I don't just block ads, I block elements on sites I don't care about with :has-text RegEx rules. You can't do that on Chrome even on desktop anymore.
I'm this close to swapping to the Android as my primary device-- it's iMessage that has me chained. It's just too dang nice to respond to chats from my Mac during work so I don't need to pick up my phone.
Everything else is better on the Android. Don't get me started about the iOS keyboard or Siri.
Have you considered messages.google.com? I think you need to use Google's messages app (not the Samsung messager or equivalent) but it does as you describe and supports RCS.
If you are on another locale, search “ublock origin lite” with double quotes.
The iOS 26 keyboard (public beta) is the biggest regression I've ever seen Apple make, and they're a company infamous for regressions. It for me has been the tipping point.
I think uBO is not disabling PPA, does it?
- June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm.
- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).
- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
I've been doing this on Signal for years.
No Apple hardware or software/service (when it comes to Apple software/services they deserve a LOL) has me chained.
It's just how disgusting Google has kept Android for anyone who wants privacy, safety (both usage and data safety in case of loss etc), and reliable updates that people stay in Apple ecosystem even though software/services wise technically they are miles ahead.
If someone ever even proceeds to tell me that "something in apple's stable is technically comparable/better than Google's.." I might rudely ask them to get their head examined.
I just can't reconcile with the fact that Google would track me every milisecond and then use my data for ads and I can't do anything about it. The good news is very soon Apple will start doing the same, if they have not, because they are already an ad company now.
As far as ditching iMessage is concerned - the last time I ditched WhatsApp in my country, I ditched it and after I didn't feel a thing. And WhatsApp in my country is not only instant messaging - it's literal-bllody-ly everything. Everything!
PS. Signal should launch a "Import from iMessage and WhatsApp" :D (Oh, but then how would they prioritise crypto ;-))
I'm using AdGuard for blocking ads in Safari. Works fine.
I do have a GrapheneOS pixel 7a as well but I'd rather not let Google near my shit.
I also have an iPhone as well as a GrapheneOS phone. They are different but I'm quite happy with those alternatives to the apps you mentioned:
Etar as a calendar frontend app. DAVx5 for syncing CalDAV and CardDAV (so calendar data, contacts and optionally also tasks). I manage tasks within my notes, so I do not really use a todo/reminder app at all but there are different options. tasks.org plugs into DAVx5, for example.
Depending on your server-side setup and your willingness to compromise on open source, are also other options. For example, if you work with an Exchange server, there is the "Nine - Email & Calendar" app which is a very powerful all-in-one-client similar to traditional Outlook on the desktop.
For photos, there are quite a few solid options, depending on what you want. I use the Fossify Gallery with only my Camera folder visible for day-to-day stuff and also have Aves Libre installed for a more advanced interface to my pictures and videos.
There are few things in life people like more than their iPhones.
+4500 upvoots
(I always thought it was suspicious that the anti-apple headline had +30k upvoots on reddit, but the top comment was pro-apple with significantly less. Its almost like they paid an external marketing team/troll farm to do reputation management)
BrowserEngineKit is a thin wrapper over XPC and iOS' extension system. The system would be so much better to develop for if XPC was an open API, and JIT for isolated sub-processes was permitted without Apple's blessing.
* Messengers could have separate sub-processes for preprocessing untrusted inputs -- iMessage already does this, third-party messengers are single-process and cannot.
* Applications could isolate unstable components for better user experience and crash recovery.
* Emulators, e.g. for retro systems, would benefit from speedy emulation.
* WASM would become useful in iOS.
* Browser could use XPC without special-purpose API wrappers such as BrowserEngineKit.
But alas, all of this would make it easier to load code that runs at native speed into an iOS app after a store review happened, and as we all know that'll be the end of the world.
I'll enjoy seeing all the accounts on MacRumors clawing their eyes out when that happens.
It would be naive to think that Apple isn't funding sites and narratives on the internet to serve their economic interests.
One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone. It's such a bizarre and indefencible take, and yet it's repeated over and over again on those Apple-worship platforms.
For a large enough definition of "everyone", it would. "Everyone" has a Meta app installed. We've seen them pull evil tricks over and over to suck up data 24/7 - most recently running a local server on Android that their websites could talk to to bypass anonymization - and the moment a crack appears in the walled garden Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store with no privacy policy reviews" and a large enough definition of everybody will be much the worse for it.
