i have used iphones for as long as i have had a smart phone. i got my first iphone in 2015, it was a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down iphone 3g. within a year i smashed that phone and received a fresh hand-me-down iphone 5s that had been sitting in a drawer for a year or so before i was given it. a year or so later in 2018, i bought my first phone, a new iphone 7 because i couldn't afford an iphone 8. that phone served me extroadinarily well. it stopped receiving major software updates before i gave it up, but when apple released the apple watch ultra, i had to upgrade if i wanted to use it. so i got my girlfriend-of-the-time's second hand iphone 8 as she upgraded her own phone. it was almost the same phone, it felt the same in my hand but now i could use the watch i wanted with it. then in 2024, i was travelling a lot and the battery wasn't performing what i needed, so i got my current iphone 12, second hand.
that phone is, amazingly, still receiving updates, but the latest version of ios (26) makes the change to an ai-first operating system. my phone has run out of storage though so it's not updating. i do wonder if it will eventually offload enough photos to icloud to free up the storage to make the update. i hope it doesnt but i dont know how long that can last.
i resent the idea that my phone may do something i have no control over. i dont want it to do it but i have no idea what triggers it or how it works so i can't stop it. but even if i could stop it, what i'm ultimately preventing there is a major software update. i think back to when i first submitted a change to qutebrowser and the excitement of updating my operating system to see if my change had made it back through the build pipelines and OS maintainer verification to end up back on my computer.
in 2024 i made the decision to start using linux once-and-for-all as my main operating system. i've been using it off and on since around 2015 when i got my first computer. the "off" periods have largely been due to necessity. when i was in college, my computer science course was done in visual basic which required that my pc run windows in order to practice in my own time. when i started uni i was in a phase of being an apple fangirl. i had the whole ecosystem, including a brand new 15 inch macbook pro. that laptop cost me £2,300 and only 7 years later, sits on my coffee table as my youtube machine for my tv. despite being so expensive and having an i7, 16gb of ram, and incredibly fast integrated (i.e. soldered on) storage, it struggles with even that. but now i have a workstation pc that i built for uni that sits on my desk and runs the sic irc client (perhaps 100 or so lines of c code?) and a blurry terminal in the sway window manager. its definitely underutilised, but it doesn't struggle with anything. but this computer runs an environment that i feel incredibly comfortable with.
i've been using tiling window managers for most of the time i've been using linux. and i've been building up a set of config files over that time for various pieces of software. my software usage profile getting smaller and simpler, but not less useful. but it has all been my choice, and i feel if i wanted to change anything (as i frequently do - i can feel dwm is giving me eyes atm) i could do that.
if i wanted to take a digital picture, i pull out my phone, open the camera app, wait for my phone to load (the battery is worn down so the operating system has been slowed), take the picture, then wait for it to be uploaded to apple's icloud. if i wanted a different process, i couldn't even be sure i have that option. and now that i am not fully in the apple ecosystem, i feel as though there isnt much reason for my phone to be an iphone aside from familiarity.
2024 was one of the best years of my life, and when i reached the end of it i wanted to make a compilation of all photos from the year set over one of my favourite songs. i was inspired by a video i saw on instagram of someone who had done the same, but the reason it worked so well was that they weren't just photos, they were videos. i wanted to do the same but videos take up so much more storage - plus, i hadn't taken any videos last year, just photos. except that iphones take "live" photos that have videos embedded in them, and its fairly straightforward to extract the videos. so now it is incredibly important to me that the photos i take to remember my life are live, so i can extract the videos later and make another video (i have recently started working on my 2025 video).
now that i'm giving some real consideration to moving away from iphones, a lot of my thinking is going into what i actually would need from an android. i am slowly trying to extract myself from the apple ecosystem and self host where i can, using linux for anything i can. its largely going well but my phone remains a problem. there are only a few android phones i've seen that i actually like, but i still dont really know how free (as in freedom) a given android can be. what i dont want is to just move to google's ecosystem. i trust them even less than apple and i dont want to have all my photos pawned off to google's ai training, i want them stored locally on a hard drive in my house (with a back up system that i still haven't sorted yet... oops). but i need them to be live photos, it is important to me that when i take a picture, my phone captures a little video with it, even if its only 2 seconds long and shit quality. the video adds life to the moment and when i stitch them all together it makes me cry with joy.
i suppose this is a request for guidance, although largely its just a summarisation of some thoughts i've been having recently. my problem with iphones is that they are locked down and closed source. android claims to be open source but any stock android distribution isn't going to be materially more open than ios. my dream is something like a fairphone running linux that works like my iphone in the ways that matter to me. but i know thats just a dream.