Judge me if you must, but the only reason I recently bought a Pixel was because of the intention on sticking GrapheneOS on it the second I got it out of the box. And it really worked great for me so far...
Unless it's something to do with work, I don't (intentionally) touch anything that has to do with Google, as I dislike too many things about them.
And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit more work to publish those binaries and make sure they work. But they still kind of have to do that, for themselves. So I think it's fair to assume why they did it. Because they made a choice to take a small loss on the devices they would sell for the few GrapheneOS users, and cash in on the walled garden, data mining, ads serving, yada yada, whatever brings the extra money after the initial phone sale.
> Judge me if you must, but the only reason I recently bought a Pixel was because of the intention on sticking GrapheneOS on it the second I got it out of the box.
The only judgement is a positive one. I thought this is what one does now that we all understand just how broad and deep the tracking is at nearly every level. Buying a Pixel and immediately flashing GrapheneOS has been my default mode of operation for years now on all cellphones in my home (wife and myself). No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I'd rather my life not be turned into an open book for targeted advertisements and whatever other purposes every detail of my existence is used for now or in the future. It's mind boggling to me how many seem to simply not care.
> I thought this is what one does now [...] No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I applaud your ability to do this (seriously, genuinely, I do), but if you truly believe what you do is normal, just "what one does now", I must inform you that you live in a very small bubble.
I would like to run GrapheneOS on my phone, but I like being able to use Google Wallet, among other things. If I look at what I use my phone for, way too much of it relies on Play Services, and (critically) the SafetyNet (or whatever Google is calling it now) checks passing.
This situation blows. I really don't like these trade offs, and iOS's trade offs are different but no better.
To be honest, it's not like Google doesn't know this.
And it's not like it should be surprising to us that Google just ignores it.
They know they'll lose some sales, but the few percent of people who'll buy a Pixel anyways but keep the stock OS on it lead to a net plus for them.
They don't care about you liking their hardware and using it like you own it (oh the good old days). They care about you using their software so they can track you better and put ads in your phone experience, because long-term, this is where their money is.
It strongly highlights why we need a decent pixel 9 pro xl format device for linux phones and some focus there. Android is on its way out as something someone who cares about basic privacy can use
I only had Nexus and Pixel phones since they existed. I've never cared what hardware they had the only thing I cared is what they have killed now.
This is the bigger disappointment than the 24 days (and counting) that they need to repair my Pixel 7 right now. I'm really glad I didn't buy a new Pixel 9 already.
I’m not buying their devices after Nexus 5X and 6P disaster. Even despite my own devices did not boot loop. I mean buying them new and using them as my primary phone. Buying a used Pixel for $50, yeah, I might. So if it’ll face some weird hardware issue, I’m not going to be disappointed. I had zero issues (hardware-wise) with so many years of iPhones.
These days all that looks very depressing. The new redesign from Apple, and now this. I was actually thinking about maybe I’d like to give Pixels another chance. If buying used, I can play that lottery after all. But having no custom ROM option basically leaves me as miserable as with Apple: either take it as it is or leave.
> And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
Their support of Pixels with AOSP has been well documented! This has always been one of their selling points, as a sort of reference device. I've exclusively bought Pixel phones in recent years and this is one of the primary reasons.
Of course Google never made any guarantees, and a rug pull was always possible, but it's absolutely still disappointing and well worth commenting upon.
> If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.
A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.
> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.
What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".
The fact that you could buy a Pixel (or Nexus), real hardware sold to consumers as a phone, download AOSP (and proprietary blobs), and get a working build with all hardware supported with no additional work was super appreciated.
Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
Plus, there's just something cooler about running your own build of Android on real hardware v.s. a VM.
> Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
The article mentions that they're also supporting GSI's as a reference target of sorts, and that's way closer to real hardware. GSI's are annoying for other reasons though - for example, there isn't a single "GSI" build type, they vary according to low-level device features (such as partitioning) and what version of Android they first came out with. Still, it's better than nothing.
These days there's also GKI, a "generic kernel build" (minus custom modules and blobs) that's supposed to work on any recent device. Note, this is not a "mainline" Linux kernel at all, it's still very much a downstream fork with lots of custom patches. But it too is supposed to enable testing and development in a unified way, regardless of the actual device.
GrapheneOS made an unforced error by exaggerating the situation. ("Boy who cried wolf"). When you're generic and obviously false in your criticism, it makes it easy for the company to counter it. "Google is killing AOSP" catches eye, but it is sooo easy for the company to counter.
What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.
To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.
How is he exaggerating the situation? What is false about the criticism? Are you referring to a previous time where they cried wolf? I read through the Twitter thread and GrapheneOS seemed pretty even keeled and above board about it to me (even if that is uncharacteristic)
Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.
> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.
