Before we put all the blame on vendors, I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, this: the public finds this tradeoff (privacy for entertainment) completely acceptable. With all the outrage, privacy-centric solutions are out there and relatively easy to find, how come they don't get more traction? Including among the HN crowd?
There is nothing inherent to the benefits that these companies tout that require them to lock us out of our own devices.
What you are describing is not a tradeoff but a magnificent bribe. They bribe us with measly benefits in order to accept the deal that is incredibly favourable for them.
I'd argue the general population doesn't even know this trade off exists (not helped by the pros being advertised to users and the cons purposely not mentioned). Even then the minority (us) shouldn't be stopped from doing what we want with our stuff just so some company can make more money.
> privacy-centric solutions are out there and relatively easy to find
Really? Please name them. Over the past 10 or 15 years, I've never seen anything other than the iPhone/Android or Mac/Windows duopoly for sale in any retail store. I've never seen any advertising for other than those duopolies. The HN crowd may be aware of obscure options, but for the vast majority of consumers, they don't exist. And since we as developers make money catering to the vast majority of consumers, we're kind of stuck with the duopoly too, at least as far as our work is concerned.
And as for "why are not selling this in every retail store?", the answer is the same - because if they were, no one would buy them. I found the situation curious, while everyone complains about it, only very few people are trying to do anything about it. Perhaps the breaking point was not reached yet, and something big has to happen to change people's perspective.
> And as for "why are not selling this in every retail store?", the answer is the same - because if they were, no one would buy them.
That's purely hypothetical. How could any prove or disprove the assertion?
The general point, though, is that consumer awareness is essential for sales. People won't buy things that they don't know about. As an indie developer myself, I'm painfully aware of this. It doesn't matter how great one's product is if nobody knows about it. Advertising is very expensive, so it requires vast capital outlays in order to get your products into the minds of consumers and onto the shelves of stores. The big established brands have a massive advantage, making it difficult for competitors to break into the market. Apple itself leveraged its existing brand, with Mac and iPod, in order to promote iPhone. And Apple's primary competitor is Google, who also was already an established brand via search and Chrome.
Remember that back in the day, Microsoft almost destroyed the entire desktop OS market. They almost killed Apple too. Only the Department of Justice put some kind of break on it, and Microsoft let Apple live in order to provide antitrust cover. If MS had for example simply withdrawn its apps from Mac—Office, Internet Explorer (remember that Internet Explorer was originally the default web browser on Mac OS X before Safari!)—Apple likely would have died.
It's not just about familiarity. People are willing to try new things. The actual problems are network effects and vendor lock-in.
The hardest part about switching from Facebook isn't installing some other app or anything like that, it's getting everyone else you know to switch from Facebook.
The hardest part about switching from Windows isn't installing Linux, it's getting e.g. game developers to target Linux before it has significant consumer market share.
That isn't to say that doing these thing is impossible, but it certainly isn't trivial, so anyone wondering why it hasn't happened already can't seriously think the only explanation is that nobody cares. It's like saying nobody cares about high healthcare costs -- of course they care, the question is what do we have to do to fix it?
I'm glad that Fairphones are available in stores right next to Xiaomis, but they cost three times the price for half the specifications. It may plausibly be cheaper to buy a Xiaomi phone and then personally sue Xiaomi to get it unlocked than to buy a Fairphone.
I've never even heard of that before, and I'm terminally online.
Anyway, desktop computers aren't really the main problem here. For example, Apple Macs offer vastly more personal freedom than Apple iPhones. If iPhones behaved like Macs in that respect, then we might not be having this debate. To the extent that Macs have been increasingly locked down over the past 15 years, it's mostly just copying the iPhone, porting the "features" over from one platform to the other.
FWIW, I have no idea if this is any good. My point is, I found this after maybe 3 minutes searching. If we were to spend 30 minutes, we would definitely find something reasonable.
I'm using a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5) as a daily driver, and it has a lot of rough edges. Root access is a no-brainer (it basically runs Debian), but a small company making them can't possibly provide Apple experience.
That's fair. What kind of rough edges did you find? I think I'm OK without any Google services, because I can simply keep another phone just for those and banks/trading platforms.
