And phones like the sidekick and motorolla razr were technically capable of being smart devices they were just kept back from it because the telecoms didnt want it.
And then Jobs forced through a phone with no telecom rot, and it did even less.
In the earlier days the android ecosystem was a bit of a mess and we already have lots of preinstalled apps from telecoms.
As opposed to when?
Sure there would likely still be higher end (and priced) android devices that would be vanilla or unlocked clean versions
… as opposed to when?
“The other side of history” here is if you could buy phone-OS software at Walmart. Like… any other software, at the time. All “app stores” are bad, actually. All of them are some form of single-vendor walled garden, and their goal is to keep people in so they can keep seeking rent on other people’s software.
Chances are high that everyone in this Lemmy thread is a Linux user, and all of us know that getting software from outside your repository of choice comes with a sense of misery. Money’s not what makes it a problem. Any system designed to be a one-stop solution is not designed for competition. No matter how open it is. Windows, for its innumerable faults, will happily run whatever garbage you got from a brick-and-mortar store, or a skeezy website, or through some networked installer installer installer. make && configure is a prayer. But I can grab any install wizard off a 1990s PC Gamer disc and have better odds it’ll install under Wine.
Android came so close to the right idea, with APKs. Platform-agnostic bytecode with permission-based APIs? Even today, that’s a fantastic goal. And lusers don’t need to know how it works if they just click Okay and watch the progress bar fill up. What we have instead is an ARM monoculture where the allegedly open and free vendor considered locking everything down or buying out another billion-dollar corporation to avoid tolerating software outside their ecosystem.
The most bitter irony is, browsers became the right answer. WebGPU’s gonna do Vulkan things. WASM has probably sorted out its threading. It’s not exactly SPIR-V and Qt, but it’s a thin enough overhead that you might as well ship one version everywhere.
And then Jobs forced through a phone with no telecom rot, and it did even less.
And they very quickly corrected and the 3g had an appstore.
… as opposed to when?
I suppose what my post is getting at is more or less that if android and apple hadnt asserted their marketplace that the result would have been that their devices would be slightly open feature phones. With the Verizon Store and ATT-Store and etc instead where everything costs money even things that would otherwise be free like chat apps.
There might be a higher end unsubsidized market for enthusiasts and enterprise users and of course I imagine on the android end we’d still get the nexus line for vanilla android, but it would be a bit of a mess.
And then Jobs forced through a phone with no telecom rot, and it did even less.
As opposed to when?
… as opposed to when?
“The other side of history” here is if you could buy phone-OS software at Walmart. Like… any other software, at the time. All “app stores” are bad, actually. All of them are some form of single-vendor walled garden, and their goal is to keep people in so they can keep seeking rent on other people’s software.
Chances are high that everyone in this Lemmy thread is a Linux user, and all of us know that getting software from outside your repository of choice comes with a sense of misery. Money’s not what makes it a problem. Any system designed to be a one-stop solution is not designed for competition. No matter how open it is. Windows, for its innumerable faults, will happily run whatever garbage you got from a brick-and-mortar store, or a skeezy website, or through some networked installer installer installer. make && configure is a prayer. But I can grab any install wizard off a 1990s PC Gamer disc and have better odds it’ll install under Wine.
Android came so close to the right idea, with APKs. Platform-agnostic bytecode with permission-based APIs? Even today, that’s a fantastic goal. And lusers don’t need to know how it works if they just click Okay and watch the progress bar fill up. What we have instead is an ARM monoculture where the allegedly open and free vendor considered locking everything down or buying out another billion-dollar corporation to avoid tolerating software outside their ecosystem.
The most bitter irony is, browsers became the right answer. WebGPU’s gonna do Vulkan things. WASM has probably sorted out its threading. It’s not exactly SPIR-V and Qt, but it’s a thin enough overhead that you might as well ship one version everywhere.
And they very quickly corrected and the 3g had an appstore.
I suppose what my post is getting at is more or less that if android and apple hadnt asserted their marketplace that the result would have been that their devices would be slightly open feature phones. With the Verizon Store and ATT-Store and etc instead where everything costs money even things that would otherwise be free like chat apps.
There might be a higher end unsubsidized market for enthusiasts and enterprise users and of course I imagine on the android end we’d still get the nexus line for vanilla android, but it would be a bit of a mess.