Comment by idle_zealot
1 month ago
This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones. That would be great, but as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible. Even assuming that building a solid alternative is feasible, though, I don't think their point stands. Generally I'm not keen on legislatively forcing a developer to alter their software, but let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations. I'm all for mandating that they change their code to be less user-hostile, for the same reason I prefer democracy to autocracy. Any party with power enough to impact millions of lives needs to be accountable to those it affects. I don't see the point of distinguishing between government and private corporation when that corporation is on the same scale of power and influence.
> Google and Apple have more power than most nations.
Yep. They control our information - how we make it, what we are allowed to find, and what we can say. And they are large enough to not face real competition. So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations they are and regulate heavily. Smaller companies can be left unregulated. But not companies worth 500 billion or more.
> So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations
If they were state owned, we could vote for how the profits get used and we would have larger budgets for healthcare and education.
The US federal government alone (not including state and other local governments) spends north of $1 trillion dollars per year on healthcare.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Another $1.3 trillion on wealth transfers from workers to non workers (including disability). And another $608B on wealth transfers from people with higher income to people with lower or no incomes.
Alphabet and Apple, combined, earned $193B in 2024, from the entire world.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...
How does your suggestion make any difference, other than destroying 2 of the very few organizations driving demand for US assets, and hence help support the US dollar's purchasing power?
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But if they were, they would never have become what they are in the first place, including the good things.
States are neither good at innovation nor dynamism.
But they are very good at telling you what you should and should not do.
The latter part has some wonderful consequences for consumer or worker protections, but it has some terrible ones for creating new stuff or improving the old.
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> Google and Apple have more power than most nations.
And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.
The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.
Well, an umbrella for nations or a sledgehammer for companies. I'd say just start shredding large companies left and right.
"And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation"
Since nations can be really small, I don't agree.
Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. I would hope you'd agree those are not powers that we should grant to large corporations...
I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them accountable.
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This was my first thought too, but the largest corporations are way too large any healthy society.
These are basics of capitalism.
Company aims for profit.
Bigger scale allows for better efficiency.
So companies naturally grow big. The bigger they are, the easier for them to compete.
Big companies have access to tremendous resources, so they can push laws by bribing law makers, advertising their agenda to the masses.
There's no way around it, not without dismantling capitalism. Nations will serve to the corporations, no other way around.
There are natural boundaries of the growth scale, which are related to the inherent efficiency of communications between people and overall human capability. Corporations are controlled by people and people have limited brains and mouths. I feel that with AI development, those boundaries will move apart and allow for even greater growth eventually.
> There's no way around it
Yes there is, the population passing laws to regulate this. The problem is though, that most people don't understand and don't care enough until its too late.
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Bigger scale allows for better efficiency.
This is dogma, not proven fact, and most people that argue this tend to use self-serving metrics and a tailored definition of "efficient". Some counterexamples: early Google was much more efficient in responding to market changes than the current top-heavy organization; small hospitals tend to have better health outcomes (both per patient and per dollar) than large chains. Tesla was able to innovate much faster than established behemoths.
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The real battle is over Google selling the public on the notion that Android would be the "open" platform that allowed people to run anything they liked on their device, and then deciding to use anticompetitive means to take that freedom away.
Without that fraudulent marketing, Android never would have crowded out other options so quickly in the marketplace.
The solution is to either have Google back down on breaking its promise that Android would be open or to have an antitrust lawsuit strip Android from Google's control.
What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". But we've accepted Apple's status for so long now, a lot of consumers are stockholmed into thinking giving away control is the only way to have a good phone (evidence: see any thread discussing that maybe Apple should allow other vendors to also use their smartwatch hardware to offer services in non-smartwatch-hardware markets that Apple also offers services in. Half the users seem like they're brainwashed by the marketing material they put out). I don't know that we can convince the general public anymore that 1984 is bad (thinking of Apple's own 1984 ad, specifically) and, without general public, there can theoretically also not be political will
I was part of this problem. I've accepted what Apple is doing because I had Android. I didn't think they'd come for me next so I didn't speak up
> What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well".
Not a legal argument, since Apple never claimed the iPhone was anything else but a walled garden, and walled gardens are legal as long as you are clear that users will be buying into a walled garden from the start.
