True. We need a 3rd player on this market that does not do surveillance and produces products with reasonable price. A business focused phone would be great. There are very few applications that you could get away.

Business focused and reasonable price usually don't go together.

Anyway, you had Blackberry which was well regarded in the business world. But they are losing to Apple and Android, and now a Blackberry is just another Android smartphone. They still provide physical keyboards though.

On the consumer side, you had Windows Phone that tried to compete with Android. It was actually a nice OS, coming from a companies that did smartphones before Apple, and with one of the best regarded manufacturers at the time (Nokia) on their side. It didn't work.

The other alternatives include the Samsung backed Tizen, and now Sailfish OS.

All that to say that we had some attractive alternatives, backed by major players, and yet, no one wants to leave iOS and Android, even when provided with a compatibility layer.

"...they are losing to Apple and Android..."

When did you write this portion of your post? 2013?

Otherwise I agree.

Windows phone could have been it.

Windows had a distinct identity, a better home screen and an inbuilt dark mode that worked amazingly well with AMOLEDS. They also had great battery life and ran faster on low powered devices vs android of the time.

It died for good reason, but it certainly was a shame. I would love to see Windows take shot at it again, but I doubt they will.

At this point, Samsung or Xiaomi may be the ones best poised to take on the current duopoly.

They mentioned no surveillance so after all the windows 10 telemetry stuff windows doesn't seem to be the answer here.

There are other options, or will be other options, i.e. the librem 5 (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/) The problem is that "out of the box" it's more or less a similar experience to the first iPhone. It's a phone, with messaging and a browser. None of the apps you've come to depend upon are there.

Here in Denmark, where digitization of the society is well underway, you're pretty much lost without official apps. You _can_ use a browser for most things, but since there are apps, almost none of them are optimized or even usable on a phone screen.

Below is just a small portion of the things that would be impractical to live without with a "non supported phone". (impractical, not impossible!)

* Our country wide common sign on solution, NemID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID) also has a smartphone app. The solution is used for authentication with all government and financial institutes, along with a lot others. The keycard remains a viable solution, for now.

* Most mail is delivered through e-boks (https://www.e-boks.com/corporate/en), which includes bank statements, insurance policies, tax records, building permits, sanitation and other. The solution is open for every company to use. It is also possible to reply to a sender through this solution. (requires NemID signon)

* Banking is done through an app. (requires NemID signon)

* Person to Person payments (including the option to split a bill), and to some extent in-shop payment is being handled by MobilePay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay). It's kinda like PayPal, but a local solution. (requires NemID signon)

* Communication with schools and kindergartens is done through "SkoleIntra" and "Børnenettet", or "Tabulex" for when school is over. This includes teacher to parent communications, homework assignments, parent to parent communication, vacation registration, calling in sick, and more. It's probably the most hated system in the world :)

* Even receipts from a wide selection of shops are digitized and delivered to an app (https://en.storebox.com/#/), allowing easy access (and tracking of your shopping habits / credit card usage)

* Even emergency services has an app that will allow you to call emergency services, and it will relay your position to the operators so they know exactly where you are.

I don't understand what people are talking about when they say they get gouged by phones. Mine cost 180 USD in 2016. I still use it everyday and I get over 10 hours screen time. The issue is people conflate everyday devices of utility with fashion products (Apple, Google Pixel).

They didn't say people are gouged by phones. They said:

>You either consent to being exploited by Google, or you pay a pound of flesh to Apple.

Meaning you're in camp 1, unless you've run lineageos or something similar. Also if you're just on the regular os, a $180 phone from 2016 probably doesn't get security updates at this point.

iPhone SE was released in 2016 and still runs the latest version of iOS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_SE

It never cost anything close to $180 though. That was my point: a phone that cost that little in 2016 was probably an older android and is unlikely to have current software support.

I got burned by Android being out of date (insecure) because my phone had to be updated by the carrier. I was royally pissed that neither the manufacturer of the phone nor my phone provider was taking ownership-- of the thing they took ownership of by not supporting vanilla Android to begin with-- and leaving me with an insecure device on their network.

Total BS.

I switched to iPhone now.

I hate this attitude. My super cheap budget android phone isn't getting updates, obviously the only solution is to switch to an iPhone that costs 4 times as much. Never mind that there are also Android phones that get updated just as long for the same price as the iPhone. Clearly all Android devices are absolutely identical no matter the price.

Not sure about 2016 but I paid $139 for my iPhone SE in 2017, from a prepaid carrier (Straight Talk).

It's also discontinued and very difficult to buy new.

To give another angle, my iPad Pro cost around 1000€. The iPhone X is about the same price.

Event taking into account miniaturization, waterproofing and just “luxury” tax, it’s insane that both products cost the same when their capabilities are so wildly different.

I know there are reasons (like paying licensing and cetification for the cellular stack, and pure greed), I just feel they are wrong reasons.

I doubt cellular stack certification is what's driving prices up. I used to make mobile phones back in the late 90's, and even then we constructed mobile phones as an n-way system.

The cellular stack runs on a subsystem on it's own, and all communication to that system is done through the good old fashioned Hayes Command set (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set).

This subsystem is responsible for everything cellular, and it is certified by itself, meaning when you make a new phone model, you put in the same certified chip as you did in the last n models, and it's automatically certified (wrt to the stack anyway).

There are still FCC/CE certifications to be passed for all electronic devices, as well as devices containing radio emitters, but those are cheap in comparison.

Apple has always priced their products on a level of what they think people are willing to pay. It is a luxury product, and they (used to) spend a lot of time making sure it feels like it. From the very moment you enter the store, to you open the box, to the onboarding experience.

Most Chinese manufacturers have more of less copied the experience since then.

Also, and thats the main thing keeping me from having an iPhone at this point, is that, even after paying a premium price for an iPhone, you have to spend even more money due to the App Store situation.

On my Android, I use a lot of open-source application that, I find, are often really the best app to do X or Y. They are also free, often without annoying advertisement, with the option to pay for a "premium" version (that usually add nothing but its to help the devs).

Because most OSS devs (with the exception of a few big project like VLC) don't have the money to pay for an iPhone and/or to publish their app on the App Store, there is almost no good open-source/free application on iPhone.

So not only do I have to pay a quite hefty price for a phone (which, to be fair, I find very good), but I also need to pay even more if I want to replicate the setup I have currently for free on an Android. Some application, don't even have good equivalent on iPhone.

I really hope one day Apple change their policy regarding OSS and open up iPhone programming like Google did with Android.

Google Play Services is what makes sure i'm staying on an iPhone.

As for OSS, apple allowed free developer licenses for non-profits some time ago. https://developer.apple.com/support/membership-fee-waiver/

I doubt the margins on them are that different. Similar CPU, the XS has a smaller but more expensive-tech screen.