Was the iPhone the first device to come with that concept?
on the original iphone the only "apps" you could have were websites, as apple hated the carrier approach
Far from it.
Before Apple, carriers and handset makers 100% controlled what you could install. "App stores" like Verizon's Get It Now, BREW, and Nokia’s operator portals existed, but they were fragmented, clunky, often exploitative, and comparatively laughable in scope and scale.
Apple did what seemed impossible at the time, which was to persuade/cajole/force carriers and handset makers to give up their roles as gatekeepers. They created a single global marketplace with mostly-predictable rules and simple discovery, which finally allowed indie developers to reach users directly just as easily as global behemoths.
Verizon wanted you to have to pay a fee every time you used their software to transfer an image from your phone to your computer, or vice versa.
I'm actually pro-app store as long as it's helping apps to be malware-free. But I'm 100% against shutting out side-loading. Side-loading was never common let alone a common vector for malware, at least not that I've ever heard. But what it is, apparently (or we would not see these Google shenanigans), is a long-term threat to Google's own app store.
Some idiot executive decided this.
Except that it isn't. Epic v Apple proved this on the Apple side.
The fact that (according to Google) only 50% of Android malware comes from sideloading should also make you question where the other 50% is coming from. (Hint: a lot of it is from the Play Store)
The only similar claim I can find is they said is you're 50x more likely to encounter malware from internet-sideloaded sources than from the Play Store, but that's rather different.
And Maemo/MeeGo were basically normal Linux distributions. Right now, SailfishOS is a worthy successor. It runs on a fairly decent number of devices and is quite ready for daily usage. Following the Nokia tradition, offline maps are outstanding. There's also a proprietary Android emulation layer that works really well for most applications, in case that is needed.
SailfishOS and Jolla could challenge the duopoly if a critical mass of developers migrated to the system. Right now, there's a fairly small technical userbase that has nonetheless produced lots of great indie applications. I can't believe I had Linux in my pocket with the N770 in late 2005 and, right now, mainstream options are so locked down.
There are of course caveats, but with a larger userbase things would get ironed out. Still, in the Sailfish forum there are American users that employ their devices as daily drivers.
(Never mind clunkier but more straightforward solutions like a libre device/OS using wifi from a mifi)
Nokia was dead man walking since the first iPhone dropped and Nokia employees of that time will tell you the same as they also wrote here before.
Even before Microsoft took over, Nokia's corporate structure, culture and management was too slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome to modern SW development, to be able to turn the giant ship around and catch up with what Apple and Google have already launched, let alone overtake them. It was game over for them already, Microsoft or no Microsoft.
But the company treated it as a side project due to internal politics. They didn't want to bother Symbian.
A classic innovator's dilemma problem. Then Microsoft (Elop) came in, killed the N9, and shifted to Windows.
Says you, not the market. You are free to disagree, but history proves you wrong. If N770-N9 were such good devices for the gen-pop, they would have beaten iPhone sales to the moon and show Apple that they were wrong, but they weren't. The average user is not your tech savvy HN user who likes to tinker with mobile FOSS Linux devices, and iPhone's success proved this.
>[...] due to internal politics.
That's exactly what I said. Having better tech is useless if your corporate management, product execution and marketing is shit. That's why Apple and Google won, and Nokia, Motorola, and et-al lost on the free market.
Maemo/MeeGo could have >10% marketshare in some EU countries, just like desktop Linux does right now. The N9 was a very elegant device, ready for the masses, and good enough to become a third mobile platform.
The N9 was incredibly elegant and easy to use. The hardware was well crafted, and the card-based UI was outstanding. All applications were well integrated. For example, any messaging application would add its protocol to your contact list, instead of having everything fragmented in apps. Offline maps were second to none. It took a decade for iOS and Android to catch up.
It shipped with native support for a variety of VoIP protocols, including Google Talk (Jingle) and Skype. The OLED screen was stunning on the dark mode UI. Mozilla provided a great mobile Firefox port, and there was a native terminal just in case you wanted to ssh to machines or do something from your phone. Tethering or even using Linux running on your phone from a bigger screen worked really well, in 2011.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
Who cares, is nobody bought it? You need sales to make money because you need money to pay wages and shareholders. Otherwise you're preaching to the choir. The graveyard of history if full of great products and great ideas that didn't catch on for various reasons related to sales, timing, marketing and execution.
It doesn't matter if the N9 was good or not in the minds of the tech savvy HN crowd, what matters is that the iPhone beat them on the free market.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" and Steve Jobs understood this better than anyone.
