I will type out a short answer, which will be eclipsed by Beatnik’s in both quantity and quality, when he finally gets it out on his fifth pass.
Android works on, like any device. iOS works exclusively on Apple products.
Android is linux-based, meaning it was made open source, and still draws from open source. This allows us to have a much better understanding of what’s happening on the inside, compared to Apple’s black-box in-house firmware. Which we know they build back-doors into so they can snoop, and no one can ever know or stop them.
There are fully non-google open-source versions of ‘android’ that you can just install over Google’s Android, giving you a fully FOSS device. Not so for iOS/Apple... unless you manage to get android onto your iPhone haha.
The app development ecosystem is much bigger and more open, especially when you think about things like sideloading .apks, and F-Droid. Everything on iOS is created or curated by Apple through the store.
It’s kinda like the difference between a gaming console and a PC. Android is a lot more open, and malleable which has a lot of draws imo. Curious what more knowledgeable people have to say
Although Android itself is open source, a lot of the firmware needed for the hardware to work is closed source. One example is the modem, which usually can only be isolated from the system because it has very complex firmware. More about this can be found on the website of Replicant, a fully free Android distribution: https://replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php
Awesome. I knew Google was up to some fuckery, I just didn't know exactly what, where, and how. The modem makes a lot of sense, seeing as that's where they would do their nefarious communications scraping for whoever wants it. Thanks for the link to Replicant, this looks really interesting :af-heart: