That's easily solved, ain't it: check the "tech savvy" box, and all "safeguards" are off?

Yet instead, we are getting increasingly fewer phones with unlockable bootloaders and root access available. What gives?

I've also checked out my mom's phone a year or so back: she had so many crappy apps from official store that it was barely usable. Stores do not really help.

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kcplate a day ago | parent [-]

What possible motivation would Google or Apple have to appease such a small percentage of their user base?

I’m “tech savvy” and I would never click that box. Frankly I can’t think of something more risky than installing some random piece of software on a device that I need and use everyday.

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necovek 21 hours ago | parent [-]

If that's the case, what is a practical difference between you having access to your device or not?

You could be installing random crap from the store, or not from the store. Or you could not be installing random apps from either.

I don't feel any more protected by device restrictions. Yes, containerization helps, but I like having root on my device (eg. I backup different .sqlite files from different apps through ssh to my phone). My phone has FDE, and is probably not at all less "safe" than yours.

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kcplate 13 hours ago | parent [-]

There are a number of mobile phones out there that are fully open. If you need root, go buy one. You seem to have a specific need that I am quite sure that 99.999% of the mobile phone using world do not have and never will have. If I am apple, I recognize that making a phone that makes the .001% happy probably will frustrate the 99.999%. They are quite happy to give that market of maybe 150k users to someone else to keep their 1.5B users content.

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mathiaspoint 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Outside of really niche stuff like the Pinephone there aren't. Because of things like this Android is increasingly incompatible with that use model and these days it's pretty safe to assume "phone" == "corporate administration you have no control over."

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kcplate 12 hours ago | parent [-]

All that tells me is that there is little to no market for these wide open devices and the existing user base is not sweating the use of manufacturer app stores.

No one outside of a tiny group of techy tinkerer types really cares.

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necovek 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Google Pixel phones for a while have been the phone of choice as they allowed easy root and bootloader access. Not sure if that's still the case, though, as they've been pivoting.

Other manufacturers offer it as well — these options continues to exist, and while it's certainly not a high percentage of the market, some of these phones sell because of openness.

Niche manufacturers usually focus on "stronger" openness (Librem, PinePhone, Fairphone...) — but they provide subpar hardware compared to mainstream top-end. Eg. most recent release in Volla Quintus (https://volla.online/en/volla-phone-quintus/) uses SoC that is half the speed of Google's Tensor G4 in both single- and multi-threading benchmarks: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-mediatek_dimensity...

So I generally go with phones which can get their bootloader unlocked and which can be rooted, to ensure I have full control of them. I did, in the past, use Ubuntu Phones (Meizu MX4, Nexus 4), HP/Palm Pre Plus and 3 (webOS with full root access), Nokia N9, Motorola A1200 etc — all as my daily drivers. I did get PinePhone, but that thing is sloooow. Since, I've switched to plain Android phones which allow you full control.

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mathiaspoint 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The idea of a smartphone you control is a little absurd, the whole point of a smartphone is to sell access to you to other people, that's where all the money is.

There are plenty of devices you have full control over but they're not called phones for that reason.

	▲	necovek 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Uhm, I see that you are playing the devil's advocate here, but I'd note that phones being bought today cost more than laptops sometimes — if that's not where the money is, could we at least get them much cheaper?