[HN Gopher] On the Duopoly of Mobile
___________________________________________________________________
On the Duopoly of Mobile
Author : zdw
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-05-02 15:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (deprogrammaticaipsum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deprogrammaticaipsum.com)
| MBCook wrote:
| Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly?
|
| Apple was the first modern smartphone with the iPhone and quickly
| got apps. That caused massive growth.
|
| Google was right there too, also had apps on a modern platform.
| They saw what people wanted.
|
| Everyone else was late to the party with their modern OSes. MS,
| Palm, BB.
|
| By the time they arrived Android and iOS already had a big lead.
| It's hard to get a company to develop their apps for your 3rd+
| place platform with almost no market share. So you have no apps.
| So things get worse.
|
| It was basically first mover advantage. Palm might have been OK
| but they were screwed over by Verizon. MS may have survived in
| 3rd but they kept rebooting their platform and breaking
| compatibility.
|
| Now the duopoly is too strong for anyone to break into without
| pouring insane amounts of cash in that will likely never return a
| profit.
|
| Until there is another big shift, I don't see things changing.
| The current game is over, Google and Apple are too far ahead at
| it.
| amelius wrote:
| > Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly?
|
| I have the strange feeling that the reason we have a duopoly is
| that companies can't get away with being a monopoly.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I have to argue that the original iPhone, as it was released,
| had no apps, the camera was not good and iOS had a laughable
| feature set. It quickly evolved to be much better than it's
| initial version, but I remember being rather upset that I had
| wait until iOS 3 or iOS 4 to get copy and paste support - a
| feature which I had on my Symbian phone for literal years. And
| my Symbian phone had multitasking for ages too. And it could
| film video. The iPhone had a handful of impressive features,
| but it was not all too useful for the first few iterations,
| aside from Safari - that was a game changer. Other
| manufacturers weren't late to the party, they had already gone
| home well drunk by the time Apple arrived. Their offerings
| hadn't advanced much for years, and it took years for
| incumbents to realize they need to catch up - get their OSes to
| be modernized, create platforms and embrace capacitative touch
| screens. All this to say, initially Apple had great marketing
| and a great vision and a lukewarm experience delivered in a
| shiny package, at least that's how I experienced it.
| MBCook wrote:
| That's sort of what I was trying to get out with "modern".
| Mostly the interface, but also OS guts. Palm was still
| creaking along on a very old OS stretched far beyond its
| design (for example).
|
| I had an iPhone 3G running on iOS 2.0. Yes, it was missing
| things. But if you were coming from a non-smart phone you
| didn't notice. And that's where TONS of people came from.
| ineedasername wrote:
| MS had a halfway decent mobile _OS_ , but pretty much stopped
| there leaving a barren software ecosystem.
|
| I had an HP ipaq w/ windows before the iPhone and as an OS it
| was okay. I could do basic web browsing, email worked fine, RSS
| reader. I could even tether it to my laptop for reasonable
| pageload speeds online, I think around 1 Mbit. (Yeah, this was
| before the days of >3 MByte dumps on every page.)
|
| But that was about all, and the mobile web was mostly non
| existent at the time. iPhones had the same problem to a lesser
| extent, but IIRC safari was smart enough to mostly make text
| readable. It was only after a few years that "mobile first"
| became the dominant mantra for sites.
|
| As far as consumer appeal the ipaq was also crap on product
| design: it screamed business user, and I felt awkward taking it
| out in public and holding it up to my head. Whereas the
| original iPhone was sleek and instantly cool & fashionable, and
| not as clunky & big, it fit in the hand very well.
|
| So MS had a passable mobile OS, they just failed in practically
| every other way, and their manufacturing partners never seemed
| to understand that a smartphone could break out of the
| enterprise mold.
| e40 wrote:
| Before the iPhone I had a very nice phone with apps and a
| keyboard. It was a PalmOS device called the Treo650. Loved it
| until the company died and I went to an OG Droid.
| amelius wrote:
| Is it really a duopoly, considering that for Google the real
| users are advertisers not smartphone owners?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Why do we have a duopoly? You can draw a direct logical line to
| the complexity of shipping apps through an app store. Right now,
| an app, say, Spotify, has to create two versions of their app
| (iOS and Android), and package them for the Apple App Store and
| Google Play Store.
