[rchaud]

Non-certified phones won't be sold in Western markets. This whole scheme has one goal only, and that's to snuff out DRM-unfriendly third party apps like alternative Youtube clients, videogame emulators and P2P file sharing apps.

[Aachen]

Like Fairphone.nl, Shift.eco, Murena.com...?

They're being sold and enough people are buying them to keep these companies alive. Fairphone said they're not delivering to USA because they don't have the manpower, not because there's no demand. Every release again you see people asking in the comments when/if it'll finally be available to them

That's not to say it's a big market where you get big economy of scale benefits. The devices are expensive but they're yours (and some of them try to do ethical resource mining and/or pay fair wages as well). Some of these will also have Googled variants available, but it's a choice

[rchaud]

They don't have the manpower to drop off some USA-bound boxes at the same shipping carrier they use for their EU deliveries? I highly doubt that. They likely don't want to bother with FCC approval, opposition from Google about selling de-Googled Android or produce separate SKUs for US-specific 5G frequencies.

[em-bee]

They likely don't want to bother...

or they don't have the manpower to take care of...

[gooob]

what i'm saying is it's time to make a new company. this is a matter of maintaining good technology and avoiding enshitification so it's quite important.

[rchaud]

That's my point. Who is going to create a company to compete with Google and Apple on the smartphone front? They already ran everybody else out of business (Palm WebOS, BlackberryOS, Windows Phone). The alternatives are already here but they don't operate in North America (Huawei HarmonyOS, Jolla OS, Pinephone).

[bryan_w]

Why not you? The beauty of open source is that you don't need to wait to make something happen if you really want it to happen.

[rchaud]

A phone OS is not a hobby project. Just because something is open source doesn't mean there are no development costs.

[gooob]

yeah that's what i'm saying. but obviously the problem is funding.

so do we have enough engineers who care about maintaining useful tools that aren't handicapped or compromised to be able to support this endeavor? i think we do. there have to be many good eggs within these companies who die a little inside each time something like this goes through.

[danaris]

> They already ran everybody else out of business (Palm WebOS, BlackberryOS, Windows Phone).

Only because those alternative mobile OSes were, frankly, crappy in comparison to iOS and Android.

I don't recall Google or Apple doing anything particularly anticompetitive to cause any of those OSes to fail to keep up in the market, aside from just plain "being the 800lb gorillas in the room". (Not saying they never do anything anticompetitive, just that those particular market failures can't be laid at their feet.)

It would be great to have some really good alternatives to the mobile duopoly. Hell, if we had more fragmentation in the market, that would even lead to more impetus for interoperability and common standards—which we desperately need more of everywhere in tech these days. But those three, in particular? They lost because they were worse at being a good mobile OS for most people.