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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

The mobile ecosystem has been built with the sole intent of milking users through targeted advertising, media consumption and unnecessary services subscription, so I find normal that corporations behind the OSes fight hard to maintain the platform as closed as possible (proprietary or seemingly open OSes, closed drivers, locked bootloaders etc). Their deepest fear is seeing their ecosystem conquered by Open Source, or for that matter any other kind of scenario (shareware, donationware, etc) in which users and developers are directly in contact and no middleman is necessary anymore.

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This is why I say a little prayer of thanks to the internet elders every day that the internet was developed in academia.

I mean sure it is a hive of villinary full of corperate scumbags trying their hardest to steal your freedoms and make you into the perfect consumer. but when I think about how much worse it would be if it had been developed commercially I get this feeling of overwhelming dread and have to go lie down for a while.

Oh man, you should have seen the mobile sphere before Android...

no joke. what a hellhole that was.

I kinda liked J2ME...

You're the first person I've ever heard saying this. People used to complain a lot about Android fragmentation, but J2ME was easily 50x worse. Maybe 100x.

Before iOS, to be fair. Touchscreens got the attention but the use of the iPod’s popularity to negotiate a non-terrible cellular market was equally transformative. The carriers used to charge something on the order of $50k each to be listed in their app stores and their percentage of revenue was high and negotiated based on your perceived ability to pay: we had several clients bail on J2ME projects because they were being asked to take home less than half of each sale and making 6-7 figure minimum profit commitments to each carrier! The sales person would look at their total corporate revenue to base their first offer on, and they were not quick to negotiate down to our actual budget.

> Before iOS, to be fair.

iOS didn't move the needle on open source, open bootloaders or anything gp mentioned. All iOS did was shift the balance of power from telecom companies to Apple.

Android was far more open than all that came before it: the source code was available,it used open source & contributed back, and brought a very "PC" mindset[1] to an industry that had always considered handsets to be appliances (save a few Nokia models in the Communicator line).

1. "Intents" that could be handled by any app of the users choosing was very much like "Open with..." on PCs. Even disregarding the open source stuff, Android was very much an open system just for that reason.

Going back to the original comment, iOS improved the situation from the carrier having veto power over the entire experience to just the phone vendor and the App Store is more open than some of the earlier ones were (standard terms). It also doesn’t have the ad / activity data issues.

Android can be more open but let’s not pretend that a lot of devices have locked bootloaders, too, and has never lived up to that “PC” model due to things like proprietary drivers and apps refusing to run on unlocked devices. The future is very much unsettled here and we need something like legislation to reverse that trend.

> Android can be more open but let’s not pretend that a lot of devices have locked bootloaders

Not all Android handsets have unlockable bootloaders - but all handsets with unlockable bootloaders run Android.

I think you meant to say can run Android ?

I realized my comment could the interpreted the way you did as I was writing it, and left it ambiguous (because that too is a good thing enabled by Android's openness)

However, my main point was that outside of niche devices[1] that are rounding errors for smartphone consumer market share: the vast majority of devices sold with unlockable bootloaders already run Android: I'd guestimate > 95%. Looking at the list of devices supported by LineageOS (after enabling "Legacy Devices") is awe-inspiring. In the past, Samsung, Sony and Motorola had a solid lineup of unlockable devices.

1. I say this as someone who almost succumbed to the temptation of buying the Pine64 phone with the intention of contributing code

Today yes, but as Google has been tightening the screws on Android, and as Google becomes ever less welcome outside of USA, I expect this trend to reverse...

Apple is indeed the driving force that improved "targeted advertising, media consumption and unnecessary services subscription" compared to the old "Open the Web Browser and Owe 10 dollars" days by leveraging their iTunes userbase.

Android would not even have launched without the iPhone breaking down those doors, you can hear it first hand from the Handspring/PalmOS/WebOS folks: https://youtu.be/b9_Vh9h3Ohw?t=1609

Before Android and iOS, the dominant smartphone/PDA platforms were Windows Mobile and Symbian. And whatever their usability issues were, I don't recall there being a problem with downloading (or even buying boxed) third-party software directly from the authors and installing it directly.

As a developer from that era - developing for Symbian was absurdly difficult and awkward.

Around 2007 we tried building an app that scanned barcodes in a store to show you comparison from online stores. Symbian's APIs for cameras were so broken, that we couldn't get a decent enough resolution of photos. Java had permission/ux issues that made the app unfeasible. It was literally impossible to build an app like this back then, even though phones had good enough cameras already.

