[metagame]

I know Cydia's your thing (I'd recognize your username anywhere) and I have an infinite amount of respect for you because of it, but I think the status quo is probably fine. iOS is a minority of the market and "Do you know how to jailbreak your cell phone?" serves as a decent deterrent to stop clueless people from butchering themselves with too much freedom.

It sounds really lame to say, but it feels like what you're suggesting is the exact opposite of what the market wants. People want a device they can give to their kid without worrying that they'll mess it up.

And I don't think this is an issue where any side actually cares about freedom; you allow proprietary software on Cydia, which sort of kills the user freedom argument, but even then, people would still be free to just buy a phone that supports them using their phone in a way they want to.

[heavyset_go]

> It sounds really lame to say, but it feels like what you're suggesting is the exact opposite of what the market wants.

If that's what the market wanted then Apple wouldn't have to spend so much money on preventing their customers from rooting their phones, running any apps they want to run and using alternative mobile app distribution methods.

> People want a device they can give to their kid without worrying that they'll mess it up.

Chromebooks are those devices, which is one of the reasons they're used in education. There were 40 million Chromebooks in public schools and about 53 million K-12 students in the US in 2019.

You can run whatever Android or Linux software you want on them, and use whatever mobile app distribution you want, too, like F-Droid.

[iknowstuff]

The sandbox protects the OS. Apps from different stores could remain sandboxed. In addition, parental controls could easily allow restricting the phone to the App Store.