Comment by liendolucas

Technology has a ratchet effect at scale - as a solution becomes widely adopted, it switches from being a convenience to being a necessity, because people start building more stuff on top of it. It's as true of to-the-minute accurate clocks as it is of smartphone banking.

You can still run a version of Word from 2004. It's fine, if all you need is to write some thoughts down for yourself. But the moment you need to collaborate with other people via a Word document, you'll find it difficult without the modern version with all its user-hostile aspects - and more importantly, other people will find you difficult to work with.

Same applies to other software, web and smartphones, and to everything else in life - the further you deviate from the mainstream, the costlier it is for you. Deviate too much, and you just become a social outcast.

> Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.

Of course. I can make a choice. When the choice is between being able to login to secure services with my SIM embedded e-signature, use mobile banking and conduct official business and not being able to do any of these things, making choices are easy.

Running Linux on desktop is easy mode when compared to phones, and yes, I started using Linux on desktop in 1999 too with SuSE 6.0. Phones are way more interconnected and central to our lives now when compared to a general purpose computer running your $FAVORITE_OS.

> Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.

Except, this not really a choice or a reasonable work around.

Phones are still somewhat expensive, not to mention a time-sink to maintain. Try explaining to your parents or even close relatives that they need to abandon the phone they either spent $$$($) on our spend a $$ monthly on that they should really buy another $$$($) phone and use their "official" device like a company card.

Bingo, this right here. Linux desktop wasn’t a daily driver until one day it was.

Although the only problem with this strategy is that Linux got that way because of a lot of private companies that actually wanted that. Valve didn’t want to be locked in with Microsoft. Many of Microsoft’s direct competitors also don’t want to be locked in. IBM famously switched to Mac, Google has been using Mac and Linux workstations for a long time as well.

Also, web technologies like Electron made porting applications to small user bases Linux easier. If that never happened, I wouldn’t be able to use my commercial apps on Linux. This concept might be a little more of a challenge for the mobile app ecosystem, which is a mix of native wrappers like react native and native apps, and there is a high amount of dependency on native APIs for the extra sensors and hardware features phones have the laptops and desktops don’t have.

E.g., For Linux on mobile to work react native can’t be an incomplete implementation like the status quo.

I have a lot of use cases for general purpose computers. If I am operating an event, "inconveniences" are literal showstoppers. When I'm running sound at a performance, switching audio inputs needs to work instantly and with essentially perfect reliability.

Another use case which Linux has a lot of trouble with is operating as a replacement for a pen-and-paper notepad. When I set a computer down for a day, I should be able to turn it on instantly and see the notes that I wrote 3 weeks ago. There are a variety of reasons this doesn't work on Linux. You say "that's an inconvenience" but there are circumstances in which being able to read those notes without needing to wait 30 minutes for the laptop to get enough charge and boot up could be a matter of life or death.

If these kinds of issues are mere inconveniences, that means the computer is a toy rather than a tool.

> I'll keep another phone for the rare times some corporate/government overlord requires it.

Not having to do that is the whole point (especially as those are not rare to most of us).

This reminds me of a Woz interview in the early days of the iphone, and his solution to it not supporting multitask was also to run two phones.

The problem is as aforementioned players pressure users and government, they can make certain aspects of the economy entirely inaccessible to unapproved platforms. Netflix and co can simply refuse to support streaming on devices which aren't hardware locked. Banks can refuse to do business. Sure banks have in person locations, but they've become fewer and more backed up.

One certain thresholds are reached, little can be done even for the committed outcast.

How about you don't forget about the majority of users out there who are unable to do the techy thing to circumvent technical issues?

It is a constant trope in technical forums.

We are a minority. Solutions which might be "inconveniences" for you, might be unsolvable issues for the rest of the planet.

> Back in '99 Linux didn't run Excel/Word/Powerpoint

It still doesn't btw.

> Back in '99 Linux didn't run Excel/Word/Powerpoint or most games, but I ran it anyway. What others call showstoppers are for me inconveniences.

