Comment by sipos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sipos | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is true to some extent - they do suit many users more than more flexible, but as a result more complicated, Android - but the iOS ecosystem is more restrictive than it needs to be, and more restrictive than is ideal, for many more than 1% of users.

Personally, I think more than 50% of users would benefit for more flexibility than iOS offers, even at the cost of less ease of use. I don't think it has to cost that much ease of use though. I think the ideal for most people is somewhere in between Android and iOS, but probably closer to Android. Android is not that hard to use. It is also not impossible to have a highly curated app store like Apple's, and allow apps from other sources at the same time of people want to install them. Ideally we'd have more diversity in OS implementations I think, based on one or a small number of actual OSs. Android based OSs that are more heavily modified to be easier to use etc. This would be easier I think if phones were more like PCs in that you could install your own OS and get the drivers for your hardware. I think Android is somewhat moving in that direction so there is hope for that in future.

Phones are very much unlike PCs in a lot of important ways.

First, is that phone users value weight and size above all else. Regardless of what that means to each individual user, it does mean that any design compromises will need to come out favorably for weight/size considerations. Modular phones have been released, but they largely failed because they provided very little benefit for the added weight/size. Phones absolutely must be integrated devices as a result (i.e. no modular components, making them impossible to repair).

Second is that because of the above, basically every chip in a phone is a custom SoC. So not only do you have to support many flavors of devices, you also have to support different flavors of SoCs, often used in different ways in different devices. This isn't insurmountable with the right driver repository structure, but good luck getting vendors to update those drivers.

Third, I don't exactly know what benefits a less restrictive OS ecosystem would provide. Apple's App Store rules are not insane (there are so many bad actors out there, the curation is a huge benefit to users); and if you ever want to run programs that aren't "blessed" by Apple, you can buy a $99 developer license, sign the binaries yourself and sideload them through XCode. Could it be easier? Sure, it could. But it's realistically an edge case, and Apple is focused on the main use cases.

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