zlacker

> Because PC is an American thing but phones are not.

I don't really understand what you're talking about here. Android and iOS are American companies. American culture is John Deere locking down their equipment. Anti-consumer laws, pushing IP laws onto the rest of the world by treaty, being overly litigious, these are all American culture. I think the culture you're thinking of is nearly dead in a shell of corporatism.

The PC was a pretty unique event due to a confluence of historical factors that all came together in a certain way. It wasn't the way of things before, and it's been slowly moving away from how it was, and it's not really got anything to do with being American or not.

>>jemmyw+(OP)
OSI layer 4 and up of Android/iOS are pretty well standardized, below pioneered by Nokia-Siemens are complete mess. Phones before iPhone sometimes had apps. Most of them used Java and lots of them needed model-specific ports due to model-specific bugs and quirks in JVMs. Compatibility of Linux is entirely dependent on stability of PC platform, and Linux itself offers little compatibility or modularity, just source level consistency with past self, unlike predominantly American platforms such as Windows.

When Google does it, of course, same apk files and NDK binaries just run on every models of every make as if always worked that way.

American companies appear to be the worst offenders in the world when it comes to breaking compatibility and right to repair, and this isn't to say those anti-consumer changes are okay at all, but I do think the reality is that, you can't break something that never existed, and it exists a lot more commonly in American things than in things from elsewhere.