This.
Most of us do not want to carry two phones around. The reality is that there is strong utility for those non-open apps and they will never be replaced by open ones.
In some parts of the world, WhatsApp is as necessary as the phone itself. Official business is conducted via it.
Communication is the main issue - If you've got whatsapp/telegram/whatever,and a couple others you can handle your own life differently without human interaction being affected.
The rest is a personal choice, I'm happy to have a bit higher friction to check my bank's balance for example. Maps is an issue but it can be overcome.
Accessibility is a big issue. The accessibility some of the apps like banking provide are compelling. - not totally unlike the difference between stairs and a ramp.
> I'm happy to have a bit higher friction to check my bank's balance for example.
I find this to actually be a great litmus test for the overall problem. Bank account balance is a basic piece of information that's about me, and that I need to keep track of to effectively live in our modern times. I should be able to access that information non-interactively at any time. But I can't.
Ask many banks, you'll get as many reasons for why they can't just allow me to cURL this number off an endpoint with some pre-shared credentials. Most of those reasons are bogus[0]. Now, it's not hard to identify several points where I could observe that information in-flight. There's an API that powers the app. The app itself has UI that could be queried or scrapped; some apps will even communicate this data to other apps when requested.
But good luck getting access to any of that non-interactively.
This is what all those technologies add up to. The bank says I can't have this information unless my eyeballs are physically looking at the screen displaying it - and the whole tech stack conspires to make sure I can't get it otherwise.
It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device.
EDIT: Accessibility tools are often the only remaining workaround here, because those are uniquely hard for services to close. And as expected, accessibility became its special privilege category on modern devices, and is increasingly heavily scrutinized and limited by device vendors.
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[0] - They're usually some kind of security or stability point, that's just a fig leaf to cover the actual reason: this is the way they can force you to interact with their app or website daily, creating an extremely valuable marketing channel for their financial products.
It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device.
I hate to risk sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, but when I hear this I flash back to Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. I interpreted his message in that book as something approximately like "you can't out-tech the bad guys", where "bad guys" can mean government surveillance agencies (probably more what he had in mind) OR "big corporations trying to control your life" (this may be me extrapolating). But even if I'm over-generalizing a bit, I think the point still stands.
"We" (open source advocates / hackers / hobbyists / makers / whatever) can't win on just tech alone. We have to use the legislative process, political pressure, social pressure, whatever, to achieve our goals. And so we should use our superior knowledge of technology to support doing that. So don't just think "how can I hack my phone to use an open source OS" but think "How can I help use technology to influence the outcome of the next election, and elect candidates who really represent the things I care about?" or "How can I help use technology to stir up enough activists making enough noise to persuade my bank to let me access my account using a non-proprietary OS", etc.
Now I'm not saying any of this is easy. By no means. Just suggesting that we need to at least approach things with that mindset in view to some extent.
I see your point, but I disagree that you need direct involvement in the legal process.
Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.
Say that you get to a point where 90% of desktop users are on linux. Is there any doubt that banks, messaging platforms and the like would have their own linux apps? no matter how many hoops you make them pass through, they won't let that piece of the cake go.
The problem is that the current way of doing things will never reach those numbers, because we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities; I think changing that is the mising piece.
> Say that you get to a point where 90% of desktop users are on linux. Is there any doubt that banks, messaging platforms and the like would have their own linux apps? no matter how many hoops you make them pass through, they won't let that piece of the cake go.
Here's the thing: we had that already. It was called Android.
> Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.
We're having this discussion precisely because this is not true. If your tech is popular enough, companies will use their money and influence to subvert it so it serves their bidding.
Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.
I don't disagree, and I guess I'd say that I think that is all part of the larger point. Eg, "getting more people to use (Linux|BSD|Minix|Mach|Whatever)" is part of the larger idea of "social pressure" to convince companies to behave in ways that we find desirable. So the question then is, as far as I can tell, what more can use techies do - leveraging out existing mastery of technology - to promote "(Linux|BSD|Minix|Mach|Whatever)" to people who don't currently understand the importance of these issues?
And I don't mean to claim that "using our tech knowledge" is the only kind of activism that matters. Maybe for some people it's just "donate money to the EFF every month" or whatever. But to me, that's all still part of the same general initiative.
s/out existing mastery/our existing mastery/
Damn typo. And missed the edit window. Sorry. :-(
> we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities
Some of the bigger open source communities, like GNOME, do some amount of these things. But I think very few people are excited enough about user studies or marketing to do them as a hobby, unlike writing code. It's hard to see how you could beat Google/Apple/Microsoft at their own game like this without a lot of money. Red Hat is probably the biggest company that might be interested in this, but still about 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the giants.
You’d be surprised, behance and the like are full of people doing case studies for rebuilding popular apps for example.
There are hobbyists and people trying to get experience eveywhere, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between communities.
I've not managed to read all the comments in this post, so apologies if I'm repeating other people, I also have only a passing understanding of how Google Play works, but couldn't we have:
Linux based phone, running Anbox to support Android apps running within containers. Effort would then have to put into support Play APIs within Anbox. Not a small amount of work, but I compare it to the state of Linux 20 years ago and how well Linux is doing today.
Yes. This already exists (though usually with Waydroid rather than Anbox I think). My Ubuntu Touch phone can run Android apps via Waydroid.
The integration isn't perfect (some important things like forwarding notifications to the host system are still missing) but it's already further along than you might have imagined.
Google would eventually manage to completely block that. For example, have the app be encrypted for download from the Play Store for the individual Google-approved device key, and the device’s firmware will decrypt and run the app in a way so that the user can’t get hold of the decrypted app blob, and hence can’t possibly run it in any other (non-Google-approved) environment.
The bottom line is, the only way to ensure user freedom here is by regulation/legislation.
The regulation will only work if it is clear that an alternative is viable and usable. This is why it's important to use GNU/Linux on mobile today.
So what. Enough of us do that it just might be feasible.
I've used Linux for a loong time before some business-critical software ran on it. I had to have a Windows VM for years for netbanking, or before that, dual-boot for gaming.
If we're all too spoiled to give a free alternative a chance because it might be slightly inconvenient, we don't deserve the free alternative.
> Enough of us do that it just might be feasible.
Not nearly enough. Not by three orders of magnitude for the market to care.
This isn't the 1990s. Computers are now mainstream.