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> It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make th

by divan 1y ago

> It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again, statements like this sound more than naïve to me. I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here. I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone. Reading technical documentation on things like secure enclaves, UWB chips, computational photography stack, HRTF tuning, unified memory, TrueDepth cameras, AWDL, etc., it feels very wrong to support claims like the OP makes. “Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.

saurik 1y ago
It being difficult is different from it being possible. If a company wants to raise $50m to read all the documentation and build an alternative OS to run on this crazy piece of hardware, as the consumer I still benefit. If you'd prefer, let's stick with repair? I also need all of that information to be able to repair my phone, but again, it wouldn't necessarily be ME who repairs my own phone: I take it to a third-party expert who has built out their own expertise and tools. (Hell: I'd personally be OK without "documentation"... it should simply be illegal to actively go out of your way to prevent people from doing this. This way you also aren't mandating anyone go to extra effort they otherwise wouldn't bother with: the status quo is that, because they can, they thrown down an incredible amount of effort trying to prevent people from figuring things out themselves, and that really sucks.)
- fastball 1y ago
  > $50m to build a modern OS from scratch heh.
  - fijiaarone 1y ago
    Nobody would invest $50 million to enter a trillion dollar market.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    In practice, it'll look more like what PostmarketOS or Asahi Linux madmen are doing - porting Linux onto the platforms where the sun doesn't shine. Of course, having any kind of documentation or driver sources that could be referenced would make it much easier, and much less taxing on sanity.
- jhatemyjob 1y ago
  I feel like adding more laws for this kind of stuff won't really stick. Like a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. We can hem and haw about what the government should do all we want but like... I mean, the Digital Markets Act certainly made a HUGE impact. And the GDPR is definitely a net positive for society. I think the thing you brought up at the beginning is the most practical path forward, someone with the technical know-how and business acumen needs to start a company. Apple and Google are quite weak now, and there are lessons to be learned from the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If enough people try, someone will eventually break through.
  - jhatemyjob 1y ago
    The Epic suit certainly opens some interesting avenues as well.
wkat4242 1y ago
> I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here. However the interests you mention aren't collective at all but very singularly the ones of the manufacturer only
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Its only the manufacturers interests because they dont want people to brick their phone on accident. Really theyre only a secondary party of interest, the real interested party is grandma/anyone who can fall victim to malware. Apples decision to ban sideloading is a huge part of how they became the most popular phone maker in the us
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    The real interest is their protection of their sweet 30% revenue stream. There are many ways to protect security, leaving all your keys in the hands of one party is not the only one. And there should also be the right to be able to opt out of the manufacturers' protections of course.
    - HDThoreaun 1y ago
      Youre not wrong about the real interest but security is another very real one. > There are many ways to protect security, leaving all your keys in the hands of one party is not the only one. When youre dealing with idiots its a bit harder than you might expect. Tons of idiots own phones and if apple allowed them to be the victim of security vulnerabilities they get terrible pr.
      - tcfhgj 1y ago
        Yeah, I see it all the time that car companies get terrible PR, because someone killed someone with their car. In reality the victim is the first being blamed, the driver second and the government third
sudosysgen 1y ago
There is already open source software for UWB, computational photography, various depth cameras, direct link WiFi, etc... Will it be as good as the iOS implementation? Probably not. But it's hardly an impossible fact and not one that has to be done entirely over and over for every device. The Asahi folks showed it could be done despite hostile conditions.
tern 1y ago
Not to mention, it's an authoritarian attitude, talking about forcing companies to support arbitrary software stacks
- jacquesm 1y ago
  That's not what they wrote at all.
  - tern 1y ago
    > It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible I was writing in reference to this quote ^ It would have been more accurate for me to say "support the development of arbitrary software stacks," but where do you draw the line between "supporting the development of" and "supporting"?
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Because the documentation is already written, it just isn't opened up. All you need to do is open it up. The big stumbling block when writing drivers for new hardware is simply to know what goes where.
      - tern 1y ago
        As soon as you open up the means, you open up an expectation of support If Apple provided all the docs, people would start building, and then they would start complaining when Apple doesn't consider them a customer of the business, and Apple would eventually be forced to react, which would take energy away from there core commitment: delivering a unified product experience for consumers I suspect you don't understand this, but this is why corporations are deliberately unhelpful in many (annoying) ways, and why people don't share things in general as much as you'd hope
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Aerroon 1y ago
>“Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area? My phone is more powerful than many of the computers I've had in the past, yet I need to jump through a million hoops to use it as a software development platform. Why?
- beeflet 1y ago
  A very profitable instance of market segmentation
- divan 1y ago
  Your smartwatch is probably more powerful than some of your past computers too. Same with your DSLR camera. Even your smart fridge. These are specialized hardware+software gadgets designed to a particular purpose, which is very different from being a development platform. Same with a phone.
  - stavros 1y ago
    Yeah, this is the sleight of hand. They used to all be computers, now we have reduced freedom to "development platforms". No. It's hardware, I bought it, I should be able to run any code I want on my DSLR (and I do), my fridge, my oven, my smartwatch, anything I own.
  - Zak 1y ago
    A modern smartphone is mostly a general-purpose computer designed to run arbitrary software with a couple tightly integrated and/or regulated bits. That's very different from a DSLR, which is designed to take pictures. That said, a camera with a fully open software stack would be fun.
    - divan 1y ago
      Oh, so no specialized hardware? Just a general-purpose components for general computation tasks?
  - 1y ago
pishpash 1y ago
That argues for opening up the hardware more, not closing down the software. In fact it further argues that the degree of vertical integration is monopolistic. Why should a Sony CMOS camera be tied to some Apple computational photography code only available in Apple firmware or iOS? What if I do not like that it makes up images that don't exist? What if someone has a better method but now cannot bring it to market? Break it up and open it up. I assure you it can be done.
fluoridation 1y ago
>I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone. That when you buy a phone you're also buying software components doesn't change the fact that the phone is owned entirely by you. You're not entering into a partnership to co-own the phone with anyone else, it's entirely yours. No one should get to decide how you use it but you. >But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food. So the argument is that by taking a piece of electronics I paid for that is running on electricity I pay for, and making it run some arbitrary piece of software, I'm putting people's lives at risk?
- arccy 1y ago
  that has never been true, your phone contains a radio, governed by the relevant laws of your locale.
  - philipwhiuk 1y ago
    My pan is also governed by the relevant laws of my locale. I can cook what I like, but I can't legally beat someone over the head with it.
elric 1y ago
> As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again Why haven't we seen a spiritual successor to the N900? It's a little strange to me that it's cheaper than ever to produce hardware, even in relatively small quantities, but no one (AFAIK) is producing any geek-oriented phones like the N900. Linux hardware support gets better every year. It shouldn't be terribly hard to have a factory produce a small number of open phones that can run Linux. They wouldn't be any good without significant investment in phone-specific usability, but still.

