> Now that’s just blatantly bullshit. The OS takes up at least 9GB. There are many Linux distros that take half of that.

Don’t care about that.

> Not to mention the OS is preloaded with a lot of Apple’s proprietary apps, most of which are designed to pull you into some kind of sales pitch. Fitness+, Apple Music, iCloud, the entire OS is an ad designed to sell you on their ecosystem.

I’ve been iOS user for almost two years now. The only sales pitch I saw, was at the start about 3 months of free Apple Music. The rest I haven’t saw, as I don’t use fitness app or any other things.

The only thing that I’ve bought so far, was €1 iCloud subscription to increase iCloud storage to 50GB. And I didn’t even see any “ad” for it.

> The most egregious statement, however, is that the OS “doesn’t change every year”. You say this right after the iOS 16 update completely changed a large portion of the OS, and in some very user unintuitive ways.

The only thing I noticed after upgrading to iOS 16 was a slightly degraded battery life and performance which was eventually fixed. The rest stayed majorly the same.

Compare that to mayhem that is Android where it’s Material 1 then Material 2 with apps still lagging behind on Material 1 then it’s material You, now it’s material 3 or whatever.

> Not to mention iOS is a glitchy mess even on the latest hardware. Frequently the OS stalls on wakeup, stalls when trying to swap apps, randomly drops wifi when my laptop doesn’t, the keyboard will get stuck on screen, it’ll even skip inputs entirely and freeze for a few seconds.

Haven’t seen any of the behavior that you’re mentioning.

The question I have is, why would I ever use an app that has ads? If an app has ads and I can’t pay to get rid of them, I delete it.

Eeeh, kinda. A local DNS server is the only way I’ve found, and that causes problems on apps that block the “VPN” status and completely breaks cellular data.

It also doesn’t always work, particularly if the app isn’t covered in your blocklist (which it isn’t always possible to add them in any easy way, because “think different”)/the app hosts ad content directly.

I'm not aware if you can do it the way you mention, but you can used NextDNS and it pretty much cleans most of the ads (I actually haven't seen an ad in a very long time).

If it ever interests you: https://nextdns.io/?from=d6jchbnv (my affiliate link).

Only if you have a supported device and you are one of the single percentage of people who want to run non Google Android or deal with the hassle.

I ran CalyxOS on my Pixel 3XL and while it delivers on the privacy focus, I think most users would find it too irritating for long term usage. I ended up replacing it with Pixel Experience, which as the name implies is pretty much an up to date version of the stock ROM.

I couldn't be so cold as to give Graphene to my grandmother. That said, I am writing this from Graphene myself, having never touched an Apple device in my life.