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2026-08-11

Update

Use GrapheneOS

I now recommend anyone who faces same painpoint as me to just use GrapheneOS instead. The privacy is a bonus, a major benefit I found is good UX due to less lock-in.
This is a little surprising, you would naively expect better privacy means worse UX. I am actually claiming the UX is about as good, assuming you have basic technical skills and aren't gonna fill your phone with 20 random crappy apps.
GrapheneOS still doesn't full fix the pain point I originally cited. For instance, you still can't just go run arbitrary bash scripts on arbitrary files. Apps have sandboxes and files have sandboxes too. I would be happy if GrapheneOS can provide some bash script-like swiss army knife functionality, without necessary giving you access to root.

2026-04-03

Disclaimer

Main

Consider following use cases:
- contact list (.vcf)
- books (.epub)
- calendar and alarms (.ics, ???)
- latest notes, not necessarily all notes (.md)
On linux or macOS you can write all these in plaintext-equivalent formats, and use simple bash scripts to manage everything.
On iOS you have to use apps that lock-in for everything:
- phone and email contact lists won't sync
- apple books won't let you export the .epub files
- there is no command at all for triggering notifications, you need a full-fledged app to do so. if you're locked in a calendar app (google calendar or apple calendar), you're stuck in that
- rsync doesn't work, iOS has done app-level filesystem sandboxing. I currently put all my notes in a single file because you can sync files using icloud and runestone, but you can't actually sync folders without a seperate app to do so.
Waiting for the day we have a good open source mobile OS

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