Apple pushed the carriers to allow it to update its own operating systems over a decade ago.

Apple's situation is completely different from Android. Demand for iphone devices was the leverage Apple had over carriers to do this, and it's not a fragmented ecosystem in the first place.

Apple created that demand. They were exclusively on AT&T at first, and aggressively negotiated that contract so they wouldn't have to have carriers' horrible bloatware. Then the exclusivity made negotiating with other carriers easier.

Google didn't even make any phones until much later. Instead they gave phone manufacturers the green light to do whatever they wanted. They ended up designing phones later because of how crappy the Android phone ecosystem had become. Google could have made Nexuses from the get-go.

Google had plenty of leverage early on with carriers that didn’t have the iPhone. Google still has leverage by threatening to withhold Google Play Services. The last thing carriers want is not to have an alternative to Apple and no cheap phones to entice customers.

Yeah, I know this. I don't think anyone at any of the other phone manufacturers has the weight to throw around that Jobs did, though.

Is there really some expectation for a carrier to be more than that? I just want a fast, reliable service that connects my phone to the internet. Is there actually profit in providing more than that?

From the carrier: yes.

The phone subsidies (in the US at least) are very reminiscent of the old leased phones of yore.

But if you look at the actions of mobile phone carriers and ISPs they're desperate not to become dumb pipes. They design all kinds of clever mechanisms and marketing strategies to distinguish themselves.

> Is there actually profit in providing more than that?

Well, in a free market, competition is intense. So if they can find ways to distort that, then yes: they will make more money. Many of us don't have much allegiance to particular gas station brands. But they create rewards programs to try and get some of that loyalty. Otherwise you just compete on price.

Let's not be silly, there is no market in this case. It's an oligopoly and occasional cartel.

There is only so much competition you can have in wireless. Different carriers have to have different bands of spectrum and only certain frequencies can be used for cellular.

That's why it's not a market. Like I said.

Being just a dumb data pipe means you aren't differentiated from other dumb data pipes, making it harder to compete with other carriers on anything other than price (reducing revenue) and service reliability/speed (and we all know how awful ISPs are at building out better infrastructure). This does make it much harder to be profitable.

well there's usually a bundle of shit in a carrier OS, it's just not profit from you.

From the carrier perspective, sure. Being a dumb pipe is a race to the bottom market-wise.

Exactly. Contracts, identification, phone numbers are not necessary for this. It could be dead simple: the application on your phone generates a pair of private and public keys. You pay some satoshis to a carrier and get some amount of Internet traffic, using your private key for authentication. If you want to switch to other carrier, you just generate a new key and send some satoshis to its account, and your modem generates a new random IMEI. You generate a new key and new IMEI for every new payment so it becomes difficult to track you and sell data about your location. And you can switch between different providers any time. You can even switch depending on who has a better signal in your current location. No need for identification, making a contract, getting a phone number, selling data about you (because carrier doesn't have it) or reporting your location to the government or courts.

This is ten times better than what any provider offers today. If someone implements this, nobody will want to use old scheme anymore.

Also this should promote competition between carriers.