> Well that world would suck immensely, with horrible integration between hardware and software like exists right now outside of the Apple world.

Why? The hardware people at companies like NVIDIA or Apple already have to write detailed documentation for their stuff anyway so that the software people can do their side.

Assuming they do a good enough job at writing documentation and testing their hardware, it should not be a problem for Linux developers to write appropriate drivers. Hell there are a very few select people able to write high quality drivers even with zero documentation (see Asahi Linux).

The only ones in trouble would be the vendors of crap SoCs who ship extremely buggy hardware and make up for the lack of QA in software quirks instead.

1. Hardware companies need some software to test their product, so this will be wasting their effort.

2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.

3. It takes a huge amount of effort to write high quality drivers by reverse engineering. The thing about Asahi Linux is that the hardware does not have many variants, but there are a lot more different hardware for PCs.

> 2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.

Not to mention that documentation != the actual behavior of the card. both nvidia and AMD release a ton of day-one driver fixes for new games being released that provide stability and sometimes double-digit performance gains over a pre-patched driver. The only way this works in a disintegrated ecosystem is if game devs become pros at creating driver bug workarounds.

> The only way this works in a disintegrated ecosystem is if game devs become pros at creating driver bug workarounds.

They already are, they have to because that is the reality on mobile games. IIRC the devs of Real Racing (or another Android car race game) made a blog post on that.

> 1. Hardware companies need some software to test their product, so this will be wasting their effort.

They can also open source their testing bench code. The only ones who have to be afraid are those who don't care about quality. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" also applies here - I'd really like to be able as a consumer to choose the product that demonstrates the better engineering!

> 2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.

Oh, I'm aware of that, and the consequences of that are becoming more and more dire as electronic waste from defunct companies or unsupported and unsecure devices piles up, together with hacked IoT devices causing mayhem on the wide Internet in botnets.

It's high time for that to stop.

> 3. It takes a huge amount of effort to write high quality drivers by reverse engineering. The thing about Asahi Linux is that the hardware does not have many variants, but there are a lot more different hardware for PCs.

So what? Ordinary PC hardware at its core still conforms to decades old standards that can be used as a fallback. Given a sufficient supply of beers, coffee and pizza, every CS student worth their money can throw up a basic graphical OS that runs on any mainstream (i.e. non-embedded) x86 system. Input, output (video, serial, audio, keyboard, mice, accessories) and storage all have standardized interfaces - the only thing that does not is networking.

There is no reason at all to say that the ARM world can't standardize on basic components or at least interfaces. Apple can - their UART implementation, according to rumors, dates back to the early iPod/iPhone days, while Samsung has something like five or six completely different implementation, and Mediatek and all the other SoC vendors run their completely own stuff.

Every year, Apple releases new hardware and software in tandem. How long does it take Android manufacturers and Windows manufacturers to take advantage of the latest OS features?

How are those Android updates working out compared to iPhones?

> How long does it take Android manufacturers

Way way too long, but to be fair a huge part of the issue are carriers and their insistence to pack the phones full of bloatware that needs to be tested against each update.

> and Windows manufacturers to take advantage of the latest OS features?

Windows device manufacturers tend to do what Microsoft demands of them.

> How are those Android updates working out compared to iPhones?

Samsung is fairly decent, although I'd be happier if they'd ... consolidate their lineup a bit and instead offer longer availability for spare parts.

Fairly decent? The iPhone 5s from 2013 just got an update and it’s the carriers is a poor excuse. Apple runs on the same carriers.

Google’s first party phones don’t have third party bloat ware and still have a piss poor history of updates

And guess why? Because ~3-ish years used to be what the SoC vendors provided as BSP support timeframe, and there was no mandate that they open up their specifications. Most don't even care about following the legal minimum aka provide the kernel and bootloader source code, especially not all these fly-by-night gongkai "brands".

