$200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit.

This translates well to the boots paradox. This can change "cheaper is much more expensive in the long run" to "cheaper is a bit more expensive on the long run".

This, of course, will not create enough value for the people who doesn't need or appreciate the need for these $200 phones.

Some/many low end phones in on have replaceable batteries (e.g., Nokia C12). I’m not sure if it’s because of buyer demographics, simpler/easier assembly, less engineering constraints due lower-end/less hardware, but the place you tend to find replaceable batteries is on the low end.

The user is never really handicapped because low end users just continue using phones after they’ve lost security updates. All their apps still work and that’s all they care about.

In the mid to high end market, you’ve got two factors at play:

1. Many consumers actually want the latest phone frequently so long as they can afford it, and for many customers in many markets it’s a trivial expense (more on that in point #2)

2. Many of the higher profit locales like the United States have financing and pseudo-financing schemes that hide the cost of the phones. If you are using a post-paid plan on one of the big 3 carriers, you’ll literally never pay for a phone. You can get a brand new $1000 phone on a trade in deal every three years, with a pseudo-contract lock-in (they give you the phone for free after bill credits, so if you leave the carrier you are paying for the phone. Or, in the case of AT&T, they just lock the phone until you pay it off).

Even budget carriers like Metro and Boost have free phone offers involving low to mid-range phones.

For a 127 EUR Samsung A17 up to 6 OS and security updates (6 years) are advertised. For a Google Pixel up to 7 updates. How long is it for Apple?

https://www.sammobile.com/samsung/samsung-galaxy-security-up...

Though for price vs. updates it's hard to beat the Pixel 9a. It's currently often ~349 Euro and gets updates until April 1, 2032.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/21/iphone-16e-geekbench-bi...

It was fine without liquid glass, but I unfortunately missed the downgrade window,

An iPhone does not necessarily last longer than an (flagship) Android phone these days, including security updates.

I have found that you can also use the less long value retention to your advantage by not buying an Android phone on release day. E.g. Pixels often go for hundreds off after 6 months or so. E.g. here in Western Europe, including VAT: Pixel 9a 549 -> 349, Pixel 10 899 -> 549, Pixel 10 Pro 1099 -> 769. At the same time the iPhone 17 has only gone down about 100 Euro. When getting e.g. a Pixel at the discounted price, the loss is not so much after selling after 1-2 years.

Also, I had a habit of getting a new iPhone every year and the loss of selling second-hand is now much larger than in the early days. I think the demand lessened due to the market largely reaching an equilibrium + there not being a lot of advances in smartphones, so people are staying on their phones longer, so there is less demand for second-hand phones (e.g. my parents were on iPhone 11 until recently, my mom still is).

The typical interested buyers are also more annoying to deal with these days (also probably due to the changing iPhone demographics). So nowadays, if I cannot sell it to family or friends, I'll often just send it to a company like Rebuy.

Modern batteries last surprisingly long. I assumed my 5yo pixel 4a was at 50~60% capacity based on feels and the adb batterystats printout estimated the same (with 1600 charge cycles). But when I actually measured the screentime / charging wattage, it was still at 80% capacity. Even confirmed this by replacing the battery and running the same tests.

I think part of the reason the old battery felt worse is that it would read 100% when it was only ~85% full then trickle charge at like 2w for another 90 minutes.

For those that don’t know what they meant, here you go[0].

I’ve always been a fan of Quality, but Quality costs, and people that get rich, generally do so, by selling lots of lower-quality stuff. Hard to compete against.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Would it? Most people, including in the developing countries, like changing phones. It's one of the small consumerist joys they get, plus they show the Joneses that they can keep up.

I remember a time when a new phone meant exciting new capabilities, and my current phone does have a new radio vs the old phone which is nicer than I thought it would be ... but at the end of the day, it's pretty much the same but different. Even though there are approximately 10,000 android phones released per year (hyperbole, I think), only a handful have my must haves (appropriate bands, headphone jack, reasonable cpu) so I don't actually get to shop on my want to haves; there's not so much joy there.

Fairphone and framework devices are more expensive than their locked down competitors. Are there any open devices that come close to being that affordable without being years behind tech/feature wise?

$200 for an open source, modern smartphone that can last sounds great. But it sounds like a bit of a fantasy right now.

