Would you care if they took the same approach for your laptop?

I find it hard to ignore that the future of Apple is iOS and MacOS is eventually going to be deprecated. Imagine if you were an Apple exec living and breathing Apple for the past 10 years, surely the OS that you don't get a cut of all app sales on and makes up a fraction of the more profitable OS will feel like the odd one out and the wrong way to do things.

Us, being HN posters obviously find such a statement absurd but imagine you're that Apple exec looking at the charts of how many users are fine with the iOS model, how much more money you make from the iOS model. How could you look at that day in and day out and justify the existence of a legacy OS with legacy ideas like being able to install outside a store like MacOS. Improved privacy/security for users within the store model is the icing on the cake to justify it.

> Would you care if they took the same approach for your laptop?

I don't ask for my laptop to be an appliance. The laptop is one type of product that can run arbitrary code if I want it to. The iPhone is not, and that's the type of product I am specifically looking for.

> Us, being HN posters obviously find such a statement absurd

HN is probably just as representative on the authoritative/libertarian scale as society as a whole - this is just a forum for anyone remotely associated with technology after all. Just because you're on a forum doesn't mean everyone will view it from the same viewpoint as you, even if it does dictate how much people downvote/upvote your posts.

That’s the thing, there is no such phone. And frankly, there will not be more mobile platforms because even the current two is already much for companies to develop for. Free market doesn’t work that way. Linux phones might rise, but only if they gain a good android compat layer.

You can buy a PinePhone now (well, when they are back in stock). It's a decent phone with a completely open Linux stack. The UI might be a bit sluggish, but it is a fully functioning smartphone.

If you want to see more apps targeting a third platform, then you should buy one of these phones.

That's the way the market works.

I have one already.

But there is a network effect in play here, that pretty much disallows a new platform to emerge without compatibility. If I were to create the very best hardware with top notch OS on top, that is superior in every way to every android and ios phone out there, noone would buy it because phones are integral part of our lives with many areas of it requiring applications that are only available on these two platforms. Windows phone pretty much lost due to it — it was not worth the effort of companies to create a third port (even with the big funding Microsoft tried), and without a critical mass, it died off.

Congrats -- do you like it? I wasn’t able to snag one before they all sold out. Hopefully, I'll be able to get one after the CNY break.

The progress it’s made is remarkable, but unfortunately it is not ready for daily use. I’m not sure what you want it for, if s hobby device to develop/check out the state of it, go for it. For more frequent use, maybe wait for the pinephone 2, as I think the hardware is a big bottleneck.. I think it has trouble scheduling processes due to the not too strong GPU and few RAM. The GPU unit is also not particularly strong, and I’m not as optimistic thar everything can be solved in software.

But if you can allow supporting the project do buy one! (Though I believe they work basically without a profit margin)

Usually whenever I hear someone in business complaining about the free market economy being harsh on startups in a niche it’s because they absolutely suck at marketing and they blame the system for not praising them for existing

You honestly believe someone can just pop up, get some deal with a hardware manufacturer/create their own hardware, create their own OS, and stay afloat as long as people start developing for it? Aaand even after a minimum feature set is achieved it will still be nowhere usable as a mobile phone, because bank N will not make an app for it, you can use facebook on it in the web browser, etc. Goddamn Microsoft failed at it. And as I said there is a reason behind it, the more platform there is, the more every company on Earth has to pay for development of their apps. And that magic number seems to be stuck at 2.

Unless there is a newcomer with crazy good compatibility, nothing will change.

> And frankly, there will not be more mobile platforms because even the current two is already much for companies to develop for. Free market doesn’t work that way.

How do you imagine free market works? No companies magically capture the midshare of most users? No companies have anough money/resources to corner the market?

Literally nothing prevents any of the current players in the "non-free market" to develop their own phone. Heck, Microsoft even tried to do it.

Please see my reply on your sibling post.

Once again: how do you imagine the imaginary free market works?

How do you imagine the real world works? Even in the very text written by Adam Smith he says that free market only works in a regulated environment. Because once a few gets big enough, they can control the whole market.

Why do you think Microsoft failed even with the tremendous amount of money they poured into and even with having an arguibly great UX?

> How do you imagine the real world works?

The way it works. It's not me complaining about "Free market doesn’t work that way."

> Because once a few gets big enough, they can control the whole market.

