this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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What industry? Does this industry you mentioned happens only contains data hungry ad oligopolies like google, facebook and bytedance; but happens to exclude all the reasonable alternatives like Mozilla, duckduckgo, grapheneos, calyxos, desktop linux, mastodon, and lemmy?
The consumer personal computer industry.
I got a feeling that many consumers do use desktop linux, given the recently revealed 4% desktop market share across the world. macOS has 15% market share (around 3 times desktop linux), and Windows at the dominant 72% (around 3 times macOS). See https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I believe macOS probably is more private than Windows, but it is definitely not as private as the rest of the industry.
Sure, open source will always have the potential for the most privacy, assuming the user is savvy enough to maintain updated security. The article was primarily focused on Apple’s hold of the smartphone market. In the US, the only real competition is Android. Google is transparent about their consumer data use, and they also don’t offer much in the form of personal information privacy outside of encrypted RCS. For example, third-party apps can access user data and enable hardware APIs without first requiring user permission.
Okay, I mentioned desktop because you mentioned "personal computer industry" which I assumed means desktop/laptops.
I think there are indeed more private (some can even be more secure) alternative to iOS, like calyx and/or graphene.
But like you said, they do require a reasonable amount of computing literacy to install: first they need to know these projects exists, then they will need to connect their phone to their computer and click a single button.
Thus, I think there is indeed no private and "popular" alternative to iOS, that a completely tech illiterate person can easily obtain.