But, I agree. I used several Motorola phones and those were the main two reasons I replaced them. They either ran until the battery was misbehaving or I became concerned about the state of the software. The other reason would be actual tech changes such as LTE/5G and the transitional period where not all models supported all the important radio bands for my providers.

A few Motos have stayed in the family and had amazingly long lives as home devices (no SIM). I'd love for the balance to somehow come out in favor of your hopes. I.e. they decde they can save so much on OS maintenance costs that they don't mind the effect of users holding onto phones longer.

The web has a secure storage standard and OAuth + MFA is just as secure as anything your bank could cook up in an app. In fact, I'd be shocked if banks did a better job of security in their apps vs what browsers and standard auth flows provide.

Banks just like selling the idea that "if it's encrypted, it's secure". But trust me when I say this, bank security across the board absolutely sucks. The company I work with does financial data ingest and... yeah... There's more than a few institutions where we had to pull teeth to get them to send stuff through an encrypted transport (SFTP, for example, they want to just use FTP).

True and all. But there is at least anecdotal evidence the niche for $500 phones marketed as not-google/not-samsung/not-apple/not-chinese is substantial and growing. Here in Europe I'm seeing Fairphones in hands of non-techies, so there seems to be some willingness to pay a premium to move away from big tech.

IF you offer someone a phone with similar specs to others, yet much, much more private - many would go for that.

think company-issued phones. There are many that would love to not have to deal with samsung and apple.

To me, this is how you get around consumers buying locked down more heavily subsidized devices, if you're competing with an open device strategy.

Corporations want corporate devices that (a) are secure, (b) work, and (c) take as little of IT's time as possible to manage.

Motorola + GrapheneOS + Microsoft for a turnkey managed corporate device solution seems surprisingly competitive.

Not necessarily, the Xperia line of devices is varied, with nice set of tiers:

1 - Flagship $$$$ 5 - Smaller Flagship $$$ 10 - Mainline $$ Ace - $

Sony's problem is that they have garbage marketing teams that don't understand that 99% of people don't look at a spec sheet, they ask the employee at the shop for the best phone, which is gunna be the one that gets the employee the most commission.

In Japan, they already have that with Docomo, AU, and Softbank. But they've failed to materialize that strategy outside of here.

What percentage of that is based on phones at that price having a headphone jack?

"Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation, marking a new chapter in smartphone security and expanding its enterprise portfolio"

I know a lot of businesses that would love to not be exposed to Google.

I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.

They're on my shit list now.

Lenovo is not going to change that, nor will they ever make a phone that is better at being a Samsung phone than Samsung.

I think that in the current smartphone manufacturer landscape, being an underdog kind of requires serving niche segments.

Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.

The average developer stopped being a "tech nerd" around 2010 or so. I think older developers sometimes don't understand how the ranks have swollen and how many, many more people are in software now that don't have the "I was a nerdy kid in the 90s, loved computers and chose the career" upbringing.

The average developer now has a MacBook, went to a bunch of bootcamps and writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.

Is perhaps the saddest sentence. Whats the point of working when you don't have enough energy left to do the fun stuff?

I still wouldn't be caught dead with a Macbook - I do have some self respect.

I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...

Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.

The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.

And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.

I do want to suggest you install termux, and do it from fdroid rather than the play store.

I'm guessing you're on Wayland, so check out ydotool. (If still on x s/x/y) there's a lot of cool things to do with tools like that. Basic one is use your phone as a keyboard (like KDE connect can do, but I found it more reliable and KDEC doesn't play well with VPNs)

I wrote a similar script in Apple Shortcuts and... wtf is this bullshit. My files backup Shortcut is even uglier. I'm incredibly impressed at the hacky shit I was forced to do just to backup photos... I almost would rather pay for an app that does it. I almost would rather learn how to write an iOS app. Just to... replace a 10 line bash script -__-

Since I'm still not a big fan of Google my next phone is going to be a Pixel and I'll install Graphene on day 1. That is, unless something better comes out :)

I have a pixel 9a with Graphene right now and I'm very happy with it. Great hardware, great price, great software. The one blindspot is messaging, which is a big problem in the US. RCS doesn't work on Graphene, and SMS is basically the worst thing ever, so I use Signal as much as I can. I'm hoping one of these days RCS becomes an actual open standard with competing implementations but... I won't hold my breath.