So it’s what happens when hardware and software is not integrated…

No, it's what happens when there is no competition in the SoC vendor area. Apple and Samsung don't sell to external customers, NVIDIA doesn't do much with Tegra outside of the Switch and automotive, Broadcom doesn't do much in mobile SoCs (and from what the Raspberry Pi community learned hard, their chips are utter dogshit which is how RPi got started after all - they used surplus crap that Broadcom wasn't able to sell), which leaves Qualcomm as a sole supplier for the "high end" and Mediatek/Rockchip for bottom-of-the-barrel crap. There used to be Annapurna Labs as well, QNAP used their SoCs for a while, but I think they stopped selling to externals as well as they were bought up by Amazon and now only do Graviton which are Amazon exclusives.

And yet Apple uses Qualcomm chips and manages to update 10 year old phones.

It couldn’t possibly be your premise is flawed could it?

> And yet Apple uses Qualcomm chips and manages to update 10 year old phones.

For modems, yes, but only because there's even less competition in that area (which is why they bought Intel's mobile modem business, but failed to produce a viable design in all the years since).

They've been running their own SoC designs since the iPhone 4 era in 2010.

So now it’s the severe lack of competition that allows Apple to support phones for a decade but stops Android manufacturers?

Apple has an interest in keeping their devices alive, since they can make money of the store and services. Android manufactures want you to throw the phone away and buy a new one.

Since manufacturers didn't demand long support, Qualcomm didn't provide updates for their SoCs. This meant Fairphone couldn't support their phones even if they wanted to, which is why they used am automotive chip in their new phone — which is nearly the same as a phone chip except the 13 years of updates.

> Apple has an interest in keeping their devices alive, since they can make money of the store and services

Isn’t that the free market working the way it should without government interference?

The problem with an unregulated free market is that eventually one or two companies get so dominant that it is virtually impossible to challenge them as a competition, especially in fields that require immense amounts of money to break into. One might even argue that the end game of capitalism is to acquire a monopoly, which one can then use to extract rents as one feels free to do, or just keep milking locked-in customers (like IBM and Oracle are).

It took Apple, flush with cash from iPhones and iPods, a decade worth of work to create a SoC able to throw punches at eye level with Intel and AMD, which themselves grew to the unholy duopoly over decades. Chipmakers have it even worse: TSMC has all the cards, Samsung and Intel have completely fallen behind with no chance in sight that they'll match TSMC any time soon. All the other competition has gone bankrupt or stopped at lesser nodes because they couldn't keep up the pace.

There's no disrupting that, not even if you are an actual nation state.

So guess what happened when the EU forced browser choice in Windows? It had no long term affect on the market share.

Geeks just always hate when normal people make their own choices using their own free will.

Every failure that you cited were well funded companies who failed to execute. Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft failed trying to introduce phones.

The market worked as it should - poor execution led to failure.

Lame excuses, Google could do the same as Microsoft with PC standards and OEM legal obligations.

They have chosen not to.

Agreed. Google has gone down the drains just as well on all fronts... the thing is, once again, there is no viable competition left since Microsoft gave up. The various Linux phone projects are extremely niche stuff, Blackberry and Symbian are long gone, and Google seems to be happy coasting along on mediocrity and billions of dollars in Play Store revenue.

That wouldn't change at all. The newly separated software company would get appropriate hardware specs and prototypes during the same timeline they do today (as a vertically integrated branch of Apple).

So instead of working together , the hardware team would work in isolation and then when they are finished they deliver to the hardware company and keep going back and forth? Yeah that’s going to work out real well. Let’s just look how well it work for Android.

> the software team would work in isolation

Only if the hardware company refuses to share info with them, which - as you clearly laid out - is not in their interest.

You really don’t see how that would slow things down compared to the hardware and software company working together?

I bet you also think that a company should set up a DevOps “department” to increase efficiency

Are you telling me that Apple doesn't have a separate hardware division? I sincerely doubt that.

I am saying that Apple has a software and hardware division that work in concert.

