Comment by divan
1 month ago
> It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible
As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again, statements like this sound more than naïve to me. I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.
I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone.
Reading technical documentation on things like secure enclaves, UWB chips, computational photography stack, HRTF tuning, unified memory, TrueDepth cameras, AWDL, etc., it feels very wrong to support claims like the OP makes. “Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.
It being difficult is different from it being possible. If a company wants to raise $50m to read all the documentation and build an alternative OS to run on this crazy piece of hardware, as the consumer I still benefit. If you'd prefer, let's stick with repair? I also need all of that information to be able to repair my phone, but again, it wouldn't necessarily be ME who repairs my own phone: I take it to a third-party expert who has built out their own expertise and tools.
(Hell: I'd personally be OK without "documentation"... it should simply be illegal to actively go out of your way to prevent people from doing this. This way you also aren't mandating anyone go to extra effort they otherwise wouldn't bother with: the status quo is that, because they can, they thrown down an incredible amount of effort trying to prevent people from figuring things out themselves, and that really sucks.)
> $50m to build a modern OS from scratch
heh.
In practice, it'll look more like what PostmarketOS or Asahi Linux madmen are doing - porting Linux onto the platforms where the sun doesn't shine.
Of course, having any kind of documentation or driver sources that could be referenced would make it much easier, and much less taxing on sanity.
Nobody would invest $50 million to enter a trillion dollar market.
I feel like adding more laws for this kind of stuff won't really stick. Like a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. We can hem and haw about what the government should do all we want but like... I mean, the Digital Markets Act certainly made a HUGE impact. And the GDPR is definitely a net positive for society.
I think the thing you brought up at the beginning is the most practical path forward, someone with the technical know-how and business acumen needs to start a company. Apple and Google are quite weak now, and there are lessons to be learned from the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If enough people try, someone will eventually break through.
The Epic suit certainly opens some interesting avenues as well.
>“Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want.
Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area?
My phone is more powerful than many of the computers I've had in the past, yet I need to jump through a million hoops to use it as a software development platform. Why?
Your smartwatch is probably more powerful than some of your past computers too. Same with your DSLR camera. Even your smart fridge. These are specialized hardware+software gadgets designed to a particular purpose, which is very different from being a development platform. Same with a phone.
A modern smartphone is mostly a general-purpose computer designed to run arbitrary software with a couple tightly integrated and/or regulated bits. That's very different from a DSLR, which is designed to take pictures.
That said, a camera with a fully open software stack would be fun.
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>These are specialized hardware+software gadgets designed to a particular purpose, which is very different from being a development platform.
Then I shouldn't be able to install software on it at all. For any given device either its functions are fixed, or they're modifiable at the sole discretion of the owner. There should be no middle ground.
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Why shouldn't I be able to reflash my fridge? I own it. I did this with my vacuum robot for example.
It doesn't have to be easy or convenient, but it shouldn't be impossible.
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A smartphone is not a specialized hardware or software, it's a general computation device.
Its just a completely bogus argument. Its not a fucking smart fridge, come on
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Yeah, this is the sleight of hand. They used to all be computers, now we have reduced freedom to "development platforms". No. It's hardware, I bought it, I should be able to run any code I want on my DSLR (and I do), my fridge, my oven, my smartwatch, anything I own.
Just a nit …
As this is HN - a very thoughtful and technically astute demographic - it’s very unlikely that your parent, or others reading, own a “smart fridge”.
> Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area?
Apple and Microsoft are constantly working on fixing the issue with their appstores and requiring app signing in more places. The way industry going is to lock down more of laptops, than allowing phones to be like computers.
>How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone?
It kind of started because phones interact with phone networks and the network companies didn't want hacked software mucking up their networks. I realise the baseband part is separate from the rest of the phone but it's always been that way with every cell phone I've had over 30 years, that they are part locked down.
Whereas none of the regular computers and laptops have been especially locked down.
It would be cool if you could just connect your laptop to a radio and connect to cell networks but I don't think any of them allow that?
A very profitable instance of market segmentation
> I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.
However the interests you mention aren't collective at all but very singularly the ones of the manufacturer only
Its only the manufacturers interests because they dont want people to brick their phone on accident. Really theyre only a secondary party of interest, the real interested party is grandma/anyone who can fall victim to malware. Apples decision to ban sideloading is a huge part of how they became the most popular phone maker in the us
The real interest is their protection of their sweet 30% revenue stream. There are many ways to protect security, leaving all your keys in the hands of one party is not the only one.
And there should also be the right to be able to opt out of the manufacturers' protections of course.
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> Apples decision to ban sideloading is a huge part of how they became the most popular phone maker in the us
I'm skeptical. A robust permission model limiting the damage an ill-behaved app was surely part of it, as was the existence of a curated app store. The relative rarity of people directly installing apps on Android suggests Apple didn't really need to force the use of that curated store.
> because they dont want people to brick their phone on accident
Or worse, blow them up.
>I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone.
That when you buy a phone you're also buying software components doesn't change the fact that the phone is owned entirely by you. You're not entering into a partnership to co-own the phone with anyone else, it's entirely yours. No one should get to decide how you use it but you.
>But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.
So the argument is that by taking a piece of electronics I paid for that is running on electricity I pay for, and making it run some arbitrary piece of software, I'm putting people's lives at risk?
that has never been true, your phone contains a radio, governed by the relevant laws of your locale.
My pan is also governed by the relevant laws of my locale. I can cook what I like, but I can't legally beat someone over the head with it.
That argues for opening up the hardware more, not closing down the software.
In fact it further argues that the degree of vertical integration is monopolistic. Why should a Sony CMOS camera be tied to some Apple computational photography code only available in Apple firmware or iOS? What if I do not like that it makes up images that don't exist? What if someone has a better method but now cannot bring it to market?
Break it up and open it up. I assure you it can be done.
> As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again
Why haven't we seen a spiritual successor to the N900? It's a little strange to me that it's cheaper than ever to produce hardware, even in relatively small quantities, but no one (AFAIK) is producing any geek-oriented phones like the N900. Linux hardware support gets better every year. It shouldn't be terribly hard to have a factory produce a small number of open phones that can run Linux. They wouldn't be any good without significant investment in phone-specific usability, but still.
There is already open source software for UWB, computational photography, various depth cameras, direct link WiFi, etc...
Will it be as good as the iOS implementation? Probably not. But it's hardly an impossible fact and not one that has to be done entirely over and over for every device. The Asahi folks showed it could be done despite hostile conditions.
Not to mention, it's an authoritarian attitude, talking about forcing companies to support arbitrary software stacks
That's not what they wrote at all.
> It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible
I was writing in reference to this quote ^
It would have been more accurate for me to say "support the development of arbitrary software stacks," but where do you draw the line between "supporting the development of" and "supporting"?
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Op here: The point I'm trying to make in the piece is that this is less authoritarian than the common suggestion that Apple and Google be forced to change how iOS and Android works. The piece is meant to be a juxtaposition to that idea.
Is it authoritarian to stop other people from being authoritarians?
If I make a product and I don't specifically help you do certain things with it, is that authoritarian?
Regardless, we're talking about products here—"authoritarian" is a word reserved to situations where the threat of force is involved.
In this specific example, forcing a company to do something is authoritarian (because they will be fined or jailed if they do not comply with the rules). Corporations are not, as a rule, authoritarian—they may, however, do things that are not to your benefit or liking.
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