IIUC, GrapheneOS cares about being forensics-proof very much. And for Android phone forensics without consent, almost 0% of work are done after the boot chain ends. So it's all about firmware.
Non-Pixel devices usually require you to just give up secure boot, in this case a GrapheneOS install could be even worse than stock Android.
> Without the Pixel hardware repos (which include the device trees, driver binaries, and more), custom Android ROMs will have a hard time developing their OS updates. This might also have implications for security (vulnerability) researchers.
Without GrapheneOS im probably going to iPhone. Been using Graphene for years, its so light and simple without all the Google cruft. Pixels with Google is not for me anymore.
Another one for the google graveyard. There's no benefit at this point to owning a pixel if you can't control it. I'm going to trial iPhone again and try to live with the few downsides, and the many upsides.
Sounds like "No, AOSP is not dead. You can still run it in an emulator if you want. Have fun..."
> For years, developers have been building Cuttlefish (available on GitHub as the reference device for AOSP) and GSI targets from source. We continue to make those available for testing and development purposes.
I'm a complete noob regarding AOSP, but if someone with more knowledge of the ecosystem reads this: Are those alternative reference targets actually useful for custom ROMs and would allow updating roms for Android 16 on Pixels as well, or is this a smokescreen?
Warning: Complete shots in the dark here so take with a truckload of salt
Watching Google's actions on Android over the past many years, they are clearly inching in one strategic direction, and that is toward being more iPhone like (i.e. locked down, user hostile, user distrusting, etc). There might be a few "two steps forward, one step back" points like the new Android terminal, but it feels like clear directional momentum away from user capabilities. It's an absolute shame too, because Google products could be hacker's delights (I mean owner-hackers, not grey/black hat).
In their defense they are far from alone. Since Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
The net result has been that I've become almost entirely disinterested in mobile phones and all the IoT things, which is a huge personal loss. It's not just disinterest, but is turning in to active hostility. I've started to hate my phone because of many of the things it can't do now (that it used to), though thanks to the proliferation and expectation of "always connected" I can't get away from it without suffering professional or social consequences that aren't worth it. It's become a required piece of equipment to function in everyday life, because of other parties. If I could go back to the days of a single landline phone in the house with maybe an emergency cell phone in the car, I truly think I would.
It didn't (and doesn't!) have to be this way Google. You have the market power to change this, and you wouldn't even have to do all that much. I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I just hope that the rising generation of hackers will hear our stories from the glory days when compute was empowering to the owner of it, not restricting.
> I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I'm not so sure of that, at least in the US anyway. Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
The only way out is regulation - laws that mandate devices be open, and alternative app stores, side loading, root access, and alternative OSes are supported by order of law.
> Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
Consider what happens if they actually do this. Millions of people have that phone platform and aren't going to buy a new phone for at least a couple years. Switching phone platforms is a large time investment for most people because all your stuff is on that platform's cloud services etc.
Meanwhile most of that stuff doesn't need a phone. You're watching Netflix on your big screen TV rather than your tiny pocket device most of the time, aren't you? Your bank has a website. So if it stopped working on your phone, you wouldn't immediately buy a new phone, you would just use the website. But now the streaming service and the bank are immediately getting millions of user complaints that their app is broken.
Either of the major platforms could also use any of the malicious compliance schemes they use for other things. Find some over-broad or unreasonable contractual provision in the "must supply DRM" agreement that you don't like anyway, point to it as a justification for making a change to the DRM system in the brand new version of the OS, and disable the DRM in the older versions of the OS that are on 95% of existing devices, blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
Then the users don't have to switch platforms, they "only" have to buy a new device and can avoid the platform transition cost. For the ones who do, the vendor gets to sell more devices. For all the ones who don't, the DRM pushers still get millions of user complaints and a strong incentive to release the app without the DRM in it.
And if they do release the app without the DRM in it, now the new devices don't need the DRM either ("we found a vulnerability in the later version too and had to disable it as well"), and now the users have no reason to switch platforms over it so the DRM can stay gone forever.
This is the same problem the incumbent duopoly causes for all other app developers. And that's bad -- the duopoly should be broken up -- but it does currently exist, and it could, if it wanted to, use that to do something good. (You might also consider what would happen if they both decided to lose DRM at once.)
If you think regulation is the answer then why not use those regulatory powers to de-fang DRM and update copyright law. People gave up their right to make copies to incentivize publishers as that was that only way to get copies. Publishers are no longer necessary for this and people should be demanding their right to make copies back.
> Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
This is part that is unfortunate. You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system, and would freely allow a corporation burning money to make improvements to it.
Instead what you see is an odd (and counterintuitive) behavior of saying alternate app stores are bad, side loading is bad - mostly because of Apple's unique PR/Marketing spin.
