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.
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.
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.
The hacker types are the riff-raff the venture capital firm put up with on their website about making money with software.
I'll see on a thread defending Airbus and Boeing next.
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.)
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're right, but Google could do this (and probably the only one who could do 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)
You used to be able to do exactly that with Nexus & Pixel. That you still chose to buy something that doesn't let you do anything just proves GP's point.
I think you're vastly overestimating customers' willingness to listen and care about whose fault it is. In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time. It would take a concerted effort across tech companies to really take them down, and nobody is interested in waging that war because the cost of simply implementing DRM is too low for it to be worth the struggle and the risk.
I don’t really need first party support though, as long as the OS in question has that kind of universality. I can grab Fedora or Mint or whatever and it’ll run more or less perfectly on any generic PC box I happen to have with a little effort.
It’s a much better situation than what we have with Android where outside of model-specific ROMs like Graphene, whether or not you can run a ROM on your phone depends on the model specific build (which has a decent chance of having been uploaded by a high schooler) existing and continuing to get updates. It’s a mess.
Complaining about it and immediately buying a different phone are two different things. And in the meantime, what are they doing? Watching YouTube or whatever other service doesn't use DRM instead of Netflix, and then continuing to watch the things they started watching on that service on their TV when they get home, and then wondering why they're still paying for the one they're not using anymore.
Notice also that a huge proportion of these people don't have an iPhone because they can't afford one -- cheapest new iPhone is ~$600, cheapest new Android is ~$50 -- so switching platforms was never an option for them. And conversely, that the people whose identity and sense of self is tied up in having an iPhone are certainly not going to buy an Android over Netflix.
> The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time.
Evidence to the contrary. Every time one of these popular DRM systems gets cracked, do they stop using it and lose all of the customers who have that platform? No, they just keep using the broken one because not losing a lot of customers is way more important to them than the DRM.
If, if only, in my mouth -- mushroom grew, well then it would not be a mouth, it would be a garden. (The point is to not engage in impossible hypotheticals)
I don't see why there can't be a well-funded effort to build a powerful MDM for Linux, but to my knowledge no one comes close. I'd think it would be very profitable.