Not to mention the fact that you needed a whole studio to build and test even a simple app like this - so many variants of OSes, and phones, and every single one had it's own quirks.

And to add an insult to the injury - we had to pirate the SDK, because the official links to SDKs didn't work for a few days, and nobody seemed to notice.

So yeah, in theory the users could download apps to the devices. But in practice it was easier for devs to hack into iPhone 1.0 and build apps there - even before the official app store launch, than it was ever to build something for Symbian and the others.

Before Android and iOS, no third-party developer cared about smartphones/PDAs, because they were a tiny sliver of the market and so you couldn't make money targeting them. Bigcorps like Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter might make free apps for these, just to cover them (since their own employees used them); but no ISV cared. If you were an ISV developing paid "apps" for "mobile" at all, you were developing J2ME apps for feature-phones.

That's plainly not true. Sure, there weren't "millions of apps" in the store, but like I mentioned above, there was actual boxed software sold for those platforms.

My point is that no ISV ever bootstrapped or got VC-funded in the 1995-2007 period by making a bet on selling "apps" for the PDA software market; the revenue would be too low to keep the company going, and the TAM would be too low for even longer-term-minded VCs to be interested.

What probably did happen, a bit, was that ISVs that made software for other markets, may have ported their software to PDAs, and sold that. (E.g. "WinZip for Windows CE", things like that.) But that doesn't mean that these companies were surviving off of this. These were effectively "halo products" (products that don't sell many units, which are made instead to increase the brand perception of key influencers who happen to have such niche interests, and thus influence their [influential] opinion of the rest of the product range through the halo effect.)

I don't remember having these problems on windows mobile 5.

It was a nascent market, and the first versions of Android and iOS were not significantly better than what was already being offered. Is the suggestion that we wouldn't have put any effort into developing the ecosystem if Google and Apple didn't decide to involve themselves in it?

What? No, no, no. iOS and Android were night and day compared to Symbian and the other operating systems of that era. Aside from the very basic games and super-simple apps, it was virtually impossible to write anything significant for non-Apple/Android devices.

Because of that, even before the official launch of an iOS SDK, there were more apps for iPhone (because people hacked it), than there ever were for Nokia.

For WindowsCE, sure there were apps, but phones didn't run Windows really then. Only PDAs.

Hmm, yet Symbian had a third-party movie player that worked decently well... (finding it on the Web was a harder issue).

Wait, also a whole freaking browser : Opera mini - don't say that isn't complex !

You mean it how it barley existed and all we did was talk and text?

Yes. And it was marvelous.

You have forgotten the video calls, have you ? Which is quite understandable, it's not like we use those much even today (in real life, I'm not talking about ads and movies), despite not having to pay extra to the cell carrier !

Open Source cell phones is functionally a very very niche market.

They end up costing more than the phone with the big binary blobs from the other android manufacturers, and often have older hardware than the hardware makers are willing to give away specs for.

For what, I'd ask? The users don't care. 98% of Android and iOS users don't even know what open source is, and at least half of those who do know, don't really care that their phone isn't open source.

The people who buy most of the phones by volume and dollars, just want a phone that works well, and lasts 2-5 years.

This was true in the pre-Android iOS version too, I cant remember a Sidekick, PalmOS or Windows Mobile caring much about it either. Most users don't care much about how the sausage is made, provided the sausage is tasty, convenient and cheap.

I donn't think they're afraid of their ecosystem being threatened by Open Source, its not even in their field of vision.

Perhaps... though I guess they will have to care if they end up being forbidden in most markets outside of the USA - nature abhors a vacuum !

I don't think that's likely to happen either. If it does, you'll just end up with rooted phone's reporting themselves to the carriers who will likely cut them off.

Also even if it does happen, the users still won't care.

I fear we as users have been trained as well and perpetuate it. People generally don't want to pay, so we're the product, advertising pays ... the whole ecosystem is a mess.

It doesn't matter if you want to pay or not. These companies need to make more money than they did the previous quarter. So they need to always find new way to exploit continuously.

Plenty of apps and services are happy to take money and have no advertising and etc.

Source?

Even Apple eventually caved in and is now starting to turn towards the advertising route.

You need a source for apps that’s take money and don’t have ads?

Sure. But what will be their model in 5-10 years?

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