Or they'll start making cheap phones with <=2GB of RAM again and people will have to write software that uses memory efficiently (the horror).
> we just stop throwing away gigabytes for no reward
Personally I might not even mind so much about the memory except the latency from the garbage collection, swapping, etc absolutely kills interactive performance. My TI-85 had a snappier interactive experience than my "modern" phone.
I think a large part of the problem, at least on the embedded side, is that people really just don't have standards for these things should feel. When I tried out the first gen Nest in a store, my first thought was it was a joke and who would actually buy it with 100ms+ jittery UI lag. But lo and behold, people did.
Also, when software is poorly optimized that implies it is possible to optimize it.
I think we're quite a ways past the point where most people would be satisfied with phones that only do voice, text, and web browsing. People have become quite accustomed to phones that can run arbitrary applications and games. There's quite a sizable population for whom phones are their only computing device.
I can't actually think of the last time that I wanted to (rather than was forced to) use a non-messaging non-browser app on my phone.
I went to a music festival last weekend, ticket has to be on the ticketmaster app which is android or iOS, the official app for the festival has timings and updates for the event which are very important else you will miss stuff that is announced, even safety warnings.
My train tickets were on the app, I needed it to book the Uber as well.
20% off drinks and food if you use the paypal app. You just can't do things without Android or iOS.
Thousands of people parked in random fields, parked in daylight, need to find car at night = Airtag/ map.
Everything is an app these days. It's a lot harder to do everything without such things. You wouldn't have been able to attend without such a device.
The age old truism in tech is that it's easier to hyper-optimize a single chokepoint (i.e. the platform) than trust distributed actors to each optimize their own thing (i.e. app developers).
Because optimization takes money. Sometimes lots. And distributed non-platform actors have their own priorities like features.
That's why you get enormous success stories like x86, TCP/IP, HTTPx, and Javascript engines providing increased performance, but the "developers as a whole self-optimize" dream remains a perpetual mirage.
(Outside of gaming console hardware, and even there arguably true before middleware)
Meta obviously don't want that and they've done a sneaky thing to make it useless: if you connect a third party app to WhatsApp, from that third party app you can only chat with other WhatsApp contacts that have also connected the same third party app to WhatsApp. So if you write your own WhatsApp client that runs on this low power phone it will be completely useless because to chat with your friends they would all have to manually connect their WhatsApps to your client, which of course they won't do.
See https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability... - check the `WhatsApp Messaging Interoperability User Experience - Android`
I guess we'll see if the EU lets this stand but my guess is they will.
For all the EU does right, it's amazing that a reviled United States conglomerate owns their entire social sphere. I hope they can change that and show the world a model of how to do so, especially given how high the stakes are.
"Make this OS and ecosystem more efficient. Make no mistakes."
Apple has a long history of not caring about budget-concious consumers. I doubt the wealthy decision makers at Apple and other companies are suddenly going to start caring about them now.
Not possible since we all "need" AI in our phones