It’s good to hear that Android supports this as well now, but I think you understate the difference in when these features arrived. From a quick search, the location example was fixed in iOS 8 in 2014 [1], and in Android 10 in 2019 [2], putting Apple 5 years ahead of Google on privacy features. Based on the list of privacy features being introduced in iOS 14, my impression is that this is still the case?
Thanks for looking up the timeline, I was not sure. Also full disk encryption on phones is another thing Apple did way earlier.
I agree it's not exactly apples to Apples. Does Apple still have special permissions for their own apps which allows them to run unobstructed, but other apps need to jump hoops with callbacks and other workarounds?
Are we expecting for Apple to always be 5 years ahead of Google on privacy features? Or did Google shift priorities with Android 10?
Honestly if we're talking about buying an iOS device or an Android device in 2014, I'd lean towards iOS for sure. I don't feel the same way about it today.
> Are we expecting for Apple to always be 5 years ahead of Google on privacy features? Or did Google shift priorities with Android 10?
Good question! My personal impression is that Google, being primarily a tracking company, reluctantly added just enough privacy features for people not to flock to Apple. (I think people have grown more privacy-conscious over the past few years, and Apple has marketed their privacy features heavily.) Links like this [1], listing the iOS 14 privacy features that will arrive in late 2020, appear to still be ahead of what Google has done yet – and e.g. Facebook’s reaction to the cross-app tracking block appear to indicate that this isn’t something they’ve encountered from Google.
But being an iPhone user now, I of course notice more easily what’s happening in the Apple world than Google world. If you have an overview of new privacy features in Android, which aren’t in iOS, I’d be very happy to be proven wrong. I’d love to see a full arms race between Google and Apple on privacy, with both parties introducing novel features.
> Does Apple still have special permissions for their own apps which allows them to run unobstructed, but other apps need to jump hoops with callbacks and other workarounds?
Unfortunately, yes. There is e.g. no way to get as reliable background sync with things like Nextcloud and Resilio as you do with iCloud, since there’s no “run in the background” permission. Not sure about this, but I don’t think any other app can take over the lock screen in the same way as Apple Maps. You can’t set a default browser than Safari, but I believe this is changing in iOS 14.
While I respect Apple for their stance on privacy and therefore use an iPhone, I do disagree with some of these missing permissions, and hope that a new round of anti-trust investigations may force them to open up on this.