Chris Lattner, the inventor of the Swift programming language and the open source LLVM was once interviewed on the Accidental Tech Podcast and he was asked whether bytecode could be used to allow Apple to switch architectures without forcing them to require developers to recompile and still have native compilation. He made up some half truth about whether that would be possible.

Years later when the S chips in the Apple Watch became 64 bit, he admitted that at the time of the interview, he knew that the 64 bit S chip was on the roadmap internally and he designed the LLVM with that in mind.

That’s what happens when you have software and hardware teams working together. The same is true with Nvidia and the their software developers who design Cuda and Intel and the compiler makers.

There were also reports that the software team responsible for the JS engine in WebKit worked with the processor team and the processor team did some design work around Apple’s ARM variants to make JS pre compilation faster.

This is also the whole idea of VLIW architectures where the processor manufacture depends on a team of compiler makers to ring out efficiencies and they work closely together.

Heck even back in the Apple // days, Woz a developer, designed hardware and software together.

Have you wrote drivers? Writing a driver off documentation is: a) very hard, how do you debug anything without JTAG ports and simulators? and b) not correct on principle because the documentation is not the hardware, there are errata in the hardware so what documentation says is not always what the hardware does and there are mistakes in the documentation for the same outcome.

>The only ones in trouble would be the vendors of crap SoCs who ship extremely buggy hardware and make up for the lack of QA in software quirks instead.

I.e. the every single vendor currently on the market...

> Writing a driver off documentation is: a) very hard, how do you debug anything without JTAG ports and simulators? and b) not correct on principle because the documentation is not the hardware, there are errata in the hardware so what documentation says is not always what the hardware does and there are mistakes in the documentation for the same outcome.

I agree with you, no system (particularly not something as complex as an entire SoC) is free of bugs.

> I.e. the every single vendor currently on the market...

And yet, we have Apple, whose hardware quality alone is good enough for a dedicated team to reverse engineer and write drivers for, with almost zero documentation available.

The problem, as I expanded below, is the complete lack of competition in the SoC space. Everyone gets away with mediocrity because the largest players in town (Apple and Samsung) refuse to sell their chips to externals. The result is that the mobile ecosystem as a whole suffers, because that is what happens in markets where entities get too large.

>And yet, we have Apple, whose hardware quality alone is good enough for a dedicated team to reverse engineer and write drivers for, with almost zero documentation available.

Apple own software is pretty janky, my current MacBook cannot bring up GPU after sleep about once a month and needs a reboot to begin drawing GUI correctly again, used to be dying completely waking up before it was fixed couple OS updates back. My previous MacBook could not stay on WiFi for more than a couple hours straight, never had been fixed.

Also, reversing an existing working driver is different from writing a driver from scratch. In one case you just need to repeat the functionality, produce the same outputs for the same inputs, the quality of hardware is orthogonal here since it's already worked around in the existing driver. It's orders of magnitude easier than writing the thing from scratch.

Documenting this in detail is neigh impossible. Ashai Linux has the benefit of having working code to RE - this wouldn't work for silicon or board bring up.

> Case in point: can you copy text on your phone, and paste in your computer (and vice versa), seamlessly as if it were the same device, without any configuration, hacks or programs needed?

I am guessing that AirDrop, Sidecar, etc have absolutely nothing to do with hardware-software integration, and have ≥ Layer 3 implementations. KDE Connect and Microsoft My Phone are competitors.

Exactly. Apple could have made this work across other platforms (Windows, Android, Linux), but chose not to. KDE Connect, for example, runs on quite a few platform, including all popular ones. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html

Why should Apple be forced to write software for competing platforms?

I suppose that loops back to the premise of the linked article (which is IMO absurd).

It doesn't - it only needs to support open standards.

So does that mean Apple can’t release anything until it goes through a standards body?

Scarface, Apple doesn't love you back.

Well neither does the government. At least Apple doesn’t have guns to force me to do what it wants.

How hard is it for you not to use Apple products? Are you incapable of using your own free will?

Between Apple and the government, guess which one has the power to take away your free will?

What open standard covers shared clipboards across devices?

