alt Hacker News>>I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on.
Perfect, I knew this would come up. It always does. "I don't want someone to convince my elderly relative to hack their phone and do something bad". It's such an infuriating argument - no, YOU can't have freedom to do whatever you want with the device you own, because MY elderly relative might get scammed.
>>I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
There are a number of phones available that can just do calls and nothing else. If your elderly relative cannot follow the most basic advice of "don't listen to people calling you and telling you to do something on your phone" then that's all they should use.
Like, honestly - if you think your elderly relative will follow a 20 step process to go to a dodgy site, run a bunch of commands to jailbreak their phone, then download an alternative store to MAYBE download a dodgy bank app....what stops them from just following instructions from a scammer to send their money urgently to this account they named because the bank is doing maintenance on their servers and the money needs to be moved now or be lost? I love these "elderly relatives" who simultaniously don't have 2 brain cells and will follow jailbreaking instructions but who won't fall for any much easier scam involving direct transfers, gift cards or even good old fashioned cash in an envelope.
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> There are a number of phones available that can just do calls and nothing else.
iPhone is this phone. Easiest to use, customer-friendly, options for limiting apps, large icons etc.
But for some reason, despite the dominance of Android phones on the market, custom smartphones being released almost every month, you want the foolproof layer to be stripped from iPhone. Why?
You can do whatever you want with what you own. And I want this restricted device. So you go be the market for yours and I’ll be the market for mine. I don’t understand what the problem is here. There are no shortage of phones on the market - many of them entirely rootable. It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car. Just go buy the gas car. No one is stopping you here (well except the EU I suppose haha).