(For example: Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox)
Legally, the only thing you could do is change the law to make walled gardens illegal, as they did in the EU.
The changes Google has proposed for sideloading are illegal under existing law, since Android was sold to consumers with the promise that it was the "open" platform that allowed users to run anything they like.
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> Google and Apple have more power than most nations.
To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US.
The UK going after Apple, only to get rebutted by the US is the most simple instance of it. International treaties pushed by the US strongly protecting it's top corporations is the more standard behavior.
Any entity fighting the duopoly is effectively getting into a fight with the US.
> To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US.
If this is true then why is Tim Cook visiting Trump? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.
The power dynamic between the gifter and the giftee isn't that simple. Even bribes dynamics will change a lot depending on who does it and to which amount.
There is a whole antropologic field around that, but to keep it short, if you pay your palace and all expenses with the money funneled to you as gifts, you're not the one in control.
Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
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How feeble they might be in today's political arena, optics are still important.
Remember, the law provides patent, copyright, trade mark, and NDA protection.
While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field.
It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.
Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.
> It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.
If only it were so. But it's not just that. It's also a question of which section of society has the power to demand or prevent the creation of such a system.
Whether enacting labor protections or the Magna Carta, these beneficial restrictions require some leverage. Otherwise what is overall beat and fairest won't be coming up.
>Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation
I'm not sure innovation is really impacted when restricting the private sector. Traditionally, innovation happens in public (e.g, universities) or military spaces.
This is extremely dubious. There are hundreds (thousands?) of examples of innovation happening in the private sector - I could name the blue LED off the top of my head, and got personal computers, search engines, smartphones, cloud computing, and integrated circuits with less than a minute of searching.
> ability to run other operating systems on phones
> building those alternatives is basically impossible
For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook.
Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources.
I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.
>I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.
My guess would be that it's a continuously moving target. There's no point in spending years working to support some weird integrated wifi adapter+battery controller when by the time you're done the hardware is already obsolete and no longer being manufactured. Repeat that for every device on the phone. The only ones who can keep up with that pace are the manufacturers themselves. It'd be different if there was some kind of standardization that would make the effort worthwhile, though.
Well then, it should be more viable today, considering how innovations in the smartphone sector have dramatically slowed down compared to 2005-2015.
> I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.
They're graphical consumer devices, the quality bar is so high nobody can reach it except huge well funded teams. It's like asking why desktop Linux doesn't still attract OS builders, or for that matter, why the PC platform doesn't attract OS builders. Occasionally someone makes an OS that boots to a simple windowed GUI as a hobby, that's as far as it gets now.
A lot of these HN discussions dance around or ignore this point. When people demand the freedom to run whatever they want, they never give use cases that motivate this. Which OS do they want to dual boot? Some minor respin of Android with a few tweaks that doesn't disagree with Google on anything substantial (Google accepted a lot of PRs from GrapheneOS people).
Nobody is building a compelling new OS even on platforms that have fully documented drivers. There's no point. There are no new ideas, operating systems are mature, it's done, there's nothing to do there. Even Meta gave up on their XROS and that was at least for a new hardware profile. Google did bend over backwards to let people treat phones like they were PCs but it seems regular Android is in practice open enough for what people want to do.
> Nobody is building a compelling new OS
Eh, Redox probably counters your statement here. It's just in that wide gulch of "the easy part is done and the hard parts are hard".
But it is being built, and some would definitely consider it compelling.
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> I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.
Cellphones are not very useful as programming tools (too small), which is what Open Source excels at.
Also, cellphones need to handle some annoying things, like it should always be possible and easy to call emergency services. Which is to say, the UI work seems stressful.
I’m fairly sure the modem firmware on the Pixels was never open. There’s some hardware that will never have open firmware to it. Especially when that firmware deals with regulated airwaves like cell signals.
My laptop has plenty of chips with closed firmware. They matter not. Open hardware is a noble goal, but open software is enough. Firmware is part of hardware block, so having open operating system, which sends blobs into some devices for initialisation is perfectly acceptable compromise.
With the right trusted computing modules, it will be impossible. As far as I am concerned, the asahi developers are building on a foundation of sand because Apple could just lock down the bootloader for the iMac laptops or whatever next generation
The primary problem is that we can't build a phone and run it on a cellular carrier network. This is where legislation is needed.
Apple and Google are still a problem, but they are a secondary problem.
