any other way, there'd be complaints too.
The standards issue is only relevant to E2EE. It has no bearing on the usability issues here. The E2EE issues should be fixed soon according to Apple. I'd bet a good amount of money the usability issues will remain.
The white-on-acid-green color combination would not make it through any accessibility review. It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see, and objectively unpleasant otherwise.
Apple gets plenty of complaints about it. Just look at the Apple forums. Their literal advice to fix it is "make your friends buy an iPhone".
> It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see
What form of color blindness doesn't let people differentiate between levels of brightness? I checked a couple color blindness simulators and it appears legible.
Heck, white on light green appears to be used in articles about good design for color blind accessibility without any indication that it there's anything wrong with it.
As someone with strong deuteranopia (I struggle to differentiate shades of green and darker bluey-reds), I am extremely sceptical about that claim too. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem reading the white-on-green bubbles in Messages. I do agree that a contrast closer to WCAG's recommendation would be better (currently 2:1, recommendation is ~4.5:1), but this is a diversion. The point I was making is that no matter what Apple does here, there is visible differentiation, and people will complain about it.
Google provides a client and infrastructure, which they sell to carriers and which has a number of proprietary extensions, including E2EE if the message is Google to Google. If a carrier does not provide Universal Profile, Google provides it. If you send a message using Google Messages, it may default to Google's profile, which is not open and only available to Google Messages users, which is arguably no different to iMessage. Apple provides an RCS client which relies on carrier infrastructure. If there is no compatible profile AIUI, it falls back to MMS or fails.
My personal stance on this is that while I’m open to making iOS, etc more flexible, it needs to be done in a way that cleanly avoids the whole “grandma accidentally installed a pile of browser toolbars yet again” problem. I’m confident I can manage added flexibility myself but there’s a very real need for a truly foolproof, social-engineering-resistant option to point friends and family without such aptitudes toward.
perhaps i'm out of date! this may have resolved with the recent increased support of rcs and i maybe haven't heard this complaint lately, it's worth checking into again.
I don't like that iMessage = lock-in, but everyone else needs to make a better standard first. We got cross-platform encrypted covid chat before we got this. RCS has an FBI "do not use" warning on it because there's no E2EE. And the reason people don't want green bubbles is cause they always screw up the group chat.
I thought it was quite good, although maybe it should have been a series rather than a single book. That might have given Stephenson time to flesh out the end, which felt a bit rushed.
Yes, I find myself in type hell with some regularity. TBH it happens with my own codebase too when libraries I want to use are authored by these type astronauts.
It is pretty universally used to filter out candidates. FAANG pioneered this and maybe for a while you could work in startups without grinding programming challenges, but unfortunately today even startups lean pretty heavily into this.
For a first job in the industry just spam applications. Assuming an acceptable resume that describes technologies you're competent with, and assuming it contains some projects or interesting things that have been built / worked on, some company somewhere will eventually take a flier on you.
Getting interviews after the first job I think is pretty self explanatory. Still spam applications but at that point you've already done this before.
FWIW, when I'm actively looking for work I will apply to maybe 10 or 15 places a day, often with cover letters that sound fairly bespoke (it is pretty easy to customize a generic template in a way that doesn't sound forced). It is not uncommon for me to have applied to 100 places by the time I'm busy enough with interviews to be comfortable stopping the application process.
this always seemed like a nightmare to me. even so today years after python2 was officially sunset, documentation is still all over the web that may never catch up.
yes technically the language got over it but i would hold this up as an example of a reason not to break backwards compatibility. having to manage multiple interpreter versions when i'm just trying to run software on my computer, what a pain in the neck.
i'm seeing a lot of support on lemmy and mastodon for defederating with servers that are associated with meta. i also hope threads takes off, and i would prefer to see everything integrated, but i wonder how difficult things will be for meta here.
it's possible that it just doesn't matter at all, and in fact the centralization is a selling point for pretty much everyone who isn't a nerd about federation.
