If you can tell me what phone can give me access to all the standard apps I would need, has good build quality, doesn’t funnel my data to Google, is backed by an entity capable of providing multi-year device support, has cloud storage integration that lets me keep my data securely offloaded from the phone’s storage, can handle modern apps and websites as far as performance, has a very good camera, and has the equivalent of AppleCare such that if/when I shatter my screen I can replace it for $30, I am all ears.
I have a Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS and it does most of the above:
- slightly lesser build quality than my iPhone 15 Pro but comparable
- doesn't funnel data to Google unless you explicitly let it, you can circumvent a lot of the Google Play stuff by restricting permissions and using Aurora Store
- is backed by, well, Google and the Graphene team porting over security updated. They have a fairly good track record by now.
- can use any of the N backup services that already exist unlike the iPhone's silly restriction on background apps
- don't notice performance differences between it and my iPhone 15 Pro in day to day use. If anything, biometrics are way faster on the Pixel since iOS 26 made FaceID slow as molasses for me
- the default camera is pretty good (uses all the Pixel fancy processing hardware) but if it's not good enough you can just install the stock Google camera which works fine. You can turn off network access if you don't want it snooping. Photos are neck and neck with the iPhone but the iPhone is way better at videos, no Android phone has cracked that yet IMO.
- Yeah, but no other brand can give you an AppleCare experience. Best option is phone insurance and just getting a new Pixel if that happens. Graphene can do full device backups via Seedvault and it's not that much more of a pain to restore compared to an iPhone backup. Granted, it's jankier but it's not impossible. The other issue is that Pixels are not a thing in a lot of countries, Apple really has the edge here but I'd take that risk over the UX shenanigans they pull nowadays with their latest updates (god is it awful)
LTT did a video on GrapheneOS recently[0]. The conclusion was basically that it’s a trade off between privacy and convenience. It will require more tinkering and things that don’t “just work”. While I haven’t used GrapheneOS, it doesn’t seem like something a non-technical user would have the patience for, unless they were into the idea of picking up a new hobby of managing their phone’s OS.
I haven't found one. I don't carry a phone unless I have a specific reason (ie: gps). I use my desktop or tablet (Daylight Computer) with a voip service (jmp.chat) when I need to use a phone number, and I carry a Sony ZV-1 in my pocket for my camera.
I tried it recently when the macOS version went to 1.0. Dealing with tabs felt more cumbersome than Safari and I ended up switching back. Safari is better at getting out of my why, which is probably why I always go back to it. This has been a pattern for a couple decades now.
At $3.99 this was an instant buy for me until the App Store told me I couldn't. I think the venn diagram between HN users and those holding off on Tahoe is probably a pretty big overlap. ;-)
My experience share only supporting the latest OS:
I have launched apps focused on a new feature in the latest OS and regretted it. The # of people who have the latest OS is much smaller than the full install base for much longer than I thought. As a result, my marketing conversion was unnaturally low - people who liked the app idea but couldn't install because they had the wrong OS. This causes two problems: potential users I activated but couldn't convert and this signal gets internalized by the App Store, pushing down future impressions.
Now I always have a fallback implementation of the feature so I can target the prior OS. Both Mac and iOS.
Thanks. An update that will add functionality that allows a user to give it a link that contains web video, will do dynamic link discovery (with Safari extension, and pull in the video automatically (M3U8 discover and retrieval) -- Lots of online lecture videos that need transcription.
I will include better version support (probably to os 13).
I was in Las Vegas when this happened, though we had no idea that day that this is what was happening. My wife and I went to get tickets to the Titanic exhibit at the Luxor and they said "our computers systems are down, we can only take cash". I had cash, and they sold us the tickets for extremely cheap.
Long story short, I've always felt like I stole from the casino that day too! :-)
It seems if you left click "Copy Permalink" that the site will generate a massive URL with all of your options. One of them is "settings-kiosk-checkbox". Change it to "true" in your copied URL and that should work.
This is so true. I've been on Kagi since March 2024. On the occasion that I find myself on Google on someone else's computer, I find it completely unusable from a search result perspective. It's all just junk. Kagi has me as a paying customer forever.