|
| (Buuut that's not even the whole truth. Mobile OS updates
| frequently break backward compatibility, so iOS and Android apps
| need to gracefully handle backward and forward compatibility,
| often special-casing different OS versions or screen
| resolutions).
|
| Anyway, if, say, Amazon resuscitated their Fire Phone, which
| would use the Amazon App Store, then Spotify would have to
| package their app for the Amazon store... which costs developer
| (or at least a release coordinator) time. That's a barrier to
| entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem.
| igorstellar wrote:
| > That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC
| ecosystem.
|
| Unless you're using some native language like C++ and cross-
| platform UI framework like QT or js/Electron you have even
| bigger diversity problem in the PC ecosystem. There are Windows
| (x86/arm), macOS (x86/arm), linux (variable desktop
| environments), Chrome OS, ...
|
| You would need to provide builds for all the OS and hopefully
| also provide Store versions (Windows Store, AppStore, Snap)
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and
| enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually
| became a thing, and we had true competition among flagship phones
| today. Imagine a Surface Pro phone with modern specs that could
| sideload any x86 application. One can dream.
| loudmax wrote:
| While we're at it, let's imagine a world where BeOS succeeded
| on the desktop. People without the technical inclination to run
| open source would have a choice of multiple competing
| commercial desktop environments rather than the current
| duopoly.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Why would it be x86? The OS isn't the holdout there. Android
| even supports x86.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying
| Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and
| bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in
| order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing
| catch up now.
|
| It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a
| WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW
| and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google
| was giving Android away for free to the same handset
| manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on
| the Fire phone.
|
| Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing
| product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism
| perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress
| like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have
| bungled it.
|
| That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a
| triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly.
|
| [1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android
| without Microsoft's antitrust woes
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...
| mr_toad wrote:
| > bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in
| order to compete with Amazon AWS
|
| Microsoft's (enterprise) customers weren't ready for the
| cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of
| the market, but I'm not sure the rest of the market wanted
| Microsoft.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It would've been nice if Nokia had made another MeeGo
| smartphone after the N9 with the same sort of quality and
| usability.
| danuker wrote:
| > that could sideload any x86 application
|
| Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store,
| gradually taking control away.
|
| I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore
| is if I needed a dedicated GPU _now_ with Windows-only drivers,
| for its computing efficiency.
|
| I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as
| proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility
| with the rest of the world.
|
| However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly
| happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-
| parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one,
| and I run them on my CPU.
|
| The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me
| to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I think about this all the damn time. Imagine how much higher
| quality and stable the software stack would be if Microsoft
| took all of their lessons working with OEMs, chipset makers
| (GPUs, etc) for Windows and applied that to mobile. Instead we
| got an unengineered hot garbage driver interface that broke
| compatibility with every major android release. Absolute zero
| continuity across any low level APIs. Camera HAL, HAL 2, HAL 3!
| Isn't the point of an abstraction layer to generalize
| functionality enough that you can grow into future devices and
| feature sets without a complete redesign of the interfaces?
| Google has zero vision of where mobile hardware was headed.
| Android design was built on Google promo culture not product
| design
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they
| rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many
| aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could
| differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is
| big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro
| BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Between their introduction of Surface phones like the Duo,
| and their Microsoft Launcher, it seems like they're aiming
| for that down the road.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| What would be the point of Microsoft failing with Android in
| the same ways that Amazon and Samsung _have already failed_
| here?
|
| (Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft
| running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use
| Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox
| and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of
| what Edge once was.)
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they
| rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many
| aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they
| could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their
| name is big enough to create a store. They already have a
| linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner
|
| I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure
| of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating
| system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware
| partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have
| some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded
| the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The
| only explanation is poor leadership.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I still think the largest balkanization factor in the
| current duopoly was the cellphone carriers. They have to
| support the phones they sell. They want as few variables in
| their support matrix. QED: three options is too many.
|
| Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where
| they had all the software the needed and all the hardware
| they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone
| carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them.
|
| For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it
| generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly
| shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at
| Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its
| network, with flip flopping which one was which between
| different "flagship" phones.