Thanks! Looks like some of the concerns are legit. I guess I'll carry two phones if I buy this one. The web browsing experience is the most concerning one -- if that's bad then I might as well use a dumb phone.
I have no data to back this up. So what follows is purely my personal opinion.
I think the reason people don't care, is because they don't know. The average person either doesn't know or barely knows That anything deeper than what they see in the user interface is happening on their system.
We humans are very much an out of sight out of mind type of creature. If we can't see it, it's hard for us to imagine that it exists.
People know, Facebook and Google getting crap for all their tracking is evidence enough.
The reason people don't care is because digital freedom/privacy is largely irrelevant to most people's lives. You can't convince someone to care about something that doesn't affect their life, they're too busy for that.
Exactly. Even the people who complain about these things immediately get defensive when you call them out on their uses: "Well, I can't switch because what about my banking app?" or "Well, games don't count as software to me." or "It won't make any difference to the big tech companies if I'm the only one who switches, so why bother?"
I believe GP is referring to things like privacy-centric de-Googled Android phones, which definitely are an option. I would not classify those as "least bad" or even bad.
GP is correct about Apple products; even among the HN crowd they are likely the most popular devices. I think this is because most readers aren't trying to die on the hill of openness. They're more concerned with software and ubiquity, two areas where Apple is doing very well.
You do get many here enthusiastic about open access to your own hardware, but I think we're talking about a Venn diagram; we're not all the same. (I'm an Android user.)
Actually, I was disagreeing with the GP specifically about Apple products. I'm an Apple user, but very much because they're the "least bad" option. De-Googled Android phones still have awful audio latency (I'm a musician who makes a music app on the side), very limited messaging and notification features, and integrate poorly with desktop OSes. For how I use my devices, open or no, Android simply isn't a viable option.
The thing about all this is, Apple's products being well-integrated and well-designed doesn't require them to be locked down the way they are. The EU move to force them to use USB-C/Thunderbolt over Lightning is a perfect example of this. It unilaterally improved things for users, and iPhone 14 vs. 15 sales reflected that pretty clearly.
So I'd especially describe Apple as the "least bad" rather than "completely acceptable." They're specifically what I had in mind saying that.
> Apple's products being well-integrated and well-designed doesn't require them to be locked down the way they are.
That's definitely true, and it's what has made me favor Google over Apple for decades now. Google's deal has been free software for the price of your user data, but I've accepted that deal because Google has never practiced predatory lock-in. Apple makes claims to value your privacy (I wouldn't know) while making predatory lock-in fundamental to everything they do. Denying access to your own device is part of this.
The irony is that I loathe the data economy. I think it has gone far beyond what Google ever envisioned (for years it seemed they had yet to discover a way to make money at all). The privacy aspect matters, but I also hate the way it makes companies and their products behave; the way it feels like every click results in an attempt to directly advertise to you. And it's all clumsy and broken. How often are ads even correctly targeted? I feel about conglomerated user data the way I feel about meme coins: it's all built on speculation, hopes, and dreams, and has less to do with people actually buying your product. I can't wait for the bubble to burst and/or for a global ban on the sale and purchase of user data.
I think we're very much in agreement on most of these things, and our "platform loyalty" led us to perceive different options as the "least bad" - that's totally okay, though! I was an Android user from 2009-2020 because I agreed with you, up until I started working on my own music software, which pushed things the other way for me.
For your last sentence, though... user data and its utilities are arguably not a "bubble." And as we've seen with AI training, use of data being illegal doesn't really stop companies from doing it. I think we'll have better actual results from governments forcing Apple to let us run our own software on the hardware we buy, as opposed to governments trying to prevent Google, Meta, et. al. from abusing customer data.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that the former is about regulating our rights with hardware, while the latter is about software. Hardware is just easier for governments to regulate. When you try to regulate software, companies will do things like the deliberately-annoying cookie popups we got after GDPR/CCPA, because it's cheap to produce lots of bullshit to experiment with ways around those regulations.
This isn't about privacy. Not directly anyway. This is about your right to have control of your own property.
You make a fair point though; the case does need to be made as to why this is a market failure and not just consumer choice working as expected. Why _do_ consumers tolerate manufacturers retaining ultimate control of consumer's property after the sale? It certainly doesn't seem to be that important to them. Maybe greater awareness of the issue would help somewhat?
