I’m a happy user of multiple Apple product, but I wish they had serious competition in the mobile OS space. Apple is remarkable that they strive for constant improvements anyway, even without good competition, but I’d rather we had multiple good vendors for an important thing, rather than one.

I’m not flaming Google or Android. By “competition” I mean “a mobile OS vendor who cares primarily about their users, and acts in their benefit.” Today mobile vendors pick Android because it allows them to cheaply treat their users like chattel.

Those vendors act in predictable old ways — attempting lock-in; adding half-assed features behind subscriptions gates; shoddy cloud services which will be abandoned in 18 months; dark patterns to trick people further into their channels; difficult, delayed, or non-existent OS and security updates.

I wish Microsoft had been more on-the-ball. Their phones were roadkill, from a market standpoint, but at least they were trying. Some of their ideas and their execution were quite good. Say what you will about their enterprise focus, at least they don’t institutionally treat users like krill, the way Google does. And the way Android affords mobile vendors to.