by divan 1y ago

saurik 1y ago

It being difficult is different from it being possible. If a company wants to raise $50m to read all the documentation and build an alternative OS to run on this crazy piece of hardware, as the consumer I still benefit. If you'd prefer, let's stick with repair? I also need all of that information to be able to repair my phone, but again, it wouldn't necessarily be ME who repairs my own phone: I take it to a third-party expert who has built out their own expertise and tools. (Hell: I'd personally be OK without "documentation"... it should simply be illegal to actively go out of your way to prevent people from doing this. This way you also aren't mandating anyone go to extra effort they otherwise wouldn't bother with: the status quo is that, because they can, they thrown down an incredible amount of effort trying to prevent people from figuring things out themselves, and that really sucks.)

fastball 1y ago
> $50m to build a modern OS from scratch heh.
- fijiaarone 1y ago
  Nobody would invest $50 million to enter a trillion dollar market.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  In practice, it'll look more like what PostmarketOS or Asahi Linux madmen are doing - porting Linux onto the platforms where the sun doesn't shine. Of course, having any kind of documentation or driver sources that could be referenced would make it much easier, and much less taxing on sanity.
jhatemyjob 1y ago
I feel like adding more laws for this kind of stuff won't really stick. Like a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. We can hem and haw about what the government should do all we want but like... I mean, the Digital Markets Act certainly made a HUGE impact. And the GDPR is definitely a net positive for society. I think the thing you brought up at the beginning is the most practical path forward, someone with the technical know-how and business acumen needs to start a company. Apple and Google are quite weak now, and there are lessons to be learned from the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If enough people try, someone will eventually break through.
- jhatemyjob 1y ago
  The Epic suit certainly opens some interesting avenues as well.

wkat4242 1y ago

> I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here. However the interests you mention aren't collective at all but very singularly the ones of the manufacturer only