As for Android, I think the real magic happens when you just realize your phone is another computer and you can do normal computer things with it. It just starts unlocking so many doors. One thing I like to do is have my desktop sit behind my TV. Big screen for movies and games. For everything else, there's ssh. Your phone is just another terminal in that environment. But the modern version of a terminal means your local machine can actually do meaningful things too. Tbh, it's really what the big tech companies are doing too, they just pretend they aren't.

Also, since you're new to Android check out revanced. I'm not sure if you need this on graphene but you can recompile apps. Mostly used for removing ads but there's more to it than that.

I'm hoping one of these days we can just treat computers like computers. Stop creating these walled gardens. It really slows down innovation and honestly, I believe the big companies would make more money doing it. After all, their whole business sits on top of open source work. The computer is nothing without the program. The smart phone is nothing without the app. Why can't we recognize that the success of these machines is that they're environments. You can't create a product for everybody, but building environments doesn't have the same limitations

  > Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

With a lot of Android devices they'll have a lifespan even beyond that. Although there are choices to make at that point. You just don't have the option with Apple.

[0] https://endoflife.date/iphone [1] https://endoflife.date/pixel

Apple makes no such guarantees, so it's not something anyone can depend on.

Beyond that, there's no guarantee Apple continues to support for 7 years. They are literally the same level of corporate greed as Google.

Also... Apple has locked all of their users into planned obsolescence for a decade plus. At least their is hope on the slightly more open side with AOSP.

Apple is a poster child of nothing. They have put out hardware that is inaccessible and unrepairable for years. Both companies suck to their end users, let's not pretend Apple is some utopia of awesome to their customers.

The hardware performance is outstanding, and while opinions are split about the OS, a lot of people who display good taste in other technical matters like it. I've chosen to spend my own money on a different laptop, but if someone offered me a high-spec Macbook Pro on the condition that I use it for a year, I'd accept.

How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.

  > WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats.

And on top of that, as frustrating as OSX is (even as terrible as OSX26 is) Winblows is worse. OSX feels disconnected, but Winblows feels hostile.

I think the moment it turned from annoyance to hate was when they bought Skype and then removed features from the Linux version. Features like... conference calling... but there's a million things like that. Go talk to Linux nerds and I'm sure you'll get a unique story each time. We've all felt the pressure

[1] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix

https://github.com/srlehn/termimg

This definitely should be improved but I honestly don't use fzf that much. I can fix it if you really need something but I'm sure you could find it in the docs or even an LLM could handle this. Requires you to define a few variables, lsd, bat, and chafa

  $ echo $FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS 
  --ansi --preview "if file --mime-type {} | grep -qF image; then chafa --passthrough none -f sixels --size ${FZF_PREVIEW_COLUMNS}x${FZF_PREVIEW_LINES} {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e directory; then lsd --color always --icon always --almost-all --oneline --classify --long {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e binary; then strings {} | bat --color always --theme=Dracula --language c; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e text -e json -e empty; then bat --color always --theme=Dracula --style=numbers,grid --line-range :500 {}; fi"

From folding@home to mining@work

Last job was a lot of SSH and webshit like Jira, Confluence, Odoo and Google apps. They didn't care if you used Amiga OS as long as your work got done.

My own experience was learning on an old IBM PC at school, then Apple 2s later. Also my dad was a programmer (but maybe less nerdy/more professional) so I got second hand x86 hardware and learned to program on Windows with Visual Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ (since he already had licenses). Eventually I got into Linux in the late 90's.

The issue is not pedigree - it’s that many folks have an incurious mind.

I certainly know many folks with a CS degree that are incurious and frankly terrible engineers. I also know bootcampers that are extremely curious, have a lifelong-learner attitude, and are subsequently great engineers.

There’s nothing special taught in the vaunted halls of a CS undergrad that can’t be trivially learned off YouTube.

I would argue writing TypeScript is also equally being unlucky (I write Elixir for a living, but sometimes have to deal with TypeScript too)

I bought a Nexus One the day it became available, installed endless third party ROMs on it, tweaked it to my heart's desire. Got a Nexus 4, then 5. Today I have an iPhone.

