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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> If I wanted to buy phones that I'd also needed to sysadmin, I could do that.

Is "sysadmin-ing" a phone really that big of a barrier? Ideally, you'd just install Mobian (i.e. Debian Mobile) on a device, security patches would install automatically via unattended-updates, and every two years you would be prompted to initiate a version upgrade. Proprietary apps would be available from Flatpak repos with strong sandboxing applied. That's essentially the same level of 'sysadmin-ing' any iOS/Android user has to do.

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Don't you see a problem with that? Sure, if I really wanted to have debian on the phone, I'd get a capable Android device and sideload something. Would my wife do it? Would your average John Doe do it? Why would an average user ever want to do it? One of the selling points of the original iPhone was exactly that: shit is taken care of. The phone will just work.

Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with. A fully supported Debian Mobile device would essentially be a highly reliable feature phone, with selected smartphone features added to it that actually work for the user and not against them.

Great for them. Leave my walled garden alone. Considering the volume at which iPhones sell I'm pretty confident that's the sentiment from millions of users.

Edit: When I'm somewhere hundreds of kilometers away from home, sitting in the car parked on the side of the road in the forest and trying to connect with people to figure out where I need to go to exactly, I want maps, email, browser, and phone. In that situation I really don't care about debian, flatpak and stuff. I just want the device to do what it was designed for.

Millions of users do not care about walled gardens. This does not factor into their purchasing decisions. Windows XP was never a walled garden, millions of people still used it. iOS could allow for more software freedoms without impeding on one's ability to use good first party map software.

There’s nothing preventing me from using third-party mapping software on the iPhone. That’s not my point.

That's not my point either - all I'm saying is we can ask for the cake and eat it too, whereas you're content with just being able to have the cake and believe that somehow having the ability to eat it would be worse?

They're using feature phones which are 100% proprietary and actively fight anyone from sideloading any app at all because they're uncomfortable with Android's ecosystem, which by comparison lets you install pretty much whatever you want if you just enable developer mode on the device?

No. People who choose feature phones do so because they don't want to deal with apps at all on their mobile device. Not iOS apps, not Android apps, not Debian apps, not Ubuntu apps, not Symbian apps, nothing. They're wanting a phone that's just a phone, even more of an appliance than an iPhone. They probably wouldn't care about the phone running Debian at all, and they absolutely won't care about running GCC to compile their own apps on their phones.

> Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's super weird to me. Using a smart phone without installing any apps works great. The integrated maps app is such a great feature, I'd get a smart phone just for that alone.

> Would my wife do it?

I tried to switch my wife to Android once and there was a revolt in the house. And that's a system that should be equivalent to iOS.

“Ideally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. Of course, I find even vanilla android a terrible UX.

That was meant to reflect the fact that current systems like Mobian are quite far from being daily-driver usable. (Mostly because of limited hardware support, which is a very difficult problem to address.) But the same is true of OP's Hp Jornada: it was sold with a different OS out of the box, and it's way too underpowered to actually run an up-to-date free OS, or for that matter, to develop anything on-device besides proof-of-concept "hello, world" examples.

Poe's Law.

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