If it doesn't exist, then obviously the standard body has to work with the stakeholders and create one.

Are you suggesting that Apple shouldn’t create any new feature without going through a standards body?

No. Apple can create a working solution and submit it to the standards body. That's what being "open" means.

And then if the standards body doesn’t accept their solution because low end Android manufacturers don’t want to spend an extra 20 cents on a build of materials?

That’s why PC OEMs didn’t support FireWire before USB 3 came out except for Sony and Dell on some of their high end offerings.

If you don’t like Apple’s offerings you are free to choose Android/Windows

That's where regulation comes in - when it is mandated that devices have to support standards, all will have to support it.

I generally think any company with a >10 billion (2023 US) dollar valuation should be forced to do things that may not directly benefit them but benefit society. Having to publish open specifications for all their proprietary integrations is a pretty easy, relatively low-cost example.

How to make this work in practice is a really interesting question. Community and employee representatives on the board would be a good start. But I think just having the requirement that open specifications be made available, and writing that into legislation, would be great.

Oh god, talking about design by committee. Why not just cut out the middle man and let the government take it over and come up with “5 year plans”

If a company doesn't want at least some element of that, the solution is very simple: drop below a USD $10B valuation by spinning off parts of the company. Note that I said TEN BILLION DOLLARS. A "decacorn". That is an unfathomable amount of money. If you've created a company worth that much you've won at capitalism.

If governments had a good track record I'd advocate for that. No need for strawmen like five year plans, I think competition is a wonderful thing.

My underlying, strong belief is that corporations are legal fictions created primarily to benefit society, Milton Friedman's philosophy notwithstanding.

Your suggestion makes a ton of sense. It's astounding how many HN people are so hardcore capitalists to be against such a simple suggestion.

It’s not hard core capitalism. It’s that geeks hate when people make their own choices without government interference because normal people don’t care that they can’t run Linux on the Apple Pencil.

It’s also naiveté to think that government power isn’t the most dangerous kind of power imaginable even though almost every law proposed by the government with regards to tech is roundly criticized by the same people.

The suggestion was simply that companies that make more than 10 billion should be forced to give back to society. That's it. To be against that is indeed hard core capitalism, bordering on religious fervor.

They do give back to society - they provide jobs, pay taxes, and mobile has created millions of jobs and put computers in billions of people’s pockets.

You very clearly miss the point, and indeed seem to be the type of hard core capitalist I alluded to in my previous comment.

I’m hard core don’t trust giving the government more power. Corporations don’t have guns and the right to drag you to jail and take your stuff without a trial (civil forfeiture).

You want to see what government can do with power - look no further than Desantis or this…

https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/20/police-newspap...

Or this

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

Requiring megacorps to give back to society (which, no, selling their products and providing jobs is NOT what was being talked about when giving back to society was mentioned, what a ridiculous take) doesn't require government overreach, just regulation which other countries manage fine, other countries that are nowhere near the illiterate uneven class disaster the US has become.

Government overreach is a legitimate concern in some cases, but not here. Regulating megacorps is something the US needs, and society would be all the better for it.

It’s a conspiracy theory that the government abuses power? Civil forfeiture, the links I gave you where there is a documented abuse of power, Desantis - a presidential candidate punished a private corporation for speaking out against a policy and running a campaign on fighting the free speech rights of anyone who doesn’t agree with him in Florida (where I live). Those are all figments of my imagination?

Do you like any of the previous laws the government has passed or tried to pass with relationship to tech?

And the EU isn’t exactly a role model for innovation and success in the tech industry.

> It’s also naiveté to think that government power isn’t the most dangerous kind of power imaginable

That's only true if the market isn't free. If private businesses are not kept in check, they can (and have) overthrown government power. Ask me how I know!

Yes I’m sure Apple and Google are secretly conspiring to overthrow the government.

If they didn't both manufacture spyware for the NSA already, they might be more willing to act out.

We have seen plenty of third party companies that have found 0 day vulnerabilities in both iOS and Android and sold the capability to nation states and law enforcement.

