[phh]

IMO, what we need, is regulatory obligation to separate SW/OS and HW.

HW-makers, just want to sell HW. They don't care about the SW, and will just do whatever they can to sell the HW. We need to force HW makers to open SW. It can even be beneficial for them by reducing their development costs.

And then, we can have SW-makers competing on long-term support, and features, and openness, etc.

Does such a scheme ring any bell? Yes, there are actually already such small niche products! Ever heard of Windows? RedHat? SuSE? That's exactly what they are doing! We just need such schemes on smartphones.

How would a separation work? I can't say I have a full solution, but here are some ideas:

- Remove the arbitrary limitations for backups. Both Android and iOS backups are severely lacking when it comes to user backuping their device to their own services. Why is this important? Because IMO the biggest user lockdown is not being able to transfer data

- Impose some standards. I don't like UEFI, it feels clunky, and old, but it's standardized, it's pretty clear what are the responsibilities in it.

- Make "bootloader unlock" more standard. I think that ideally, it would be HW switch or button, which is hidden, that is documented in user guide. Like chromebook's unlock screw. Actually, it shouldn't be so much an "unlock", but rather a "change root signing keys", but anyway.

There are some limitations for sure, and currently, the best way to get longer support on as many devices as possible is through Project Treble, so it requires to have Android as a basis provided by the OEM. It doesn't feel right to me. I dream of being able to impose Linux mainline support, but uh, no, I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Also, even though I would want to force Apple to unlock their bootloader, they are not doing anything wrong wrt long term support, so forcing this down to them on the ground of right to repair, doesn't feel ok.

[mrtranscendence]

> It can even be beneficial for them by reducing their development costs.

There's no world where phone makers stop customizing the software they ship, even if forced to allow users to install competing OSes. It affords some product differentiation and helps tie users to the platform. Even if you let me install an open OS on my iPhone tomorrow, I couldn't possibly do it because all of my digital life is tied up in Apple's ecosystem (including the human capital of learning to use the platform well).

[saltcured]

I think the poster you replied to was also advocating a symmetric requirement that you could get the OS without hardware, i.e. take iOS and the Apple ecosystem with you to your favorite hardware vendor's phone.

Your point raises a third axis (services) but also illustrates to me how hopeless this all is in our current world. In my ideal world of consumer freedom, vendors would not be allowed to bundle hardware, software, nor services to prevent interoperation.

I despise all this subscription and rent seeking to try to turn every product into a locked-in service dependency. As an aging computer scientist and long-term developer of open and free software, I feel myself drifting further apart from a world that so willingly embraces an asymmetric and transactional existence with regular people locked into some amorphous, global company town.

[fsflover]

> There's no world where phone makers stop customizing the software they ship

This is exactly what Pine64 is doing with their Pinephone. They probide no software at all, just hardware.