|
| How does _any_ product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Windows Phone came out at a time when smartphones were
| still lifestyle products. Apple was the king of the hill in
| that respect and Google was still perceived as a pretty
| cool company even if having an Android phone wasn't as
| showy as having an iPhone. Having a phone from Microsoft
| meant you were probably a corporate weenie who wore pleated
| khakis and spent their day in a cubicle. The quality of the
| phone and the OS didn't really play into the perception of
| it.
|
| It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in
| other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a
| premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance
| in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions.
| Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America
| could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really
| know and given the influence of the North American market
| on global culture, it might not have worked.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Windows phone had to introduce a store, operating system,
| and new hardware partners. The store was launched in tandem
| with Windows Phone and not added to the Desktop version
| until 2 years later. The OS and existing software base they
| had was irrelevant for small touch screens. The hardware
| partners they had weren't relevant to the mobile space and
| they weren't doing enough hardware development themselves
| to just rely on the in-staff hardware folks they had.
|
| Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They
| tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops,
| they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform
| specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use
| type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn
| and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors
| already had working alternatives to all of these before
| they even launched.
|
| Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the
| 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they
| already had everything made for them and let it fall apart.
|
| Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them
| which got all of these changes over time but again they
| launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.
| guessbest wrote:
| Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard
| method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting
| recognition built in to every device running locally on a
| 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was
| possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was
| very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the
| problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not
| compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft
| working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to
| consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots
| of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not
| being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire.
|
| Article from 2007 :
|
| > Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone
| and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device.
|
| >> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the
| market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have
| products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go
| through this again in phones and music players. There's no
| chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market
| share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a
| lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3
| billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software
| in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%,
| which is what Apple might get.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...
| ansible wrote:
| What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the
| user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in
| 2007.
|
| I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet
| access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had
| very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly
| underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down
| network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone
| experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running
| Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable
| text browser.
|
| I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that
| worked.
|
| Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive
| touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more.
| You went to regular desktop websites, and they _just worked_.
| Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address
| book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user
| experience quite unlike anything else at the time.
| Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE
| handheld PDAs.
| dwighttk wrote:
| >You went to regular desktop websites, and they just
| worked.
|
| Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I
| really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after
| I request the desktop version.
| guessbest wrote:
| You are 100% correct.
|
| They probably all missed this because the executive class
| all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft
| executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I
| agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever
| putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering
| of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser
| applications and feature phones all used something other
| than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a
| phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering
| like Opera Mini.
|
| > Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering
| (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The
| Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for
| optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA)
| screens. It was also the first widely available mobile
| browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to
| pass ACID2 test.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser
|
| Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much
| effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and
| WML. It just never materialized as viable.
| mrkramer wrote:
| If that happened Android wouldn't exist but funny enough I
| trust Google more than Microsoft because Google at least
| pretends it cares with its once famous motto "Don't be evil".
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| I find it weird how perfectly stable the marketshare is
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide What
| are the odds.. Edit: actually Apple has gained marketshare in the
| last few years up to 29% then fallen to 27% and since stagnate to
| it. Despite being much much more APKs than Ipas (and the gradient
| likely increasing (any data ?), this doesn't seems to affect much
| markestshare. What the IOS market needs to fall is to miss some
| killer apps.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Despite being much much more APKs than Ipas (and the gradient
| likely increasing (any data ?), this doesn't seems to affect
| much markestshare. What the IOS market needs to fall is to miss
| some killer apps.
|
| Market share doesn't tell the true story. It's all about
| revenue. Apple generates nearly twice the profits of Google
| from one third the number of devices.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/05/app-store-earns-7...
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| While a commonly repeated trope, I disagree with it: Play
| stores apps must pay a 30% comission rate the first year then
| it drops to 15%. Most of user acquisition of successful apps
| are made after the first year of existsence. Therefore, the
| vast majority of Android apps revenue are made with a 15%
| commission rate vs Apple constant 30% milking. So one could
| ~say for an equal revenue, Apple will take the double, and
| since they have ~25% marketshare, then I see no signal of
| apple users spending more than Android users, however the
| milking is hard.
|
| Android announced this year that from now one, the comission
| rate will be 15% even the first year. And 15% is still
| indecent, people must be really perturbed in modern society
| to find such power abuse acceptable.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >So one could ~say for an equal revenue, Apple will take
| the double, and since they have ~25% marketshare, then I
| see no signal of apple users spending significantly more
| than Android users, however the milking is hard.
