Keep Android Open

> But I can also see the clutter argument.

I don't understand the "clutter" argument at all. What does it matter if there are a billion apps? You already need a functioning system to show the better ones at the top whether the worse ones are 50% of the total or 99%.

On top of that, this isn't about their store anyway. They're charging this fee to the people not using their store.

> Windows app store has been and still is a nightmare to use.

The big problem with all of these is that they're charging too much. Apple takes 30% because they ban the alternatives. People only use Windows because they have dependencies on legacy software distributed outside the store, so Microsoft can't ban that or there would be no reason to use Windows. And when you don't have to use the vendor's store, they can't even get away with charging 15%, because it turns out platform stores are actually worthless.

Because people want platforms to provide both of two separate things. First, they want the long tail. They're a chemist or a mechanic or a photographer or a farmer and they want that half-finished app some grad student in Minsk wrote ten years ago that does the thing only people in their specific sub-specialty care about. And second, they want a curated list of apps so that when they're looking for a messaging app or a finance app it only shows the ones that don't steal their contacts and sell their financial records to data brokers.

The problem with platform stores is that they try to do both things at once, which isn't possible. Either the store has everything or it doesn't.

What you actually want is for there to be stores that only contain the curated stuff and simultaneously a reasonable means for ordinary people to install things from the long tail. Because sometimes you don't know which one to trust, which is when you want the store, and other times you know exactly what you want to install because this time it's your field and you and your colleagues are the experts, even though the store has no means to vet an app their reviewers don't understand and only 100 people in the world are using.

You can have a platform that gives you each one via different but each widely used paths. What you can't have is a store that curates the long tail.

> This situation would have been avoided if we, as community of engineers, had insisted on full and uncompromised open source (Stallmanist or GPL way) right from the start instead of going the ESR way of half-hearted open source where it's technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.

And we would have been in a better position to lobby for this if unions were widespread in the tech industry, which they are not.

Last I checked the situation was similar to what it is in Calyx, which is that it's not officially supported and you have to keep manually reapplying the root after every update.

> I can choose to use a bank that allows me to access all of their online banking features via the browser.

Lucky you. There are fewer and fewer such banks out there. The trend is to route login and consequential interactions on the web through 2FA on a phone - and not TOTP, but push notifications sent to the bank's app, that only runs on devices that pass remote attestation checks.

> I can choose to work for a company that doesn't want to surveil my personal device.

Again, lucky you. Most people don't really get many options for employment at any given moment, and the issue of corporate phones is usually at the bottom of the list of criteria when one is looking for a job. I.e. not a real choice for most people.

> I can deal with the government via snail mail

At a snail pace.

> or in the browser.

Modern government systems around the world tend to require some sort of identification that usually gets tied to your smartphone, either directly or via your bank.

> I can use third-party YouTube clients and torrent movies and games, or simply don't engage with DRM'd media because there's plenty of entertainment out there.

Torrents aside, that's not the case. Entertainment isn't fungible. Disney can release all Star Wars media DRM-free for everyone to download, and it means exactly zero to someone who wants to watch Star Trek, but Paramount/CBS decided to go all Ferengi on the franchise. Can't substitute one for the other. This is why the market supports so many streaming services these days - they exploit this very fact.

> Count the percentage of software you use that are open-source compared to 10 years ago. I bet it's more.

Open Source software stopped mattering once the world embraced Software as a Service model. Source code on Github means nothing if the code is actually executed on servers you don't control and have no visibility into.

That covers end-user OSS. The larger space of OSS building blocks are... building blocks. OSS libraries matter to users just as much as standard Phillips screws used inside an appliance, when they're beneath layers of glue and permanently soldered elements and join together elements explicitly labeled as "not end-user servicable".

> It's only a matter of time before we make hardware open-source, too.

That time will come around when we build a Star Trek-style replicator (and then have a successful revolution to seize this new means to production, because no way the first company to build an universal manufacturing device is going to just let people use it). Open Source Software succeeded only because software development has near-zero natural barrier to entry, so there was a large supply of bored high-schoolers and students, hobbyists, academics and other do-gooders with enough time and will to just build stuff and give it away for free. This isn't true for hardware.

Now, circling back to the main point:

> Whether we can move to open platforms depends on the choices people make.

No, it does not. On consumer side, the market is driven by supply, not demand. I.e. you only get to choose from what the vendors decide to make available to you, and they know perfectly well you have to choose something, so your voice doesn't matter.

If it did, we wouldn't be having this whole thread in the first place.

Good luck convincing anyone of that. We could also live without clothes and fancy food and most of modern amenities, but we don't, for the same reason.