I don’t think the OS is the problem - it’s that some of the critical service/apps people rely on (government ID, banking) only exist for the closed systems. Third party OS’s try to “solve” it through various container approaches running the official apps, but since they see that as a security problem it’s not something you can fully trust to be working at all times.
I think they’re both pretty big problems. An open OS and hardware that supports it seems to be a huge hurdle, but at least there is a clear vision of how to solve it. The problem you bring up though… It seems like we’ve almost gone too far at this point and it’s gonna be really hard to put the cat back in the bag. It seems like something we need to solve with legislation potentially?
This. Alternative OS exist: Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, SailfishOS, just to name a few.
What is missing are the apps people want. And those include mostly commercial apps, where the developers need to weigh dev hours vs profits, and decide to only target the big two for obvious reasons. That is the key problem.
I don’t think the OS is the problem - it’s that some of the critical service/apps people rely on (government ID, banking) only exist for the closed systems. Third party OS’s try to “solve” it through various container approaches running the official apps, but since they see that as a security problem it’s not something you can fully trust to be working at all times.
All those “apps” are websites. You could say NFC is special, but so is gps.
To be fair, a lot of those depend on some client side trust. Which is conceptually stupid, but it is the way it is.
I think they’re both pretty big problems. An open OS and hardware that supports it seems to be a huge hurdle, but at least there is a clear vision of how to solve it. The problem you bring up though… It seems like we’ve almost gone too far at this point and it’s gonna be really hard to put the cat back in the bag. It seems like something we need to solve with legislation potentially?
This. Alternative OS exist: Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, SailfishOS, just to name a few.
What is missing are the apps people want. And those include mostly commercial apps, where the developers need to weigh dev hours vs profits, and decide to only target the big two for obvious reasons. That is the key problem.