“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.
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.