I just need something that works, just because I can tweak endlessly doesn't mean it's a good use of my time. Honestly one of the original biggest motivators was iMessage. A rock solid messaging system ought to be table stakes for a mobile OS but Google has reinvented the wheel so many times I've lost track. Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives.

Sad to say, I don't find myself missing the relative openness of Android at all. Google-branded Android has issues similar to iOS, they also removed ICE Watch style apps. And non-Google Android is work.

Are your relatives unable to install Signal or WhatsApp?

Yes is a possible answer here, but installing a messaging/video-call app seems pretty low effort. I've had several elderly relatives do it and none required hand-holding, just the name of the app.

Installing an setting up Signal or WhatsApp is out of the question for a huge portion of the population.

Yes, 90% of global smartphone users can't do it at all :P

What an insane take this is.

Not just old people. Hackernews skews technical and seems to mostly interact with other technical people.

There are people in their 30's, 40's and 50's who don't own a computer at all (other than a smartphone), don't interact with computers on a regular basis, and almost exclusively use the built-in talk/text/browser apps that come pre-installed.

It may be a relatively small percentage of the adult population in the US, but it is still many millions of people.

I ran Android since the beginning because I wanted to write my own software when I was in high school. I was on Android for something like 14 years. The other software I ran was never as good as my iOS compatriots. My software would crash, it looked worse, and it was generally lower quality.

Of course, there were exceptions, but not enough.

I switch to an iPhone a bit over a year ago and, while still having issues (especially recently), it's just such a better experience.

My computer is where I do my fun software development. I just want my phone to work, which my Android phones weren't. Whether the hardware, the OS, or the applications were at fault doesn't matter to me, because I just wanted it to work.

It’s a tool, a means to an end. I just want my tool to be easy to use and work.

Another analogy would be cars: do you tune and modify, or do you want a transportation appliance?

There is no wrong answer. Maybe your hobby is tinkering with your tools. If that’s you, more power to you.

I want a phone, editor, and car that are easy to use and “just work.”

I tried switching but it is really hard when nearly every app is just horrible to use or missing basic features.

Sure there are some limitations on what software is easy to install (as there are and will be soon on Android), but at least iOS has software worthy of being installed.

If you are a phone manufacturer looking to differentiate your product, this is cheaper than inventing a display that folds four times or what have you.

Apple doesn’t care what I think about their battery draining bloated garbage software anymore so I’m quietly quitting and don’t care about them either.

I just finally gave away my MacBook to someone who needed it more than I do .. I loathe Tahoe… as much as I do ios26… but haven’t cut the cord with the iPhone YET.

GrapheneOS seems to be the only contender that will get me to go along with that,(I’m running it on a pixel7 and warming up to it but still go back to iPhone to do some things I have no patience for figuring out on the pixel.)

Motorola may seal the deal. If they offer a cool device. I had a Nexus 6 (I think) that Motorola made and it was cool, it was just already obsolete when I got my hands on it. I could root it and do whatever I wanted on it, and half the reason I got into iPhone was that I could readily jailbreak those once upon a time. And can’t now.

So I have this fisher price piece of shit Apple device I can’t do anything fun on and the battery’s dead after 2-3 hours of use when … I paid extra for so called “pro max” devices for the extra battery capacity alone… the whole reason I even went down that road was getting lost in New York City with a dead battery a few too many time, this thing used to go 12-15 hours under ios18…

Motorola had made several of my favorite phones ever before an iPhone existed. We’ll see. I don’t think anyone even enjoys or wants an iPhone anymore. We are all just fucking , and getting fucked by, Apple until someone better comes along.

What else disgusts me about Apple is all the subtle ways they want you even more addicted to or dependent on your device. iCloud bullshit. In device subscriptions. Oh use our password manager and have a unique fucking 30 char password for every single site . Would you like a proprietary “passkey” so you’re forced to reach for your god damned iPhone another 15 times a day! 2fa? Authy won’t run on gOS. Just all this endless shit I’m going to have to divorce and migrate off of as well to get rid of them. And i will because i hate this company now. Please put them out of society’s misery for us.

I tried to switch to graphene for similar reasons to you. It just wasn’t viable, as you’re discovering.

And if you want to even attempt to have a modern smartphone experience, you’re logging into Google account, which is an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” move.

For now, Apple is still the best in a bad situation, and at least for now they aren't primarily an ad company.