Why do you think that the NSA needs Apple and Google’s help?

But isn’t that a reason to be more concerned about government power and not try to give the government power?

Google spies on you and targets ads. The government has the power to arrest you and send you to black sites and cause you all sorts of harm if you go against its interest. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a publicized fact that the government went after MLK for upsetting the status quo and did wiretaps.

> Why do you think that the NSA needs Apple and Google’s help?

Because leaked NSA documents have implicated them since 2010.

> But isn’t that a reason to be more concerned about government power and not try to give the government power?

I mean, not when private interests are compelled to manufacture them. If anything, it's a reason to demand all software be Open-Source and let the malware-manufacturing cocksuckers suffer the consequences.

Design-by-committee doesn't sound half-bad if it can standardize a single serial cable that doesn't have licensing fees. Doesn't resemble an unreasonable use of government power at all.

I don’t think that’s the argument you think it is. Thought experiment, grab a random USB C cable, now tell me:

1. What speed can you transfer data through it?

2. How much power can it deliver?

3. Can it support video over USB C?

4. Say a random device comes with a USB-A cable on one side and a USB-c on the other. Now take a standard usb c/usb c cable, will it always charge the device?

Also when that same government first wanted to “standardize”. They wanted to standardize on micro-USB.

> Thought experiment, grab a random USB C cable, now tell me

Oh, easy. Apple already solved this one; if it has the Thunderbolt logo, it's maxed out. If it's anything else, you're usually getting at least 5w charging and USB 2.0 speeds. In other words, the worst-case scenario is usually slightly better than Lightning.

It’s not that simple. A cable has to support video which is separate from the speed.

So your solution to making sure that you get the most compatibility is to buy Apple cables for Apple devices…meet the new boss.

I’m slightly trolling. I have these….

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093YVRHMB

I travel with a portable monitor that gets power and video from one USB-c cable. It works with both my personal MacBook Air and my work Windows laptop.

> So your solution to making sure that you get the most compatibility is to buy Apple cables for Apple devices…meet the new boss.

I was hoping you'd bite the hook, but not like this...

Intel actually designed the spec, drivers and IC controllers for Thunderbolt. Apple consulted on it with USB-IF, but they don't own the spec like they do with Lightning. They're less of a new boss, and more subsuming their rightful position as a valued consultant on a shared standard. It's a good (albeit old) example of Apple doing the right thing through the right channels.

If you look at the origins of Thunderbolt, it was designed by Intel and Apple. Apple is very much in the patent pool for Thunderbolt.

> Well that world would suck immensely

Maybe.

> Case in point

But this does not really support your statement no? What you described seems to me SW only functionality no? And if in requires any special HW (BT? I have no idea how it works under the hood), why does it need tight integration? I do not see a technical reason why Android and Windows could not provide the same feature out of the box, despite neither the Google nor Microsoft making the HW.

the most probable cause is patents

Sounds like we clear abuse of patent law.

> Non-obvious is a requirement for patent protection that literally means your invention is not obvious to someone who is in the same industry. A new invention needs to be unexpected or surprising and cannot be anticipated by looking at the existing technology or prior art.

Literally never needed to copy text from smartphone to pc (or viceversa). At best anyone needs to sync between photos, docs or stuff like that. For that you just need a sync on the cloud like Dropbox, Drive, Box, and so on (also never heard of bluetooth for small files?)

moreover, apple's software is generally very buggy.

Never typed a 2FA code from the phone to the computer?

Just copying them on the iPhone and pasting them on the mac is super convenient.

On android you can view your sms messages at messages.google.com allowing you to easily copy and paste it

Yeah, can also view email on both phone and computer since forever ago - this is not even remotely similar to the shared clipboard of an iPhone and Mac, where you don't need to open any links or programs, install anything, configure anything - you just copy on phone/computer and then instantly are able to paste on phone/computer.

