A lot of the discussion around this sounds almost exactly like “we need pro-business anti-regulation, it’ll trickle down!”, ie “high taxes on business hurts consumers”. Just like in real life, these arguments would be easier to swallow if they weren’t coming from the businesses themselves who just want a larger slice of the pie.
Too often these discussions on HN center on the power dynamics between Apple and app developers, and occasionally mention in passing something like ("choice is good for the iPhone owner too; if they don't want X then they can just choose to not install X"), but the discussion rarely tackles the nuance of the power dynamics between app developers and smartphone owners.
They care about market power very deeply so they don't have to care. Where are you going to go? Google? Doing the exact same thing. Neither? Cabin in the woods territory. Oh for the Nokia N900, right?
The Pinephone is on the frontpage at the moment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24329900, and the Librem 5 has been several times recently. Maybe not grandma friendly ATM but I wouldn’t call it “cabin in the woods territory.”
The point is we had it. The N900 was it. 10+ years ago. Maybe pine or librem or open moko or whatever will get us back to where we were more than a decade ago. I really hope so.
+ 2 companies, Pine64 and Purism, making 2 lines of phones
- Pinephones in various community editions, $150 and $200 with and without the convergence package
- Librem 5s for $750 now that the crowdfunding campaign’s over, and a $2000 Made in the US version
- Phosh, based on GNOME and GTK+, developed by Purism as the default shell for the Librem 5
- The KDE equivalent of that, that Purism has wanted as an option for the Librem 5 from early on
- Ubiports’ community maintained Ubuntu Touch
- Sxmo, a bundle of mobile adaptations of dwm, dmenu, etc. with a nice modular (Unixy/KISS/suckless) design eg. a gesture daemon made by the same developer with it but not exclusively for it
+ 2 companies, Pine64 and Purism, making 2 lines of phones
- Pinephones in various community editions, $150 and $200 with and without the convergence package
- Librem 5s for $750 now that the crowdfunding campaign’s over, and a $2000 Made in the US version
Treating all developers as businesses is part of the problem here I think. There should be more bespoke apps by individuals for small audiences — more of a community feel to things.
You are not entitled to get a open computing platform if the thing resembles an... Actually, they defined this form factor!
That's if you have a lot of throwaway money and you don't like charity.