I am glad about the Graphene+Motorola partnership though, it always felt ironic to me to have to give Google money to completely escape Google.

Why do you assume every "developer and tech nerd" cares about the things you do, or should? This is like the stereotypical buffoonish sysadmin who scoffs at people who don't mod their machines or configure every last bit of their OS by hand.

I expect tech nerds to be aware that the conflict of interests exists in this case, while the average person would not.

There's no right answer, everything is a shade of gray. Your strongest ethics aren't necessarily your neighbors'.

This, I suspect is a large part of it. At least for me, as a self described "tech nerd" who have been messing with computers since my childhood in the 90s.

The other aspect is that I don't do anything serious from my phone. I'm still "old school" I guess and prefer a keyboard + mouse. My laptop is my main computing device, not my phone. And for that, Apple currently offers the best of a bad situation. It's still advantageous to them from a marketing standpoint to offer privacy, and they aren't primarily an advertising company. They are the only one of the two that offer E2EE (Advanced Data Protection) for photos, all the processing for that is done on device, etc. When meta threw their huge fit over the app tracking transparency, but were silent on anything Google was doing with Android, that just sold Apple even more for me.

I'v made a choice to accept the tradeoff of them being an application gate keeper because for anything "serious" I'd just be using my computer anyway, which still allows me to install and run whatever I want, and do whatever I want with the hardware. I don't need that from a phone. Quite the opposite, I don't want that on a phone, I'm totally fine with the phone just being an appliance, and Apple offers the best appliance experience still.

Yes, here, you can talk about the relative merits of one piece of tech vs. another and compared with your personal needs. Of course, what is immoral is never permissible—it is nonsensical to speak of immorality otherwise—but there's nothing of the sort here. The behavior of the OP is a kind of moralizing rigorism, that is, the imposition of a personal concern on others that has no objective severity of the sort being claimed, as if his personal concerns here are morally binding on others.

> Ethics are personal, subjective, and subject to trade-offs.

Subjective, no. Morality (ethics is the study of morality) is objective, or it is nothing. Murder is evil not because I arbitrarily opine—with no objective basis whatever—that it is evil, but because it actually is evil, and to choose to commit it is a gravely immoral act.

Morality may be objective [1], but Ethics is not just/no longer only the "study" of morality but the subjective practice and personal application of it. Ethics becomes the pragmatic and imperfect framework for working with the belief system of the other's ideals. If you want an infosec analogy, think "security threat model" versus "security posture". Morality is your ideal "security threat model", many people will have shared threat models and a lot of lofty goals and ideas to guard against them in theory. Ethics is your "security posture", what you are actively doing day to day to guard against threats, not just imagined, but the real ones you encounter on those days. People may share the same "security threat model" but nearly every "security posture" is a unique and personal snowflake with differing imperfections (and sometimes unique beauty).

[1] You paraphrased Immanuel Kant, which suggests to me you may have a strong religious background/upbringing coloring at least some of your view here. Unfortunately, this overall question of if there is an objective Morality is a centuries long debate among Philosophers and people have different perspectives across different religions and in different cultures. Immanuel Kant was a strong voice on the side of an absolute and objective Morality, but there are so many other viewpoints. Defining a truly objective Morality is harder than it sounds, even if there are lots of individual moral beliefs many religions and cultures share together. Especially, I believe, as imperfect people working through however many layers of imperfections we may have accumulated in our personal ethical frameworks along the way to having these philosophical discussions. Because Philosophers can't agree on if Morality is objective and/or absolute or neither, it becomes useful to separate the discussion of the ideal state (Morality) and the subjective practices (Ethics) as separate things.

Unless you count xiaomi and huawei as the proper android devices?

Now I want to spend exactly 0 seconds a day on any of that, and would never buy something that caused me to exceed that 0 seconds. I want an appliance in my pocket, when my car breaks down or I need to be in touch. I do my fun stuff elsewhere.

How on Earth is iPhone more "appliancy" than regular Android? If anything, it's more annoying than Android with all the Apple inconsistencies. The settings UI, for example, is just plain broken. The gesture UI is finger-breakingly inconsistent, while Android has a simple reliable 3-button bottom bar.

If you stick with Samsung, the issues I've had probably go away.

