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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold. Personally I wasn't sad to see it fail to obtain a place in the market.

Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer, or that it integrated better with their existing Microsoft systems. People who want to 'think different' could have embraced Maemo, BB, Sailfish, Firefox, or various other niche platforms. And then observed the same problem -- lack of people developing applications for them.

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> There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold.

You're forgetting that Microsoft _was_ the smartphone leader around the time of Windows Mobile 5 and 6, after defeating Palm. At one time, there were over 100 models of of Windows Mobile phones on the market. (Android's fragmentation problem was entirely foreseeable because it happened to WM first.)

They lost the market to Apple and Android through a mixture of complacency and stupidity, which is something of a shame. WM was just as open as the Windows desktop; no walled garden, no app store eating a third of your revenue, no vendor lock-in shenanigans, just load whatever software you want and run it.

Not on Europe, we were happily using Symbian based phones.

> Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer

The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones. Android spies on basically everything you do. Both android and iOS are vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before. Compared to the current smartphone OS offerings, Windows was (and is) an incredibly open platform.

WHy not LineageOS then?

Windows already spies on you on the desktop. Is their mobile OS different in that regard?

Android itself does not "[spy] on basically everything you do", that role is given to the Google-specific services and applications you can - but do not have to - run on the thing. Neither is Android "vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before", the source to the basic OS is available after all. The exception to this is formed by the device drivers which generally come in the form of "blobs" which are tailored to a specific build of the OS. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to make use of source builds, a situation which might be rectified by "project Treble" [1] but the jury is still out on this.

With the source to Android available and decoupled from the device-specific code it should be easier to create alternative Android distributions. This should also make it possible to upgrade Android on devices which have been abandoned by the vendor and those which never got any updates to begin with.

This is not just theory by the way, I'm using a number of Google-free Android devices myself. They run just fine without those Google bits, they don't spy more than any other device. This does not mean it does not spy at all but that problem is present in all mobile devices from all manufacturers and under all operating systems: the radio interface layer is a black box closed source blob in all commercially available devices that I've come across.

[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...

The Android that competes with the iPhone and Windows Phone devices in the market at large is the Android that either has Google Play Services, or occasionally has a much worse (privacy-wise) Chinese alternative suite.

The Android you get without Google Play Services are more like Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Phone, or chrooting into Debian and calling that your "OS", interesting things for developers, but not really what the average end user would consider a serious phone option that's even on their radar.

Those who are interested in the nitty-gritty of keeping a semblance of privacy generally will not baulk at taking some hurdles to get there, nor do they expect their devices to work exactly like those within the walled gardens.

Now if there where a way to combine these two worlds - that of the 'it just works but it knows more about me than I do myself' and the 'it does exactly what I tell it do do, no more and no less' - it would be feasible to offer such a device to a larger section of the general public.

A stripped-down Android distribution - sans Google-specific bits, with some replacements where needed - which does over the air updates just like devices on the other side of the wall would be a good start.

iOS lets you keep a semblance of privacy without hurdles. The walled garden even contributes to it's security.

I think more people who have a passing interest in privacy would rather take a walled garden on some of the best hardware out there with a rather enjoyable, if not powerful, OS.

iOS only allows this if you consider your data to be private as long as it doesn't leave Apple (i.e. the garden). This does not mean your data can not be used for profiling purposes, it just means the profiling would be done wholly within the confines of Apple, Inc. If you trust Apple to not use this data for anything but your personal good you can feel safe and secure. If on the other hand you consider Apple to be an (extreme) example of a profit-driven company you'd do well to reconsider whether you want your personal data within their reach.

While it is hard - and getting harder - to evade profiling it is still preferable to minimise the amount of personally identifiable data collected by commercial or governmental organisations. Using an Android device without Google-specific code can help here.

For the majority of users I'd recommend trusting Apple. If you're in a class of user where Apple can't be trusted I don't recommend a smartphone. They can earn profit by being the privacy oriented alternative to Google's OS.

I think the conversation has shifted from my main point. When the average user hears "Android" or says it, it's "Android + GPS". The GP said Android but seeing as the most common Android devices competing with the other two OSes they mentioned come with GPS I find it disingenuous to try and imply that it's not "Android proper" if it has GPS. If anything Android without GPS isn't "Android proper" in this context because of the amount of functionality it provides that people include when they compare those OSes

>The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones.

Someone tell this guy about Win10 telemetry and store app tracking.

I’ve got a Windows Phone* and I honestly appreciated it’s UX. It wasn’t “for me”, but I still appreciated how they took a new direction than just the rampant copying back and forth like iOS and Android do. I kinda wish it had gained share, competition is a good thing, especially when the competitor is willing to step outside the box.

* - Admittedly I also have 10+ Android phones, 20+ iPhones, and 2 WebOS phones.

I, and it seems a few others in this thread, like our Windows phones. It's the only Microsoft code I have running, actually.

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