Yes, previous management messed up before that point too (they did not ship N700 with GSM chip and marketed it as "internet tablet" so as not to jeopardize their Symbian phone sales, only adding it to N800 and beyond, and then Apple turned their iPod Touch into iPhone and stole their lunch), but they finally figured out a great phone, and then... pivoted.
The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia, and it was outselling Lumia (Windows) in Q4 '11. That's fairly good for something that had no marketing and it had already been labeled as a dead platform. Around 2 million N9 devices were sold. That's on the same order of magnitude as any Google Pixel generation.
What could have happened if the device had been phased out is something we can only hypothesize about, but I don't think it's fair to claim it was a fringe device nobody cared about.
If only Scandinavia was as relevant as the US, UK, Asia and rest of the EU for a product to stay in development and in production to remain internationally relevant and competitive to the iPhone.
>Around 2 million N9 devices were sold.
My LLM research says 1-1,5 Million MeeGo powered Nokia N9 devices were sold by 2011, versus 93 Million iPhones and 237 Million Android devices out of which Samsung had 94 million, similar to Apple at the time. The N9's 1,5 Million wasn't even close, it was orders of magnitude less than Apple or Samsung.
So the writing was on the wall by then. How can you even think that they had a chance to be competitive after the numbers of 2011? Based on those numbers they were right to pull the plug back then at the time, the finances spoke for themselves, there was no way for Nokia to turn the ship around in their favor. The line was just going down and even more down.
HP Pre 3 was a similar situation where it was pulled after it was shipped to retailers and operators, but before it went officially on sale — they still sold well even with unsupported system.
There were many rugpulls like these, and while they technically make these products flops, they were also not given a fair chance either.
Your point was that Nokia had nothing that could compete with the iPhone. You have now been shown this to be patently untrue and that Nokia was killed by an incompetent board bringing in a MS transfuge.
Stop trying to move the goal post. You are just wrong. That’s ok, you will survive. Everybody who lived through it could have told you by the way. The first iPhone was a pretty poor device and it wasn’t before the 3 that things started to improve. There was plenty of space to compete.
Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and walled gardens are not illegal unless you do what the EU did and change the law.
What is going to bite Google on the ass here is selling users an "open" platform and then using anticompetitive tactics to yank those supposed freedoms away.
Look at Microsoft's Xbox platform. It was created, advertised and sold to the public as a walled garden with no legal repercussions at all, because walled gardens are not illegal.
On the other hand, Microsoft created Windows as an open platform and sold it to the public as such. When Microsoft tried to use anticompetitive tactics to maintain control of the platform they sold as "open", they were found guilty of antitrust in jurisdictions around the world.
Google made the choice to sell Android as open. "Sideloading" apps was the only way to install apps at all for the first couple of years. The decision to sell Android as "open" only to yank those freedoms away will have legal consequences again here.
The problem here is that the people who announced the "open" platform option were lying to everyone in order to gain market share.
You can still lament the wider societal scale impacts of increasing controls. If both Google and Apple become walled gardens, then what exactly is left? And people need smartphones to get through daily life, interact with banks and government offices.
And I bet Windows is going to head down the same path. ID-verified-by-default, only government and corporate-approved apps installable, AI surveillance running in the background analyzing your every click (for your safety) etc. You see, we need that to catch the bad guys.
The solution is to force Google to keep the promise that they made to consumers, which is the job of the courts.
I would expect them to lose yet another antitrust case over this if they don't back down.
Does Google want to have Android and Chrome stripped from their control?
That would be amazing but it's not going to happen.
And the EU will back their sideloading validation because they want to spy on all of us anyway. This will be done with a backdoor in each chat app, meaning they want to be able to block unsanctioned apps.
(editted to add repository and package manager points)
The amount of legalism that's been brought in by both sides, Apple/Google and the regulators, layered in lies (we need to approve the software, register the developers, to protect the user from software), is divorced from the reality of the hardware-software relationship. This has led us down a path where everyone is debating the topics that Google, Apple, and revolving door regulators choose rather than the underlying reality.
There is a simple solution to all of this: Google and Apple should no longer be allowed to operate any sort of "App Store" or software distribution channel.
“Simple” solutions can produce unintended outcomes.
You want to take a device that is targeted for “everyone” and not just tech savvy people and provide no control or standard to what can be loaded on it? The very idea of it is horrifying to me.