It didn't ran on computer of people that wanted Excel/Word/Powerpoint or most games. I don't think the market of people wanting to use their phone only as a server is big enough for a competitive OS to arise, but I may be mistaken

What's an inconvenience for you is a no-go for many others. I'm willing to put up with certain things... others aren't.

You can't buy a new less than $400 that can be google free.

Communication is the main issue - If you've got whatsapp/telegram/whatever,and a couple others you can handle your own life differently without human interaction being affected.

The rest is a personal choice, I'm happy to have a bit higher friction to check my bank's balance for example. Maps is an issue but it can be overcome.

I've not managed to read all the comments in this post, so apologies if I'm repeating other people, I also have only a passing understanding of how Google Play works, but couldn't we have:

Linux based phone, running Anbox to support Android apps running within containers. Effort would then have to put into support Play APIs within Anbox. Not a small amount of work, but I compare it to the state of Linux 20 years ago and how well Linux is doing today.

So what. Enough of us do that it just might be feasible.

I've used Linux for a loong time before some business-critical software ran on it. I had to have a Windows VM for years for netbanking, or before that, dual-boot for gaming.

If we're all too spoiled to give a free alternative a chance because it might be slightly inconvenient, we don't deserve the free alternative.

Websites as platform can't solve a problem that's social in nature - that it's allowed and accepted for organizations to have such excessive, invasive levels of control.

The parties I accuse of driving this problem didn't suddenly go rogue when smartphones happened. They always wanted this level of control (and much more) - they just couldn't get it until relevant technologies matured enough.

I'm not speculating here - we have actual empirical evidence to confirm this. A clear example is that there are several countries that, unlike the US and most of Europe, went all-in on Internet banking back before smartphones. Web limitations and conventions didn't stop them from doing the same thing everyone is doing with the phones now - the banks there just force customers to install malware on their computers, so they can do some remote attestation and KYC (and totally no marketing data collection) on their PCs.

Most of the West never had this because of the inverse of leapfrogging phenomenon - big, developed economies had too fast progress and at the same time too much inertia to fully adopt a pre-smartphone solution nation-wide.

This works only as long as the webapp allows you to log in using a username/password and/or 2FA which is not tied to a smartphone app. More and more countries are moving to digital identity solutions, and while many of them offer hardware tokens as alternatives to apps, the future looks like one where smartphone apps will be only option.

They're working hard on shutting that down as well with Passkeys. It's only a matter of time until the only way to log in will be through de-facto proprietary apps.

But, it doesn't. The browser is unsupported for many of the above-mentioned applications.

Being a web app doesn’t mean shit. We already have DRM encrypted web content where the consuming device requires some attestation to decode. I.e. Widevine.

Yes, some banking apps work on Waydroid.

> I can choose to use a bank that allows me to access all of their online banking features via the browser.

Lucky you. There are fewer and fewer such banks out there. The trend is to route login and consequential interactions on the web through 2FA on a phone - and not TOTP, but push notifications sent to the bank's app, that only runs on devices that pass remote attestation checks.

> I can choose to work for a company that doesn't want to surveil my personal device.

Again, lucky you. Most people don't really get many options for employment at any given moment, and the issue of corporate phones is usually at the bottom of the list of criteria when one is looking for a job. I.e. not a real choice for most people.

> I can deal with the government via snail mail

At a snail pace.

> or in the browser.

Modern government systems around the world tend to require some sort of identification that usually gets tied to your smartphone, either directly or via your bank.

> I can use third-party YouTube clients and torrent movies and games, or simply don't engage with DRM'd media because there's plenty of entertainment out there.

Torrents aside, that's not the case. Entertainment isn't fungible. Disney can release all Star Wars media DRM-free for everyone to download, and it means exactly zero to someone who wants to watch Star Trek, but Paramount/CBS decided to go all Ferengi on the franchise. Can't substitute one for the other. This is why the market supports so many streaming services these days - they exploit this very fact.

