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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> with our consumer decisions to trade 'freedom in computation' in smartphones

TBF, the first few iPhone releases were arguably better and more open than anything before them. Apple refused to bow to carriers and provided a standard development platform for the first time. Then the Appstore, again bypassing carriers, increased developer access to mobile platforms by 1000x or more.

Sadly, both consumers and developers then failed to push for even more open alternatives, to the point where Apple and Google managed to entrench themselves too deeply to address this problem through simple market mechanisms. It's time for authorities to step in, hopefully we're seeing that (slowly) happening.

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I don’t think Android was well understood by the Linux and Open Source community in it’s first three years. A lot of people happy that it was consumer Linux and hacking away on root kits, bootloaders, and alternative marketplaces. We didn’t realize Google would have an effective monopoly on software distribution inside of the Android ecosystem (at least in western markets).

What? There are other software stores available for android? and even apks for the adventurous

I recall first iphone couldn't even run apps at all. It had "web apps".

yeah but they refused to integrate with carrier crapware or otherwise customize it in any way to suit the carrier. iOS was iOS and that was it. This seems trivial now, but at the time it was new - most phones would be sold with carrier-tailored operating system and apps, which made it difficult to build anything on multiple devices.

It was quite easy, just like with iOS, you just had to pick one platform (Windows CE, Symbian, BREW, J2ME,...) and target those devices.

Did you actually do it...? J2ME was a nightmare of incompatibilities. You could basically use it only for games, because you took control of the whole shebang. The slightest attempt at integration with platform services or native widgets brought utter pain across devices.

Symbian also changed drastically from featurephone to featurephone. WinCE was a bit more consistent but nobody used it on actual phones, it was largely a PDA os and PDAs were a very small market.

Yes, J2ME targeting Nokia and Sony-Ericson devices, Symbian on Nokia devices, and I used to travel occasionally to Espoo.

You must have few hairs left then :) I worked a bit on j2me on Nokia and ran away very quickly. Cross-device testing was a massive (and expensive) issue. Definitely it was not comparable with the ease enjoyed on iOS today, where there are very few devices and the emulator is enough most of the time.

The only hair I lost on those days were caused by Symbian C++ and the multiple reboots on the development environment, from Metrowerks all the way into the burning platforms memo.

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