But, they won't, because they rely on that moat to keep competitors out. It's exactly the same at the lightning cable.
Many of those standards are objectively poor. I don’t want to live in the world where what we are allowed to use is defined by the lowest common denominator of mediocre engineers.
Mediocrity über alles is what you are tacitly advocating for. I’ve been part of many standards processes where the majority democratic outcome was low-quality low-effort standards that were extraordinarily wasteful and inefficient because the people making the standards didn’t care, it was all about what was expedient for them. This is the default state of humanity. No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.
Okay, fine, I already covered for this. If your new protocol is really the bees knees, then open it, problem solved.
> No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.
They're not.
Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
Okay, if their hardware is esoteric, open the protocols for interacting with hardware.
> Should they give away every hardware design needed too?
Yeah probably. It would be a lot better, more like x86. We would actually get repairable phones instead of landfill fodder. But that's a different issue.
> Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
And then it became a cheap scam, whereby Apple made a few dollars off of every single lightning cable produced by anyone on Earth due to licensing.
Also, as for USB-C - doesnt matter, still better. My chargers work across multiple devices. Yes, there's some standards noncompliance, this is still a huge improvement over ZERO cross compatibility.
ARM and phone manufacturing is a hot mess in comparison. We're still trying to reverse engineer M series MacBooks and iPhones are off limits. Android is also not open source, no AOSP does not count.
There would be a lot more competition in the space if the hardware had proper specs, like x86 does.
It’s great that documentation exists, but it doesn’t make for competition. ARM is at least licensing out to more than two manufacturers.