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Comment by bloniac | Hacker News Reader

Apple really has locked down its ecosystem.

It’s kinda depressing that there isn’t more choice and competition in the mobile space. Your choices are Android and apple.

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As someone who owns multiple Apple devices and is generally pretty happy with their hardware and services, I agree. I wish there was at least a third option, if not more competition in this space.

RIP Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego, Firefox OS, et al

Competition is no longer possible these days, as banks, towns, etc. start to require an _unrooted_ Android/iOS device for basic operations (e.g. authorization of credit card operations, paying taxes and fines, COVID stuff, etc.).

Agreed. I tried to get a hardware-based TAN generator from my bank because that's the official alternative, but they indicated as long as I don't do 10k transactions a day I "don't need one". But I did need one, lacking an up-to-date smartphone and a Windows/Mac PC.

They were also baffled that I wanted more than 5 digits as login PIN (without username) for the banking app.

At least here in Germany, there are many banks that work fine on rooted devices. And outside of banking and Google Pay, I haven’t seen anything that won’t work on rooted devices.

The rest of your comment, I sadly agree with.

Up until a couple weeks ago, my French bank's program worked on rooted devices. No longer. Same thing happened with my previous bank a year or so ago. They removed SMS 2FA as an alternative at the same time.

FfOS would have been a great alternative. I kinda still hope that a similar software setup (boot to browser, sandbox all the things to there) will one day be flashable to any generic handheld device, like older Android phones or the Pinephone.

FirefoxOS still exists as the proprietary KaiOS, and the open fork of it, GerdaOS.

https://gerda.tech/

It's still there. A fork of it is #3 most popular OS: https://www.kaiostech.com/

It just targets devices your probably don't want to use (as in with physical buttons), so you haven't heard of it.

In fact I use it daily in my 3310, buttons and all, as a replacement for my <model forgotten> FFOs phone from a few years back. From that experience I can tell you it has nothing in common from the user point of view.

They all got beaten because Apple and google thrashed them in all the ways that mattered.

Actually Windows Phone was pretty much killed by Microsoft's lack of marketing, developer incentives and general incompetence, the OSes (7 and 8 mainly, 10 was weird) were incredibly smooth, fast and well designed. For a short while (in between most popular apps gaining WP support and then dropping it) it was IMO the best mobile experience available. You could get a dirt-cheap low-end phone like the Lumia 520 and it just worked. Then there were the AMOLED Lumias (Windows Phone was almost all black!), good cameras, the future looked really promising. Well. Good times were had.

Never forget how MS decided to prop up their WP app store numbers by running classes that ended up in the projects being submitted (and approved) to the store.

The amount of utter shit in the WP store was astounding. It was like if every single 0 star GitHub project had been submitted to a store for everyone to download.

My father wanted a smartphone but didn't want to pay Apple premiums, so I told him to get a Windows Phone because they guaranteed software updates, unlike Android's dismal situation.

He was very happy with it, then it was EOL-ed and WhatsApp stopped working on it (I consider that a feature, not a bug, but for some odd reason he disagrees). So I set him up with a LineageOS Pocophone F1. He still misses the simplicity of the Windows Phone UI, though.

I don't remember any WP8 phones actually being a good experience. The high end Lumias had good cameras...once the camera app eventually launched. The low end Lumias were absolutely terrible in every respect. They were dirt cheap because they were garbage. The App Store was a joke and what little software it had was awful.

The Metro/Modern/Whatever UI looked good in screen shots. In actual use the tiles just ate up a lot of screen real estate and rarely refreshed their content when expected. The UI inside apps was equally brain dead with touch elements often lacking borders. So you'd have to hope you aimed your finger perfectly on an icon. Because the UI could become unresponsive for unexpected reasons, especially on garbage phones, even if you hit an element it wasn't clear if the app was actually responding.

Windows Phone 8 and up was a dumpster fire. The highest end phones were just okay and didn't really hold a candle to the Apple and Android flagships of the time.

You couldnt watch a TV show in 2013-2015 without everyone and the dog using product placement Lumias.

And they trashed themselves. Microsoft was late to the party, but Windows Phone 7 was genuinely innovative and good. Unfortunately, when WP7 started to get some traction, they reset the entire ecosystem with Windows Phone 8, which could not be installed on existing Windows Phone devices. And Windows Phone 8 applications could not be installed on Windows Phone 7.

That is still one of the most mind boggling decisions I've seen. You launch a new smartphone platform to compete with two rivals that already have a head start, and then you intentionally wipe away all your progress so you can start even further behind again. Any interest in it evaporated overnight

It isn’t that mind-boggling to me, it’s Microsoft’s way.

Release a phone platform. Then another, incompatible phone platform that looks and behaves practically identically.

Reminds me of Windows 11. Three different kinds of control panel, two different kinds of context menu, infinite different kinds of window frame.

MS competes with itself!

https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts This classic is still very true for Microsoft at least.

On the contrary. Starting from the release of the original iPhone SDK in 2008, developers gained more capabilities and app entitlements than they lost.

There are lots of open mobile distros. I'd say postmarketOS is the best option for installing on random devices. Or for devices with preinstalled OSes, PinePhone or Librem 5.

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile#Distributions

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