alt Hacker NewsI'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?
I'm imagining a future where you buy a smartphone and when you do the first configuration, it asks you which services provider you want to use. Google and Apple are probably at the top of the list, but at the bottom there is "custom..." where you can specify the IP or host.domain of your own self-hosted setup.
Then, when you download an app, the app informs the app provider of this configuration and so your notifications (messenger, social media, games, banking, whatever) get delivered to that services provider and your phone gets them from there accordingly.
Is there anything like that in the world today?
Replies
> I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?
At this point? Reliable emulation that can run 99% of Android apps, to provide a bridge until the platform is interesting enough for people to develop for it "natively".
I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
Any one of us here could learn the skills to design a smartphone. It won't necessarily be good, but I remember that years ago, someone made one with a touchscreen hat and GSM hat atop a Raspberry Pi, rubber-banded to a power bank. I'm sure any one of us HN users could do this. And it worked. Quality only goes up from there.
The problem is it won't run any apps, so you'll need to carry this open-source secure phone in addition to your normal phone.
You can escape the duopoly by using a GNI/Linux phone, Librem 5 or Pinephone, but don't expect any support from Google or Apple for them. I'm using the former as a daily driver.
There are some good stuff on the software side that people mention, but a big one is the driver support. We would need device makers to upstream support so there is less worrying about reverse engineering or needing to run modified ROMs based on old builds. Or just publish specs on the hardware that is enough for implementation. Sure, you can buy a specific phone and run a de-googled android or linux, but that only really works for the hobbyist who wants to spend time doing this. Which makes it difficult to create a market that encourages developers of software to port their software or write new software. With out being able to broadly support devices, most people are gonna be better off running Google's android.