#3 is so nice, I want root access to my phone. Does anyone know if doing this can lock Apple out from updating/removing it?
I even have realtime watch complications which no shipping app can have because of apple restrictions - developer mode lets you push complication updates realtime if you want.
I'll probably consider something more open next time I buy but just pointing out that right now with a developer account you're not actually _that_ restricted on iOS, the experience is better than you might think if you're making an app you never intend to ship.
I am not arguing Apple's restrictions are a good thing, if I were in charge I would in fact make allowing installing your own software on your own device a legal requirement of selling hardware, yet here we are.
I still have my linux desktop when I want to tinker.
There is no single provider that does all of that combined as good as apple.
..."until I want to do something that the default Apple behavior does not do."
To oversimplify, it's like saying "you can do these 10 things and they're guaranteed to work". On some platforms, you can do things 11-20 as well, but there's a chance they may not work as desired. This may still be preferable to a total inability to go past the first 10 due to restrictions.
I find that a lot of computing devices work fine out of the box if you use them exactly the way the included first-party options were tested to work. It's gotten to the point where I'm less concerned about how nicely they succeed at the "common" things than how well I can deal with them when they "fail" (to do the thing I want them to do).
I appreciate easy and convenient as much as the next person, but if I have to choose between "must install app or change configuration to do what I need" and "nope, you can't do that", I'll take the former.
But for what it's worth I personally had a very good customer service experience with them. I had a laptop where I couldn't enable the TPM anymore and they asked me to ship it to them to look at it and replaced it with a newer model. That was in Germany though and just one case.
It's a night and day difference with mac.
Like we did on HTC G1s in 2008
I want the freedom to install the OS I want on my phone. Now if I install a proprietary OS, I get what the developers of that proprietary OS choose to do. And if that proprietary OS does not give me root access, well, that's life.
Of course you do. You can run GrapheneOS, or LineageOS, postmarketOS, or mobian, or many others. All of those are open source, you can modify them as you want before you flash them.
What is your goalpost for a "serious OS"?
What market share proves is popularity. Which is important in an OS, but ridiculing other people's choices on grounds of market share doesn't seem very convincing to me.
Doesn't make you right. PostmarketOS and LineageOS are very much NOT the same OS in a different shirt.
Don't try to be provocative just because you were wrong, it doesn't help.
And that I disagree with all the whining about having root everywhere. If you are able to install your preferred OS on the device you own, then you can install one that has root, or fork an open source one and add root, or write your own.
Stop expecting differently.
Did people used to get like this about pocket calculators or digital watches? “Why am I forced to be limited to only the manufacturer’s firmware?”
I guess it is more debatable for a pocket calculator or a digital watch, but IMO when I buy a smartphone, it should not be illegal for me to install whatever I want on it. And the manufacturer should not add technical measures to prevent me from doing it.
That does NOT mean that the manufacturer should implement the features I want (like root access) or go out of their way to give me tools to install my favourite OS. Just that they should not prevent me from doing it (say if I manage to reverse engineer the hardware). Because I own the hardware I buy. At least I should.
If I buy a device, I want to be able to install whatever I want on it, and I want it to be legal for somebody else to sell something that I can run on it.
Probably your problem is that you have no phones, only someone's thin clients.