> Count the percentage of software you use that are open-source compared to 10 years ago. I bet it's more.

Open Source software stopped mattering once the world embraced Software as a Service model. Source code on Github means nothing if the code is actually executed on servers you don't control and have no visibility into.

That covers end-user OSS. The larger space of OSS building blocks are... building blocks. OSS libraries matter to users just as much as standard Phillips screws used inside an appliance, when they're beneath layers of glue and permanently soldered elements and join together elements explicitly labeled as "not end-user servicable".

> It's only a matter of time before we make hardware open-source, too.

That time will come around when we build a Star Trek-style replicator (and then have a successful revolution to seize this new means to production, because no way the first company to build an universal manufacturing device is going to just let people use it). Open Source Software succeeded only because software development has near-zero natural barrier to entry, so there was a large supply of bored high-schoolers and students, hobbyists, academics and other do-gooders with enough time and will to just build stuff and give it away for free. This isn't true for hardware.

Now, circling back to the main point:

> Whether we can move to open platforms depends on the choices people make.

No, it does not. On consumer side, the market is driven by supply, not demand. I.e. you only get to choose from what the vendors decide to make available to you, and they know perfectly well you have to choose something, so your voice doesn't matter.

If it did, we wouldn't be having this whole thread in the first place.

I think this is true for other European governments. The UK is has introduced age verification (although not mandated an app) and is pushing for digital ID. If digital ID meets too much pushback plan B is a boiled frog approach by introducing it for children first (the legislation for that is in its final stages).

Governments say they want sovereignty but not if they have to pay anything for it. They also like the fact that forcing everyone to do everything through a few big businesses makes surveillance and censorship easy. No need to pass laws, just do deals with a few companies. Governments are all about central control, and its more important to them than what they see as obsolete nonsense about sovereignty.

Your post made me contemplate how other entities want to be able to attest themselves (in your case the government wants to be able to verify the identity of its citizens). Moral and legal arguments aside, the way they are going about it is a bit sloppy in that they are banking their sovereignty on a third party instead of taking the reins themselves.

Instead of mandating google/apple signed applications, they could instead implement some specification for a secure enclave (or whatever fits their needs - I doubt they need control over the entire OS meaning there is plenty of space for pushback for people that want to retain their rights and freedoms for their devices). If you add some sort of certification based on an open standard that would allow any manufacturer interested in the market to be verified that the "attestation" for specific apps or secrets works, then it would no longer enshrine the current winners (apple/google) and instead allow for a healthier market.

This would only be a good thing because it places power with the government and not a third party (something surely the government would prefer), and allows things to be more in the open.

And in an ideal world the specific locked down portion would not need to be active or interfere with the rest of the operating system to some extent, so people would not be reliant on the manufacturers for their applications and would have the freedom of installing whatever they want and using the rest of their device however they wish.

The key thing isn't that the banks (and governments, and enterprise software vendors, and ...) don't provide an alternative to the app as authentication factor. It's why they don't do this.

It's not about security. It's about them wanting people to use the apps. Forcing everyone to use an app streamlines the vendors' operations, reduces the state space of possible user interactions down to small number of flows they control directly, and also provides them a direct channel (communications or upsell, where applicable) to the user.

This is not a fluke or a conspiracy of small number of influential players. It's an emergent alignment of incentives across pretty much the whole supply side of digital aspect of human civilization (not "just" the market, because it's also happening in political and social spheres).

Maybe the answer is to put whatever the banks etc need on something like a smartwatch. Smartwatch + phone is better than two phones IMHO and they're so tedious to use/install anything on that it reduces the attack surface for hackers etc. Tap to pay or digital signatures or identity, passkeys etc via a smartwatch interaction seems like a good use case. Sort of a souped up yubikey. I don't know how good biometrics is on watches nowadays but my Pixel phone has some sort of camera behind the screen to read fingerprints so I can't imagine its impossible. Even adding a capacitive pad on a band seems plausible. Who knows, I don't feel like biometrics have been a real focus of design in the smartwatches I've used.