Whilst there are some seemingly unpaid Google defenders here today, I am always surprised how many people come out of the woodwork to defend whatever Apple chooses to do.
The problem with Android is that it’s something of a bad compromise. That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing, and unfortunately nobody in the industry with any kind of power is doing anything to try to fix that situation. I’m not even really sure that it can be fixed so long as smartphones are based around custom ARM boards. Attempts at truly open ARM-based smartphones all have a laundry list of problems mostly thanks to compenent vendors that won’t play nice with drivers and documentation (or if they do, it’s with SoCs so old as to not be remotely competitive).
Following that, I may as well benefit from an overall smoother user experience, better app selection, etc on iOS. It’s not open and doesn’t pretend to be.
I’m keeping my eyes open for a smart device analogue of x86 desktop PCs, though. It might be powered by an open RISC SoC design or maybe someone finally figures out how to make x86 work well in handhelds, I dunno, but the current situation isn’t it.
> You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system
Nope
I work on embedded security which is why there is no IoT shit at home.
I am forced to be tech support for my family, which is why they have iPhones and why i support locked-down hardware - less pain for me removing sideloaded shit than when they had Android devices.
I am bored of maintaining things - i just want them to work, which is why my WRT54G is gone and I use UniFi gear.
And I am tired of "slightly annoying, but i am supporting open source", i just want my laptop to wake up from sleep every time and last a while day, which is why I use a MacBook.
If it was open source IN ADDITION to doing everything else i want, sure. Being open source by itself is NOT a feature i am willing to pay for with any inconvenience. And being locked down IS a convenience when you are managing devices for people with no digital hygiene (aka: family)
Readit News
And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit more work to publish those binaries and make sure they work. But they still kind of have to do that, for themselves. So I think it's fair to assume why they did it. Because they made a choice to take a small loss on the devices they would sell for the few GrapheneOS users, and cash in on the walled garden, data mining, ads serving, yada yada, whatever brings the extra money after the initial phone sale.
The only judgement is a positive one. I thought this is what one does now that we all understand just how broad and deep the tracking is at nearly every level. Buying a Pixel and immediately flashing GrapheneOS has been my default mode of operation for years now on all cellphones in my home (wife and myself). No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I'd rather my life not be turned into an open book for targeted advertisements and whatever other purposes every detail of my existence is used for now or in the future. It's mind boggling to me how many seem to simply not care.
I applaud your ability to do this (seriously, genuinely, I do), but if you truly believe what you do is normal, just "what one does now", I must inform you that you live in a very small bubble.
I would like to run GrapheneOS on my phone, but I like being able to use Google Wallet, among other things. If I look at what I use my phone for, way too much of it relies on Play Services, and (critically) the SafetyNet (or whatever Google is calling it now) checks passing.
This situation blows. I really don't like these trade offs, and iOS's trade offs are different but no better.
They know they'll lose some sales, but the few percent of people who'll buy a Pixel anyways but keep the stock OS on it lead to a net plus for them.
They don't care about you liking their hardware and using it like you own it (oh the good old days). They care about you using their software so they can track you better and put ads in your phone experience, because long-term, this is where their money is.
This is the bigger disappointment than the 24 days (and counting) that they need to repair my Pixel 7 right now. I'm really glad I didn't buy a new Pixel 9 already.
These days all that looks very depressing. The new redesign from Apple, and now this. I was actually thinking about maybe I’d like to give Pixels another chance. If buying used, I can play that lottery after all. But having no custom ROM option basically leaves me as miserable as with Apple: either take it as it is or leave.
This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
Their support of Pixels with AOSP has been well documented! This has always been one of their selling points, as a sort of reference device. I've exclusively bought Pixel phones in recent years and this is one of the primary reasons.
Of course Google never made any guarantees, and a rug pull was always possible, but it's absolutely still disappointing and well worth commenting upon.
Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.
A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.
> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.
What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".
Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
Plus, there's just something cooler about running your own build of Android on real hardware v.s. a VM.
The article mentions that they're also supporting GSI's as a reference target of sorts, and that's way closer to real hardware. GSI's are annoying for other reasons though - for example, there isn't a single "GSI" build type, they vary according to low-level device features (such as partitioning) and what version of Android they first came out with. Still, it's better than nothing.
These days there's also GKI, a "generic kernel build" (minus custom modules and blobs) that's supposed to work on any recent device. Note, this is not a "mainline" Linux kernel at all, it's still very much a downstream fork with lots of custom patches. But it too is supposed to enable testing and development in a unified way, regardless of the actual device.
What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.
To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.
> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/android-16...
This was posted 2 days back.
The hardware support is nice, but even without it it's still vastly more secure than stock android.
Non-Pixel devices usually require you to just give up secure boot, in this case a GrapheneOS install could be even worse than stock Android.