> gesture UI is finger-breakingly inconsistent

I'm not familiar with this, at all. The app switching is actually my favorite feature about iPhone. So easy to flip between two apps. I don't use a case, so maybe that's related.

It typically took me maybe an hour to move devices? Including moving to a non-Google phone once when I broke my phone during a foreign trip and had to get a temporary replacement.

> I'm not familiar with this, at all. The app switching is actually my favorite feature about iPhone. So easy to flip between two apps. I don't use a case, so maybe that's related.

I can't get it to switch consistently. On Android it's dead easy and reliable with a nav bar. On iPhone it's often not registering a gesture if I swipe too fast or don't start swiping from the very bottom.

I don't disagree with you that in order to sell, these devices need to be somewhat appealing to more than just devs. However, I will say that the dev market isn't as small as it once was. A decent phone with an open platform would be something a lot of devs would likely prioritize buying. It won't be the next Iphone, but it will be a pretty dedicated market segment.

Framework is a good example of that. A laptop business that stays afloat mostly because there is a desire for repairable long lasting products, even if it's a bit niche.

Given a lot of phone manufacturers are now trying bizarre edges to get ahead (like foldable... who wants that?) it seems like a good rarely taken route.

I think there are a lot of people who would love to have a smaller form-factor for when the phone is in their pocket, with a large screen for when it's being used. The current state-of-the-art might not be very good for foldable phones, but the demand is there, and that's what drives innovation.

Foldables are a growing market in Asia, where they are more widely available. They are quickly becoming a new status symbol, displacing Apple. Especially in China where the local phone manufacturers are now completely independent and free to experiment.

Apple somehow completely missed the plot (yet again) despite being having the largest tablet marketshare. Google, to their credit, is now pushing developers towards supporting dynamic screen dimensions.

1) You don't need to capture a large part of the market to make a profit. The market for smartphones is large enough that even capturing a small percentage of it can be profitable.

2) Privacy is increasingly becoming a differentiator and I predict privacy will be increasingly important as a differentiator. Just because no company has successfully managed to market privacy benefits doesn't mean there is no market for it. There's a lot of marketing potential in terms of privacy that companies like NordVPN, Incogni, and DeleteMe have figured out. People are clearly willing to pay for privacy.

The whole point is that a company is going to try to market this developer fantasy to non-developers, assuming that what excites developers about it enough to discuss it will resonate with non-developers when they hear developers talk about their new phones.

It's not a guarantee of success or anything, but a lot of stuff works like this. Mozilla didn't gain market dominance (for a hot second in the early 2000's) because they marketed to non-devs. They just provided a superior product in every way to everything else at the time, and devs couldn't ignore that, so non-devs always dealt with non-microsoft browsers whenever the devs came around. That kind of "grass is greener" non-marketing is a real winner when the product is solid.

So here's hoping Motorola takes a great idea and builds a product so solid on it that people can't ignore it.

Now I don't know how big the public market is. And you'd have to do a lot of conspiracy-based marketing to pull it off, which is kind of gross.

But commitment to auditable, hackable OSS would target a different market of people looking for devices -- think of the EU agencies trying to get off of MS products.

"Hey, do you know if the NSA is spying on your devices? PLA intelligence? Would you like to be able to build all your phone's code from source to be sure?"

A fully suitable off the shelf device would be a dream for most government IT.

As someone born in a country that used to be "the leader" of the third world, computers here won over consoles only because we could pirate expensive games that we couldn't afford. Expensive cartridge vs two tape recorders and some fiddling with the tapes? The tapes win!

While this is true, I can also say that the other minority becomes large enough for any OEM to care. It might even drawf market size of other markets when only compares in numbers.

This description of average consumer is so 2021. Nowadays the average consumer can vibe code stuff and share it with his friends. So he needs a package manager not only an app store.

I personally don't hold vibe coding in any high regard, I hate not knowing and controlling what code is running on my computer/device, but I can see the value for amateurs in just playing around and occasionally destroying the OS, installing it again and so on.

This is also developer fantasy for two reasons:

(1) Most vibed apps suck in unpredictable ways.

(2) Most avg consumers don't even know what Claude is, let alone Claude Code, let alone being good enough at vibing to produce anything of value.