> Why _do_ consumers tolerate manufacturers retaining ultimate control of consumer's property after the sale?
Just my opinion from many conversations with normies about this: It's because most of them don't know (the marketing material from these companies certainly doesn't advertise it), and the ones who do know don't care because they wouldn't be able to (technical knowledge) or want to root/unlock and utilize the capabilities.
> the ones who do know don't care because they wouldn't be able to (technical knowledge) or want to root/unlock and utilize the capabilities
This is a good point. Some of that is perhaps self-perpetuating: Why root if there's nothing you can do with root? And why develop stuff you can do with root if there's nobody who can use it? If there weren't so much active suppression of software freedom by manufacturers maybe the situation would change and the benefits of consumers having full control of their devices would be more apparent.
And ironically, it was the jailbreakers who demonstrated to Apple why the company needed to add third-party apps to its platform that originally didn't allow them.
Agree fully. Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. I accept the risk or tradeoff of Apple or MS spying on me. It’s not that, but the right to repair, to tinker, to hack. Those things have brought us so much interesting wonderful things. My entire generation (millennial) has superior tech literacy to both those that came before and after (no shade to the older gen - some of you are better than us, but with millennials it’s so much more widespread than eg gen X). Many younger gens never use ”real” computers (only tablet & phone). The gilded age was an anomaly, and is over.
> the case does need to be made as to why this is a market failure and not just consumer choice working as expected
I swear this consumer choice navel gazing will be the death of innovation. The US is obsessed with this narrative, that the magic market hand will self-correct, without any justification or scrutiny. Yes, consumer choice is necessary, but not sufficient. Just look at the developments in tech over the last decade+. I don’t have the solution but anyone who’s not entirely lost in dogma should be able to see the failures.
Market failures do happen, so I'm not claiming consumer choice is the perfect solution in every case. But consumers aren't stupid either; if this _were_ a mainstream concern the market _would_ self-correct. But it hasn't self-corrected on this issue, because most consumers don't really care that much. So I think you have to carefully consider why that is before you start thinking you know what they want better than than they do and eliminating certain choices by government decree.
There are costs to any regulation, and lots of possible unintended consequences. So even though I'm personally a strong advocate for user control and software freedom, I'm wary of acting without strong justification and careful consideration of the underlying reasons behind the status quo.
> I accept the risk or tradeoff of Apple or MS spying on me.
For what it's worth, I do think this issue has indirect effects on privacy. If you have ultimate control of the software on your device, you can use that control in ways that help protect your privacy. Otherwise you're limited to whatever protections the manufacturer decides to grant you.
There are lots of similar positive possible downstream effects of software freedom, which is why I think this is an issue worth serious consideration despite my misgivings.
> if this _were_ a mainstream concern the market _would_ self-correct.
The underlying premise here is that the alternative is available for consumers to choose, i.e. that you can buy something which is otherwise equivalent to an iPhone but supports third party app stores or installing a third party OS. But that isn't the case.
What you get instead is e.g. Fairphone, which has the specs of a $200 phone but costs $800 and if you actually have root your bank app might break etc. And still many people buy it. So all you can conclude from this is that the price the mass market places on freedom is less than $600 plus some non-trivial usability issues, not that they value it at zero and don't care about it at all.
On top of this, it's a threshold issue. If the median phone was rooted, people would develop apps that need root. When the percentage is some low single digit if not a fraction of a percent, they don't, and then taking the trade offs of a phone that can be rooted isn't buying you what it should because you need a critical mass in order to achieve the expected benefits, but you need the benefits in order to achieve the critical mass. This is the sort of situation where a mandate can get you over the hump.
> There are costs to any regulation, and lots of possible unintended consequences.
A good way to handle this is through anti-trust, because then you can do things like exempt any company with less than e.g. 5% market share. That means not Apple or Google or Samsung, but if there is any major problem with the rule then the market can work around it by having 20+ independent companies each provide whatever it is that people actually want. Meanwhile that level of competition might very well solve the original problem on its own, because now a couple of them start selling unlocked devices without any countervailing trade offs and that's enough to make the others do it.
