You’re encouraging regulation of the iPhone and calling it the free market. You’re confused.
Android exists. Other phones exist. Use one of those. No one is twisting your arm.
[predictably the communist wing of HN is out on the downvote]
Android exists. Other phones exist. Use one of those. No one is twisting your arm.
[predictably the communist wing of HN is out on the downvote]
Until this problem is solved with iOS and Android, this isn't a valid argument.
Microsoft Office does this currently. The Mac version is extra…
In regards to games on Steam, you don't pay anything extra to play on Windows/Linux/Mac if the game has support for that platform -- haven't since it became a thing almost a decade ago.
Most of these decisions these days are made by parents buying their kids their first phone. They aren't made by adults for themselves. By the time they become an adult, they've probably heavily invested in whatever ecosystem they grew up in.
FWIW, I'm not an Apple Fan. I'm just stuck with it.
You can’t have fair competition without rules, without sane rules you could win the Marathon with an AK47 and a Jeep every time, without any innovation.
Also come on, this “vote with your wallet” is just dumb — what are you voting for between literally the two candidates? What if I want a privacy-respecting, but open to customization phone with great hardware - do I buy like 87% iphone and 13% android, or how does that work? Will it somehow magically register my “vote” at Google, and not make them introduce an ever worse privacy feature?
The phone OS market has such a hard entry for others that even goddamn Microsoft failed at it, and they did throw a litany of money there. This is as much choice as the US two-party system: you get go vote at the least bad, good for you..
You’re bitching that you want more privacy, when GrapheneOS, Fdroid, Librem, Pinephone, and other alternatives exist.
They’re not that well developed because most people just don’t care like you do. “The man” isn’t keeping you down, there’s just not that big of a market for it.
And who knows, maybe the Solana phone will take off and be what you’re looking for.
Then maybe the rules are wrong.
> You’re bitching that you want more privacy, when GrapheneOS, Fdroid, Librem, Pinephone, and other alternatives exist.
All of these "options" come with huge compromises. I'd love to use GrapheneOS, but I also want to continue to be able to pay for things with my phone. That's just one example among many.
The point is that I shouldn't have to choose between these options. I should be able to get all of these things, but the market leaders have destroyed the ability of anyone else to be competitive.
This is just entitled conspiracy theorist thinking.
We have these amazing devices that are improving all the time and you’ve got these boogeymen “destroying” fdroid, graphene, librem, and all others.
There's no competition between Android and iOS either, it's a duopoly.
The phone market itself still competes on features, on the software side, the competition is fully dead though.
That is a hugely disingenuous mischaracterization of what Android is. AOSP is nowhere near enough to put together modern phone platform that anyone actually wants. And every year it becomes less and less useful due to Google's actions.
You and I both wish for more privacy features, so we can run one of the forks, or the Solana phone. Or maybe we don’t care enough to do that.
And Android isn't really an open platform but a semi-open platform. There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP (not even their own Android emulator) and the Play Store contracts where Google dictates their terms are pretty much mandatory to ship a phone.
Then again, there's network effects in play as well.
Well no, turns out you can't. Any app you might need for basic usage (communication, banking, taxes) isn't on it.
Competition in economic terms means actual substitutes and this just ain't it. This is also reflected by their negligible marketshare close to 0%, because well, they just aren't competitors.
> You want the like to be mandatory, using the long arm of the law. I think that’s an obvious overreach.
I'm not even talking about the political solutions to this duopoly yet, just stating the facts that the competition is dead on the area, then the conclusion on how to solve this are up to debate.