Vibe coding is very early and pretty expensive, but computers and the internet are always in an exponential curve, a curve much steeper than the rest of the economy. Give it 3 years, and you will be amazed.

Not everyone will be vibe coding. In every social circle of 10 people, 1 person will be good at that, and will develop programs for his/her friends.

>Most vibed apps suck in unpredictable ways.

Yes of course, it would be infinitely preferable for normal people to learn proper computer science, algorithms etc. We agree on that.

Even more than all of those, customers want Google Mobile Services apps, such as Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube.

Institutional trust is at an all time low, this is a smart move selling into the growing demand for secure devices and it’s in line with Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.

Finally this seems to be a corporate play itself, most companies also don’t want other companies surveilling their staff and extracting staff secrets. Hence the bringing of enterprise functionality to compliment the ‘secure’ work Graphene are already doing.

Consumers, when faced with a phone that offers "privacy" but that doesn't work with their banking app or their favorite game, will return it and get the non-privacy phone essentially every time.

This is the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.

The reason that doesn't work for white label microwaves is that the manufacturers don't want it to. The off brands exist so they can make sales to people who prioritize price, and they purposely change the company name every month so no one can find a review of the off brand and the same company can sell the same microwave with a higher margin to other people who will pay more for the name brand.

Whereas when your company makes a phone with better privacy etc., you want everybody to know that so they buy your phone instead of a competitor's.

> They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"

Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one. (It's actually a pretty decent red flag that your bank has a cargo cult security team.)

It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".

This Motorola thing has (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".

Consumers don't understand and they don't care. Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.

How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?

> Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one.

If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.

That's the marketing noise from the company itself. Then you go to Reddit or similar and ask technically competent people what they recommend.

> Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.

The phone that supports open operating systems is the one that's less of a hassle. It doesn't go out of support even though there's nothing wrong with it, it isn't full of spyware and weird bugs because people can actually fix them when the OEM doesn't, it has a working ad blocker etc.

> How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?

Windows market share was >90%, now it's 67% and still falling. And that's just desktops; Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated. By most accounts Windows Phone was actually decent but being from the notorious company whose OS nobody uses unless they're locked in was a death sentence.

> If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.

You're not switching banks to buy a new phone, you're switching banks because when you bought a new phone it made you realize that your bank sucks. Which annoyed you enough to spend five minutes checking out other banks, at which point you realized there are credit unions that not only support your new phone but pay better interest rates and charge lower fees.

Then you remember that time when they charged you that fee for some BS reason last year and you swore you were going to get a new bank but never got around to it, and decide that you'd rather get on with what you always intended to do sooner rather than later instead of replacing your new phone that you otherwise like.

This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps. They didn't have apps because they rewrote between Windows Mobile 6 and WP7, and rewrote between WP7 and WP8, and rewrote between between WP8.1 and WP10. That's a lot of work for developers and they didn't have enough users to justify developers rewriting their apps that many times. Combine that with some companies refusing to build apps at all (YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client) and users didn't want to put up with the lack of apps either.

They didn't have apps because nobody likes them. If you're a user and you expect them to be well-liked then you buy the phone expecting others to buy the phone and developers to target it. If you're a developer then you make apps expecting enough users to buy the phone.

But if you don't like them and you're not sure anybody else is going to like them then you play wait and see instead, and so does everybody else, and so they have no apps and no users and people start to see that they have no apps and no users.

Which is why they kept changing things trying to force people to do it, giving Windows 8 that widely-disliked tablet interface on desktops etc.

> YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client

Oh no, did someone with a dominant OS market share do an anti-competitive thing to Microsoft?

You're asking why people don't pick up Linux faster but you can see the symmetry when it's going the other way. It's not that they don't want to, it's that 80% of enshitification is lock-in.

Roughly 10% of buyers across most products and services will seek to buy “the best”. For those where the best is defined as “the best security”, Motorola (running GrapheneOS) has the opportunity to take these customers off of Apple. Not to say everyone is looking for a “more secure phone” but positioning that can seek to gain 5-10% of the mobile phone market, for a player who hasn’t had significant market share since the pre-iPhone 1990’s, looks like a no brainer, from Motorola’s perspective.

Where did you see this? I want to believe it, but I can't find any press release about this (other than it already being available as an option at checkout, but it's not default) outside of weird domains full of AI articles.