It's not about WP in the company name. It's about loosely using the words "Wordpress" and "WooCommerce" all over their website in ways that violate trademarks.
For there to be a violation there has to be a reasonable prospect of consumer confusion by the consumers in the target market. The page is labelled "Choose your WordPress Hosting plan"
Someone who is in the market for Wordpress hosting is almost certainly aware they have Wordpress and that they need hosting for it. Wordpress is a nominative use to refer to the entity, and Core is an adjective which in context means central.
Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself? That would be the standard. Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis.
Fair enough on wordpress.com. It still doesn't strike me as plausible that any reasonable person in a purchasing decision thinks WPengine is wordpress itself. I certainly haven't seen any such confusion online.
He is throwing things around like: "it's tragedy of the commons", "they are evil capitalists" etc. etc. In another words he wants to "hijack" their market share as they supposedly "hijacked" WordPress' brand, logo or whatever.
Ah I really wanted this too but it seems like it's not available in the EU.
Does anyone understand why? Is it apple having a flap about recent DMA/Whatever regulations they don't like or is there an actual technical reason why what's probably a fancy version of VNC can't work without breaching European regulations?
They haven't given a detailed reason, but pundits who have paid more attention to the DMA suggest that it's because the feature does not allow 3rd parties to offer the same integration.
While the DMA's changes to the app store received the most publicity, the DMA mandates for modularity for any feature where a home-advantage could be granted by the gate keeper. Since features like AI and screen mirroring are already established markets with competitors, Apple offering these as built in functions could be interpreted as actions against the DMA unless they offer a way for others to tap into it via APIs.
However this is just a guess. There is a cynical rhetoric that it's to punish the EU but this is a pretty flimsy idea since it's clear that Apple is relying on these new features to propel upgrades to M series macs and new iPhones. Currently there exists no tentpole feature for people in the EU to upgrade. The other reason is that it's pretty tenuous to think that the EU masses will rise up against the EC because they don't have screen mirroring or image playground.
This is an interesting one because, to my knowledge, and unlike alternative App Stores etc on iOS, there’s surely nothing stopping an Android phone manufacturer from developing a Mac app to offer equivalent functionality?
I’m unsure whether the DMA compels them to provide specific APIs beyond the ability to connect to arbitrary devices and draw to the screen, and it’s maybe a little bit concerning if it does. My understanding was that nothing in the DMA specifically compelled Apple to create e.g. MarketplaceKit, it’s just that the alternative would be to open up iOS far more than Apple is willing to do.
I can install a whole number of AppStore or opensource apps that allow me to access other machines graphically. I really don't see why accessing the GUI on an iPhone should be treated any differently than accessing the GUI on a terminal server or an android or linux box or something.. The argument doesn't really make sense to me..
While your guess is as good as mine. I can see that the screen sharing feature goes beyond what is currently possible with 3rd party mirroring tools, including apple's own earlier tools. For example right clicking brings up extensive contextual menus that aren't accessible in iOS, and I can see these also leverage the continuity features between the platforms.
It's DMA. Certainly part of it is punitive, but it makes sense, too - building and especially supporting interoperability for these protocols is a burden that they can avoid by not shipping features to the EU. They're free to change the key exchange, APIs, wire format, etc. without having to deal with documentation, key issuance, etc. outside of their walls. And, being forced to open up Screen Mirroring would reduce its value as a moat, since someone would presumably be able to build an Android client quickly and with no reverse engineering work.
So do I understand it correctly; the problem is not MacOS having a client app, the problem is iOS acting as the server with only apple approved client implementation?
I really don't see how it falls outside of the DMA.
> And, being forced to open up Screen Mirroring would reduce its value as a moat, since someone would presumably be able to build an Android client quickly and with no reverse engineering work.
Which is everything wrong about current Apple. How far the Apple has fallen off the tree. Back in the resurgence of the Mac after Steve Jobs returned, the policy was to make everything as open as possible, now it's entirely the reverse.
If the iPhone/Mac were a competitive product as they are, there would be no need to retort to that sort of shenanigan, the whole thing would be openly documented but implementation quality would be the deciding factor.
It is not surprising that Apple doesn't want to compete because they wouldn't necessarily win, before even talking about price.
