> Meanwhile, after two years my Android phone will brick itself.
I understand the sentiment, but your phone was not made to exit the solar system.
I understand the sentiment, but your phone was not made to exit the solar system.
Cellphones are a mess because we can't even have a nice base hardware platform. ARM isn't a platform. It's a SoC spec with random shit soldered to random pins by different vendors with completely non-upstreamable kernels. Google could just mandate UEFI on OHA phones like Microsoft did with theirs, but instead we're just getting this /vendor partition in the next release.
I don't think it's unintentional either. It's an aspect of planned obsolescence. The cellphone industry wants you to upgrade every two years, when we should not be destroying the planet and creating gear that lasts 10 years. Fewer factories, less pollution, longer life .. but we're in a consumerist economy hardwired the opposite direction, where any type of profit shortfall or lack of growth is seen as a problem, not the result of a good product.
The problem is the lack of vendor participation in the community.
What we need is a privately held cellphone company that will forgo profit in favour of creating long lasting, repairable, maintainable devices. [I've been working on this thesis for the transition from capitalism to communism]
Meanwhile I'm wearing a 25 year old tshirt, whilst tshirts bought much more recently wear out and get holes in.