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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The way I like to look at it is: Imagine a world where the concept of a phone call never existed. Then, suddenly someone invents an app that:

1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device

2. Rings and vibrates your device

3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device

4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number

No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!

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It's a pocket computer.

The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.

The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.

When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.

I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.

I doubt people from the last century are the ones holding on to the idea of a phone call.

Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.

I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.

Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.

Unfortunately it kind of fails at being a good pocket computer (all else aside they got rid of the concept of files and replaced it with nothing). The fact that it fails at being a phone too is just adding insult to injury.

If things were different, things would be different, certainly. But things are not different, so things are not different.

I assume you are using android or some ancient version of iOS.

Currently on iOS, #1 is not done by any app including the phone, and #2-#4 are in fact allowed by App Store apps.

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