This whole thing feels like a lobbying push, and to be frank, I am more worried about the monied interests who might have bought this kind of lawmaking and what their end game is.
People in this situation could also have chosen to not buy a cell phone in the first place, eschewing that benefit for using landlines or cordless phones; and yet, I don't think we would consider that a reasonable limitation, right?
Clearly, then, there is some line that we must draw where people are buying something they think they want and yet should still get to have full access to, and I don't see why it would correlate with Apple vs. Google.
In my case, I barely wanted a phone: I want a good camera attached to a good touch screen; I have requirements past that largely dictated by size, weight, and durability. That's the device I am looking for.
The devices which satisfy my needs are mostly from Apple or Samsung, both of whom lock down their devices. (Can I install an alternative browser on a Samsung Android device? Sure. But is it my device? No. No it is not and it has never been, by far. Samsung is only ever so slightly better than Apple with respect to that shit.)
The reality is: every device should be open. It shouldn't be some trade-off in the space where you don't get to have a device with any of the other key properties you want just because it is always a better business model to build a walled garden and then shill your services, charge a usage tax, or run advertisements.
That said, in a world where it is allowed to build closed devices, and it is some random set of tradeoffs that we all have to tolerate, we have to get to complain about it, because then it is just yet another property of the device, and we get to complain about all of the shitty decisions we had to put up with, whether that's the pricing, the functionality, the quality, the experience, the "tactile feel"... or whether it is open or not.
So like, I don't really see the framework in which this one axis is something where people don't get to complain because "they should have gotten some other random shitty device that isn't at all what you wanted but was open"... this seems to just be some broken narrative--mostly pitched by people who clearly aren't also tracking the anti-trust work against Google and haven't been a part of the fight to jailbreak all of the random locked down Android devices--pitched by people who seem to just like locked down stuff and Apple's puritanical control over morality :(.
These people don't even want freedom. When I read their posts, I almost can't believe they're not bots created by Apple to promote and normalize their interests.
I just wish their shitty decisions didn't affect me. Unfortunately they do.
It is simple, choose an Android device. There are many premium android devices.
If you don't know by now that on iOS devices all the browsers are running the same engine under the hood, especially on a tech site like HN, then there isn't much hope for you.
I'm a reasonably-satisfied Android user, but Android is nearly as locked down as iOS. Sure, I can (and do) run "real" Firefox on my Pixel, and can (and do) side-load apps, but there are quite a few things I can't do.
For example, my Pixel 4 just fell out of Google's 3-year support period, so I no longer get security updates. I would be completely happy to run LineageOS or some other alternative that would extend the life of the phone with regular updates, but I can't if I still want to be able to use Google Pay and other apps that require the phone to pass SafetyNet. Those sorts of apps are a part of my day-to-day, so being unable to use them would be a showstopper. (I've read various things about tricking apps into believing the phone passes SafetyNet, but none of the methods seem particularly reliable, and for every user who says it works, there's another person who couldn't get it to work.)
So sure, it is technically possible for me to treat the phone as "open" and run whatever OS image on it I want, but then I become restricted in other ways as to what I can do on it. Maybe you don't care about being able to pay for things using your phone (etc.); that's fine. But I do, and I consider it a critical feature these days.
Given that there isn't an individual vote on each property of a device/ecosystem, iOS is probably the least evil rather than a completely optimal choice for many (if not most!) users.
Just imagine that type of reasoning applied to other parts of life, like politics, work, interpersonal relationships... "Love it, change it, or leave it" has three components, not two.
And if they'd bought one, and were unhappy about some aspect of that, you'd be here and write "But it's not your decision to buy an iPhone?". We don't live in a world were you can get your perfect choice with no compromises, and having made a compromise does not imply that you can't criticize decisions made by the system you choose.
Buying an Android phone certainly allows you to run other browsers that use their own rendering engines, but Android is hardly open; you are still restricted in many ways from doing what you might want to do, with little recourse. Installing a third-party OS image is possible, but then removes your access from some things that you might still like (any app that requires SafetyNet to pass, for example).
The bottom line is that there is no open phone platform out there that even remotely provides feature parity with Android or iOS. Anything you do is going to be a trade off, and for some people, there is no way to satisfy 100% of their needs and wants. That doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain about the bits that can't be satisfied.
A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time. They find out way later what the actual consequences of apple or google's walled gardens are, and can only escape the garden if they have an android phone with an unlocked bootloader
> A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time
I mean the devices change year to year but are people seriously finding themselves surprised by what iPhone can do but Android can't or vice versa?
If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a mortgage then yeah I'd say `not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time` but this is like the lowest stakes decision possible no?
> It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
Is that true? Seems like there is always a nearly free phone deal out there and your network will probably migrate everything for you anyway.
Most of the studios participate in MoviesAnywhere meaning a movie purchased on iTunes automatically shows up in your Amazon, Google, Vudu, etc library.
How many apps that you purchased that have an Android equivalent aren’t based on cross platform subscriptions?
Walled garden policies make full migration not possible, at least for free. Things like your music library, ebooks, in-app currency, etc are often not allowed to move.
If I were to move to iPhone now, I'd have to spend at least a hundred bucks finding and buying alternative apps.
Where is this narrative coming from? Only about 20% of App Store revenue coming from non game in app consumables (came out in the Epic Trial) and the other big money makers are from services like Netflix and Spotify where you can easily use your app cross platform. Even Apple Music is available for Android.
Most users aren’t complaining about any “walled garden”
God damnit it's my device.