Personally, I have found smartwatches fairly useless (I do enjoy the activity tracking and notifications but that's not much really) so freeing my phone from bullshit by moving some functions to a watch could increase the value/utility of a some sort of smartwatch. Ultimately, it doesn't need to be that "smart" even.

Doubtful - the costs of supporting it far outweighs any gain they'd have. In case of banks, the costs of supporting aren't just about developing software for an additional platform, but also insurance premiums and managing fallout of hacks (which always eventually happen) - both of which would go way up, as the company would be voluntarily supporting endpoint decides that are less secure than "industry standard" minimum.

"just use a second phone" cannot be the answer because 99% of people will just scoff at that. Instead of buying a second phone, why not just buy one that works?

And that's to say nothing of the environmental impact.

Which is exactly my point: once you apply these workarounds, you don't need a smartphone anymore.

Also: both banks and governments are pushing for 2FA with a mobile device being the primary, and in some cases the only, accepted second factor source.

As for the atm: to use the ATM I need a bank card, to use the bank card I need a PIN. What do you think all the local banks have chosen as their secure channel for communicating that pin to users in the last few years?

For bank apps, you can just use their website

Too bad browsers also support device attestation.

I agree. I also think though that it's a different kind of trust. They trust Google, Apple, and Microsoft because they _think_ they'll be held accountable by some legal system, but judging by the wrist slaps meted out for their massive security lapses (especially you M$) or their constant breakage of their own privacy policies to spy on people it actually seems worse than trusting individual app developers.

This is only until the only 2FA solutions that the bank requires you to use to log in and authorize transactions only come as smartphone apps.

There are OSS solutions for glucose monitors and even insulin pumps, and they exist precisely because commercial vendors tend to give at best suboptimal quality even when it comes to medical devices. Sure, most pay attention to not accidentally kill you, but beyond that, their incentives go in opposite direction to your incentives.

It's important to have computing freedoms so that people who actually care end-to-end, and don't have financial incentives directed against patients' well-being, are able to build on top of products on the market, fix the enshittification, and improve functionality.

(We also need that to close the loop. It's a common story that meh products of today, which improve on bad products of yesterday, are just commercializing the fixes developed by people fed up with said bad products.)

Web being an open platform doesn't matter in any way, when the code runs on proprietary servers.

> But they don't demand the same control over laptops and desktops. Only phones. Why is that?

Oh, but they do. PCs (and Macbooks) are products of an earlier era, and the solutions of control evolved along; it looks chaotic, but that's because it's where the R&D happened over the past decades, which ultimately produced a cleaner - and more easily identifiable - mobile control ecosystem. But it's all there, if you look closely. To name few major groups:

- Many generations of DRM plugins for games, then for streaming media

- Trusted computing hardware

- Intel Management Engine and other firmware backdoors routinely inserted into hardware

- Endpoint security software, deployed widely on corporate-owned machines

Mobile solutions are just version 2.0, built on top of all that R&D.

> Granted I can't deposit a check with my laptop but I can do any other banking I wish to do.

This is the insidious part: for many banks, this is only tolerated because they force you to use their proprietary app on a trusted mobile device as a second factor! At this point, it doesn't really matter how well-controlled your main browsing platform is, because you have to use your phone anyway, and there the control happens. And, "for your convenience", the mobile app isn't just a physical security token, but lets you do banking too, which allows them to gradually deprecate the web experience.

Apple is already in the process of closing down the Mac. As for PCs... why do you think these hardware requirements were imposed on Windows 11?

Hint: When Windows 12 comes out, everyone, or at least everyone with a newish PC, will have a TPM module that's capable of enforcing and attesting a signed-code boot path from power on all the way down to application-level code. Windows 12 will turn these machines into Xboxes that run Excel. Many computers will also have Pluton technology, which is an on-chip TPM implementation that cannot be tampered with or removed from the CPU, and which literally came from Microsoft's Xbox division.

