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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Is that realistic? Or would the pain of that be high enough to cause a revolt against the law to allow people’s beloved phone OSes back?

I’m not arguing the status who is good, more “is it too late to fix?”

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"The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through [...] The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible."

https://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Look at the reaction to "cookie dialogs" which are the companies trying to toe the line as close as possible on compliance (and arguably often over it) at the expense of UX. Banning Android and iOS would absolutely trigger a much stronger reaction and would seem to me to be away to torpedo any regulation by including it such a requirement

Realistically they are not irreplaceable. They provide convenience for coordination of some stuff but a company that would be able to sell smartphones at scale with an alternative OS could get there pretty fast. All the very useful apps are some sort of marketplace/coordinating software (with an identity/messaging system) that already has a web version anyway.

The major issue is the massive web index since that would take a lot of capital and time to recreate but there are already various alternatives that could get better with use. For the commercial web it doesn't matter as much since it's always evolving anyway and every big website already has its own search engine. Would be inconvenient at first but not something that would affect people's lives as drastically as tech people like to think.

Ironically the main examples are places like Russia and China who built their own local versions of everything.

If the one thing people revolt over is those companies, that consumerism, then our civilization is dead and it is not worth to save it.

Yes. But that would happen, just need to check Nepal

I think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of what happened in Nepal which had many confounding factors and was years in the making. The narrative that it was "just gen z wanting their apps" only serves the purposes of the old regime.

this can be said about any revolt against any government. It is not a coincidence that there are riots when governments try to regulate apps.

Can that not be said of any revolt?

That is a very strange way of looking at things. Should people not get upset at their desires being interfered with based upon some arrogant busybody's concept of the ideal? For the crime of being liked by too many people?

Frankly declaring a civilization dead over not doing what you want sounds very much like an egocentric "elite tantrum". Like all of the arrogants who think that they can know the best interests of others better than them in spite of the fact that every time that has tried it just amounts to an unaccountable autocracy. After all the nobility were supposed to 'know better' for the peasantry and represent them.

It's always too late to fix and too big to fail until it happens and everyone sees it's not that bad.

China is doing it. Huawei now has its own proper OS (and no, it is not Linux. Lookup HarmonyOS Next). I played with the laptop a bit a couple months ago. It is very basic but it has a functioning browser and some really neat features.

>Or would the pain of that be high enough to cause a revolt against the law to allow people’s beloved phone OSes back?

Nobody that is not a developer loves an OS, and there's a large subset of developers who don't even care that much.

Have you talked to many apple users?

I can’t imagine anyone in my environment becoming really angry over this. Some of them would have to find new time sinks though—-hopefully ones that actually benefit them instead of turning them into commodities.

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