You kind of can? The carrier network has no way to verify that your cellular modem is a real modem made by a real modem company, and not 3 SDRs in a trench coat standing on the top of each other.
The sheer technical difficulty is what makes this kind of thing impractical.
The network does validate that a SIM card is a real SIM card, but you can put a "real SIM card" in anything.
Yeah pretty much. I don't disagree on principal that people should be able to install a custom OS on their device. But in practical terms it doesn't really matter all that much because hardware is so complex and moves so fast that no hobbyist has even close to the time and resources to develop a custom OS for the latest phones.
The M1 Macbook Air is 5 years old now, has an active development, lots of community funding and attention, yet is still missing basic functionality like external monitors and video decoding. Because it's just a mammoth task to support modern hardware. Unless you have a whole paid team on it you've got no hope.
IMEI whitelisting is common in the US at least... I think this shuts down the trench coat idea.
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You'll run into a variant of the tragedy of the commons; without any kind of regulation or provable assertions from people taking part in common communication infrastructure, it'd be quite easy to ruin it for everyone.
You don't need to allow completely unrestricted access to the network. However, there needs to be a process with a defined cost to certify your hardware. The cost can be expensive and time consuming but it needs to be known and published and the cellular companies need to be held to it.
The problem right now is that even if I had a couple of million dollars lying around, I STILL couldn't reliably get a piece of hardware certified for the cellular network. I would have to set up a company, spend untold amounts of money bribing^Wwooing cellular company executives for a couple years, and, maybe, just maybe, I could get my phone through the certification process.
The technical aspects of certification are the easy part.
The problem is that the cellular companies fully understand that when it happens their power goes to zero because they suddenly become a dumb pipe that everybody just wants to ignore.
That's why this will take legislation.
Monopolists always talk about the tragedy of the commons, but don’t see anything wrong with the tragedy of the monopoly and don’t want you to think anything can exist in between.
But how do we start a movement for these ideas? I feel like there isn’t awareness outside of niche circles and the public may not see the short term benefit. Meanwhile politicians are lobbied by the same corporations and won’t listen.
I don't think the cellular network is the problem at all - everything except SMS and PSTN calls works on wifi. The problem is the apps. Netflix only runs on a verified bona fide electrified six car Google- or Apple-approved device; so do most financial apps (EU law requires them to) and basically everything else where the app developers are trying to get money off you (which is most apps). Some apps will refuse to play ads on a non-genuine device and then refuse to function because you aren't watching ads. Play Store does its best to stop you installing its apps on a nongenuine device, but it has to support older devices without TPMs so it's not fully locked down yet. Even YouTube has some level of attestation.
In the US at least, you could already have a lot of trouble with Wi-Fi calling when using unlocked Android phones. And it is basically nonexistent if you use a phone purchased outsiden US.
And why can Netflix ignore everybody who doesn't have a bona fide Google or Apple phone?
Because the number of non-Google and non-Apple phones is a rounding error.
And why is that? Because, except for the incumbents, it is almost impossible to certify a phone.
We could have nice sub-$100 phones (remove camera, etc.) if people could get them certified. But they can't; so we don't.
This is one of the real canaries I watch on "real AI" for programming.
It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures.
Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult".
And would any corporate AI allow that?
We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.
AI kicks ass at a lot of "routine reverse engineering" tasks already.
You can feed it assembly listings, or bytecode that the decompiler couldn't handle, and get back solid results.
And corporate AIs don't really have a fuck to give, at least not yet. You can sic Claude on obvious decompiler outputs, or a repo of questionable sources with a "VERY BIG CORPO - PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL" in every single file, and it'll sift through it - no complaints, no questions asked. And if that data somehow circles back into the training eventually, then all the funnier.
That's one of the boil-ups. Why would lack of Linux compatibility for hardware be a thing? If AI can write the drivers in 1/10th the effort/time, it should be a game changer for open source.
I haven't heard much from the major projects yet, but I'm not ear-to-the-ground.
I guess that is what is disappointing. It's all (to quote n-gage) webshit you see being used for this, and corpo-code so far, to your point.
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>It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers.
How is it going to do that without testing (and potentially bricking) hardware in real life?
>It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures
I don't know why you would use an LLM to do that. Couldn't you just distribute the binaries in some intermediate format, or decompile them to a comprehensible source format first?
