It's really ironic how having suffered from microsoft monopolistic abuses in the past, they now do the EXACT same thing.

And the worst is that higher management probably convinced themselves they're not.

Yeah, i believe only a trial will make them realize what they've become.

PS: planning on buying a non-google non-apple phone in the future, after having had to buy a new iphone just so that i could install ios 13 and keep working (the old one being perfectly fine btw). Any advice ?

The options I know of are the Pinephone and the Librem 5. They're various degrees of open source and secure. They're also slow, lack most software, require constant tinkering, and have terrible battery life. The pragmatic option is to get an Android phone you can install LineageOS on, use the fDroid store, and don't install Google services. This way you can sideload normal apps if you need them.

I guess it depends what you use your phone for, but Mobian[1] on the PinePhone is a surprisingly decent daily driver for me.

1 - https://mobian-project.org

It works for some use cases, I don't mean to imply otherwise. For my use cases... I have more apps installed on my phone than Mobian has in its repository.

>Android phone you can install LineageOS on

What would be good candidate phone for that? Is there a phone that is friendly towards hackers in that way?

I'm happy with my Pocophone F1. It's not the only phone with very good ROM/Free software support, but among the cheapest (around 300€, maybe a bit less by now, it should now also be available used).

It has lots of RAM, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, a high-end processor, a large battery and most importantly is very repairable (a screen costs about 20€).

The initial unlocking process is a bit annoying and stupid, but after that it's quite nice. The only thing you could say it really lacks is NFC.

The list of supported devices is here: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Looking at the LineageOS downloads page OnePlus has strong support (as a ratio of the number of phones they released to the number of phones that are compatible). Another idea is to check XDA Developers and see which forums are most active.

https://download.lineageos.org/

The OnePlus phones are good and they run on Lineage, but they do bundle google services by default. Of course, you can unlock the bootloader (wasn't too hard on the OP6, or the OPO before that, not sure about newer devices) and flash whatever you want, though, if you want to get rid of google services.

If you intend to flash custom rom on your phone, generally avoid devices with mediatek (or other non-qualcomm) chipsets because they tend to have higher risk of hard-bricking when you messed up which will require sending the phone to a service center to fix.

I just bought a oneplus pro 7 with lineage and microg and i love it !

> It's really ironic how having suffered from microsoft monopolistic abuses in the past, they now do the EXACT same thing.

It is also extremely concerning how little backlash there is for this behavior, because that is what stopped Microsoft.

> Any advice ?

Last I checked, all Google phones (Pixel, Nexus) can be rooted/flashed in a supported manner. There's irony for you. You can't do anything about the binary blobs for the baseband/radio.

It was a different time man.

How so? I didn't get the chance to experience it.

There are also a lot more people playing the stock market now than before.

If one is a shareholder of a company, that gives incentive to defend them no matter what.

The government didn't just bend over and let companies do whatever they wanted every single time. They still fought back some of the time.

Apple has always been like that: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Of course they will relive their desktop experience because some other environment will at some point be better due to fierce competition. It's kind of their omen that the company with the bitten apple from paradise has to created a walled garden. The difference will be that there is no Steve to rescue them again.

Funny thing is, their first logo was Newton's apple. Imagine the difference.

Well, Newton's life was heavily influenced by an intellectual property battle over the invention of calculus, and he spent his later life hunting and executing counterfeiters, so, maybe appropriate after all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Isaac_Newton#Ach...

While I see where you're coming from, I think there's a pretty big difference between software and hardware expandability. Anyone can write software for a Mac and run it, then and now. (Nowadays users need to right click to open apps from unidentified developers, but that's not so onerous.)

One plus runs and android fork and pixels. Both have decent support with non bkoatware images that unlocked for a privacy kernel if you want.

> just so that i could install ios 13

Can you install iOS 13 on a non-Apple phone? If not, why not just stay on iOS 12? What software requires that kind of upgrade and is available on a phone OS other than the iOS/Android duopoly?

If I were to guess, they may need to develop against iOS 13. Or an application they rely on only works on iOS 13 now.

But yeah the problem doesn’t get solved by moving devices.

i had to test the app i was developing for a customer on an iOS 13 device for some technical reasons (i used to not care for my previous apps). And my iphone 6 wouldn't install that version (which is another topic).