|
| Blood from a stone and all that. You can only milk people
| for what they've got, and you can bet that Google's 15%
| number is not coming out of the kindness of their hearts.
| It's a competitive tactic to lure app developers away from
| what they know is a more lucrative platform. Point being
| that Apple users are, on average, much wealthier and more
| willing to spend money in an app store, and thus much more
| profitable per MAU.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| > Point being that Apple users are, on average, much
| wealthier and more willing to spend money in an app
| store, and thus much more profitable per MAU.
|
| No the only maximally pro-thesis consequence you could
| speculate from data is that Apple users have on average,
| maximally 15% more money willing to spend. Of course in
| many cases the fact they pay 50% more to apple (global
| 15%) does not imply that this excess money would be spent
| in additional app purchases, only a subset would and
| spending often have diminishing returns. I would say that
| the average apple user has 5-8% more money to spend, and
| as said, in the ridiculously pro-thesis case, 15%.
| Therefore the effect you're trying to show is in fact
| very small.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Another effect that may be playing into all of this is
| that Android has a larger share of users who want a phone
| but not necessarily a smartphone. This demographic is
| less likely to buy an iPhone and more likely to opt for
| the cheapest thing on the shelf, which is almost
| invariably going to be running Android. These users
| basically do not exist as far as app revenue is
| concerned.
|
| I don't have links but I've seen reports that on average,
| iOS users make considerably more heavy use the "smart"
| features of their phones (and thus, buy and use more
| apps), which lines up with this. While there are "power
| users" who make heavy use of Android's more technical
| features and deep customization, they probably aren't a
| large enough group to make up the difference.
| a4isms wrote:
| > Apple users are, on average, much wealthier...
|
| That someone willing to pay for a premium product is
| likely to be wealthy is a reasonable conjecture for items
| where the item is so expensive that a typical middle-
| class customer is making a substantial sacrifice to
| purchase, if they can do so at all.
|
| So for architect-designed homes, small-volume luxury
| cars, cigarette boats, personal jets... Absolutely.
| Middle-class people can and do buy small-volume luxury
| cars, but it's a big compromise and most of the people
| driving Bentleys are actually wealthy.
|
| iPhones are not that kind of luxury item, they're what we
| might call "affordable luxuries." Even the most tricked-
| out iPhone is within reach of your typical 9-5 full-time
| employee if they want one.
|
| Other "affordable luxuries" include things like premium
| alcoholic drinks, expensive basketball shoes, carbon
| bicycles, and Fashion brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren
| that specialize in pretending to be exclusive but
| distributing their wares in department stores.
|
| Owning an affordable luxury in no way suggests you're
| significantly wealthier than people who buy an affordable
| substitute for the same product. It's more about
| signalling taste than means.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Makes sense - in my experience people with iPhones are more
| willing to pay for things.
| prox wrote:
| In my experience the apps are more often worth paying for.
| Probably a viscous circle. Android always feels like a
| garbage bin I have to scrounge through to find some gems
| imo.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| And this effect is even more profound when looking for
| tablet optimized apps, which are far and few between on
| the Play store. There's a few decent ones on F-Droid but
| iPadOS has the quality tablet app market solidly
| cornered.
| mojzu wrote:
| I'm a recent-ish convert and found this to be true, there's
| definitely plenty of rubbish on the app store similar to
| the play store and trying to avoid subscription services
| where it shouldn't be necessary can be frustrating (I'm not
| paying a monthly fee for a calculator). But so far I've
| generally been able to find high quality apps that are pay
| once/sync via icloud/support sign in with apple that means
| I've spent more money on apps in a couple of years then I
| did in the previous 10+ with Android
| enos_feedler wrote:
| What are the top things you want in a calculator that
| aren't included in the default one?
| ink_13 wrote:
| If you increase the timescale, those numbers actually show that
| iOS has increased its market share by 10% since late 2018,
| which is also interesting.
| fckgw wrote:
| Not too long after the introduction of the iPhone SE and
| Apple keeping older models in their lineup to act as cheaper
| options to their yearly flagship phone. I'm sure a $399 SE
| has taken a chunk of Android's market share.
| brewdad wrote:
| I made the switch to Apple a year ago. I was tired of
| losing support 12-18 months after purchase and having my
| phones be practically unusable after 2 years. I have no
| interest in messing about with 3rd party OSes, I just want
| a phone that works. So far, I don't regret the change.
| Check back in a year to see if my battery still holds an
| all day charge.
| [deleted]
| iskander wrote:
| Since 2009: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/mobile/worldwide/...