Have you ever wanted to copy anything from A->B that wasn't a 2fa text, a password, or a url? I certainly haven't. An android phone out of the box supports syncing tabs and passwords and provides a trivial way to copy 2FA codes with a built in feature.

So your argument is that because the things to copy are few, this feature doesn't matter? Or what? I fail to see how what you say contributes to the discussion of vertical integration in any way.

Not few none. People need to share files, tabs, messages, mails. If you can share the things people actually want shared then sharing the clipboard itself has zero value.

Your response is completely irrelevant to the discussion of vertical integration. Whether or not you find use in it is up to you, and I don't really care.

I never felt like syncing my devices besides steam cloud saves. Too much convenience makes me uncomfortable. Especially if it means mixing corporate and personal stuff.

Why would this be an issue? Under the proposed model, the vendor for phone software can be the same vendor for desktop software.

Really your example serves as disproving your point, without the hardware walled garden there could be nothing to prevent apple to distribute the software to copy-paste from-to multiple devices

Ah just forgot to add to the point, its possible to copy paste from mobile/desktop with kconnect that is open source, its not that bit of a deal that requires special hardware

Not only copy/paste, but have notifications shared both ways, use your computer as a phone laptop, use the phone as a trackpad/mouse, and much more. It just works.

KDEConnect lets you sync your phone keyboard, even with Windows. And Apple could let you sync your clipboard to non-iOS devices too, they just block arbitrary features unless you buy into their entire ecosystem.

I did mention without installing a program, and without any configuration.

Is the implicit "… not written by the original OS vendor" at the end of your sentence intentional? There is obviously a program and/or configuration, just done by Apple. Nothing precludes building such a system in other systems.

Yes, the whole discussion is about vertical integration, achieved best so far by Apple. I'm sure it can be done in other systems, but for whatever reason other systems haven't made it as simple and seamless. I wonder why. Could it have something to do with the lack of vertical integration maybe?

With those preconditons, it doesn't even work on Apple devices.

What do you mean? This is what Universal Clipboard does.

Pretty sure you had to configure both devices for it to work.

No, just sign into both of them with your iCloud account

It obviously uses "a program, a hack, or configuration" (taking these from the original reply), just that they are written and pre-installed by Apple, and work seamlessly.

But from the end-user perspective it doesn't really. Nobody consciously sets the universal clipboard up, it comes as part of the cohesive whole of the Apple ecosystem. That's my point. Whether or not you want to dive deep into nerdland of if it's a program or not is besides the point, because for the end-user none of it matters, and that's why the vertical integration is nice.

Probably true. The whole vertical integration does rub me the wrong way though, it's just uncomfortable to have one company own so much of my personal computing infrastructure, especially one that is so unfriendly to "tinkerers" like me.

Yes because the 10% market share that Apple has in computers is really worrying…

If I buy an Apple phone, tablet, and computer, that will be 100% of my computing infra, which is all that matters to me.

Then don’t buy a device that doesn’t meet your needs? I don’t go shopping in the big and tall store expecting to find something that meets my needs when I am five foot five.

Yes, that works if I want it to, e.g by running KDE Connect (which works outside of KDE). Works on Linux, Android, Windows and even on Apple-things in case you need to escape the walled garden...

Sounds like it needs a special program and configuration, which is not needed on Apple devices. Also, KDE Connect needs both devices to be in the same network - which is not needed for Apple devices. My phone can be on 5G, and my Mac can be on wifi. Or they don't have to connected to a network at all.

> Sounds like it needs a special program and configuration, which is not needed on Apple devices

How else would it work across different devices? Apple devices can not connect to e.g. Android devices without a 'special program and configuration' nor can they do so with Linux or Windows or whatever other devices.

> Also, KDE Connect needs both devices to be in the same network - which is not needed for Apple devices

KDE Connect and other similar tools work fine over a VPN which is the preferred solution for such setups. You can choose which VPN you want to use, OpenVPN and Wireguard are two popular choices. Here again that VPN can be used to connect disparate devices - Linux, Windows, Android, Apple-things, whatever. Apple devices only talk to other Apple devices which is far more restrictive.