As i said, i'm both an iphone user AND mobile professional developer. The first is quite easy to change, but the second will take a bit more time for me to get rid of Apple (or google).

Have you considered SailfishOS? It can be run on a number of devices (including the PinePhone if that interests you): https://jolla.com/sailfishx/

And more info about the PinePhone and it's OS support: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...

Jolla are selling sailfish for 50 euros and the official support is limited to Sony xperia phones. Personally, i have never paid for my cellphone OS and neither have the vast majority of people out there.

When the instructions involve a bunch of convoluted commands and the terminal, Sailfish doesn't stand a chance. Like, their chances of growing in popularity are literally zero with this model.

I really appreciate having the MacOS app store as a sort of "trusted" alternative to downloading off the web. That said I can't ever see Apple removing the ability to download applications from untrusted sources, like they did with iPhone.

Really? I can absolutely see that. It seems OSX has been creeping towards that for some time, and now they're moving to ARM and stuffing their machines with "security" chips, it's getting more and more locked down. Macintosh computers are steadily becoming iPads with hardware keyboards.

That is just not backed up in the actual events of what they are doing.

If there was ever a time to do this it would be right now as they undergo changing Mac to ARM, but they're not.

I don't think the right time to make that transition is while they're trying to switch to ARM. Right now, they're probably trying to get things switched by making as few changes as possible. That eases the transition for everybody. I'm not sure why they would want to deal with both things at the same time. They are both huge undertakings. Not to mention, the two things are really unrelated. Besides, how does CPU architecture affect the ability to lock the OS into only running App Store apps?

You think Apple could make Adobe, Autodesk, and countless others go through the Mac App Store?

Yes, yes they can.

The real question is if they can convince all the professionals those companies cater to to adopt an ecosystem where software providers have to go through an arbitrarily and closely controlled App Store.

If their hardware and base OS is too attractive to those professionals relative to the loss of freedom Adobe, etc. will follow.

Thankfully, though, I don’t think Mac users will actually be ok with that. There’s been quite an exodus of professionals from Mac to windows based on much smaller things so far.

They've been already doing that for all the iOS version of their apps (which are now way past a simple player or viewer).

Why not ? It's probably only a matter of time.

A couple of points:

1) Apple has much more leverage on iOS because it has a bigger market share and many more iOS users than macOS.

2) macOS has traditionally been an open platform

3) Many desktop app developers wouldn't be able to keep installing and running the products the way their do it now. For example, Adobe has an app called Creative Cloud that manages installs, licenses, active computers, and other things. It's practically malware at this point, but if you want to use Adobe apps there is no other way.

you can't really stop a desktop computer from running arbitrary software. If users can install compilers (which you pretty much have to allow), then all you can do is make them go through extra steps.

> I really appreciate having the MacOS app store as a sort of "trusted" alternative to downloading off the web.

But it's not, the Mac App Store is a dumpster fire.

How come?

Because there's a vibrant marketplace outside the store and Apple provides little benefit but takes 30%.

> provides little benefit but takes 30%

I understand the MAS is not a great fit for all use cases, but IMO this statement is wrong for the use cases where the MAS is a good fit.

I used the MAS as a dev, and it adds other benefits such as updates, cloud storage, etc.

I used it specifically for an education app and it was just great to tell macOS users to simply download it from the MAS and let it handle the updates from there.

Implementing updates on your own is not trivial in a desktop app. Before using the MAS we used Electron with Squirrel. We had to manage a server exclusively for the updates. Squirrel worked great in macOS but in Windows it was a nightmare. Also the Electron apps were huge, as you probably know.

For the MAS app, we kept the web UI but moved to Swift + WKWebView. The app went from a 50MB download to about 4MB. Memory consumption also decreased dramatically, I think the Swift version used something like 10-15MB of RAM.

It’s still far more trusted than buying on the web. That’s a significant benefit for developers.

It's only a benefit for Adobe and Microsoft and Slack who can call someone up at Apple and ask them to hand over the appropriate entitlements so their apps will function.

> there are times where I think they are asking to be regulated

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by corporate incompetence.