Anyone is free to enter the hardware market with an open platform. There are some devices for sale which allow this. But they're enormously unpopular.
It's not really any different in my mind than phones with more battery life, a better camera, or any other product mix.
But the situation here is that there is now an actual law mandating that no, you're not to allowed host an app store on your phone OS without allowing alternative app stores.
For an exaggerated analogy, you can't make a car without seatbelts and tell consumers that if they value safety they should purchase a different brand of car.
Too late. It already is. Which makes all these restrictions on what you can and can't do with it stupid especially if its gonna sell for an amount of money nearly equal to reasonably spec'ed laptop.
Contrast with, say, Adobe, which makes computer software not distributed through any App store and is a $278 billion company.
Android is fully open. No one is making you use Google services. You can, in fact, buy a Pixel and simply uninstall the Play Store. As a developer, you can distribute your app without any Google involvement whatsoever.
It's true however that you can use microG to replace Google Services, but even then some banks will block your account upon doing that (happened to me).
Granted, this really is a completely different point to what you were discussing, and I do agree with you. But, if we want truly open ecosystems, we need standards that ensure the authenticity of the user. Unfortunately, that gets distopian fast.
I really don't know what to think of all of this.
This is on the Pinephone Pro btw.
That you then can't really do anything with either because of the super limited HW support (due to only using "free" drivers) or because they're so slow you just give up in frustration. Or lack of apps.
At least in the case of the Librem 5 its wildly overpriced for what you actually get (if you ever actually get it that is).
If you think the hardware is slow, have a look at SXMo.
> if you ever actually get it that is
They've been delivering the phones within 10 days since a long tome already. Sent from my Librem 5.