If you are a happy camper in the walled garden then things are good for you. I prefer the freedom of camping in the wild even if that means I may have to build my own fire and cook my own food since it enables me to go where I please without being held back by that wall and without having to pay the ferryman. To each his own I guess?

> How else would it work across different devices? Apple devices can not connect to e.g. Android devices

I was talking about Mac and iPhone having seamless integration - something I have not noticed of any other ecosystem. I have not been able to share clipboards with an android and a PC (Win and Linux) without installing an app, or doing some other hacky things. The integration, while possible, doesn't exist by default. It's not seamless. It doesn't _just work_.

> KDE Connect and other similar tools work fine over a VPN

I don't want to use a VPN? I want to use my regular home wifi or phone network, like a normal person.

> I have not been able to share clipboards with an android and a PC (Win and Linux) without installing an app, or doing some other hacky things

How else would this type of interchange work between disparate systems other than by equipping all systems with a piece of software to bridge the gap? In what way is this a problem and what makes it 'hacky'? When you want to use your Apple-device to interact with something non-Apple you install a piece of software to enable this interaction - that was the premise of a 'smart phone' after all, a device which' functionality can be extended by installing software? This in contrast to a 'feature phone' where all functionality has been baked in by the manufacturer/distributor. You seem to be using your Apple devices more in the way of the latter - using only manufacturer-provided functionality.

> I don't want to use a VPN? I want to use my regular home wifi or phone network, like a normal person.

I do not want to use 'the cloud' and Bluetooth in ways I do not have control over [1] - as I said, to each his own?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/02/26/simple-ap...

> Case in point: can you copy text on your phone, and paste in your computer (and vice versa), seamlessly as if it were the same device, without any configuration, hacks or programs needed?

Circumstantially, yes. I am a KDE user though, on GNOME you do have to install a little app for it.

What is KDE Connect? Which incidentally runs equally well on other desktops and even windows.

https://userbase.kde.org/KDEConnect

Also gsconnect can provide integration with gnome.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

KDE Connect is a project that enables all your devices to communicate with each other. Here are a few things KDE Connect can do:

    Receive your phone notifications on your desktop computer and reply to messages

    Control music playing on your desktop from your phone

    Use your phone as a remote control for your desktop

    Run predefined commands on your PC from connected devices. See the list of example commands for more details.


    Check your phones battery level from the desktop

    Ring your phone to help finding it

    Share files and links between devices

    Browse your phone from the desktop

    Control the desktop's volume from the phone

Also you can read and reply to messages on your Android phone by navigating to messages.google.com without installing anything

Firefox and I presume chrome let you push tabs from one machine to the other or with forefox simply pull up a list of tabs currently open on the other device.

Unified remote also gives you a great remote for our multimedia pc.

Basically every email service abd chat app has good integration between desktop and phone.

Mpd and mafa lets me easily listen to my music

Calibre and calibre companion let's me easily sync my books

I doubt one person making these things would make them better

KDE Connect requires both devices to be connected to the same network, which means you have to connect your devices to the same VPN if you're on a wifi network with client isolation (most public wifi). If you're away from wifi, you'll have to configure one of the devices to be an access point and join everything else to that device.

Apple's clipboard/handoff/continuity automatically works as long as the devices are within wifi/bluetooth range.

This is a good point and a good reason to propose an improvement to KDE Connect but users point was that integration would be awful if not done by the same party and it seems to my eyes to be pretty good despite one being created by a party with literally a billionth of the resources of the other.

For what it's worth, Connect does have a Bluetooth backend that supposedly works: https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/tree/master/...

It doesn't seem to be enabled by default though. I'm not totally familiar with the situation, but I'd assume it's a problem with multi-device handling and switching to the best backend. For most people/situations, the Wifi Direct option will be faster and lower-latency.

It also wont magically stop working 30 feet away if you want to use the multimedia remote functionality. Graceful degradation seems like a useful feature but if you aren't careful the result might be flaky