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Comment by handity | Hacker News Reader

A hard fork doesn't matter when the vast majority of phones have a locked bootloader.

Yeah, that's the biggest issue. And it all originally stemed from phone carriers wanting to lock customers into their services.

We need some pro-consumer regulations on hardware which mandate open platforms. Fat chance of that happening, though, as the likes of both the EU and US want these locked down systems so they put in mandatory backdoors.

The other big issue is the closed source binary only drivers for almost everything.

Google's own phones do not have a locked booloader. You can buy a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it in like 10 minutes. But basically no one does this, because no matter what people say in online forums they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.

It's the nature of free software.

The reason GNU and Linux won was because they produced software that was sufficient for the market: servers.

The software is also sufficiently good for a PC for software development.

There's almost sufficient software for PC gaming (up against an absolutely insane monopoly that is Microsoft).

Phones are slightly different and for something more than a dumb phone you need great hardware; great software; and great integration.

Employee computers for companies and general home users or tablets? Still a ways to go.

I don't think wanting features and good UX is unreasonable from consumers.

That's probably their next target once android is fully locked down

A google tax which google's grace bestows upon us for as long as its whim want.

> no matter what people say in online forums

The people who speak in forums are a minority.

> they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.

There's no actual competition so we don't know this on any level.

Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.

People will keep using the OS their phone comes with and that would be Google's Android. It's worse than with Windows PCs and Windows to be honest because phones have a locked bootloader.

People give a lot of flack to the EU, but this is the sort of thing they would regulate.

The Italian digital ID wallet is already in fact banning GrapheneOS and other ROMs [1], the EU doesn't mandate that member states have to allow non-Android/iOS apps [2]

[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...

[2] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...

Or the fact that you need device drivers for every piece of hardware in a phone.

Yep, exactly why I've always supported the adoption of GPLv3. What point is there to FOSS if you cant use it?

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