I think that’s part of the problem - android doesn’t work as a product model, for literally anyone involved.
Google would not be doing it if it wasn’t for the advertising business. It’s pretty much the definition of a loss-leader to get people into the ecosystem for things that google can monetize. So android as a product is implicitly, foreverially tiedup with marketing and spyware, because google isn’t onboard otherwise. Same as gmail or search was a loss-leader to get people onboard for advertising too. Google only cares about these things insofar as they might stop being a funnel into their money-makers.
SOC vendors can’t make a run providing 7 years of driver/firmware support for a product they sell once at bleedingly thin margins. Or at least, they really don’t wanna.
OEMs can’t make a run providing 7 years of support for someone else’s software, especially when they also have to do a lot of the driver work themselves thanks to IHVs abdicating their job.
Consumers get stuck with a product that loses support in 2 years or whatever, and may even have landmines involved with unlocking it to continue support (Sony wipes the camera firmware if you unlock the bootloader for example). They face a completely unnecessary hardware and software treadmill due to all these other factors. Supporting your own phone is not a reasonable expectations for Joe Sixpack either.
The idea is supposed to be the “linux model” but honestly linux has the same problems, it is reliant on the same unpaid labor around driver work to make up for the inability of vendors to track the ecosystem and provide the long-tail of support. In cases where the vendor can’t open source it, the functionality simply ends up broken, and driver support, kernel versioning, and DKMS is a constant battle for end users. Just like with custom roms for android.
Android simply has too little margin split among too many disinterested parties to ever really work. And fixing it would involve either increasing the size of the pie (margin), which consumers in this segment hate to an unfathomable degree (android users = cheapskates is a reliable first-order approximation, borne out by the app store revenue too).
But that's the free-market system working as intended, right? Literally every penny has been squeezed out of margins, software costs pushed onto free labor in the open-source community, and ad revenue used to contra-fund and push end-user prices even lower. Android is the finest solution the free-market can deliver, that's how the system is supposed to work, and it’s delivered an excellent product for the needs of the customer - it's just you're not the customer, you're the product.
The alternative is vertical consolidation and bringing more things under the same roof, raising the price, and targeting the consumer needs instead of the ad revenue needs. Basically the apple model. But that can never be a viable path in a GPL world. And it will still probably involve paying more - phone costs are currently subsidized by all these indirect costs like ad money and vendors cutting corners on support. There is more work that will need to be done, and that contra-revenue from advertising revenue needs to be backed out of the purchase price, so at the end of the day consumers will simply have to pay somewhat more (hopefully not apple prices of course). But again, people are cheapskates, android users doubly so.
I don't know why people got so allergic to the idea of paying for their operating system, the baseline assumption now seems to be that it needs to be free, and if that's the case you will never be free, only stuck in a choice between advertising-mongers and exploiting unpaid labor. And that can either be in hardware costs, or in actual recurring support costs, but either way, someone needs to be paid to sit down and make sure the bluetooth and sound drivers work.
You see the same problem in software too - open-source projects get commercial entities tapping their value without providing contributions back, or existing via patronage to the needs and goals of the commercial entity. Without an incentive by the actual developers to provide end-user value, and with permissive licensing, you end up with a constant struggle for financial homeostasis. Firefox/Mozilla, for example.
People complain about android but they still are not willing to pay a little more to opt-out of these problems. The revealed preference is for purchase price above all else, and people still think in the yardstick of Apple being "too expensive" rather than Android being "too cheap". The yardstick is still the artificially-cheap advertising-subsidized Android product.
These are fundamentally problems of not enough margins to support all the players in this ecosystem, which leads to them looking for places to find the revenue to make it work. Pay a little more and these problems go away.
If you want to stop being the product, get used to opening up your wallet. That transactionality is a good thing - you can’t really demand boundaries when you’re living on someone else’s dime. It’s Google’s house and they’re letting you crash for free. But this is the very deepest core of the problem - people will do anything except just pay a little more.
