Bit Cannon

Finding an Alternative to iOS

I've used iPhones since 2008, adding thousands of dollars to Apple's giant pile of cash. Much like my move from macOS to Linux more than 3 years ago, Apple's recent behaviour has prompted me to consider iPhone/iOS alternatives. Join me on this journey into the world of Android and the lack of real choice that smartphones present in 2020.

Background

For about 12 years I've owned iPhones, most bought outright, totalling thousands of dollars. I've held on to my most recent iPhone, an iPhone X longer than all others. Contrary to claims of planned obsolescence it still works well. I like technology though, and was planning to replace it this year and pass it on to my father.

Apple have recently ramped up their hostility towards the developers that make iOS the desirable platform it is. App Store horror stories are nothing new, but lately Apple seems to have really ramped up their desire to extract money from every developer's business, despite being one of the richest companies in the world. They seemingly do so without regard for whether the end-user experience is actually better for it.

Recent events, perhaps starting with the Hey saga and continuing with the ongoing battle with Epic have not reflected well. Apple appears to see developers as owing them for the privilege of being in their store and using their APIs. This is despite app development requiring a yearly membership fee of AU$149, and purchase of Mac hardware for development.

We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years.

— Apple App Review Board

Epic decided that it would like to reap the benefits of the App Store without paying anything for them.

— Apple legal submission, via Marco Arment

Apple: Epic only looking for a free ride

Epic, according to Apple, has given Apple $257,000,000 in commission fees in two years over in-app purchases that Apple has no hand, act, part in, doesn't host on their servers, just for the privilege of existing on their OS. ‘Free ride’.

— Steve Troughton-Smith

To take just one example, Epic has for years used Apple's groudbreaking graphics technology, Metal. [..] Apple doesn't charge anything beyond its standard commission for the use of Metal or any of the other tools that Epic has used to develop great games on iOS.

— Philip Schiller, via Steve Troughton-Smith

The only alternative to Metal is OpenGL and Apple have deprecated that!

Anyway, whether you agree with Apple or not this whole thing has me (a developer by trade, and a past contributor to the App Store) feeling offside. Additionally, since I now use Linux full-time there are other sources of friction:

  • iPhones work best when paired with a Mac (or even a PC running Windows).
  • Apple only support building apps on Macs, so if I want to cobble together an app for my phone it's no longer possible.

My only real recourse as a consumer is voting with my wallet and perhaps sharing my reasoning on this blog, so here we are. If enough people do this maybe they will take notice, maybe they won't, but I feel I at least need to try. Just like last time, when I sought a replacement for Mac OS X and switched to Linux I have been evaluating alternatives to iOS.

It's worth noting at this point that I really dislike Google. I distanced myself from all of their services about 8 years ago. The only Google service I use regularly is YouTube. I use Fastmail for email, DuckDuckGo for search, Apple + Flickr for photos, Mattermost, iMessage, Matrix, and Telegram for chat.

Evaluating Alternatives

Initial research turned up the following candidates. Almost all were immediately written-off due to lacking apps or being too immature:

  • Android as shipped on a mainstream phone
    • Full of apps and services dependant on Google.
  • LineageOS
  • LineageOS for microG
    • LineageOS with microG compatibility library to allow running apps that rely on Google APIs, without using Google services.
  • postmarketOS
    • Good in theory: An Alpine Linux based OS for your phone. However, it notes, "Beta version. Calls don't work on most phones yet", on the home page.
  • Librem 5 + PureOS
    • By all accounts the expensive hardware is still not great quality and the software is still being built.
  • LuneOS (WebOS)
    • Very small ecosystem.
  • Sailfish OS
    • Bills itself as, "the mobile OS solution for corporations and governments", right on the front page. I am neither of these things.
  • Give up on a smartphone
    • Get a basic phone for calls and texts and do everything else on a real computer, possibly an ultra compact like the GPD Pocket 2.
    • A friend who has never owned a smartphone talked me out of this. It's possible but very inconvenient. Especially due to some things only being possible with a smartphone like ride sharing.

Turns out duopolies suck: you can choose some modicum of respect for privacy with developer hostile Apple, or get a bit more freedom with surveillance capitalist Google. The candidates that seem most viable for me are LineageOS, and LineageOS for microG. To test out this theory I purchased the cheapest phone supported by LineageOS that I could get new: a Redmi 7 by Xiaomi for AU$175.

For the price I was honestly expecting this phone to be hot garbage. It is in fact much better that I expected. However, this was just a platform for testing the software ecosystem, I won't be reviewing the hardware or letting it colour my impressions of Android. If this experiment goes well my plan would be to by a higher quality iPhone replacement phone.

Stock MIUI ROM

I spent a small amount of time with the stock ROM1 (MIUI) that the Redmi comes with to get a bit of a baseline. It worked well enough and was fairly aesthetically pleasing, but the ads and tracking were truly horrifying. Just take a look at this post describing the steps required to disable data collection and ads — and this is just what you can turn off. Who knows what else it's doing behind the scenes.

LineageOS + Open GApps

I quickly nuked MIUI and installed LineageOS + Open GApps (nano). Open GApps gives you access to some of Google's closed-source apps and libraries, crucially the Google Play Store. The "Open" part of the name refers to the open-source scripts the project publishes for the generation of up-to-date Google Apps packages.

