> basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices You can do whatever you want on a platform like Windows becaus

> basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices You can do whatever you want on a platform like Windows because they make their money off of selling support for their platform, and selling their own products for it. Google and Apple do not make money selling support for their platform, and only Apple really focuses on selling products for it. But they both make money by tightly controlling their platforms, in order to to squeeze money from developers, [in the case of Google] from manufacturers, from carriers, from users' payments, and from all the data they collect about it all. They don't have to care about the customer at all, and they can just focus on engineering. It's the programmer's dream. Their business model is a walled garden, and they pick the fruits of that garden. In the case of Google, they run the Android platform so they have a way to still make ad money if Apple denied them access to that platform. In the case of Apple, they run the Apple platform so they can make money from expensive consumer devices, and also use it to control more of the services/products we use. So, it really doesn't have anything to do with literacy. Even if everyone were a genius, their choice is still A) don't use a smartphone, or B) use a walled-garden smartphone.