HDThoreaun 1y ago
Its only the manufacturers interests because they dont want people to brick their phone on accident. Really theyre only a secondary party of interest, the real interested party is grandma/anyone who can fall victim to malware. Apples decision to ban sideloading is a huge part of how they became the most popular phone maker in the us
- wkat4242 1y ago
  The real interest is their protection of their sweet 30% revenue stream. There are many ways to protect security, leaving all your keys in the hands of one party is not the only one. And there should also be the right to be able to opt out of the manufacturers' protections of course.
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    Youre not wrong about the real interest but security is another very real one. > There are many ways to protect security, leaving all your keys in the hands of one party is not the only one. When youre dealing with idiots its a bit harder than you might expect. Tons of idiots own phones and if apple allowed them to be the victim of security vulnerabilities they get terrible pr.
    - tcfhgj 1y ago
      Yeah, I see it all the time that car companies get terrible PR, because someone killed someone with their car. In reality the victim is the first being blamed, the driver second and the government third

sudosysgen 1y ago

There is already open source software for UWB, computational photography, various depth cameras, direct link WiFi, etc... Will it be as good as the iOS implementation? Probably not. But it's hardly an impossible fact and not one that has to be done entirely over and over for every device. The Asahi folks showed it could be done despite hostile conditions.

tern 1y ago

Not to mention, it's an authoritarian attitude, talking about forcing companies to support arbitrary software stacks

jacquesm 1y ago
That's not what they wrote at all.
- tern 1y ago
  > It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible I was writing in reference to this quote ^ It would have been more accurate for me to say "support the development of arbitrary software stacks," but where do you draw the line between "supporting the development of" and "supporting"?
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    Because the documentation is already written, it just isn't opened up. All you need to do is open it up. The big stumbling block when writing drivers for new hardware is simply to know what goes where.
    - tern 1y ago
      As soon as you open up the means, you open up an expectation of support If Apple provided all the docs, people would start building, and then they would start complaining when Apple doesn't consider them a customer of the business, and Apple would eventually be forced to react, which would take energy away from there core commitment: delivering a unified product experience for consumers I suspect you don't understand this, but this is why corporations are deliberately unhelpful in many (annoying) ways, and why people don't share things in general as much as you'd hope
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

Aerroon 1y ago

>“Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area? My phone is more powerful than many of the computers I've had in the past, yet I need to jump through a million hoops to use it as a software development platform. Why?

beeflet 1y ago
A very profitable instance of market segmentation
divan 1y ago
Your smartwatch is probably more powerful than some of your past computers too. Same with your DSLR camera. Even your smart fridge. These are specialized hardware+software gadgets designed to a particular purpose, which is very different from being a development platform. Same with a phone.
- stavros 1y ago
  Yeah, this is the sleight of hand. They used to all be computers, now we have reduced freedom to "development platforms". No. It's hardware, I bought it, I should be able to run any code I want on my DSLR (and I do), my fridge, my oven, my smartwatch, anything I own.
- Zak 1y ago
  A modern smartphone is mostly a general-purpose computer designed to run arbitrary software with a couple tightly integrated and/or regulated bits. That's very different from a DSLR, which is designed to take pictures. That said, a camera with a fully open software stack would be fun.
  - divan 1y ago
    Oh, so no specialized hardware? Just a general-purpose components for general computation tasks?
- 1y ago

pishpash 1y ago

That argues for opening up the hardware more, not closing down the software. In fact it further argues that the degree of vertical integration is monopolistic. Why should a Sony CMOS camera be tied to some Apple computational photography code only available in Apple firmware or iOS? What if I do not like that it makes up images that don't exist? What if someone has a better method but now cannot bring it to market? Break it up and open it up. I assure you it can be done.

fluoridation 1y ago

>I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone. That when you buy a phone you're also buying software components doesn't change the fact that the phone is owned entirely by you. You're not entering into a partnership to co-own the phone with anyone else, it's entirely yours. No one should get to decide how you use it but you. >But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food. So the argument is that by taking a piece of electronics I paid for that is running on electricity I pay for, and making it run some arbitrary piece of software, I'm putting people's lives at risk?

arccy 1y ago
that has never been true, your phone contains a radio, governed by the relevant laws of your locale.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  My pan is also governed by the relevant laws of my locale. I can cook what I like, but I can't legally beat someone over the head with it.

elric 1y ago

> As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again Why haven't we seen a spiritual successor to the N900? It's a little strange to me that it's cheaper than ever to produce hardware, even in relatively small quantities, but no one (AFAIK) is producing any geek-oriented phones like the N900. Linux hardware support gets better every year. It shouldn't be terribly hard to have a factory produce a small number of open phones that can run Linux. They wouldn't be any good without significant investment in phone-specific usability, but still.