You have apparently never sat down on an elderly persons PC in the early ‘00s and tried to sort out all manner of shopping toolbars, coupon widgets, and crapware that has caused their pc to slow to a crawl. It’s literally bad enough with the poor performing apps in app stores but it could be so much worse without it
No thanks.
Yet instead, we are getting increasingly fewer phones with unlockable bootloaders and root access available. What gives?
I've also checked out my mom's phone a year or so back: she had so many crappy apps from official store that it was barely usable. Stores do not really help.
I’m “tech savvy” and I would never click that box. Frankly I can’t think of something more risky than installing some random piece of software on a device that I need and use everyday.
You could be installing random crap from the store, or not from the store. Or you could not be installing random apps from either.
I don't feel any more protected by device restrictions. Yes, containerization helps, but I like having root on my device (eg. I backup different .sqlite files from different apps through ssh to my phone). My phone has FDE, and is probably not at all less "safe" than yours.
No one outside of a tiny group of techy tinkerer types really cares.
Other manufacturers offer it as well — these options continues to exist, and while it's certainly not a high percentage of the market, some of these phones sell because of openness.
Niche manufacturers usually focus on "stronger" openness (Librem, PinePhone, Fairphone...) — but they provide subpar hardware compared to mainstream top-end. Eg. most recent release in Volla Quintus (https://volla.online/en/volla-phone-quintus/) uses SoC that is half the speed of Google's Tensor G4 in both single- and multi-threading benchmarks: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-mediatek_dimensity...
So I generally go with phones which can get their bootloader unlocked and which can be rooted, to ensure I have full control of them. I did, in the past, use Ubuntu Phones (Meizu MX4, Nexus 4), HP/Palm Pre Plus and 3 (webOS with full root access), Nokia N9, Motorola A1200 etc — all as my daily drivers. I did get PinePhone, but that thing is sloooow. Since, I've switched to plain Android phones which allow you full control.
There are plenty of devices you have full control over but they're not called phones for that reason.
Were you horrified by the Apple ][?
The Apple II was never used by “everyone” and nobody expected it to be, even towards the end of its quite long life.
No question, it was a stepping stone to where we are today but you can’t compare an enthusiast/early adopter product from nearly 50 years ago to contemporary Android and iOS devices that are intended for “everyone”, in the way you’re attempting with your comment.
I think it’s more a reflection that people mostly use other devices, like phones and tablets, for tasks they might have used a PC for 20 years ago - at least outside an office environment.
That’s not to say the PC experience hasn’t improved - certainly Windows is at least more secure - but that it’s not the only factor, and I don’t think it’s the biggest factor either.
One data point for you: the last company I worked for, when I joined in 2017, already >50% of external users were accessing our service via mobile devices.
Ok, then.
The Atari 2600 was an immensely popular home computer for a decade(ish), but it didn't exactly spark the personal computer revolution. Why? Because it used the iphone software distribution model. You could only buy licensed software (in the form of cartridges) even though technically it was of course a programmable computer. So it was as open as an iphone.
All the actual progress happened on Apple ][, C64, the Radio Shack computers and later the IBM clones. Because, obviously, anyone could write and sell any software they wanted so the market growth went exponential.
A lesson to society, there.
The 2600 just sucked as a computer.
In fact just the opposite. Activision was one of the first third-party game manufacturers and Atari tried to sue them into the ground for it.
It's widely believed that the massive glut of 3rd party games (with effectively zero quality control) for the 2600 partially contributed to the video game crash of 83 [1].
It's also one of the reasons Nintendo learned from this mistake and enforced everything from limitations around the total number of games a company could produce per year, to the seal of approval, etc. on their Nintendo Entertainment System.
Also having grown up with the Atari 2600 - I don't know anybody who would have described it as home computer. It was a video game console first and foremost. Are you possibly thinking of the Atari ST line? [2]
This is because the EU is not a citizens advocacy platform. They're an economic platform mainly built to smooth the cost of doing business in Europe for multinationals. They don't have our best interests at heart. They care more about a big neoliberal common market.
The European project started well but mid 90s it got hijacked by hard neoliberal interests, especially the commission.
This is a fine distinction. And it will happen and should happen because there are always gaps. Without a way to fill them, you're left with a subpar experience.
And while many people are fine with it on their iPhones, I can't really imagine not having ReVanced apps, Molly, or a dozen other little fixes.
Who gets to decide what the main channel is?
For a lot of people here, F-Droid is their main way of installing programs on phones.