You will never stop being the product if you can’t bring yourself to be a customer.
I mostly agree with your take. Mobile is particularly challenging. I'm optimistic about a hardware only startup succeeding (Framework but for phones), but building your own hardware and your own OS is much harder, I think.
For an even spicier take: GPL has accelerated/worsened this trend, imo. Not out of anything they really did wrong, but actually just by well-intentioned success.
It’s about “code revenue” vs “services revenue”. If I can’t sell you a copy of Office 97, well, obviously that pushes things to the Office 365 model. And the unfortunate reality is that a huge amount of important code is now GPL, which means a huge amount of the world’s codebase is now un-monetizable in that sense. This has fueled a massive push for “alternative revenue”, and the whole google model has been that the "alternative source" is advertising dollars.
Moreover, GPL itself has conditioned people that the right price for software is “free”. And obviously software is not free to produce, nor is the ecosystem of phones conductive to the Linux “hardware bazaar” model in the same way as 1990s era IBM-compatible PCs. [0]
Well, if the only valid price for consumer-facing software is “free”, and a huge amount of the software in the world is now un-monetizeable in the sense of being able to sell a copy of the software to fund your R&D effort… obviously that just pours gas on the fire of the tivo’ization and SaaS revenue models. That is a correct business-development response to the changing market conditions.
GPL has essentially forced the collapse of the traditional “fee for source” or “fee for binary” model. I think it probably would have been out-competed by service revenue eventually anyway, given that consumers obviously prefer “free” to paying money, but basically this is an accelerationism thing whereby GPL has more or less collapsed the entire proprietary-software market (to the extent that many people now view hardware that doesn’t have open drives as being somehow fundamentally bad or illegitimate), driving everyone into the arms of the SaaS providers. It has accelerationism’d us right into tivo’ization.
Big “my neighbor’s cats keep getting eaten by coyotes and he says that he just goes to the shelter and gets another cat and I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and his daughter started crying” energy. Like GPL literally has been so successful that people think proprietary software is illegitimate… except for the “free” ones backed by advertising dollars.
GPL has been feeding consumers to the coyotes. It doesn't mean they meant to do it, but, functionally by killing fee-for-software models and by conditioning everyone that the only valid price is "free", that's what it's kinda done. Proprietary software still exists... you just don't pay with money anymore.
I am of course human too, I groan at the thought of paying $350/year for a personal jetbrains license or paying $1000 more for an apple laptop than a comparable commodity one... but software costs money to develop and you make your choices about what is worthwhile and which relationships you want to accept enshittification on. My point is just that transactionality (ie, you pay money and receive a service) is actually a good thing, because those services are much less likely to enshittify if it's going to come at the expense of actual paying customers rather than just some livestock waiting to be sheared. It changes the nature of the relationship.
It doesn't mean there aren't bad companies that do enshittification anyway, but if the expectation is pay money => receive good, then obviously you can reasonably hold expectations about the nature of what you're going to receive, vs GPL and proprietary models fostering the "it's free, why are you complaining" mindset. GPL and SaaS models are alike in that respect and GPL has both directly reinforced that mindset, and also pushed far more companies to SaaS far more quickly with its own success.
[0] (Wireless+modems have specific regulatory requirements that are inherently incompatible with open-licensing, it is illegal to release a wireless chipset which is capable of violating local band-regulation requirements, which functionally imposes the requirement that devices listen to the local band to detect weather radar upon bootup to see if they're allowed to use the band in a given locality. This is part of why modern routers are so slow to boot up! And to prevent tampering/replacement, this effectively must be put in a closed blob to pass certification. Which is why projects like OpenWRT are struggling with Wifi 6E/6GHz and other newer hardware - when I checked maybe a year ago, there were zero 6E devices supported. And unfortunately, it is not possible to make a very good phone without wireless connectivity. It literally is one of the most challenging domains to try and go open-license on because the FCC ain't playin'.)
