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@riley @quinsibell I used to have one that just ran the normal ARMv4 port of Debian with an app for doing calls and SMS.

@jeremy_list Pity that these went out of fashion.

@quinsibell

@jeremy_list I believe whatever is meant to run on PinePhone is fairly close to some kind of stock Ubuntu, FWIW. FairPhone is also supposed to have an Ubuntu Touch option, IIRC.

@quinsibell

@jeremy_list Oh, and Kali Linux supports a bunch of (mostly obsolete, in order to have given kernel engineers all due time to figure drivers for the undocumented hardware out) Android phones.

@quinsibell

@jeremy_list There was the Nokia N800 series. In its days, it was a weird thing that people had trouble finding a purpose for. In modern days of ubiquitous tracking, what it did makes a lot more sense.

@quinsibell

@felixf I am not sure of that part, tbh.

The story is, Google had been developing Android for a while by the time iPhone came out, and when it did, they scrapped the original Android and scrambled to make a new one that would look much more like iPhone. I haven't seen the pre-iPhone Android, and I don't have a very good idea as to what would have been in it. It probably didn't include quite as much tracking as modern Android, partly because of the different ways people interact with button-phones and all-glass-phones, but then again, the early releases of the Android that actually came out wasn't as bad as the modern versions, either.

As far as I know, the original intent behind Android wasn't to create the mess that exists today, but to create a One Platform to Rule them All, in the sense of replacing the very fractured smartphone OS scene that had been existing before. This actually had legitimate purposes — as well as the obvious benefits to reducing the costs to rolling out tracking features to a myriad of different platforms.

@quinsibell

@riley @quinsibell and that was an iOS invention?

@felixf The fully touchscreen cellphone interface was an iPhone invention. This had not been done previously; while some types of smartphones had a touchscreen — I believe that there were experiments with crossing Palm PDAs, with resistive stylus-based touchscreens, with cellphones, for an example —, none had only touchscreen, and user interfaces were heavily button-based. iPhone changed that, and Android copied it.

Another major thing that Apple did with iPhone did was popularising capacitive, solid glass, fingerable, touchscreens. Apple didn't invent capacitive toucshreens outright, but these were kind of a niche thing before iPhone, on the theory that nobody would want such a crude input mechanism on a device smarter than, say, a microwave oven. After iPhone, capacitive touchscreens became the norm, and slowly, over time, the resolution improved, too.

@quinsibell

@felixf Oh, and while we're at it — the recent iPads with Apple Pencil really cheat. The main capacitive sensor just isn't that capable, so the Pencil uses a couple of special electrodes that don't electrically behave like a fingertip, and the iPad itself has a special secondary sensor layer just so that it would be able to detect the position of the Pencil's tip. You'll note that iOS can tell a fingertip apart from a Pencil, and that there's Apple devices — such as iPhones — with the standard Apple capacitive touch sensor layer, but without the secondary sensor layer for Pencil, so they can sense only a finger, but not a Pencil.

@quinsibell

@riley ah well...I was aware that iPhone did all the innovation in terms of UI and UX.

My question was, is iPhone also the pioneer in terms of collecting huge amounts of data?

My gut says no. My assumption is that it was Android that eventually turned phones into data sinks.

@felixf It's overstating it that iPhone did all the innovation. iPhone started out ahead, but Android bypassed it soon, for a while, and nowadays, both OS lines have many UI and UX ideas from both development teams in them.

As far as I know, early iPhone architecture wasn't, directly, into aggressive logging. It was, however, aggressively into creating the App Store, and delegating application development to third parties. How tracking-based ad recommendation could work was pretty well understood by 2008, so there's a strong possibility that Apple foresaw it becoming a major revenue stream for the "free" apps, even if it didn't particularly care about having the data for its own purposes.

@felixf A clue could be found in analysing howthe sensor access permissions were structured.