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no excuse, merely a conspiracy explanation: it simply cannot be permitted. somebody realized PC market/platform made a huge "mistake", letting anybody make sof

no excuse, merely a conspiracy explanation: it simply cannot be permitted. somebody realized PC market/platform made a huge "mistake", letting anybody make software for them and permitting random hardware. this 'mistake' was avoided on smartphones for very pointed, clear, intentions of social control. there exists NO homebrew smartphone hardware like for PCs.

chongli 3y ago
Your conspiracy explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test. There’s a much much simpler explanation: lack of demand. Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yet take a brief wander over to one of the many (many) recent Reddit crisis threads and you’ll find countless naysayers talking about how lemmy and the like will never succeed, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users in a week and a half.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  it is really incredible, how could lack of demand be made to happen? but I'm not trying to imply anything. I merely wonder if such a thing (to create or destroy demand of something) is possible; and if it were, how would you do it? surely it involves marketing? but I also want to reflect on the market cap of convenience...
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    Linux phones are a niche within a niche. Marketing won't do anything to change that. Most people are satisfied with iPhones and Androids, and the few that aren't are mostly satisfied with degoogled Androids.
    - __d 3y ago
      That's the problem with the vision of a Linux phone as being "iOS/Android-like, but without the corporate control". For an open phone to be truly successful, it has to be better for its users, and in a way that's worth shifting ecosystems for.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  >Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yes, every PinePhone thread has people posting that it's unusable because it's not as good as a flagship iPhone or Android. Or the usual "not ready to be a daily driver" ... because the definition of "daily driver" is apparently a constant of the universe written by God so everyone is expected to have the same one. Meanwhile I've been "daily-driving" my PP for two years at this point because calls, SMS, voicemail, Firefox and the camera work well enough.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    For me a mobile phone needs: phone; SMS; Web browser; maps/navigation. That’s 90% of what I do with my phone and I can live without the other 10%
  - not_your_vase 3y ago
    This is kind of my biggest gripe with Pine64 (beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time): the community. Every time I google something related a pine* product problem, there is at least 1 result from pine64 forum where the answer is along the lines of "if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". I have quite a bunch of pine64 devices, but after I saw these interactions, I didn't even dare to ask anything nor to interact with them on any level.
    - Arnavion 3y ago
      >(beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time) Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable". >"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". You only get these responses if you reveal yourself as someone who didn't read the warning labels before buying the hardware and/or if you act entitled to a solution, as AndyKelley did in this thread. We indeed do not have any patience for someone who comes in and says "It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable."
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  My personal favorite explanation for nearly everything: money Locked down platforms without user freedom are a goldmine
- api 3y ago
  The naysayers are jaded folks who have watched two generations trade all privacy, freedom, honesty, transparency, openness, and even ownership of their own data for convenience. Judging by consumer behavior it appears that ease of use is more important than virtually any other concern. People who really care about things like privacy and freedom are too few in number to tilt the market, and this is compounded by the fact that as a rule FOSS people don’t pay for things. So the market here is a small number of cheapskates.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I think the intersection of people who were outraged at Reddit’s API change and “average consumers” is very small. They honestly aren’t important to me because for the most part they’re lurkers anyway. The people I care about are the power users, the posters, the creators. People put effort into building communities. Those folks are very few in number but extremely important. They can create a community anywhere they go. They’re also willing to put in effort to begin with so it’s generally easier to get them to move to lemmy when the experience may not be as polished.
api 3y ago
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just economics. There is no money in it so there is no funding available for it. Things like Librem are practically basement operations compared to Apple, Samsung, and Google. Mobile software is far harder and more costly to produce than desktop because the small form factor and rapid casual use cases mean there can be zero tolerance for bad UX. The amount of effort that goes into just getting things like touch keyboard and touch gestures just right is monumental. The tolerances are very tight. PCs with big screens and keyboards can support I/O paradigms that are much less demanding of perfection or require much less polish to make usable. A PC can just put some buttons on the screen or use a command line and that works fine. A phone UI needs obsession.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has spent more time and money on the iOS keyboard than Purism spent on the entire phone + software. Modern phones are probably the most advanced products humanity has ever produced.
  - api 3y ago
    What efforts like Purism should do is greatly reduce their scope. Make a device that does the basics which would be phone, text, basic web, and maybe a media player or support in the web browser for this use case. At first anything else could be accessed via the web, and maybe look at introducing PWAs as a way to do basic apps. Keep the GUI as simple as possible with the smallest number of options and features as possible and focus more on perfecting what is there. Ship a more minimal better polished product. If you don’t have the resources to perfect it, drop it. Make anything more custom or advanced configurable via ssh, but make the core features entirely usable without doing that. At first you might not even have an App Store, just a CLI package manager you can access from a PC with ssh. It’d basically be a hackable minimalist phone. Someone who just wants a privacy oriented minimal phone could use it as is and power users could ssh in and hack on it.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      I think maps/navigation is a must. Without that, I’d just use a $30 feature phone
opan 3y ago
I believe there are some limiting laws/regulations around radios that make DIY, free, hackable ones usually not allowed. So, modems, WLAN cards, wireless routers... tend to be quite proprietary.

