I bought Brave Origin shortly after it came out, but I’ll be god damned if Apple’s ecosystem doesn’t keep pulling me back in.

Leo AI is pretty good for stupid little questions, and Brave Search is the best search engine I’ve ever used. Siri AI feels better to me than Leo though, and it’s built right into my homescreen.

It can summarize web pages too, but only from Safari. I would think Brave would be able to do the same thing with Leo, but there’s no setting I can find for it.

On top of that, I’m an iCloud+ subscriber, so I get Private Relay as part of that. Only works in Safari though, naturally. I could pay for Brave VPN on top of the $60 I paid for Origin, but then I already have Private Relay, don’t I?

Also, as a side note, I make a lot of link posts on my blog. I set up a Shortcut to capture links in markdown, with an optional markdown quote for any selected text — exactly like the Drafts app for iPhone.

But that’s another thing that only works in Safari — even Drafts’ quick capture Shortcut. As far as I know, there are no third party browsers that share enough of a webpage to make a Shortcut like that work. Simple to make for Safari, but a huge pain in the ass to go without it.

I use Brave on my Debian laptop, and it’s at least a great way to sync accounts on websites I log into a lot. Because with everything on my phone, I use Apple Passwords. There’s obviously no Linux port of that.

I used 1Password before that but I was already pissed off enough about the rate hike that I was already out of there by the time they decided to go all in on Nazi Linux.

I tried Bitwarden for a while and it felt like some guy’s weekend hobby project, so I just decided on Apple Passwords since I’m on my phone most of the time anyway.

It’s definitely a pain copying some of the crazy long random-generated passwords by hand from my phone onto my laptop browser, so I really like having a few sites I frequent in Brave’s passwords.

But I’m right back to square one: torn between some really good open source software, and the slightly more convenient Apple software that comes with my closed-source, proprietary phone. I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Google Ads phone though, so I guess I’ll just make myself comfortable in the undertow of Apple Island. But I’m keeping Brave installed too.