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Adding onto that, it's super interesting that the 2011-2012
| time period seems to have coincided with the most balanced
| market shares for both mobile OS and browsers:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
| didibus wrote:
| I find the desktop duopoly even more annoying.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It's more like a triopoly, isn't it? Linux is a reasonable
| choice for a consumer OS on laptops/desktops, at least for
| techies. Much more so than non-Android/iOS options on mobile.
|
| Especially with the work Valve has done to make Linux gaming
| more easily accessible, even releasing a Linux-based handheld
| console.
| ajvs wrote:
| Even non-techies really, as long as you have someone to do
| that first install since there's very few companies that
| offer Linux as the default OS for their hardware.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Eh, there's definitely issues where you do a search to see
| how to change/fix something and the most prominent results
| tell you to delve into the command line. As long as that's
| true, it's harder to recommend to non-techies imo.
| linguae wrote:
| I disagree; I find it harder to migrate away from the
| iOS/Android duopoly than it is to migrate from the
| macOS/Windows duopoly. Because so much of modern desktop
| computing has migrated to the Web, I can use any operating
| system that supports a modern Web browser. LibreOffice has
| pretty good compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats
| for my needs at home; the only time I need Microsoft Office is
| at work, where I have access to Windows and macOS anyway. I
| could migrate to Linux or one of the BSDs full time at home if
| I wanted to (I currently use both FreeBSD and Windows 10), and
| the only thing I'd lose would be access to some DRM-protected
| media from iTunes I purchased years ago.
|
| However, if I were to give up my iPhone for a phone running
| GNU/Linux rather than Android, I'd have to give up many apps
| that I depend on, some of them with no Web versions. The
| smartphone situation today feels like how the Linux desktop was
| in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| Even migrating to variants of android other than the vendor
| installed one is a major pita, that is only possible for an
| increasingly small subset of phones.
| pphysch wrote:
| In theory, the duopoly would be broken by manufacturers from
| other countries, but those products would just get banned in
| America.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Why do you think this?
| wyre wrote:
| Because Hauwei is a competitor from another country but is
| banned in America
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| There's plenty of foreign phone manufacturers that sell in
| America. The idea that the US would ban them solely for
| being foreign is absurd.
| gilrain wrote:
| You can right now buy handsets made even by the US's primary
| competitor, China. Go nuts, have a blast.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Huawei+phone
| [deleted]
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Convergence was, if you go back and re-watch that video from
| the iPhone launch linked above, the big selling point of the
| iPhone. It is a media player, an internet browser, and a mobile
| phone all in one. And these days, it is a camera, a satellite
| navigation system, and a payment card too. So it is not enough to
| make a good phone, you have to make a good all-of-those-things._
|
| Or people have to be willing to go back to "Not all of this in
| one thing."
|
| And there are some nice benefits there. "Separate things" don't
| tend to data mine in the way that modern smartphones do, and I'm
| not too concerned about my not-at-all-networked camera submitting
| stuff upstream without me realizing it. I don't mind having music
| separate again, and I've been re-acquainting myself with internal
| navigational skills using paper maps and written directions to
| get around.
|
| It was nice when "all the things" were on a single device, and
| I've done that, but as I'm more and more opposed to "turning
| everything I do into extracted behavioral surplus," going back to
| separate things makes sense - and, realistically, it doesn't suck
| nearly as much as I expected it to.
|
| I now carry a phone that does calling and texting and... if I'm
| in the mood for pain, some bluetooth audio to speakers. It'll do
| calling via BT to the car if I bother to turn it on, and that's
| about as fancy as I normally get. Though anymore, I'm as likely
| to forget the phone as not when I go places.
|
| Photos are done with a pocket camera now, going back to that
| which I did for years. I take fewer photos, but it's fine, and it
| also means that working on projects I'm documenting, I don't have
| the distraction of the phone there. I have a camera, and it takes
| pictures.
|
| It's a different approach to life, more of a return to a
| 90s/early 2000s approach, but I've been quite happy with it, and
| find it a welcome change from "Everything in one device."
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