Basic details from the article were that machines would come with Ubuntu for retail and fedora for business machines and that 60% of new machines were planned to be Linux; therefore ending Lenovos prioritising windows on the majority of its machines.

But yeah can’t find much record of it now.

This site seems to have scraped the article I read as that copy all reads familiar but I def wasn’t reading from an AI site with a YouTube thumbnail up top.

https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/lenovos-historic-shift-...

Earlier article that’s not in question. https://itsfoss.com/news/lenovo-cuts-windows-tax/

The only specialty that we possess over others is a deeper knowledge about technology and the politics behind it. But it DOESN'T have to be exclusive to us. We're not the only ones fed up with this amount of BS from the gilded class. People do listen and act if we're willing to inform them. Even if everyone doesn't respond, there will still be enough to make a difference. Just dismissing their will like this is uncharitable at best.

After two years of talking up mastodon/pixelfed and most folks ignoring me, I've gotten 2 pings from family members about signing up and migrating off of twitter/instagram. It's only a matter of time and how quickly the rug gets pulled out from under folks I think.

Maybe their closer contacts disappeared…

Laptops too. Look at the Steam Deck or Switch 2, both years old hardware, both very relevant. Laptops with equivalent specs are more than fine for most people.

Yeah, most people don't want that. Wasn't that apple add with the hammer all about freedom?

Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how many people are sideloading apps, which is part of the reason Google tried their bullshit with developing countries first.

You're right that people mostly care about if it works, but when they have more choices they care about more things IF all else is equal. The "2 years" thing is definitely not correct either, especially as budgets are getting tighter.

The time is right for this change, as the reality is that the market has stagnated. Even cheap phones have good cameras, good batteries, and run smooth now. There's been very little innovation in phones over the last 5 years that the average person actually cares about. But the average person is frustrated with surveillance capitalism, but feels like there's nothing they can do about it. Don't confuse exhaustion with apathy. They look similar, but are very different.

The Windows phone did all three way better than Android and was still a massive failure in the US and abroad.

- tech consumers (i.e. the current GOS pixel market)

- family members of tech consumers. i.e. tech consumers can hopefully now recommend stock grapheneOS on motorola to family members since it's not a custom ROM but just a stock device with official manufacturer support.

- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.

- non-techy users who want a device without AI or a bunch of unnecessary addon apps like google or samsung tend to preload on devices.

- business IT optimising for security and minimal attack surface while sticking to COTS B2B and B2C options for corporate handhelds.

Like this isn't the largest market ever but it's a sizeable and fairly loyal market because each one of these groups is fairly opposed to unnecessary change. It's safe, reliable, and sustainable growth in a broader market that is extremely hostile.

And they are in particular targeting the business IT market since this announcement was made as part of their showcase on their new B2B cellular options.

If features like phone calls, SMS, the camera and most regular apps work (especially banking apps, sadly), they'll be happy and receive free indefinite support from me.

I wouldn't use banking apps myself unless they open source them, but I'm willing to make a concession and support my friends' issues with such apps.

* xiaomi with their miui skin/custom ROM - "bringing iOS like polish to Android" back then

* oneplus with their initial devices with cyanogenmod - clean aosp interface without any bloat and lots of features.

In fact, when my brother was buying phones for my mom (neither of them were really that technically inclined), he bought a Motorola mostly because "it doesn't have all those ads like redmi at the same price"

Not to mention the more techy people in a family unit often make recommendations. I told my dad to buy a Nexus phone for that same reason which he still has, of course it's 10y old now so I'll probably have him upgrade to a Motorola.

The ecosystem is closed, Google is speed-running to 100% evil, they're locking down APK installations, etc.

I need to find a replacement, and with me a lot of tech friends and non-techies that just ask me for advice.

The market is waiting for someone to step in; this is a golden chance for Motorola.

I'm annoyed a lot by that, but there's simply no alternative that I found.

I definitely see how large security conscious companies could be quite interested in a good GrapheneOS phone since it would alleviate fears about their corporate data getting leaked to Google, and really allow them to secure the phone in all the ways they want. So the market wouldn't just be niche privacy conscious consumer, but companies buying these phones for employees.

Because here in Canada you can buy devices preloaded with such things for a pittance over MSRP.

Currently, yes. These are easily achieved bars for a Graphene piece.