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by thayne 1604 days ago
> will be required to unlock bootloaders and publish technical specs

is probably sufficient motivation. There's no way Apple would be willing to do that. Google might be, but they might have a lot of resistance from Qualcomm and possibly mobile carriers and other partners.
1 comments
pyrale 1604 days ago
That is imo a bad fix, because it would be very easy for Google and Apple to make sure the technical specs are unreadable and the bootloaders complicated to use, without much recourse for the lawmaker.

Comparatively, it's much easier to make a law targeting the stores that's hard to avoid.

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thayne 1604 days ago
As has been mentioned in other comments that is also easy to avoid by simply making it impossible to download apps on older phones.
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pyrale 1603 days ago
Yes, indeed. But that is a massive footgun to use, and it creates a direct incentive to have longer service durations.

It is likely that Google would stand to make more money by offering longer service duration for their OS, and by demanding phonemakers to maintain their firmware.

I guess the info we need to see whether this would be a good decision or not is how much money Google makes from selling apps to phones 3 year and older.

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