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Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone,

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

chii 5y ago
but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).
- Ragnarork 5y ago
  Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone. How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone? (Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
  - tndtgrwy 5y ago
    I agree. I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app. It's android OR ios. What choices do I have here?
    - ArnoVW 5y ago
      Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?! What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone? Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.
      - yosamino 5y ago
        You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code. This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
        PeterisP 5y ago
        Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company. Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
    - Ragnarork 5y ago
      I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you (although your question sounds a bit rhetorical), and that's part of the problem in my opinion. It's so ubiquitous now that even if you want to get out of this duopoly, you can't really.
- keawade 5y ago
  The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all. Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy. In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture. Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above. Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  What do you mean by “i [sic] guess android [sic]”? Over 70% of smartphones in use run Android.
- pmontra 5y ago
  On the Android side mostly Samsung and Chinese phones.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem. Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else. Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences. Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010! The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too. Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally). We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago. But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
    - AstralStorm 5y ago
      Don't worry, the tax men will find you and force you to file the taxes on paper. Or maybe even electronically. I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Freak_NL 5y ago
I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring them (Whatsapp and Signal come to mind).
- afandian 5y ago
  More insidious is the requirement to have an account with Google or Apple.
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    That's what bugs me too. Having to enter a legal agreement with a foreign entity to use local services irks me out of principle.
- dools 5y ago
  Your government demands you own a smart phone?
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    You can of course function without one, but the nudging towards getting their authentication app is getting worse. For healthcare records, vendors in the Netherlands are required to move authentication of their portals to the government provided DigiD¹. Healthcare will be the first field where the minimum level of assurance is being raised to 'substantial', and this means that only authentication via the Android or IOS DigiD app will suffice (right now for other government functions like taxes and planning your booster shot you can also use SMS as (weak) 2FA). While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”. Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme. 1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.
kleiba 5y ago
I don't have a smartphone, am I not participating in society?
- r_singh 5y ago
  What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days. Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia. So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all… With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone Really? I wonder where you are. I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
    - r_singh 5y ago
      I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.
simonh 5y ago
For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too. This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power. There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > Consolidation benefits users. Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS. Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.
  - simonh 5y ago
    There are several commercially viable desktop OSes other than Windows and MacOS, but they are not mass market. I knowingly wrote my comment to exclude specialist players addressing niche markets because they have completely different adoption dynamics. Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile. Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government. Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand. Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.

chii 5y ago

but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).

Ragnarork 5y ago
Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone. How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone? (Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
- tndtgrwy 5y ago
  I agree. I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app. It's android OR ios. What choices do I have here?
  - ArnoVW 5y ago
    Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?! What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone? Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.
    - yosamino 5y ago
      You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code. This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
      - PeterisP 5y ago
        Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company. Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
  - Ragnarork 5y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you (although your question sounds a bit rhetorical), and that's part of the problem in my opinion. It's so ubiquitous now that even if you want to get out of this duopoly, you can't really.
keawade 5y ago
The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all. Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy. In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture. Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above. Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
Freak_NL 5y ago
What do you mean by “i [sic] guess android [sic]”? Over 70% of smartphones in use run Android.
pmontra 5y ago
On the Android side mostly Samsung and Chinese phones.
mschuster91 5y ago
It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem. Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else. Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences. Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010! The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too. Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally). We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago. But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Don't worry, the tax men will find you and force you to file the taxes on paper. Or maybe even electronically. I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Freak_NL 5y ago

I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring them (Whatsapp and Signal come to mind).

afandian 5y ago
More insidious is the requirement to have an account with Google or Apple.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  That's what bugs me too. Having to enter a legal agreement with a foreign entity to use local services irks me out of principle.
dools 5y ago
Your government demands you own a smart phone?
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  You can of course function without one, but the nudging towards getting their authentication app is getting worse. For healthcare records, vendors in the Netherlands are required to move authentication of their portals to the government provided DigiD¹. Healthcare will be the first field where the minimum level of assurance is being raised to 'substantial', and this means that only authentication via the Android or IOS DigiD app will suffice (right now for other government functions like taxes and planning your booster shot you can also use SMS as (weak) 2FA). While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”. Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme. 1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.

kleiba 5y ago

I don't have a smartphone, am I not participating in society?

r_singh 5y ago
What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days. Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia. So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all… With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone Really? I wonder where you are. I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
  - r_singh 5y ago
    I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.

simonh 5y ago

For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too. This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power. There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> Consolidation benefits users. Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS. Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.
- simonh 5y ago
  There are several commercially viable desktop OSes other than Windows and MacOS, but they are not mass market. I knowingly wrote my comment to exclude specialist players addressing niche markets because they have completely different adoption dynamics. Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile. Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government. Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand. Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.