Dead Comment
This concerns me as a GrapeneOS user.
> For years, developers have been building Cuttlefish (available on GitHub as the reference device for AOSP) and GSI targets from source. We continue to make those available for testing and development purposes.
I'm a complete noob regarding AOSP, but if someone with more knowledge of the ecosystem reads this: Are those alternative reference targets actually useful for custom ROMs and would allow updating roms for Android 16 on Pixels as well, or is this a smokescreen?
Watching Google's actions on Android over the past many years, they are clearly inching in one strategic direction, and that is toward being more iPhone like (i.e. locked down, user hostile, user distrusting, etc). There might be a few "two steps forward, one step back" points like the new Android terminal, but it feels like clear directional momentum away from user capabilities. It's an absolute shame too, because Google products could be hacker's delights (I mean owner-hackers, not grey/black hat).
In their defense they are far from alone. Since Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
The net result has been that I've become almost entirely disinterested in mobile phones and all the IoT things, which is a huge personal loss. It's not just disinterest, but is turning in to active hostility. I've started to hate my phone because of many of the things it can't do now (that it used to), though thanks to the proliferation and expectation of "always connected" I can't get away from it without suffering professional or social consequences that aren't worth it. It's become a required piece of equipment to function in everyday life, because of other parties. If I could go back to the days of a single landline phone in the house with maybe an emergency cell phone in the car, I truly think I would.
It didn't (and doesn't!) have to be this way Google. You have the market power to change this, and you wouldn't even have to do all that much. I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I just hope that the rising generation of hackers will hear our stories from the glory days when compute was empowering to the owner of it, not restricting.
I'm not so sure of that, at least in the US anyway. Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
The only way out is regulation - laws that mandate devices be open, and alternative app stores, side loading, root access, and alternative OSes are supported by order of law.
Consider what happens if they actually do this. Millions of people have that phone platform and aren't going to buy a new phone for at least a couple years. Switching phone platforms is a large time investment for most people because all your stuff is on that platform's cloud services etc.
Meanwhile most of that stuff doesn't need a phone. You're watching Netflix on your big screen TV rather than your tiny pocket device most of the time, aren't you? Your bank has a website. So if it stopped working on your phone, you wouldn't immediately buy a new phone, you would just use the website. But now the streaming service and the bank are immediately getting millions of user complaints that their app is broken.
Either of the major platforms could also use any of the malicious compliance schemes they use for other things. Find some over-broad or unreasonable contractual provision in the "must supply DRM" agreement that you don't like anyway, point to it as a justification for making a change to the DRM system in the brand new version of the OS, and disable the DRM in the older versions of the OS that are on 95% of existing devices, blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
Then the users don't have to switch platforms, they "only" have to buy a new device and can avoid the platform transition cost. For the ones who do, the vendor gets to sell more devices. For all the ones who don't, the DRM pushers still get millions of user complaints and a strong incentive to release the app without the DRM in it.
And if they do release the app without the DRM in it, now the new devices don't need the DRM either ("we found a vulnerability in the later version too and had to disable it as well"), and now the users have no reason to switch platforms over it so the DRM can stay gone forever.
This is the same problem the incumbent duopoly causes for all other app developers. And that's bad -- the duopoly should be broken up -- but it does currently exist, and it could, if it wanted to, use that to do something good. (You might also consider what would happen if they both decided to lose DRM at once.)
This is part that is unfortunate. You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system, and would freely allow a corporation burning money to make improvements to it.
Instead what you see is an odd (and counterintuitive) behavior of saying alternate app stores are bad, side loading is bad - mostly because of Apple's unique PR/Marketing spin.
The hacker types are the riff-raff the venture capital firm put up with on their website about making money with software.
Following that, I may as well benefit from an overall smoother user experience, better app selection, etc on iOS. It’s not open and doesn’t pretend to be.
I’m keeping my eyes open for a smart device analogue of x86 desktop PCs, though. It might be powered by an open RISC SoC design or maybe someone finally figures out how to make x86 work well in handhelds, I dunno, but the current situation isn’t it.
Nope
I work on embedded security which is why there is no IoT shit at home.
I am forced to be tech support for my family, which is why they have iPhones and why i support locked-down hardware - less pain for me removing sideloaded shit than when they had Android devices.
I am bored of maintaining things - i just want them to work, which is why my WRT54G is gone and I use UniFi gear.
And I am tired of "slightly annoying, but i am supporting open source", i just want my laptop to wake up from sleep every time and last a while day, which is why I use a MacBook.
If it was open source IN ADDITION to doing everything else i want, sure. Being open source by itself is NOT a feature i am willing to pay for with any inconvenience. And being locked down IS a convenience when you are managing devices for people with no digital hygiene (aka: family)