In any case, while it's a nice feature to have, it can only be considered worthwhile because all of Apple's strategies for convergence have failed pretty hard (after mocking Microsoft) and there are now too many annoying things you need to do specifically on a smartphone (because of Apps, Auths, or other nonsense of the sort).
If anything, it is extremely dumb (considering the price and marketing around ecosystem) that you cannot just use whatever data is on the phone but with correct desktop app implementation even (and especially) for Apple first party app.
As a Mac user that is getting old (I remember System 7 from my youth, and I used System 9 for a bit) I feel extremely saddened that we are now celebrating what is basically a custom implementation of VNC/Remote Desktop for a completely locked device/OS.
This feature was considered essential/basic 20 years ago, having to use it to access a limited device because a company can't figure out proper convergence, largely out of pure greed, is really not something to be happy about.
I'm sure one day they'll figure out how to make a Mac App to properly exploit all the health/sport data of their very expensive Watch products (that require an iPhone for no good reason).
But when this day will come I probably won't be a customer anymore so whatever...
> Back in the resurgence of the Mac after Steve Jobs returned, the policy was to make everything as open as possible
My perception is quite different. One of the first things Steve did after his return was to revoke the licenses for Mac clones (Power Computing, Daystar, UMAX, etc). Also, the iPod, iPhone and iPad were created under his leadership and have always been very far from open in their designs, regarding both hardware and software.
Apple was (and still is) very open when it helps them, e.g. by adopting and enforcing USB (original iMac) or USB C (laptops from ca 2015 on).
> supporting interoperability for these protocols is a burden
Also an unprecedented and unacceptable privacy and security risk.
You would be allowing third parties the ability to continuously record your iPhone's screen. Which includes websites you browse, apps you open, health information, text messages etc.
And the Mac is so much open that you could do this, have a local model to transcribe it and ship it to a remote server without the user noticing.
There isn't a government or advertising company on this planet that wouldn't want to get at this information.
> Also an unprecedented and unacceptable privacy and security risk.
> You would be allowing third parties the ability to continuously record your iPhone's screen. Which includes websites you browse, apps you open, health information, text messages etc.
> And the Mac is so much open that you could do this, have a local model to transcribe it and ship it to a remote server without the user noticing.
MacOS is not secure in the way you would like to think it's secure. This is already risk. And Apple really could do this right: make screen mirroring use the DRM playback paths, and open up the API to trigger it to competitors (who would get precisely the same DRM-playback-pathed result of a screen mirror showing up in a window from which they cannot read). I don't really know why a competitor would want to compete here, but they could.
Most people interact with apps like Health on their phone not their Mac.
And there are also many third party apps that never made Mac versions.
So the amount of data we are talking about exposing is significantly higher.
And the issue is that the DMA is ambiguous about what competition and interoperability specifically means and so it would just take one company to complain about your solution for Apple to be fined 10% of global revenue.
Many people log into their Mac using the same credentials (Apple ID) that give access to the Health data, and in fact Apple makes it really hard or even impossible to use it without (you can't selectively grant access, you need to use a separate Apple ID but then you lose some useful features such as universal clipboard, etc).
This is again a misinformed take. Your Mac can already get all your iPhone's data from the cloud where it is synced without viable opt-out or compartmentalization.
> Only if the data is available in iCloud and it is stored in files and it is not encrypted.
Health data is available in there, just to go after your example. iPhone backups are also available in there.
At no point am I being asked anything else beyond my Apple ID, password, and two-step approval on another device (such as the Mac) to set up a new iPhone and download all my data.
Thus the outcome is that the Mac indeed has everything it needs to get access to all your iCloud data. In fact, reverse-engineering how to get it directly is unnecessary work - instead, just reverse-engineer enough to capture the Apple ID password (or prompt to it - given there's still no way for the user to tell a real system dialog from one drawn by malware) and approve the 2FA prompt, get an actual, real iPhone and sign into the person's account and then extract all the data from there (via screenshots if necessary).
There’s a universe in which your Mac is a locked down device like your iPhone, with a proper immutable filesystem, carefully controlled persistent state, and a strong sandbox in which the terminal, Homebrew, and apps (App Store and otherwise) can act within the sandbox but cannot do things like, say, reading your entire iMessage database.
