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0 pointszepto5y ago0 comments

I don’t think it’s hard to vote with our wallets at all.

We just can’t expect to get what Apple built.

If we want an alternative, someone has to build it.

I think Apple’s platform is great. The problem is the lack of an open alternative.

No amount of intervention can possibly force Apple to produce an open alternative.

All it will do is pick a few winners from already well funded competitors.

The costs will be borne by both developers, and consumers, and the bar to ever having an open alternative will be raised impossibly high.

What we need is for the community to actually invest in a platform that as a baseline solves the problems Apple is solving in terms of creating a trusted platform, but is actually open.

Frankly, it’s not Apple’s fault we don’t have this. Google is responsible.

Lack of openness was a serious concern right from the beginning of the iPhone’s lifecycle.

Google claimed Android would be open, and at the time people had faith in them to actually deliver on this.

I know plenty of people who chose to buy Android phones on the basis that they were supporting an open system, from within and without the tech community.

Google completely betrayed this promise, as illustrated by your results.

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wezm5y ago· 1 in thread

That's an interesting perspective. In particular, "I don’t think it’s hard to vote with our wallets at all. We just can’t expect to get what Apple built", aligns well with my experience switching to Linux. I included this part in the post:

> Something I learnt from my move to Linux though, was to embrace the platform's conventions as opposed to trying to reproduce the system you're moving from as much as possible.

Which is kind of along the same lines. I think my experience so far was that it felt like giving up too much to go the more/completely open option at the moment. With projects like postmarketOS though, I feel there is some progress being made on this. I will continue to keep an eye on it.

zeptoOP5y ago

For what it’s worth, I’m on the same page about this.

I think we need an open, community owned, phone OS.

I don’t see any of the actors who are impugning Apple as having any intention whatsoever to support the development of that - there is literally zero evidence of it.

They only want to capture a part of the revenue stream for themselves. It’s simply all they have talked about.

I believe that there are serious technical challenges to overcome to create a true open alternative to iOS that provides the same safety benefits that their controlled ecosystem provides. It took years for Apple to build their walled garden and it would take years to build an alternative.

It would be pretty easy for these billion dollar corporations who are attacking Apple to fund such an initiative though a foundation of some kind, but it’s much cheaper for them to just try to use the courts to capture some of Apple’s revenue stream instead.

In this case, the enemy of my enemy is just another bully.

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