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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

As an end-user having my last four phones as Xiaomi's that get upgraded to LineageOS upon their replacement as the primary phone, this affects me in an indirect fashion:

I bought Xiaomi's because they were popular for custom ROMs, and their popularity was based on decent hardware for a decent price with a boot loader that's unlockable without too much hassle.

Once the bootloader unlock becomes a hassle, fewer developers will want to touch them, so their popularity for hobbyists will decline, therefore their sales will decline, leading to even further decreasing popularity amongst developers.

It'll be interesting to see how much difference it makes to sales, but Xiaomi will no longer be a preferred brand for me to consider. Pixels seem to be great for custom ROM compatibility, but they're ridiculously expensive even on the second hand market. Motorola might be the new go-to.

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That loss of 1000 or so users will really affect them I am sure. Got to remember HN and hacker culture is an echo-chamber.

That's always a valid point, and I'm going to say 'but', but it's a 'but' without a lot of conviction:

But, in Australia at least, it's not super easy to buy a Xiaomi. I have to go looking for them. Samsung is synonymous with Android, it's Apple or Samsung that people say, not Apple or Android.

People still look at me sideways when I say it's a Xiaomi (or Poco).

Australia isn't really a market that acts as any kind of leading indicator though.

So exactly the point. Not their target market is it. SE Asia they are practically the number one selling phone with OPPO. And a minority (and I mean minority, perhaps a low thousands) will be wanting custom roms.

It sucks that companies have so successfully trained an entire generation (or more) of people who treat their phone (and computer too) like an appliance.

hardly anyone would be tinkering their phone to make the hardware do more than the default applications.

The same is happening (or is already happened) to cars.

I'm not sure if it is the companies who "trained" anyone that. I think it is more correct to say that many wants that and companies recognised this desire and are offering what the costumers want.

The companies do this simply because this is the way to grow their market. For every single person who finds enjoyment in twiddling with their tools, there are hundreds who just want the thing to work and get on with other things in their life.

Many want those things, but that doesn't imply that offering yet another option for the median customer, imitating the average or market leader, is the optimal strategy either in our current economic/corporate systems or an idealized system with different rules.

Yes, there are economies of scale that come from chasing the middle, and yes, it's probably easier to just mimic an iPhone than to do the creative work to try to invent something better than what worked before. And yes, the tradeoffs, design goals, economic targets, and principles of repairability and customizability that go into, say, an F150 make those pretty popular trucks, but since Ford is still making F150s, and Chevy, and Dodge, and Toyota also have offerings that are direct competitors in that space, that doesn't mean that a hypothetical competitor can maximize their market share by making yet another F150.

Why does everything cluster into the same choices?

> Why does everything cluster into the same choices?

i suspect it's the same reason you get a cluster of the same stores/shops in a region.

It's the classic economic dilemma - Hotelling's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law)

Consumer want has to be expressible. It's the "faster horses" problem.

The market doesn't know what it wants until the options exist. Until a culture forms.

Almost all companies are competing in one direction only, a race to the bottom. There's sometimes some semi-geeks freedoms offered, but usually those are gilded cages too. We'd have to go back some something like Maemo to see consumers getting something actually empowering, a portable mobile Linux+FreeDesktop offering.

>It sucks that companies have so successfully trained an entire generation (or more) of people who treat their phone (and computer too) like an appliance.

Just like how most of us treat cars and stovetops as appliances?

Look, becoming omnipotent is an admirable pursuit, but time is a finite resource and by fuck most of us simply do not have enough of it. We can choose to become potent in something and most of us are in fact potent at something, but that isn't necessarily going to be electronics or computer programming.

There are over 1.5 million active users of LineageOS, let alone other roms. A good chunk of these are Xiaomi. Not a trillion dollar market, but hardly 1000 users.

It's also easy to make assumptions, such as that it's few users

90% of statistics and figures are made up

Do not forget the 6 degree of separation: 1000 people are directly connected to 100 people each on average and those 1000 are generally those who suggest what to buy to most of their contacts, and those contacts will reverberate as well.

Average Joe is more ignorant than ever in IT terms, but we are near a breaking point, and OEMs have felt it, trying to worsen as usual, and as usual such ideas will led them in the opposite direction.

But they don't make LOS for new Xiaomi phones for a long time now, though? Unless you want some shady rom made by some rando from xda.

I have one with "Pixel Experience" and one with 'PixelOS". Both of which, by my understanding, are built on top of unofficial Lineage OS releases - but I might be way off base.

Pixel Experience was not based on LineageOS. And Pixel Experience is dead and unsupported now. While there is no official direct successor, EvolutionX offers a comparable feature set.

What are you using these secondary phones for? Mine just collect dust in a drawer

One acts as a backup for my primary phone, I keep them as basically a mirror of each other as much as possible in case the primary gets stolen or broken.

That same one, or a different one, gets used as my 'house' device on WiFi only, so that my primary phone's battery gets used less and is therefore less likely to need charging if and when I need to leave the house.

I have one as a semi-hardware cryptocurrency wallet that can go online if necessary, but primarily is offline.

I also used to use one GPS spoofing in Pokémon Go - I actually found the intellectual challenge of getting it working far more satisfying than the actual act of playing Pogo 'remotely'. But I'm a couple of years 'sober' now and have no desire to regress.

I've also used a phone or two as webcams / security cameras. Permanently plugged in, but with the app ACCA (requires root) which limits charging to within certain battery percentages to minimise the chances of spicy pillows.

It’s one per year and the stated reasons are fair enough. Even if you get a new phone every year it’s business as usual.

Yes, that doesn't really affect me as an end user, but I think it disproportionately would affect developers. If it makes their lives harder then they'll avoid.

I think the stated reasons are bullshit. Unlocking the bootloader isn't a process your regular customer base is performing, so it will only affect the hobbyists. They're basically stating they don't want the hobbyist community anymore.

And maybe that's a bit harsh given they're just dropping from three per year to one per year, but why? How much of a difference to their stated reasons* will the change from three to one make?

I think it's just the tightening of a screw that's intending to squeeze out an element they no longer want.

(Or maybe it's to satiate an untrusting US government, to delay their own Huawei-ing)

*Reasons stated in the article are assumptions and haven't come directly from Xiaomi.

> disproportionately would affect developers

Developers of what? If it affected every software developer out there, then yeah this is a major issue. But it's a small subset of developers - mobile developers. Actually, a smaller subset - the ones on Android, not iOS. And even smaller than that - not the ones who develop apps in Kotlin (what we see on the Play Store), but the ones who hack in C++ on AOSP.

Every community likes to imagine that it is disproportionately large and powerful and influential (unless being tiny is a flex) and the ROM community is no different. To put it in perspective, the size of the LineageOS install base is 1.5 million, which is 0.05% of the total Android install base - 3 billion.

To claim that this community will make any difference to the vast majority of normies who just want to use WhatsApp, TikTok and their bank app - it's a bit delusional if I'm honest.

And to somehow tie this to the US government, that's full on tinfoil hat conspiracy mongering. You cannot be serious.

Totally understand the size of the install base for LOS. As someone else said, their target market is SE Asia.

Where I am, Xiaomi is pretty much an enthusiast / hobbyist only brand.

> the total Android install base - 3 billion.

That's so wild to me as an early millennial. For a good chunk of my life the smart phone didn't even exist and going back further computers were only for nerds. Now 3 billion freaking people using a computer every single day in a form factor that at one point I thought would be always marginal (vs desktops and laptops).

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