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.)

>“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?

> 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

>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?

> 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.

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

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.

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.