Outlawing this "contra-revenue"/ad-supported moel is low-key one of the biggest things the EU could tackle though. Big problem, wide problem.
Granted they're walking down that path with GDPR dismantling a lot of the worst of the surveillance capitalism, and with forcing Android to have actual reasonable OS support lifespans... they are gradually forcing these externalities/defects to be priced in properly. But I think it is explicitly worth stating as an end-goal: transactionality and fee-for-service or fee-for-product is a good thing, because then companies are competing to service customers and not competing for more livestock to be the product.
If you want to stop enshittification, get rid of contra-revenue models. The thing you are paying for, should be profitable to produce at the price you sell it. If you have engineering effort that's shared with other products: fine, amortize/attribute it however makes sense. But if you are selling a widget that costs $10 to produce for $9, on the expectation of $3 of revenue: no, that should be illegal.
If nothing else it's a competition issue, you can't have "honest" firms ever break this situation if you have other companies "dumping" and selling below-actual-cost. It is really no different from any other kind of dumping.
Otherwise, the advertising-supported companies will always be able to out-compete the "honest" companies, so it will always be a race to the bottom.
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anyway, as far as hardware startups specifically: those exist and they just haven't gotten any traction. Fairphone, pinephone, lightphone, etc. These inevitably end up getting very little traction among enthusiasts etc. I don't think the existence of these solves any real problem with the android ecosystem.
Also, ecosystem is a major factor in OS adoption. Like you could go run MenuetOS right now, so why don't you? Ecosystem and network effect and available codebase etc. So these hardware startups have to work within the existing OS ecosystems etc - almost all of these startups are android and the ones that aren't, frankly are doomed. Consumers don't want featurephone or phone-specific app stores in 2024, especially for some niche product with no actual apps released for it. There is very little point to making a custom OS from vxworks or whatever, that's not where the problem lays here.
Similarly: Framework and System76 are attempting to thread that needle of supported hardware+OS configurations on "generic linux". This exists, just not to massive success or fanfare or changes in how the world works. And they're not re-engineering the OS. Even System76/PopOS is based on ubuntu iirc. Jumping to MenuetOS or other completely-new-OS things is a whole other can of worms.
Despite Framework/System76 existing, the world still runs on Windows 11 ad-supported installs or free Linux labor. So I don't know why it would be different for phone hardware+android.
Overall great comment, I wanted to highlight the part about "dumping". A huge amount of dumping-equivalent behaviour guess on in the software industry, I sometimes wonder what kind of market we'd see if it were prevented.
It's one of the biggest problems with "sustainable software" if you will. How is honest software supposed to outcompete "free", especially for key "platform" things like email, where "getting platformed" (in the sense your mail delivers) is non-trivial?
things like that really need to cost money, because they cost money to deliver. and "I get it with my ISP" isn't a satisfying answer either.
SMS 2FA is another similar problem. It's basically an identifier token at this point and you have very little choice over it etc. I actually have been denied for credit cards twice (I think, microcenter told me why it usually fails for them and it makes sense) because my phone number is in my parents' name... (I pay them for a line on a family plan as an additional line). It's obviously not the same problem but it's getting at the problem of these "bundled" services having become de-facto identity providers.
Cause it's not adobe making photoshop free, right? It's bundled search, mail, identity provider, as a free service (you don't pay with money).
But there are many many smaller places it happens etc. I don't quite know how to draw the line of "this is a feature that's bundled" vs "this is actually a separate service" but like, in the large picture there are places where it's not really questionable, right?
"Free as in freedom" is obviously on the clear side of the line. I don't quite know how to draw it for everything, because again, you can see ways where "free MS windows" could be exploitative even if it were free. I guess that falls into the "actual damages" sort of regulatory scenario.
I haven't exhaustively developed the concept but yeah, I mean, "dumping" seems obviously problematic in a market-fairness sense.