This ROM provides a decent balance between open-source Android and access to the breadth of the Google Play Store. In hindsight The nano version of Open GApps includes more Google than I actually want. I think the ideal for me is the pico package, which is just what's needed to run the Google Play Store.

With this install I attempted to replace the apps that I use most on iOS. For the following apps I just used the Android version:

  • Authy
  • Catch.com.au
  • Deliveroo
  • Discord
  • Element (Matrix)
  • Fastmail
  • Firefox
  • Firefox Focus
  • Instagram
  • Mattermost
  • Reddit
  • Slack
  • Telegram
  • Up
  • YouTube

For these apps I found a replacement that I was mostly happy with:

For these apps I wasn't able to/have not yet found a replacement that I was happy with (please don't send me recommendations):

In general I don't find Android apps to be as nice, or as polished as iOS apps. John and Ben recently discussed this on the 9 September episode of Dithering, which matched my experience. I also really dislike the visual style and slow animations of the Material design language. Especially the circular animation on tap. The apps I like the most are the ones that shun the Material style for their own.

Something I learnt from my move to Linux though, was to embrace the platform's conventions as opposed to trying to reproduce the system you're moving from as much as possible. So I will put my dislike of Material aside.

Screenshot of the emoji keyboard on LineageOS

So Ugly

One thing I'm not sure I can put aside is the use of the super ugly Noto Color Emoji font for emoji on Android. On Linux my system emoji font is JoyPixels and I go to certain lengths to avoid seeing Noto Color Emoji. Almost any other widely available emoji font would be preferable to me. I did try side-loading a JoyPixels package when flashing the ROM but couldn't get it to stick. Apparently something changed in Android 10.

I could "root" the phone and swap out the font file but in the same way I've never jail-broken an iPhone this is not a path I want to go down right now. If worst comes to worst I could actually build LineageOS from source and swap out Noto Color Emoji — what a concept!

LineageOS for microG

microG is a library that implements various APIs provided by Google closed-source libraries in order to be able to run more apps — those that depend on Google's mapping APIs for example. The microG versions of the APIs don't rely on Google servers. Critically going down this path you lose access to Google's push notification servers. Some apps like Telegram work around this but for the most part you lose notifications.

LineageOS for microG gives a familiar LineageOS experience initially. Instead of the Google Play Store though, it uses F-Droid, a repository of strictly free and open-source software. As expected there are far fewer apps available on F-Droid. Most of the big names are missing.

I think if you were especially principled, were happy to use web apps for many things (like Twitter), and didn't use a smartphone all that much LineageOS for microG could work. After spending some time with it though, it's just too limited for me.

Picking a New Phone

The experiment so far showed that I could probably get by with LineageOS + Open GApps. I started looking into what real phone to get as opposed to the Redmi 7 test phone. I had these requirements:

  1. I want a phone around the size of my iPhone X (5.8" display).
    • I find larger phones like the iPhone 6 Plus I owned, and Redmi 7 uncomfortable in pocket, especially when sitting.
  2. If I go with Android I want it to run LineageOS or similar (least amount of Google as possible).
  3. Available in Australia.

That basically only leaves Google Pixel 3 and 4 phones. Pixel 4 seems to have been a bit of a dud. It was discontinued after 9 months and the unreleased successor is rumoured to revert a bunch of the changes it introduced: back to fingerprint sensor, removal of radar gesture sensor. Pixel 3 (from 2018) seemed like it could be viable… but then I looked at GeekBench benchmarks:

  • Pixel 3 — 468 single core, 1833 multi-core
  • Pixel 4 — 610 single core, 2210 multi-core
  • iPhone X — 916 single core, 2334 multi-core

At the time of writing no Android phone is faster in single core performance than my iPhone X from 2017. The OnePlus 8 is at the top with a score of 900. It seems they caught up on multi-core ~last year (by having more cores).

So if the Pixel 3 is my main option I'd be spending money to upgrade to a significantly slower phone made by Google to escape Apple's restrictive, developer hostile, albeit more privacy respecting ecosystem… this is not immediately compelling.

Closing Thoughts

I'm really torn. The upcoming Pixel 5 would likely be a good option if it were possible to strip out as much of the Google dependencies as possible. If past releases are anything to go by it seems that it's likely to be almost another year or so before LineageOS is available for the Pixel 5.

I don't like the idea of buying a Pixel 3 given that it's a step backwards performance wise. After 3 years with the iPhone X I kind of what the replacement to perform close to it. Sadly modern web pages and fake native apps (apps built with web tech) demand fast performance. For example, the Redmi 7 has a really hard time with long Medium articles.

Another option would be to just keep using the iPhone X. It still performs well, battery capacity is still 89% of new, it's still getting major iOS updates. And I'm still voting with my wallet by not giving Apple more money. I did however tell my Dad to hold off buying a new phone earlier in the year because he could have mine when I replace it. So I kind of need a new phone one way or another.

For now I'm going to wait for the Pixel 5 and new iPhones to be released later this year and continue to follow Apple's behaviour towards developers. It's not uncommon for them to actually listen to their customers eventually — often it takes longer than it feels it should though (*cough* butterfly keyboard). As usual subscribe to the feed, or follow me on Twitter or the Fediverse for future updates.

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I'm using "ROM" (Read Only Memory) here knowing that it's incorrect, since that's the typical language for alternate OSes for Android phones.