I suppose in a round-a-bout way, it could, more specifically around iMessage, which is Apple's baby in the US and a big part of their lock in effect for US users.
Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private. Break open the walls of the garden and now you could say that you can't trust that the other end you are communicating with hasn't installed some random crapware or malware that's scraping their messages, or recording the screen during a facetime call, thereby compromising your own privacy by interacting with a bad devices.
In that instance, Apple is correct - but what Apple doesn't tell people is that all other forms of digital communication are open to the same risks so they aren't special.
I want to use my phone locked down hard and apps reviewed by Apple. I sleep better with things as they are. I suspect 99% of normal users are in the same boat.
Now with 'troll farms'/'reputation management' being so ubiquitous, we'd call Apple irresponsible to not be doing this.
Google's Project Zero uncovered quite a few 0 days in Apple's "perfect" operating system. They're not magical wizard cult gods over there, they're just a buncha developers same as 'em all. And given the quality of what's been coming out of Apple _and_ Google recently sometimes I wonder if someone's dug a pit under their supposedly high bars they held in the 2010s. Even just Youtube is a disgustingly buggy app nowadays.
Now I have to worry about the inevitable phone call from ‘Apple Technical Support
To be clear I support letting people run whatever apps they want, but let’s not pretend that this won’t make the median iPhone more prone to have a malware infection (like Android). There are reasons other than anticompetitive greed that Apple does things this way (although I am sure greed is the primary motivator).
If you interpret that very liberally, doing a region-locked "you can release alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.
Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?
I know it's not super realistic, but maybe there's a path to global browser choice in there.
That's one of the things Apple has been doing with EU
The japanese law's phrasing is apparently better, but I kinda expect apple to still ignore it and then drag whatever comes through court as long as possible
Not having JIT is a showstopper on the modern web where most sites take more javascript than all of windows 3.1 and word perfect combined.
Mozilla is used to only a tiny fraction of users anyway. Why would this be any different? It could also be a chance to release a version for QA by the users before the rest of the market opens up.
"Why wouldn't apple make an iphone mini even though it only targets a tiny fraction of people? They already only target a tiny fraction of the living animals on earth because they don't make iphones for fish"
The reality is that japan is less than 5% of iphones, and mozilla has to focus it's limited resources.
Also, if mozilla's, mostly US based, developers can't run firefox on ios, they can't even build it in the first place
Those are 3 large jurisdictions, I wonder if that's now a market big enough for Chrome and Firefox to invest into iOS versions of their browser that use Blink and Gecko under the hood. From what I heard this was one of the main reasons they haven't done it yet.
But the bigger the market they can reach, the bigger the reward, and so at some point it may justify investing resources to work around those roadblocks and accept the drawbacks.
How is switching to Blink, a Google-controlled engine, supposed to help creating an "alternative engine"?
Because of the way the App Store works, browser engines segregated by region need to be two different apps. That means maintaining two source trees (EU+UK+JP vs worldwide) and two releases with two reviews.
I expect niche browsers to have a go at porting to iOS at some point (I'd love to see a project like Ladybird be the first non-Safari browser on the app store!) but for the major companies it seems like too much of a hassle at the moment.
Now the question is what's the threshold for this market to be big enough? Maybe Japan's joining in pushes it past that point.
Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is *bad*.
Where Apple is doing everything they can to make that “market” work in their interests instead of as it is supposed to from a user perspective. And when you don't have a choice, it's not really a market either.
I'm sure Safari sucks to support for web developers and is missing a lot of cool apis, but I'm willing to take those tradeoffs for the increased privacy I get as a result.
That being said, I do think Apple should allow third party browser engines.
On the one hand Apple must be made to open up iOS more.
On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.
If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?
There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.
There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
Microsoft got into trouble for pushing Netscape users over to Internet Explorer, but what they did isn't half as evil as the dark patterns Google is using to get Chrome and other Google apps onto the few devices left which don't have them.
It's IE6 all over again. But worse.
This is all narrowing the scope of what advantages native apps have (they do still have advantages), but it's hard to argue they simply aren't moving gatekeeping to other areas.
