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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

I support this move as hopefully it will kill off the practice of carrier specific OSes.

The last carrier phone I bought was a Samsung Galaxy 4 from T-Mobile. I got a total of 0 os updates out of it because T-Mobile never released a new version of the OS (even though Samsung did). They just abandoned the phone.

At this point the most important quality of a phone to me is active security updates, so I'll never buy one where a carrier can get in the way of protecting myself from zero day exploits.

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No it won't, not unless it's specifically addressed in the law.

The EU (or at least most of it) has banned SIM locks a long time ago, but carrier-branded Android phones are still a thing.

In fact, the situation here is even more pernicious, there have been news reports[1] of carriers being able to remotely lock your phone down if you stop paying the bill, or if you buy it used and the first owner stops paying the bill.

[1] Polish https://niebezpiecznik.pl/post/plus-instaluje-cos-na-ksztalt...

I'm not from Poland, but they probably have prices similar to ours ... data plans are cheap, you have credit cards with offers for zero interest plans over 12 or 24 months, and the mobile carriers are unable to offer discounts like the used to, not to mention that exclusivity deals for devices are not a thing here.

So why in the world would people still buy phones from their mobile carriers?

Here its basically 3 phone brands (Google, Samsung and Apple) and although the brands sell unlocked direct most people get deals to get phones massively discounted by signing up for two years of service or something like that. Carriers lock the phones until they are fully subsidized and paid off and theyve made their money back. unlocking immediately breaks this business model.

I don’t think this will make any difference—SIM unlocking is totally separate from phone firmware

I bought Samsung S21 from some shady reseller because original Samsung store was trying to steal my data by a promotion where I need to give them my bank account number and they will send my 20% of phone price back, then when I returned with phone to home and turned on phone I saw a message saying "this phone is a property of Polkomtel (on of carriers operating in Poland), it will be locked if you stop paying the bills", shady reseller agreed to replace my phone with another one not fucked up by a greedy carrier who is making incomes private (selling expensive phone in subscription model for people with no credit rank, often abusing this subscription model as low rate credit (they are goi g from carrier straight to lombard) and making loses public (they will lock my phone if someone dont pay)

OS and the bundled sleazy apps and injected ad networks are a big positive cost center for american telcos.

>At this point the most important quality of a phone to me is active security updates, so I'll never buy one where a carrier

you have no ideia how little of minority this type of thinking is! :(

It would be nice if security updates were more friendly, and not bundled with feature updates (ever). Having to go through a whole song-and-dance, only for the OTA update to fail for one reason or another: not endearing. Worst of all: they stop coming just when you've become really familiar with your phone, after a few years.

Yup - it's why the iPhone wasn't on Verizon for years - Verizon insisted on being able to "customize" the iPhone and Apple told them to pound sand.

As a years-long happy Verizon and iPhone user I'm glad they did!

Now I wish they would do the same thing to the EU wanting to "customize" the iPhone... (e.g. forcing USB-C)

Yeah, I agreed with the usb-C law until I realized how easily usb-C cables snap compared to the alternatives lol

I've never seen a usb-c cable snap, and lightning doesn't look much sturdier to me.

Lightning is definitely sturdier, but I don't think that's enough to outweigh the benefits of USB-C. USB-C is much more universal.

Regardless of whether lightning is better than USB-C or vice versa, I am more worried about the general principle. The only organization that has a track record of building smartphones that I enjoy using is Apple. It's certainly not the EU. Thus I want Apple to be able to make design decisions as freely as possible because in practice that seems to result in a good product. I'd make an exception for things that are OBVIOUSLY blatantly uncompetitive (refusing to support modern interoperable replacements for SMS might be in this category, but I don't think what charing cable you use is).

> OBVIOUSLY blatantly uncompetitive

Lightning was/is the most blatantly money grabbing technology ever.

The reason Apple stuck to lightning is not because they liked the design, or because it was superior (it wasn't). It's because you have to license the connector to use it. Every single lightning cable sold, whether it be from Apple or not, Apple made a pretty penny.

Running such a racket at the expense of consumers is bad. Someone had to step in, because it was becoming increasingly obvious Apple had 0 intention of ramping down the money grubbing.

Well 52% of Americans use iOS and 31% are Samsung which now get 7 years of support so I think that's actually a pretty large majority now.

This argument would only make any sense if you believed that the reason Americans were buying from Apple and Samsung was for their software update policy, which I'm pretty sure you don't.

I think you could argue people are buying them for longevity, and these measures increase their perceived longevity.

I know a lot of iPhone users who will only buy iPhones because of their longevity. They'll keep them for many generations, and they simply don't have faith in Android phone brands to keep up that long. Phones are large purchases, sometimes financed, like a car. So when it comes to buying, some consumers treat them like cars. They weight reliability and longevity very high, and they'll often buy slightly used phones. A generation or two old iPhone is really still top of the line.

A lot of that is marketing perception but there's also some truth to it.

Samsung only offers the 7 years of support for their flagship series of phones. The majority of phones they sell are cheaper ones that do not get that support.

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