If you don't see the patterns of absolutely pathetic authoritianism, which most people cheered on during covid policies times, you're not going be very effective at opposing this crap.
Yes, it blocks ads but it also skips sponsored segments and other chaff with a SponsorBlock integration. Then it fixes all the little UI annoyances across apps, for example letting you filter out low-view videos and live streams from your TikTok feed.
It turns mass market apps into something that an HN user would make for themselves.
It is actually pretty hypocritical they’re adding such tech to their apps while fighting so hard against people that want to block the ads they serve…
The only downside is that free Apple accounts must renew their certificate in AltStore (while connected to their computer's home network) once a week, or else it'll all be deactivated and you'll have to reinstall AltStore and YTLitePlus from scratch. But you can pay $99 for a year-long developer account, set a recurring reminder to renew, or worst case YTLitePlus makes it easy to export your settings so you can quickly restore it after reinstalling.
Wait, let me take out my word 97 CDs to read the "sideloading instructions" booklet. Oh wait, what was considered a normal install Same on mobile phone in symbian era. It's not "sideloading", it's a "normal install".
oh, those things you literally load from the side? :P
/s
Note how the term 'side loading' is already weighted against you doing it, it is supposed to make you feel you're doing something that is borderline illegal even if it is still possible and that you are bypassing safeguards that would stop you from doing this stupid thing if you only took the proper route.
This was before it had a download manager or file manager and using your computer to manage your phone was the norm.
The term predates Android anyways, goes back to the 90s I think.
You'd never need sideloading on your PC no matter how you got the installer. Because you can run anything there, you don't need to "come in through the window" to run whatever you want. Yet.
Hell, people used to use iTunes to manage the apps on their iPhone and organize their Home Screen.
Then with the windows mobile world, you could install manually, or use activesync which really sucked. Same with Palm. I don't recall Blackberry.
In fact on the iPhone Cydia existed before the app store ever did. Apple had decided that web apps were the way to go.
Because that's what it is, despite the extremely successful campaign to paint people who want admin access on their mobile computers to be painted in the same light as pirates.
I wish Android supported more profiles (for even better compartmentalization, like it would be nice to have a similar isolated profile for banking and such). But as-is Work Profile was a pretty great discovery on Android (for me) a year or so ago and a feature I think more people should play with.
There's an app called Shelter that builds off the Work profile plumbing to add support for even more profiles. I forget why I switched to using Work profile directly... I think I just wanted to see how the built-in stuff worked. There's other stuff about the Work Profile that I don't remember Shelter providing (with Work Profile you end up with copies of the app with briefcase icon to tell them apart and separate intent handlers, I remember liking that but I don't remember if Shelter supported that sort of thing)
Free lunch is over yo.
LMAO. Nope they won't. They'll go to tiktok or some other platform where you'll surprise pikachu face have to watch ads. Ads powers internet. Someone has to pay server cost at the end of the day- either pay with your dollar or your attention. There's no other option.
I'm not sure what you want.. You want access to their service, they offer a premium.
You don't want to pay, at the same time you are not will to boycott them for moral reasons, so you instead you attempt to circumvent it by using ad blockers..
Though personally I watch very little YouTube. I have no patience for long vids and even if you pay for premium it's unwatchable without sponsorblock. If i need to start blocking I might as well go the whole way.
And no I don't feel bad for Google. This is not some old shop owner trying to make ends meet. It's an evil mega corporation trying to control and monitor our every impulse and enriching their already wealthy shareholders. Nobody will eat a spud less over this.
You wanna pay someone else, feel free- vimeo, and a zillion other platforms exist - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms
And as the parent already said, "I may as well get an iPhone".
I myself use iphone cause I like the hardware quality (over android). I pay for youtube premium cause I like the service (over apple music for example)...
You can bellow as much as you want that you are losing a "free service" but nothin is free buddy at the end of the day. You get what you paid and youtube premium is one of the few services I find worth paying... Not worth it, you say? Feel free to bounce to a zillion other video platforms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
The hypocrisy...
Just allowed me to pay only for ad free and not include youtube music. I know youtube lite is a thing but its only available to limited countries.
Disagree entirely. Google Play refused to download some app on my phone because it thought the specs weren't good enough for whatever reason even though it worked fine on my previous weaker phone.
I found the APK, I downloaded it, and just installed it. Why would I want to first download some other middle-man to deal with any of this shit? Ideally there would be no "store" at all on my phone.
