This is not one of the claims made by the ICEBlock developers; their claims are only to do with notifications.

If you want to claim that a locked Android device is substantially easier for law enforcement to break in to than a locked iPhone, please cite up-to-date (from 2025) sources.

It makes me suspect they’re not talking about the stock systems OEMs ship.

The developers of GrapheneOS, an independent, security-oriented Android distribution are probably not only talking about stock OEM Android. What they’re saying is true about stock OEM android though.

That’s a separate issue from whether users are forced to get all their software from a specific source, which is also separate from whether users will actually use other sources when given the option.

On Android, developers can offer users a way to install an app that isn’t easily traced to their identity and on iOS they can’t. Furthermore, an Android app can be both on the Play store and available from other sources; there’s no exclusivity.

It’s true that FCM will result in more reliability and a better UX than other ways to implement notifications. Doing something else is still the right choice for certain use cases, such as those where privacy or keeping the entire codebase open source are top priorities.

Maybe they want that, but the statement on their website is not wrong on a technicality because it’s oversimplified; it’s wrong because it asserts a privacy difference between the two operating systems that does not exist.

The link in the comment you’re replying to says which part is not true, but since you seem more willing to comment than to click a link and read, I’ll summarize:

The part about the Apple Push Notification service requiring less information that can identify an individual user than Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging is not true. Both use a similar token system. Furthermore, it is possible to build android apps with notifications that do not use FCM.

I think generating and sharing sexually explicit images of a person without their consent is abuse.

That’s distinct from generating an image that looks like CSAM without the involvement of any real child. While I find that disturbing, I’m morally uncomfortable criminalizing an act that has no victim.

I’m content if my shoe cost is under $10/month. You’re just over a tenth that. It would be hard to get the number lower and still have reasonable comfort and protection from the shoes.

How long before people abuse the text feature?

Unsolicited photography tip: your phone camera’s sensor is 4:3. Setting the aspect ratio to anything else crops the image and can make fitting subjects that aren’t tall and skinny in the frame difficult.

This is true even if the phone calls a different aspect ratio “full”.

It had been the norm for phones, then Android came along and a much more PC-like level of capability became the norm for phones. SafetyNet didn’t show up until five years later and it didn’t get significant negative press.

It’s weird this didn’t get more pushback on mobile. Even the mainstream press was critical when Microsoft proposed it for PCs.

What happened to old Internet Forums?

Some of them still exist; some of them shut down. It’s not just a matter of Reddit siphoning off all the users (though that’s a factor), but that administering and moderating forums is a lot of work without a lot of reward. In addition to the baseline effort being significant, a changing landscape including reduced organic search traffic, more spam, and increased legal liability in some jurisdictions has reduced the number of people who want to attempt it.

banned for not adhering to Left Wing orthodoxy

Reddit has many problems, but in my experience this is not one of them. Of course you’re very likely to be banned if you bring politics into a community that isn’t about politics.

a mid tier graphics card?

GPU inflation is getting silly when 1000€ is just mid-tier.

I’m sure there are several I would consider fine for me.

I’m skeptical that they can be fine for someone who doesn’t know what federation means, isn’t especially upset that a handful of megacorporations control most human communication, and already finds the fact that I’m asking them to use anything different from what they’re used to annoying. XMPP has more things for the end user to think about than Signal does even if a client is very polished.

Huawei was forced to offer non-Google Android due to USA sanctions. I don’t know whether that has created difficulties for them in the Chinese market, but a quick search shows a significant decline in market share in Europe.

I do think Amazon launching an Android phone in 2014 without Google’s ecosystem is the main reason Google launched SafetyNet. Of course the Fire Phone failed because it wasn’t very good and Amazon didn’t iterate, but I imagine Google didn’t want them or anyone else to try again.

Sometimes people make things that are useful to Google or find bugs for them. It has no meaningful cost to them as long as non-Google Android isn’t appealing to mainstream users.

That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.

Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.

No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal’s key exchange and encryption. WhatsApp was an independent company for years and had rejected several acquisition offers, but $19 billion is a big number.

One of WhatsApp’s founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.

Mastodon’s federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.

Servers don’t remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There’s work being done on both, but I’m surprised it wasn’t prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.

I think Samsung put out a couple smartphones about a decade ago with 16:9 sensors, but otherwise phone cameras are almost universally 4:3. Nothing wrong with cropping intentionally of course, but I see a whole lot of images that appear to be cropped accidentally.