chongli 3y ago

Your conspiracy explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test. There’s a much much simpler explanation: lack of demand. Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yet take a brief wander over to one of the many (many) recent Reddit crisis threads and you’ll find countless naysayers talking about how lemmy and the like will never succeed, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users in a week and a half.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
it is really incredible, how could lack of demand be made to happen? but I'm not trying to imply anything. I merely wonder if such a thing (to create or destroy demand of something) is possible; and if it were, how would you do it? surely it involves marketing? but I also want to reflect on the market cap of convenience...
- Arnavion 3y ago
  Linux phones are a niche within a niche. Marketing won't do anything to change that. Most people are satisfied with iPhones and Androids, and the few that aren't are mostly satisfied with degoogled Androids.
  - __d 3y ago
    That's the problem with the vision of a Linux phone as being "iOS/Android-like, but without the corporate control". For an open phone to be truly successful, it has to be better for its users, and in a way that's worth shifting ecosystems for.
Arnavion 3y ago
>Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yes, every PinePhone thread has people posting that it's unusable because it's not as good as a flagship iPhone or Android. Or the usual "not ready to be a daily driver" ... because the definition of "daily driver" is apparently a constant of the universe written by God so everyone is expected to have the same one. Meanwhile I've been "daily-driving" my PP for two years at this point because calls, SMS, voicemail, Firefox and the camera work well enough.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  For me a mobile phone needs: phone; SMS; Web browser; maps/navigation. That’s 90% of what I do with my phone and I can live without the other 10%
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  This is kind of my biggest gripe with Pine64 (beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time): the community. Every time I google something related a pine* product problem, there is at least 1 result from pine64 forum where the answer is along the lines of "if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". I have quite a bunch of pine64 devices, but after I saw these interactions, I didn't even dare to ask anything nor to interact with them on any level.
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    >(beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time) Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable". >"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". You only get these responses if you reveal yourself as someone who didn't read the warning labels before buying the hardware and/or if you act entitled to a solution, as AndyKelley did in this thread. We indeed do not have any patience for someone who comes in and says "It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable."
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
My personal favorite explanation for nearly everything: money Locked down platforms without user freedom are a goldmine
api 3y ago
The naysayers are jaded folks who have watched two generations trade all privacy, freedom, honesty, transparency, openness, and even ownership of their own data for convenience. Judging by consumer behavior it appears that ease of use is more important than virtually any other concern. People who really care about things like privacy and freedom are too few in number to tilt the market, and this is compounded by the fact that as a rule FOSS people don’t pay for things. So the market here is a small number of cheapskates.
- chongli 3y ago
  I think the intersection of people who were outraged at Reddit’s API change and “average consumers” is very small. They honestly aren’t important to me because for the most part they’re lurkers anyway. The people I care about are the power users, the posters, the creators. People put effort into building communities. Those folks are very few in number but extremely important. They can create a community anywhere they go. They’re also willing to put in effort to begin with so it’s generally easier to get them to move to lemmy when the experience may not be as polished.

api 3y ago

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just economics. There is no money in it so there is no funding available for it. Things like Librem are practically basement operations compared to Apple, Samsung, and Google. Mobile software is far harder and more costly to produce than desktop because the small form factor and rapid casual use cases mean there can be zero tolerance for bad UX. The amount of effort that goes into just getting things like touch keyboard and touch gestures just right is monumental. The tolerances are very tight. PCs with big screens and keyboards can support I/O paradigms that are much less demanding of perfection or require much less polish to make usable. A PC can just put some buttons on the screen or use a command line and that works fine. A phone UI needs obsession.

Gigachad 3y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has spent more time and money on the iOS keyboard than Purism spent on the entire phone + software. Modern phones are probably the most advanced products humanity has ever produced.
- api 3y ago
  What efforts like Purism should do is greatly reduce their scope. Make a device that does the basics which would be phone, text, basic web, and maybe a media player or support in the web browser for this use case. At first anything else could be accessed via the web, and maybe look at introducing PWAs as a way to do basic apps. Keep the GUI as simple as possible with the smallest number of options and features as possible and focus more on perfecting what is there. Ship a more minimal better polished product. If you don’t have the resources to perfect it, drop it. Make anything more custom or advanced configurable via ssh, but make the core features entirely usable without doing that. At first you might not even have an App Store, just a CLI package manager you can access from a PC with ssh. It’d basically be a hackable minimalist phone. Someone who just wants a privacy oriented minimal phone could use it as is and power users could ssh in and hack on it.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I think maps/navigation is a must. Without that, I’d just use a $30 feature phone

opan 3y ago

I believe there are some limiting laws/regulations around radios that make DIY, free, hackable ones usually not allowed. So, modems, WLAN cards, wireless routers... tend to be quite proprietary.