We do not live in this universe. Consider getting a Chromebook instead if you want to be in that universe. (But then you have a tradeoff: Apple itself seems pretty good about not using your data inappropriately. Google, not so much.)
>You would be allowing third parties the ability to continuously record your iPhone's screen
Apple is first-party to the device, but third-party to me, the user. Why are they more trustworthy than a free open-source tool? Who the hell are they to tell me who I can and cannot trust?
It is sad to see such a misinformed take on a technical forum. You can already do everything you want. It will take some reverse-engineering work, but it's possible.
Similar things were said about iMessage interoperability with Android, until Beeper proved them wrong. They managed to reverse-engineer it, build a compatible client and clearly proved Apple's claims were BS (and no, this didn't lead to a mass-scale compromise of iMessage, contradicting fanboys' claims).
If the feature allows to pull up the iPhone's screen without any user consent, then it is vulnerable to begin with - the reverse-engineering requirement would become an insignificant hurdle compared to the value of such a vulnerability. Presumably however, there will be a consent step, either on the spot or prior (maybe it can reuse the cryptographic pairing mechanism that happens when the phone asks you to "trust this computer?" the first time), and no third-party (whether using an approved API or reverse-engineered) would be able to bypass it without the user intentionally consenting.
> the reverse-engineering requirement would become an insignificant hurdle compared to the value of such a vulnerability
The idea that breaking device attestation that is secured through Secure Enclave hardware i.e. not accessible from user code is an insignificant hurdle is hilariously ridiculous. It is borderline impossible for any ordinary developer.
And people that bring up the "just ask the user" argument clearly don't remember how poorly that has worked in the past e.g. Microsoft Vista. Users will blindly approve any dialog which is why Apple has been so careful to limit them to targeted actions which a "do you approve this app to record everything on your iPhone" is not.
You're approaching this from the idea that the impenetrability by third-parties is the primary security feature.
If this is true, then my worry isn't even about malicious attackers, it's my neighbor (with a real Mac) being able to (accidentally!) eavesdrop on my phone screen (since according to you this is the primary security measure).
It's obviously ridiculous, and the primary security measure is that there must be a prior key exchange and consent step. If that part is secure, then it would be secure against a third-party.
If that part is not secure, then no Secure Enclave-ing will help you, because worst case scenario, the attacker can just use a real Mac as part of his attack to pass the secure-enclave-protected authentication step, or just exploit the good old "analog hole" by using the real Mac as the main attack vector (and then just capture its HDMI output and feed in inputs via a USB-capable microcontroller simulating a keyboard).
> It is sad to see such a misinformed take on a technical forum.
If you’re going to make such a claim, you should be very careful to ensure you’re not misinformed yourself.
> Similar things were said about iMessage interoperability with Android, until Beeper proved them wrong.
No, they did not. We already knew Apple not allowing iMessage on Android was a lock-in choice. The trial with Epic brought that unambiguously to light, years before the release of Beeper Mini¹.
“Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.”
Considering the pricing in the EU it was already hard to consider the effort to value worthwhile but now we are officially getting a substandard product.
Before there were many stuffs like Apple News never making it but at least there was some pretense of working on it.
Since EU people are getting a less featureful product, they should get products priced accordingly.
Otherwise, Apple should just fuck off EU if it doesn't want to play ball, they started the whole thing by being consumer hostile and the greediest corporation ever, they make Microsoft look like the good guys.
I've been waiting a year for the summarize AI to (not) make it to my Google Pixel 8 Pro. It should be known that everyone outside of the US get a different product than what is advertised online and reviewed on YouTube.
Publish the protocol docs. That's literally all that's required from them. Actually they don't even need to - they can just promise not to sue anyone who reverse-engineers it and publishes a commercial client.
That's how adversarial interoperability worked for decades (and gave free software the ability to interoperate with proprietary formats, see LibreOffice for example) before abusing the DMCA and/or threatening legal action to take down compatible implementations became common practice. I do not recall of any security breaches as a result of this.
Apple are however not going to do that, because doing so would overnight destroy their moat around Universal Clipboard and all their existing interoperability features. So instead they make up some bullshit that non-technical governments and courts will take years to disprove, buying them more time to operate anti-competitively.
