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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

This is a very interesting thread to read... I can't help but remember the wishes expressed in other news threads such as 'I wish I could just pay for things to not have tracking built in' / 'This vital software component is so underfunded, no wonder this happens'

Now a company offers it and every 2nd comment has the vibe of 'Why would someone pay a subscription for their "own" phone'. I guess that means the former vibe is not something most people actually want?

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I'm not sure if you find it genuinely surprising that the Hacker News populace is not moved by a device that you not only have to pay rent for, but that also seemingly does not support custom ROMs/firmware.

Besides that, the software that they expect you to pay rent for is a fork of LineageOS/AOSP, but it doesn't seem to mention anywhere on the site whether they donate any of the rent to their upstreams.

Those are fair criticisms, but that's not what I saw mentioned when the thread was young and the comments were at the level of "wait I have to pay for them maintaining the OS??". It seems people have that as a gut reaction even though they have presumably also (on average) been exposed to sentiments pro paying for things that cost money

I think the distaste is for rent being charged on a device that you've supposedly bought out right.

Charge a subscription or sell the phone outright but don't do both.

I feel the same way about cars where you pay for the engine or the heated seats but can't use them without paying rent.

I think it's an interesting model. Somehow, the maintenance needs to be funded, and that is an ongoing effort. Charging for security updates is not ideal, but I'm not sure what the alternative would be.

I don’t think they can charge for updates, at least not in the first five years where the EU mandates that updates must be made available.

Also if it's mandatory? I would also say it's desirable to prevent the situation in which users just choose to have zombie devices because security is more expensive, but making them free or making them mandatory paid would both work for that

How would they make it mandatory, though? The only way I can think of making it mandatory would be if the phone bricks itself when the subscription ends. Or if you just lease the phone and the lease includes updates.

It seems like the best approach would be to just include the cost of updates in the price of the phone, which I guess is what every other phone maker does.

It seems like it would be cheaper and more effective to just keep in sync with GrapheneOS rather than maintaining a custom fork.

I understand that maintenance still isn't free in that case, but it seems like they went out of their way to make more maintenance work for themselves, and then they asked their customers to pay for it. As a potential customer, I would've rather it just come with standard GOS rather than paying yearly for a fork that probably isn't as secure.

Yes. Don't listen to what people say they will do, pay attention to what they actually do.

People are willing to pay for value delivery and innovation, neither of which are even attempted in this device-, this is just reskinning and rent-seeking.

So if you dislike Google's business model you have to love John Deer's?

Propose another model instead of just saying no to every option?

I don't understand what's wrong with just releasing a phone that uses baseline GrapheneOS so that their development costs are relatively minimal.

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