Comment by crote
5 hours ago
Everything hinges on app support.
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
Although I haven't held one in my hands, apparently there's Flutter support for Harmony OS. There are quite a lot of mobile apps implemented in Flutter and Dart, and platform support for alternative phone OSs looks doable.
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.
Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.
If the app truly just plumbed a webview and cert verification - which has been doable for over a decade - it would be very portable and this wouldn't be a problem.
The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
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> Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities.
I've never owned a smartphone in my life and are not planning on getting one, and I'm going through life just fine.
>heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms.
should work for banking and governmental applications, especially as those should already have the workflow in place to support niche platforms.