> Why is that even relevant? Because breaking the stranglehold that the tech megacorps currently have over devices is not going to be cheap. In the end, if use

> Why is that even relevant? Because breaking the stranglehold that the tech megacorps currently have over devices is not going to be cheap. In the end, if users won't pay for it to happen, it won't happen. > the actual thing which is necessary, i.e. for the user to not be denied control over their own device. My point is that as things currently stand, users don't care about this. To them their device is not a computer they should control. It's just an appliance. They have no clue what "general purpose computing" means or why they should want it (to the extent they should) on their devices. Framing it as "we'd like to give you ad blocking apps but the platform vendors won't let us" might be an improvement, but I'm not sure even about that. Ads vs. ad blocking is a perpetual arms race, and it will continue as long as the ad supported business model is the primary one the tech megacorps use, and the incentives that lead the tech megacorps to use that business model in the first place are also the ones that lead them to lock down what apps on their platforms can do. The real solution, as the last statement suggests, is to do away with the ad supported business model. But that would require users to be willing to pay for apps that they use; and right now, it seems like most users won't. They've been conditioned for at least a couple of decades now that everything they use on their devices, like everything they use on the web, should be "free". And since those things aren't actually free, it costs a lot of resources to provide them, they have to be paid for somehow. Or, alternatively, users could simply stop buying devices that are locked down, and buy open ones instead. There are ways to do that--but they're outliers, and I don't see how that's going to change any time soon.