Even now in Japan, mobile payments are anything but a monopoly. When Apple is forced to compete, they do things like add Suica with Express Transit. PayPay, a made-in-Japan QR code payments app is more prevalent than credit card payments here.
Every Google Pixel has FeliCa its just turned off on non-Japan phones due to said licensing, though people have rooted the phone to turn it on.
Presumably they would have invested more resources into it and been done by now, if there was a viable path to release, which there isn't yet due to Apple's EU geofencing, and because there were a number of bugs and limitations in Apple's BrowserEngineKit which browsers are forced to use.
> Checking out and building Chromium for iOS
> Building Blink for iOS
> The iOS build supports compiling the blink web platform. To compile blink set a gn arg in your .setup-gn file. Note the blink web platform is experimental code and should only be used for analysis.
> [gn_args] > use_blink = true > ios_content_shell_bundle_identifier="REPLACE_YOUR_BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER_HERE" > ios_chromium_bundle_id="REPLACE_YOUR_BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER_HERE"
> Note that only certain targets support blink. content_shell and chrome being the most useful.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...
https://9to5google.com/2023/02/06/google-chrome-blink-ios-we...
To my eyes, the regulators hit the nail on the head here. It's not about other browsers, it's about keeping the iPhone browser crummy so the app store and the 30% Apple Tax stays humming along.
Not that you really should, but Safari has a limit of 500 tabs. Why? It's arbitrary. Safari doesn't support WebRequest in blocking mode, so you can't have real adblockers (just MV3 style content blockers, like uBOL). There are all sorts of edge cases too, like if you want cross-browser sync and extensions. Sure, you can totally run Safari with extension support, but extensions in e.g., Orion are shaky at best.
The biggest claim that Apple made about this whole thing was that web browsers offered an attack surface increase as a result of giving JIT to other browsers, and they could be owned. Frankly, though, I would take a browser without JIT if I had a real adblocker.
So I think this is great news, maybe we get rid of nonsense like that.
However, I'll bet apple will make this japan specific just like eu laws don't affect their behavior in the US.
For example, a japanese iphone will always make a sound when you take a picture. If you leave the country, that will go away, unless you're in airplane mode and then it will start making sounds for every picture again. country-specific behavior.
I don't see why apple wouldn't do the same thing -- firefox works in japan, but not outside japan.
Hope you guys like Chromium!
> 43. Developers cannot avoid Apple’s control of app distribution and app creation by making web apps—apps created using standard programming languages for web-based content and available over the internet—as an alternative to native apps. Many iPhone users do not look for or know how to find web apps, causing web apps to constitute only a small fraction of app usage. Apple recognizes that web apps are not a good alternative to native apps for developers. As one Apple executive acknowledged, “[d]evelopers can’t make much money on the web.” Regardless, Apple can still control the functionality of web apps because Apple requires all web browsers on the iPhone to use WebKit, Apple’s browser engine—the key software components that third-party browsers use to display web content.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544... (p22)
(oh, and gecko is a joke, especially on mobile - no need to even bring it up)
Lots and lots of Web development projects target Chrome, then make sure it works on Safari. In that second step, they accidentally fix a lot of bugs that'd show up on Firefox, too.
Not a lot of them are bothering to check Firefox directly these days. Hell, a decade ago it wasn't making the test list in tons of cases.
Soon as this happens, Chrome is the web. The OWA knows this, it's their goal, it's an astroturf outfit.
But if you're using Google's web tools, they make it (too) easy to download their apps and push you in that direction in a million little ways. For example, GMail's native iOS app will either open a link in a WKWebView or Chrome (if it's not installed, it'll prompt you to install it), but you have to jump through some hoops if you want to open a link in the system's default browser. Similarly, if you're searching for something via google.com, they'll put up a prompt to download their search app, with the default "Continue" option taking you to the store rather than continuing with your current task (and then click-jack the back button).
But what's for-sure is that Apple is hugely profitable. And that browser control is a relatively important part of that profitability. Plain old greed will give Apple ample motive to keep Safari going.
I do appreciate these being open-source. But there must not be an illusion that these large projects being open source means that "just forking" works. A culture is much more than a repository.
So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.