I just realized how powerless we are. The situation is almost unavoidable. Majority people will just accept this. They are unaware how restricted they are, thus they don't care.
are there enough devs to make "non-certified" phones? also i wonder if you'll be able to disable the verification check similar to bootloader unlocking.
Non-certified phones won't be sold in Western markets. This whole scheme has one goal only, and that's to snuff out DRM-unfriendly third party apps like alternative Youtube clients, videogame emulators and P2P file sharing apps.
They're being sold and enough people are buying them to keep these companies alive. Fairphone said they're not delivering to USA because they don't have the manpower, not because there's no demand. Every release again you see people asking in the comments when/if it'll finally be available to them
That's not to say it's a big market where you get big economy of scale benefits. The devices are expensive but they're yours (and some of them try to do ethical resource mining and/or pay fair wages as well). Some of these will also have Googled variants available, but it's a choice
They don't have the manpower to drop off some USA-bound boxes at the same shipping carrier they use for their EU deliveries? I highly doubt that. They likely don't want to bother with FCC approval, opposition from Google about selling de-Googled Android or produce separate SKUs for US-specific 5G frequencies.
what i'm saying is it's time to make a new company. this is a matter of maintaining good technology and avoiding enshitification so it's quite important.
That's my point. Who is going to create a company to compete with Google and Apple on the smartphone front? They already ran everybody else out of business (Palm WebOS, BlackberryOS, Windows Phone). The alternatives are already here but they don't operate in North America (Huawei HarmonyOS, Jolla OS, Pinephone).
yeah that's what i'm saying. but obviously the problem is funding.
so do we have enough engineers who care about maintaining useful tools that aren't handicapped or compromised to be able to support this endeavor? i think we do. there have to be many good eggs within these companies who die a little inside each time something like this goes through.
> They already ran everybody else out of business (Palm WebOS, BlackberryOS, Windows Phone).
Only because those alternative mobile OSes were, frankly, crappy in comparison to iOS and Android.
I don't recall Google or Apple doing anything particularly anticompetitive to cause any of those OSes to fail to keep up in the market, aside from just plain "being the 800lb gorillas in the room". (Not saying they never do anything anticompetitive, just that those particular market failures can't be laid at their feet.)
It would be great to have some really good alternatives to the mobile duopoly. Hell, if we had more fragmentation in the market, that would even lead to more impetus for interoperability and common standards—which we desperately need more of everywhere in tech these days. But those three, in particular? They lost because they were worse at being a good mobile OS for most people.
Sadly "non-certified" phones come at a big consequence, I wrote a big article on it on HN but I'll give you the summary, Google has added in "play integrity" into all certified phones which detects if your bootloader is unlocked or your phone is modified in some way, and apps can (and do) request this device verdict on your device to choose to deny you service. Bank apps, basically all NFC wallet apps like Google Wallet, and games do this, and it's a massive headache. Good apps also make this a server-side check meaning you cannot bypass this without leaking your phone's special hardware attestation key stored in 50 different layers of security in the actual CPU with tamper detection.
Don't they have ads on pay TV too? "Free plus ads" is not the norm. In some countries you pay tax for national TV and you still get ads. Sports matches are only available on paid services and they stick as much advertising in them as they possibly can.
They only show ads for other shows on their own service (at least in my region), and they're skippable, but I'm not defending it, it's still bad and serves no purpose for the customer.
What bothers me more with Prime is that when I finish watching the latest episode of something, as there is no next episode, it starts playing something entirely different I have no interest in watching, which then ends up on my "Continue watching" list.
Fun fact: cable TV also started out ad-free. The sell was you'd pay a monthly subscription and got just the content you wanted to watch. Then came the ads. Enshittification as a phenomenon didn't start in Silicon Valley.
IIRC it was basically undefined, some data formats were defined. Eventually it was specified that it must correctly parse RFC 3339 and everything was browser defined. I think in the name of web compatibility they have started to carefully define the legacy behaviours of common browsers.
But the morale of this story should be if you need a date from a user user a date input and if you need to parse a computer-readable date always use UNIX timestamps or RFC 3339 (which are correctly and consistently supported).