Editing to add this from the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082595 (F-Droid site certificate expired)
It also allows you to patch other apps to make them work the way you want.
vless://[email protected]:443?security=reality&encryption=none&pbk=BhTJ3phnq-Z-10aFKSsj1lzhA8mULR4L6leE4-0WTAs&headerType=none&fp=chrome&type=tcp&flow=xtls-rprx-vision&sni=www.bing.com#%F0%9F%87%A9%F0%9F%87%AA%40VPNv2ray_Fre
vless://[email protected]:443?mode=stream-one&path=%2Fsef&security=none&encryption=none&type=xhttp#%F0%9F%87%A9%F0%9F%87%AA%40VPNv2ray_Fre
Google has dramatically altered that deal, and now shows much longer, less-likely-to-be-skippable ads, with much higher frequency.
Calling it "a prety reasonable subscription" is only reasonable if we forget that this wasn't the deal originally offered
Furthermore, this is a massive corporation closing up a project that got it's start by selling itself to geeks as Open.
It is Google's OS, and it is Google's app, but closing up the Open project to advantage their own app sure as hell feels like poor form
YouTube would not be effectively the only game in town if Google hadn't underpriced their product to drive out competitors
In short: If Google had played fair from the beginning, I would have the option to watch streaming semi-pro video elsewhere.
Can you not do this on Samsung phones? I was considering buying a used s22 ultra as an iPhone user to explore more freedom and pirate apps, etc. Is andoid really this locked down now? I have heard that quite a bit, but can't you sideload or install any apps you want on Android? Why do you need to unlock the bootloader?
Sideloading doesn't require rooting the device.
And yeah majority of phones simply won't let you do that anymore
On my computer, I can choose to containerize applications I run with something like docker, flatpak or snaps; run them in a VM, under a separate user, in a chroot... or, not! I can get them from the Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/... archive or... not! Or I might compile it from source and run it directly or... not!
Based on source of the app I decide how much I trust it and thus decide on the encapsulation strategy for it (sometimes, none).
Yes, I understand having full control of your system has some minor downsides (you can mess things up more easily), but you can usually do that anyway (just fill up your phone storage with photos and see how your phone behaves).
Especially after people paying so much money for the devices, it's ludicrous that they are not allowed to make their own decisions and install what they want. Ownership, user rights, and privacy have been kicked in the face. If you can not install whatever software that you want, then people should be signing only rental agreements.
It is also more the reason to push Linux smartphones[1]. Android is not doing anything special, that people could not get or create for Linux phones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...
While not as powerful as root access, your user rights are almost completely gone.
You buy a $1,000 phone and $1,000 on a service plan which is not an insignificant amount of money for many, then take away every semblance of ownership.
Right to repair? Warranty void. Want to run language models Google doesn’t approve? Not anymore. Want to run your favorite VPN? Too secure, unavailable. Want to audit the security and scan the device you carry everywhere and stores your life’s data? Unapproved. Want to compete with anything that dents Google’s profits? Papers please developer.
Just because your nose is already caved in and you’re dazed from the repeated blows, doesn’t make it less of a face kick. It’s more of a curb stomp.
Also your comparisons to “kicked in the face” “curb stomped” “being in jail” are seriously over the top at this point. Continue making them only if you don’t want to be taken seriously.
For reference, if the field of technology had the walled garden concept and mass advertising propaganda available when x86 spread, you wouldn’t have an open pc either. We’re just fortunate to have escaped that reality (for now).
Imagine all of the technology we would have lost when the “education” we allow children to have on engineering/science requires a $100/yr subscription to even push buttons, and only select corporations are allowed to design or extend the capabilities behind multi-thousand dollar access restrictions. Innovation and society crippled to protect profits and control.
You not caring doesn’t negate the massive societal harm. Stop making personal attacks on a subject you’re clearly wrong about. That’s called shilling.
Which is why we should always applaud and support those who do care enough to sacrifice something in return: they are the ones ensuring at least _some_ things we disagree with do not come to fruition.
Dont get me wrong, im not accusing Pixels of being "quality". In my experience, they're not quite as good as a free phone from a MetroPCS store.
As for calling me a troll, fuck right off, asshole.
However, the crusade against the word and concept of "sideloading" is really weird. Yeah, installing from the repo is normal, and all the windows-land "download an .exe/.msi to invoke an installer" ways that then may or may not update the app are unusual and apart from an ordered process of system management.
The proper alternative to Google Play is F-Droid, not downloading/baking .apks.