General purpose computing isn't quite dead yet, but there's really nothing we can do for the patient. We're just waiting for it to flatline.

Good luck convincing anyone of that. We could also live without clothes and fancy food and most of modern amenities, but we don't, for the same reason.

Yes, but what do you use as a second factor to authenticate and confirm money transfers?

In large parts of the world, the answer is usually "my uprooted, remotely attested smartphone". Increasingly, it's becoming the only supported method. When that's the case, what you use to load the banking UI doesn't matter anymore - the mobile device is the only actual requirement.

I tried to log into a banking website on a full desktop browser recently, one that I had previously used with a password. It literally would not let me login until I downloaded their app and set up a passkey. That is now the _only_ way for me to access those accounts. Presumably, I could call in, though I wouldn't be surprised if the person on the phone also asked that I download the app in order to verify my identity, and even if it wasn't the case, they didn't offer that option when I was trying to login. Many bank websites now also require the phone app.

Remind me again what video quality Netflix gives you when streaming to an open browser on an open OS?

You're saying I can use Revolut in the Firefox on, say, Fedora?

People have genuine reasons to stay with the provider / platform and usually browser doesn't cover half of their use cases.

For example I have to use Revolut because it's one of the very few banks that allow me to use Garmin Pay and work (reluctantly) on my phone without Google rootkit. Can't use, say, Curve because their privacy policy is alarming (and I had a very very weird/disappointing interaction with their compliance team).

And you've already got a good example with Netflix.

You're getting downvoted because that's not the point.

You are technically right, we still have access to these services via a web browser today. It doesn't mean we'll have it forever.

With the advent of AI browsers and AI agents, it's not hard to think of a future where LLM chat interfaces and mobile apps are the future, and web apps start getting disregarded as legacy and eventually, discontinued.

Try ordering some food via mobile application and then again via web app. You'll instantly feel the downgrade on the web app. Bugs, glitches, slow experience.

The desktop web is already the 2nd-class citizen for modern startups.

EU govs siding with google in this move would be catastrophically stupid, it's equivalent to ceding their digital sovereignty to the US. All it would take to knee-cap Europe is for the US to command google to suspend all european developers' accounts, and suddenly Europe is fucked. No banking apps, no government services, no nothing.

The only rational step for the EU is to support open everything: Open Software, Open Hardware, Open platforms, etc...

Beggars can't be choosers. Until they pony up the cache to fork android, they're beholden to the US.

right, government literally side with them if any

open hardware/platform is impossible if they mandate all chat is exported to gov anyway

I'm sure they would love to. They've been trying to make their own app store (Galaxy Store) a thing for over a decade. But cutting ties with Google would mean no Google Apps and no Google Play Store, and that would probably be catastrophic for them.

Web standards have progressed but your other points would still apply.

Does there exist a company or project that has the resources to develop a smartphone with better performance, UI, and cost than Android or iOS devices? Microsoft couldn't pull it off, and I am skeptical that Meta would have been able to.

I can imagine an alternative smartphone carving out a niche audience like older users, FLOSS enthusiasts, digital minimalists, kids, gamers, privacy-focused users, etc. Perhaps over the span of decades such a project could iteratively improve while the incumbents enshittify and eventually surpass them in popularity.

But it seems more likely to me that Android and iOS will dominate consumer smartphones for as long as that form factor exists. When they are displaced, it'll probably be by some innovative non-smartphone computing device.

If that's inevitably the case, then we should all enjoy the ability to install user-controlled, open source operating systems while we still can.

However, if it's not inevitable, then those who cherish such freedoms should forcibly push back against the attempts to strip them away.

The Librem 5 is awfully outdated now (and so I won't buy it today because I'd worry about it becoming e-waste fast), doesn't have a good battery life, is very pricey, and I'd worry about call reliability (I have no doubt it can be made to work, but reliably, from sleep?).