I agree that it's a challenging problem.
My line of thinking is that AI essentially is really good at breadth-based problems wide knowledge.
An operating system is a specific well-known set of problems. Generally, it's not novel technology involved. An OS is a massive amount of work. Technical butrudgerous work.
If there's a large amount of source code, a great deal of discussion on that source code, and lots of other working examples, and you're really just kind of doing a derivative n + 1 design or adaptation of an existing product, that sounds like something in llm can do
Obviously I'm not talking about vibe, coding and OS. But could an OS do 99% of that and vastly reduce the amount of work to get a OS to work with your hardware with the big assumption that you have access to specs or some way of doing that?
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> as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible
I don't understand why everybody is ignoring existing, working GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone. The former is my daily driver btw.
Apparently they just can't live without Netflix and its even worth their freedom.
"This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones."
Sometimes owner control, cf. corporate control, can be had by sacrificing hardware functionality, i.e., features, closed source drivers. Choice between particular hardware feature(s) working and control over the hardware in general.
Yes but in the phone space the sacrifice is too much. You often times forgo the ability to even participate in many aspects of society, e.g. banking. It's not your typical "rough around the edges open source alternative", it's just not even a comparison.
Can’t you do banking on the web via your phone? Same as desktop users?
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Have at least two phones. One with corporate OS for banking, commerce. Another with user-chosen OS for experimentation, able to boot from external media.
> let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations.
Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk.
Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height.
Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.
There are power rankings where these top companies are considered more influential than many nations.
https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-wo... https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchme... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesl...
Sorry for the terrible formatting. Tried to fix it but the last edit seems to have borked it completely.
www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries
techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen
www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy
EDIT: Now in plain text since the last URL does not show up otherwise. And why is it rendering with --, its only - in the URL?
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Well there's Huawei's Harmony OS. Can someone who knows what's going on with that report in? Is it anything close to an open platform?
It is also equally closed, so not the champion you are looking for. It could still be a major player breaking the duopoly.
GrapheneOS?
Only runs on a handful of hardware, and still uses the binblobs from google for the hardware devices.
That is a fair point, this is a similar issue that Libre-boot went through a few years back. Yes, you try to stick clear of binary blobs as much as possible but at a certain point you just run out of hardware that meets that criteria.
I think GrapheneOS focuses on privacy and security, not liberation. I think their pragmatic and narrow-minded approach is valid, it's important not to conflate their scope with related issues they are unable/unwilling to tackle.
Personally, I think a usable pure Linux phone is required to weaken the desktop vs. mobile distinction and break the lock-in. This would additionally empower the desktop platform, confirm it as baseline.
Forces users to directly give money to Google and to rely on Google's OS underneath.
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That's a reductio ad absurdum conclusion.
Both lobby for and are in major political cahoots with many governmental bodies worldwide. They lobby like crazy, and can defend just about any lawsuit that comes their way - including dodging congressional hearings, selectively adhering to laws other companies cannot afford to skip, etc.
But I think you knew that. Being argumentative with the general point OP was making doesn't solve anything and just defends multinationals when they shouldn't be defended.
Every point you raised is in fact evidence for how they are weaker than governments.
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Is this a good time to introduce the Coca-Cola death squads? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Colombian_death-squa...
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
The USA military, and secret services were, and still are, at the behest of "American business interests"
See also the Oil industry, and Donald Trump's remarks aimed at the Australian government that might "curtail the tech companies" [1]
1 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebo...
People are weapons.
Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people.
YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from.
Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know.
It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.
Why torture someone when you can make every aspect of their lives depend on your moat and then decide to kick them out?
Do you know how many people use Google, Apple or Meta for every single sign on for every app/website they use?
No, but Google and Apple together could destroy a nation economically overnight without even lifting a finger, by bricking all devices within that nation and making their services (gmail, google maps, icloud) unavailable. No amount of guns or jails is equivalent to that power
Or they could "deplatform" anyone they don't like. Sure, you can live without google/meta/reddit/... but you will miss out on both business and social opportunities, especially if they do it without warning.
It will disadvantage you in life in ways which are hard to quantify for a single person (you don't know what you don't know) but will be measurable in aggregate.
They have access to such absurdly large amounts of money that they don't need those.
break into head office to find out