There is plenty to criticize about Apple when it comes to anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices…

But if you’re gonna talk on the level of “evil” and “freedom”, Apple’s greatest sin is their supply chain.

And then there’s Google, whose evil I would place somewhere between [Apple’s] pseudo-monopoly and [Apple’s] pseudo-slavery. At least Apple is a tech company. Google is a surveillance company that just happens to make tech so they can monitor you more closely.

Working with the shared-space AR APIs in iOS and Android really drove home the difference in their priorities. The iOS SDK only allowed us to share AR data through a local, SDK-managed connection. The data is opaque, can’t be directly serialized, and doesn’t work anyway if you try to persist/distribute it yourself. Android, on the other hand… They wanted us to upload your AR data to Google-owned servers, where they could do Google-knows-what with the scans of your living room.

It’s sad that we’re at a point where you have to either pay for your privacy, or pay with your privacy. But we can at least not be naive about it. Android is more interoperable, more prolific, and more lenient with third-party code. And that’s because it’s a good strategy if you’re a surveillance giant. Not because it’s good for consumers.

Edit:

Got a couple of comments that are like “Um, actually, Apple is still subject to government surveillance and exploits”.

Let me be clear: You should not expect any off-the-shelf product to shield you from intelligence agencies and state-sponsored hackers. You will have to radically change your life to accomplish that, and “Apple or Google?” won’t even be a relevant question for you.

And I’m not saying Apple doesn’t do shady monitoring for their own commercial purposes.

All I’m saying is that Google’s core business model is shady monitoring, and that directly influences their decisions regarding Android. So painting it as the commoner’s hero against the greedy walled-garden warden is a dangerous proposition.

There are no good guys here.

There’s some hardware, SDKs, and back-end services that you can evaluate on their own merits if you’re capable.

But if you want to just look at business practices:

• There’s one company that doesn’t want to integrate with anything outside of their own products – because that’s good for their bottom line.
• And there’s one company that wants to integrate with anything and everything – because that’s good for their bottom line.

Don’t assume the difference is benevolence.