It is however sad to see a member of a technical forum gobble up said bullshit.
Can you articulate where in the DMA where it says that all Apple has to do "is promise not to sue anyone" to be in compliance. Or where it talks about protocol publication.
The DMA is about preventing gatekeepers from using arbitrary restrictions to prevent competition. It does not try to predict and anticipate every possible example nor solution.
The existence of competitor would by itself be enough proof to the fact that Apple is not restricting competition. But for such a competitor to exist, they would require enough assurance that the business will be viable and they won't get sued out of existence.
Apple either publishing the protocol or at the very least publishing an official licensing agreement allowing anyone to reverse-engineer and reimplement said protocol would achieve this.
Evidence could be that Microsoft isn't in trouble for shipping Windows with RDP servers/clients in Europe, which is equivalent to this iPhone mirroring feature.
Why is Microsoft able to do it just fine (without running afoul of the DMA) while Apple supposedly can't, despite MS having an ever larger marketshare of its field than Apple and this would warrant even more scrutiny?
The multitude of third-party RDP clients (and nobody being threatened with legal action for implementing one) out there may be at least part of the answer.
I know that Apple wants their cake and eat it too, looking for ways to wiggle out of this while still dodging their responsibilities. This is why they need years and a small army of lawyers.
Pretty simple really. The EU can't fine Apple for not doing business in EU countries, including not rolling out a feature. But if they do roll out a feature, EU has decided it can fine them 20% of global revenue if it isn't just how the EU wants it to be.
Not doing so only costs Apple whatever marginal business they expect to lose in EU for not offering this or that feature. So I'd expect more of this going forward.
It's only a matter of time before the EU gets wise to this - this move is simply to delay the inevitable and buy themselves some more time to act anticompetitively. When they feel like the EU is closer to disproving their argument (because there is no technical reason this can't be opened to third-parties in a secure way), they will suddenly announce that they have found some magic and miraculous way to do it and release the feature, bringing them back into compliance.
> It's only a matter of time before the EU gets wise to this
"gets wise to this" how, exactly? The EU can certainly set conditions which Apple must meet to ship a feature. They have no legal grounds whatsoever to demand that Apple ship that feature to Europe, specially modified to meet their exacting requirements.
How would that even work? One way to comply with the EU's demands that a product work a certain way, is to not sell that product in the EU. Is your stance that EU has a right to force companies to sell their wares in the EU?
Gets wise that this is blatant malicious compliance, and use this to inform potential enforcement action and/or revisions to the regulation.
It could very well become that after enough of this, DMA 2.0 would have a provision stipulating that any feature withheld in the EU would need to have a valid technical justification that passes review by a panel of independent experts.
Yep, I hope they work on something like that. Maybe we could get a chance for another competitive OS in the EU.
Sometimes I wish they tax the hell out of those US behemoth in a way that would open space for EU companies to become competitive.
The network effects are too big when it comes to IT, it's not very wise to let the US be the sole beneficiary of such an industry.
It is surprisingly slow, though. Like, awfully slow. There's a very noticeable latency that's unacceptable for a local device sitting right next to the computer.
Apple has been doing low latency screen mirroring for, I don’t know, a decade. If you find the latency unacceptable, consider looking into your network performance.
Great way to tell you have low standard and can't detect latency. The same thing has been said about the iPad Mirroring, expect it's effectively unusable for anyone half serious if you don't use the wired mode.
For a quick tech demo, it's all fun and games, but when there is real shit to do, nobody wants to fight their tools.
fix your network. i send a display to my ipad to run audio mixing in realtime for work. 30fps, but more importantly consistent pen input for control. been doing this for 3+ years regularly
Nothing to do with my network, it has disappointing latency for drawing applications (it's not just about the theoretical latency of input, you have to consider the whole chain, with translation to softwares). Pretty much every pro reviewer has said has much.
I can see why it is completely fine for your application but you can't say the same for other applications.
Besides it doesn't even make much sense to need that when the thing has such a powerful processor, Apple need to get their shit together and have it run real Mac software and that's it.
As someone who dislikes the “you’re holding it wrong” argument, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Your network latency is outside of Apple’s control.