I'm sure it's way better than the PinePhone, but the Librem 5 is definitely not suitable for the general public, even without considering the Linux mobile part.

> Which OS?

Mobian and postmarketOS

> Did you try SXMo?

Yes, not my cup of tea. I'm happy with a stable Plasma or Phosh; at this point, the GUI is not a concern at all for me. SXMO is a nice project but it will never target the general public, and I think we need to target the general public because I wish the general public's computing were free. It's nice that nerds can be free but it's also not good enough.

> The one catch is that it can be difficult to trick certain picky apps into running on an "unsecured" device.

Imho, this is where we should fight for regulation.

"All mobile apps must allow the user to acknowledge the risks of running on an unsecured platform, but then launch normally"

Couple it with a liability shield for user security issues, if the user acknowledges risk.

The real Android lock-in is the universe of essential apps that, through developer laziness, refuse to launch on alternative platforms.

I think next time I upgrade my "phone" I'm going to get a gaming capable tablet with wireless and give it the steamos treatment. This gives you decent linux/windows/android interop.

I already lug a small backpack around most of the time, I can leave the tablet in the bag and use buds for conversations and when I need an actual computer it'll be way better.

Ubuntu controls a big voting block in debian’s organization. They forced systemd in, for example.

Devuan is a good enough compromise for me. The OS is stable, and the only issues I’ve had involve hacking curl|bash scripts that fail to realize they should just install the debian version.

(Steam and docker run well.)

> If you're worried about a for-profit company having sway over your computer, Ubuntu is not really the choice to make.

Why not? The point is not to not have anything supplied by a business. The point is to avoid being controlled by a business.

Ubuntu does not have the same hold over your computer that Google has over your phone. The software is open source. You can switch distros easily as it does not have lock-in.

Agreed.

So many good working devices go to waste because no longer supported by Google and the hardware manufacturers. They have good cameras, good wifi etc... we should be able to reflash them and install whatever OS we want on them.

It's becoming more and more difficult to install even Lineage on a lot of 6 or 7 year old hardware.

Good point about hardware duopoly, and laws (along lines of "right to repair", right?). Nit: "Until we do not have that in place" - double negative

For example because the wait time in the theme park which I visited can be find only in their app for iOS and Android. The same true for ordering food to your table in another theme park. Yeah, there are alternatives, but those cost you time, sometimes hours. And these companies won’t implement anything for an error margin.

Not so, if the next system is mobile GNU/Linux. As long as the components remain free and mostly the same as on desktop, if one or two go bad, they can be replaced. And certainly the core system won't go bad.

> Most if not all large, successful open source projects are funded by commercial interests, not just consumers.

Right, the key point here is most of the fundamental projects were never commercial in origin and had grassroots community or academic roots. Android is built on top of a student's hobby Unix clone.

> The resources it takes to maintain something like Android far exceeds what can be funded solely by donations and volunteers.

Um, no duh a corporate project requires corporate funding. Android was never a grass roots community effort.

How many consumer devices is Linux successfully running on?

If it's just about building software against suites of tests and spec that already exist, then definitely what I'm saying would make it faster. But if it's a hardware control issue, then no.

In that case (ie, if in order to be free we need to free the hardware, too), we need to create a hardware company that builds a phone from the modem/radio on up and owns every layer.

Obviously non trivial hahahahaha :)

AI is letting the world of bits move faster than before by exponentially reducing rework and sharing around the benefit of network effects from collective human knowledge. It's not touching hardware in the same way, and doesn't give us the same superpower.

edit: I guess the "easier" play is to convince an existing full stack phone hardware company to make us an OpenPhone that we can hack on because they believe in the inevitabilities of trends and consequences from AI and want to invest in that future. That would be cool? Any takers? Reach out cris@dosaygo.com

Like many others in this thread have already said, Linux is not the solution.

You call it blackpilling, I call it facing reality.