Alas, I feel the mistake they made was releasing an MVP of a phone OS, instead of hitting feature parity with Android (or at least iOS) of the era. Phones have quite a big switching cost - if you make a mistake and are not super wealthy, you may need to live with it for the next year, or more. By releasing and aggressively pushing a subpar product, Microsoft completely obliterated the trust in their mobile brand.
I think Windows needs to run Android apps like Chrome OS does. Then they will eventually be able to run on phones once again.
I think the "best" option for now would be an Android phone without Google services. And as a developer you don't have to play to put your app in the F-Droid repository (you may want to donate though).
In 2019, the Librem 5 will probably be a good (expensive?) option too.
It is not the best option for a secure device, for which some restrictions are necessary.
Using only apps from F-Droid, I'm reasonably sure no app is doing something shady. Google is probably not spying on you as much as on a regular Android phone. No need for having a Google account to install apps, by the way. Depending on the device, SELinux policies can be enforced (and probably are on a well supported device).
F-Droid requires enabling insecure sources but this is not a problem if you don't download random APKs from the Internet and on Oreo, it seems insecure sources are handled with a permission given per app. Insecure sources can be enabled in any regular Android device anyway.
(edit: and actually, I think enabling insecure sources is not necessary if F-Droid Privileged Extension is flashed on the device (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged...)
I can't verify what are doing the numerous proprietary blobs all over the place, but this is true on any current Android phone so far (and this is my motivation to put "best" inside quotes actually).
Why would this option not be secure enough compared to a regular Android phone?
Sure you have to deal with an unlocked bootloader, but if someone gets physical access to the phone, they can unlock it anyway. They will not get access to the data since it is encrypted (it should, anyway!).
(p.s. for posterity: I meant "pay", not "play" in my previous message)
So for Europe, each major update should either remember your preferences or have them opted out by default.
What do you mean specifically about the walled garden? Is it just the fact that it's a bit of a hassle to get apps on an iOS device without going through the store, or is it something else?
(I'm absolutely not trying to argue your preference; some people just like Android's take on the mobile OS better, and that's fine. I'm specifically interested in your comment about the walled garden, and what that prevents or gets in the way of for you.)
You seem to be deliberately understating the difficulty. For the overwhelming majority of the people, it's simply not an option.
I'm not who you're replying to, but it's hard to honestly argue that Apple doesn't maintain a walled garden unless you come up with a euphemistic term that means the same thing but sounds more generous. It's entirely possible that such a model doesn't bother you, and it clearly doesn't bother most of their enormous customer base, but that doesn't make it not the case.
Anyway, you're coming at me apparently ready to argue about whether it is or isn't a walled garden. That isn't what I'm asking about. I'm asking what, specifically, Apple won't let you do that you want or need to do that leads you to describe it as a walled garden.
A bit? Maybe you can provide a nuanced answer here. As a user, when browsing a site on my iPhone, what steps do I need to take to download software from a website and run it? Can you provide an example of a website that provides their software for iPhone download without Apple's permission? I can build and publish an APK on my website without Google's approval. That approval is the wall, the only place to get apps is the garden.
Another example is Blink.io, which is currently the best terminal emulator for iOS. (It works GREAT, btw -- I can use emacs and orgmode in it, even.) Blink is in the app store, at $19.99, but you can also download and build from source and get it on your device that way. That's more trouble than most folks will go to, but my assumption is that it's not too high a bar for most folks who are seriously sideloading software on Android.
Android fixes this with side loading, but forces you into a surveillance model that many find unacceptable.
At win phone’s peak many people (including me) incorrectly thought that MS would be able to provide the best of both worlds, since that’s what windows used to be, and they weren’t ad dependent at the time.
With Win 10, it is clear that they’re going the opposite direction: surveillance + walled garden + pay for the OS and services.
This let’s them triple monitize the windows platform, so it is great for the short term stock price, but it is a risky, user-hostile, bet.
Full disclosure: had android, then win phone, typing this on an iPhone.
I think, in the Ballmer years, what hurt them was his ideological obsession with Windows Everywhere -- like, down to the Start button. I'm still pretty convinced that mobile needs a fundamentally different interface than desktop, and not coincidentally that's the way Apple has approached it. MSFT under Nadella is way better in lots of ways, but they still seem to think Windows oughta be the way for every device, and it hurts them.
The walled garden doesn't stop at apps and the app store, but it includes how easy it is to integrate non-Apple products into your Apple device or how easy it is to integrate Apple devices into non-Apple products. Which is often near or completely impossible and Apple doesn't provide any support for it. If it's non-Apple there's no reason to support it.
Just take a look what they did to OpenGL. Open standards implemented by pretty much everyone gets deprecated for their proprietary Metal implementation.
The walled garden isn't only about apps, but it's any interaction with the non-Apple world or from the non-Apple to the Apple world that is being made very complicated if not impossible at times.
Yes, there are.
You can compile your own and sideload, or you can download precompiled apps and allow them to execute explicitly in the security settings. It's just that most people don't care to bother.
I get that "the walled garden isn't only about apps," but I really don't see examples of it being a problem. You broadened the question to "Apple" from "iOS;" are you aware there's absolutely no walled garden AT ALL for apps on the Mac? You can download software from ANYWHERE YOU WANT; my emacs build came from gnu.org.
As a Mac user in a Windows world I've always been able to interoperate pretty well, at least at the user/app level. For example, both OS X and iOS have native Exchange support, which is huge. (And the native tools are more capable than Outlook in lots of interesting ways that aren't germane here.) This is something that Apple explicitly supports. Macs talk to Windows file shares without issue. So I guess I don't really know what you mean here at all.
I can't speak to OpenGL, but given that Apple development has always kind of gone its own way I'm not sure that's a great example of a walled garden where actual user experience is concerned. Can you say more about why that applies?