So what phone link has been doing for years. But I suppose with the integration Apple can do you can just open the notification on your mac? Phone link very unhelpfully bings the notifying app name...
On supported devices (Samsung and OnePlus, off the top of my head), Phone Link can mirror apps to your PC and will open them up in this mode when you click a notification. There are some rough edges, like needing to manually unlock your phone—unless you do what I did and rig up a complicated Tasker flow to automate the process. This update makes jumping over to the Apple ecosystem surprisingly tempting, since Continuity with mirroring sounds like a more polished version of Phone Link. I can't imagine giving up my ThinkPad, though.
NSUserActivity didn't forward notifications, it just provided a way to move whatever you were doing on your other Apple devices to the one you're currently using and only covered things that the dev specifically implemented.
Oh interesting! Does it mean that the content of these forwarded notifications goest through Apple servers then? With no way for the source app to prevent it?
I haven't picked it apart, but if it's like the other Continuity features it all takes place locally over bluetooth and ad-hoc wifi. There's a possibility that their servers are just sending the notifications to the user's Macs in the same push that sends them to the phone though.
Can you elaborate on why it's nice? How do I do multi-touch gestures with a single cursor? Is the main benefit be able to use iPhone apps on a bigger screen? Can iPhone apps display more content (maybe let the app pretend it's being displayed on an iPad or at least a larger screen than the physical screen size)?
At least in Sonoma, Screen Time requests crash Messages, fail to work properly on iPadOS, but work fine on iPhone. Now I can approve requests without having to dig my phone out my pocket. A small convenience, but I can’t expect them to fix Screen Time on macOS any time soon.
But with a trackpad you cannot see what you are touching. You see a single cursor on the screen. If you touch two things on your iPhone you know exactly which two things you are manipulating. With a single cursor on the Mac, no matter how many fingers you use you only manipulate one thing.
This seems to me a difficult challenge in mashing up the wildly different interaction paradigms. I'd love to see how Apple solves it in their new feature.
Imagine a game that's supposed to played with a landscape orientation. Your left hand control (up/down/left/right) is located on the lower left corner. Your right hand control (A/B/X/Y) is located on the lower right corner. You are expected to touch two controls simultaneously.
I don't even like Apple as a company but I have high expectations of their products and I assume their product is meticulously designed for a variety of use cases. Why should I as a consumer expect half-assed implementations? Just because all software are half-assed these days?
Apple says "With iPhone Mirroring, users can now fully access and engage with their iPhone right from Mac while iPhone remains locked nearby." And nowhere does Apple say this feature doesn't work for games.
this is so asinine. reassess your expectations for a corporate monolith that only cares about money. You should expect half assed implementations from a corporate board beholden to only a profit directive.
I didn't discount anything. Where did I say that? I merely have high expectations and I'm asking about the feature and whether it satisfies the high expectations, and if so, how. This is called curiosity.
I'm never the kind of person who discounts a feature before I even use it. And I clearly said I haven't used it.
Zooming into a map, a picture, a webpage, or quite frankly most things would be rather awkward if you didn’t know where it would zoom in (or if it would always zoom into the center of the screen, for instance).
As another comment mentioned, it appears to use the cursor position as the pinch-gesture location.
Let us know if you're actually using it in a week or so. (I tried it a couple of times in the beta. It is slow. It is clunky. It is an impractical way to interact with your iPhone.)
Well, it's basically VNC over Wifi with a custom layer for touch events and other special iOS cases, so yeah.
VNC over wifi is worse than RDP'ing a server across a country if you have good wired fiber connection. But I guess in a pinch if you don't want to look for your iPhone and need a quick interaction.
But I agree that in any case it's largely a gimmick and mainly something for marketing reasons around the ecosystem and all that jazz. It's just like the failed attempt at porting iOS/iPadOS apps to the Mac: makes for a great release announcement/keynote, in practice barely worth using.
That’s not what your parent comment is saying. They’re commenting on how there’s no official Instagram app for Desktop, except now there kind of is: you use the mobile app on a mirror of the iPhone on the Desktop. That is “kind of wild” because it’s so roundabout. The comment criticises Instagram (and their lack of a Desktop app), not Apple.
