[titzer]

> use it in line at the post office

If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.

But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.

[ConceptJunkie]

> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.

Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.

[9cb14c1ec0]

There are more options on PCs to fight back with.

[fragmede]

If you think having a developer mode switch on your smartphone that would enable shell access and a build env is what's stopping "the majority of the public" from "zombifying", either you need to talk with more "majority of the public", or I've been talking to the wrong "majority of the public".

The general public doesn't know how to program. They don't know what variables are, that they have types, they think functions are what rich people call a dinner party or corporate event. On computers, where there are no such restrictions, the majority of the public haven't suddenly become hobbyist programmers in their spare time.

If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all, not even a little bit, simply on principle, I mean, you do you. Meanwhile, there are people who aren't the majority of the public, but that want to do things that able to get into tech learning to code despite the epic of Apple vs Google vs Gilgamesh flattening towns. It would be great if it were easier because the phones were more open, but at some point you gotta go with the serenity prayer.

[titzer]

There's definitely a mismatch between expectations between what you inferred I meant and what I really mean. We agree that the majority of people are not going to suddenly stop being zombies if the platform were more open for development. It's a complex societal issue that's driven by the media atmosphere and the attention economy and affects all platforms. But smartphones are the platform that seems to be the most extremely affected and it definitely is accelerated by the locked down, content-consuming, ad-laden nature of everything the platform drives them to do. Nothing about the interaction mode of a touchscreen phone lends itself to being able to do deep work particularly well, but then on top of that all the platforms' incentives push away from it again.

> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all

It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.

[fragmede]

It's not a question of being technical enough. It's actually a question of being too technical. You're here, which for me garners youa base level of respect if only because I've had the creators of certain subjects of discussion have responded directly to me grousing here.

Because you're technical, the iOS restriction that code must be signed seems insurmountable, because it is. But if you know less about computers, you'd find bitrig or swift playgrounds or Pythonista. And knowing even less, you get into building web apps. For what people want to do and create; they don't know frontend from backend and are just getting their feet wet, a phone does alright.

Could it better at it? Absolutely, no question about that! But so could everything else in life. It depends on where on the spectrum you exist, A laptop is better than a phone for writing code for a lot of reasons, but when we're looking at the bigger picture, a phone is better than nothing.