Yes, yes they will.

So what is, exactly, the nature of your complaint?

> Literally nothing prevents any of the current players in the "non-free market" to develop their own phone. Heck, Microsoft even tried to do it.

Literally, the already existing 2 platforms prevent a new one from emerging —- thus it is incorrect to say that the free market will solve the issue.

Anyone can launch a new phone with its own hardware and OS and a marketplace. It just takes a lot of money that most people don’t have. I think what you are really complaining about is not enough people have the money to launch a new phone

Anyone can launch a new phone, but even one of the richest company failed, even when they paid for app developers to create apps?

> thus it is incorrect to say that the free market will solve the issue.

Are you arguing with yourself now?

This is your text (emphasis mine): "And frankly, there will not be more mobile platforms because even the current two is already much for companies to develop for. Free market doesn’t work that way."

You could continue to not install those 3rd party apps if Apple was forced to open their platform.

I’m just not sure why they should be forced to open a platform they made and own so other people who don’t own it can get what they want. If I sell property I don’t have to give mineral rights and the purchaser accepts that up front. Why should phones be any different. Should we force all software companies to give us the source code of their proprietary software that we buy? They sell us compiled versions of it which are not hack friendly. If we can get upset at Apple for controlling it’s platform why not lash out at all the software markets?

The problem is it's not completely closed. It's open, but they control the only gate into the system. That's a monopolistic practice, very akin to owning all the railroads. Actually it's probably worse than that, because the railroads were only about the transport of goods and people. Most people do more on their phones than anything else. People literally have sex on their phones now, and control their important peripherals (sometimes medical devices) with them.

I'd be a lot more amenable to allowing Apple to make as much money as they want on controlling the only gate into my phone if their only incentives were monetary, but the moment they started making political decisions (banning all vaporizer apps, removing the Hong Kong flag emoji, banning Parler, etc) I was no longer on their side. You can agree or disagree with their decisions on each individual case, but as a liberal I'm not comfortable with a private organization having that much power over public policy. On some level I want to give Apple a way out. My best hope for the company is that they'd prefer not to be making political decisions, but have to bow to external political pressure. I'd like us to help them out and take the decision out of their hands.

As to being able to leave Apple. The amount of work it would take for me, a professional Software Engineer, to decouple all of my contacts, data, personal photos, text history, etc from their ecosystem effectively locks me in. They created a marketplace, and when you create a market in a free market society we'll take you up on it and enforce anti-trust laws. The idea that they don't have monopolistic power is demonstrably false. In fact, I think Apple's monopoly is the most clear cut in the tech community.

I understand it sucks being so reliant on a 3rd party and entrenched in their system but I’m sure you understand that they can legally “sunset” the App Store as a project like Google loves doing and not allow any new software on the device at all. We can’t enter into a contract with a company and expect to get something other than what was in the agreement. Just because a large part of the population starts relying on a privately provided resource does not make it a public utility. Relying on 3rd parties always involves a risk that they will eventually decide to change whatever you are relying on. We all hopefully know and understand that before deciding to make it a mission critical part of a pipeline

I don't disagree with you on some level, but I also think that society should have the right to say, "Okay, you've become a public utility now. Your market power is becoming a black-hole. Consider your market monopoly revoked". We have the right to do and say that as a society. We should do it sparingly and very carefully, but there's no reason we can't do it.

I'm just not sure why I should be forced to accept restrictions on hardware I bought and paid for.

Unfortunately, unless they told you that you would be receiving something they did not give you before you made the purchase, you are entirely responsible for the fact you have a piece of restricted hardware. Why buy something you know you aren’t going to like?

Why should society accept general purpose computing devices being arbitrarily locked down?

I don't accept that - it's leaning into having too much faith in the free market that alternative options must emerge to suit the actual consumer desire. The issue is that we're dealing with an oligopoly where consumers have very little freedom of choice and refusing to use the iStore leaves you with precisely one option.

There is a common argument that having such a locked down store is what allowed the device to thrive but I don't believe that is usually made in good faith due to the easy counter example of Android being able to unseat the initial monopoly without using the same tactic and the fact that very little marketing or praise for the device has been specifically focused on the iStore being so locked down.

Consumer choice only really counts when there is an open field with healthy competition.

Field is rigged by ad-tech. Opening it up will mean consumer will be product again and choice pretty irrelevant.