I can’t talk to my coworkers anymore during my free time? Oh no.

Anyways.

You say that until Google realises that there is no other viable alternative and so they can do the same thing since it’s not like there is another option.

Not entirely. I’m fairly sure that, if google decides to lock down pixel devices, the graphene team would evaluate other devices that are more open. The reason they recommend pixels is because they are open, not because they are big google fans. Graphene DOES run on other devices aswell, it’s just not officially tested or supported. And there are other devices with unlockable bootloaders, most noteably older oneplus devices and fairphones.

You answer is basically a big “go fuck yourself” to everyone who bought an iphone before they knew about the things Apple did to keep users looked in

No, my answer is a big “go fuck yourself” to everyone who voluntarily decides to stick with apple devices despite knowing of their practices. Let’s be honest for just one second: Barely any consumer is so tied into an operating system that it would prevent them from switching. What do most people do with their phones? Listen to music, have a messenger, maybe check emails, browsing - that’s it. And you can do that on any other phone. The amount of people that are apple power users that use applications that only exist in the apple ecosystem is abysmal and largely irrelevant in this discussion.

Same goes for the acquiring root access on an android phone. People are not born with knowledge.

True. Neither was I. But in 2025, we have the internet and you can read up on almost anything imagineable. If I wanted to learn about astrophysics, I could find plenty of videos or resources about it. If I want to learn about japanese history during the sengoku period, there are a lot of resources about that. And if I want to learn how to unlock the bootloader of a phone and install a custom rom, not surprisingly, there are resources for that.

This “People are not born with knowledge” argument is so stupid - nobody is born with it, the problem is just that most people are too lazy to learn about their possibilites to break free from oppressing corporate conglomerates. And THAT’S something I have an issue with.

In reality, companies aren’t afraid of making anti-consumer products

Because people will still eat the shit thrown in front of them. Why bother with good products when the doofus buys it anyways?

What do they do when Google makes some restrictive bullshit change again, for example to the android API? Fork it and become incompatible with apps meant for stock android?

Well, yes, that would most likely be the result. Even now, some apps aren’t working - the commerzbank banking app, for example, didn’t work on graphene (because of play protect tho, not incompatibility). I was emailing them, asking if they planned to change it, they said “nah fam sorry no time” so I was switching to revolut. Recently, revolut made some steps into that aswell and I’m more than ready to switch again, but it seems like they didn’t pull through with their plans.

Again - rejecting somethign for moral reasons is never easy or comfortable.

When the non-hostile options are gone, or reduced to a few crappy ones, the educated consumer is fucked.

Yes, but that never happens. If there is no good option left, there will be another company filling the gap. Just look at what happened with lego - nobody was bothering creating a competition for them, they were the defacto standard if you wanted … well, lego. However, they because more expensive and worse and suddenly we have blue bricks and cobi, both much cheaper at a higher quality.

I know people on lemmy don’t want to hear it, but the free market works. It actually works extremely well. The only time when it does NOT work if there’s too much government interference so building a competition is too hard or when there is no choice on the side of the consumer, which is only really the case for crucial things like housing, food, healthcare etc.

I already wrote it somewhere, but people can’t choose to “not eat”. They can damn well choose to not buy a device from a company that is known to be anti-consumer.

a majority of them relies on you

Imagine friends and family only want to stay in touch because they “rely” on you. Bro that’s outright sad.

Anti-consumer?

Inventing your own “standard” and forcing everyone to use it (lightning and webkit) and preventing consumers from having their device repaired from anyone else than a “certified technician” at 4x the markup is definitely anti-consumer.

But in many respects Apple performs better on the consumer front than, say, their primary competitor Google.

Google pixels are not OEM-locked and I can easiely install graphene or any other operating system on them. In the smartphone category, google is the only good vendor, ironically. I bought a used pixel 6 2 years ago, flashed it with graphene and it’s the best phone I ever had.

Regulatory actions are an important tool

Yes, but they’re the last resort. And it should be treated as such. If apple had like 90% of the market share, okay, we can talk about regulations, but right now, apple only has 1/3 of the market, so people can still easiely choose any android device.

It’s not like the EU is saying “we can ignore starvation and homelessness because at least we cracked down on Apple.”

I never said that. I said that these are cases where I would support drastic regulatory actions because this is no longer within the rules of supply and demand - people can’t choose to “not eat”. People can damn well choose to not buy an apple device.

Dunno about that critical mass, iOS only has 1/3 of the market in europe while android has the remaining 2/3.

Do you want the world to collectively suffer from products that are artificially made worse

I want a world in which corporations are scared to release anti-consumer products because they know it’ll tank their income.

Android is also getting more locked down with each major release

There’s stuff like graphene or other open source OS’s - installing graphene is literally connecting your phone to a PC and opening a website, something even a chimp can do.

You can say that ignorant people deserve what they get, but do the others deserve to get dragged down to their level

Nobody is affected by apple devices getting locked down except apple users, and they chose that.

I literally don’t understand the people downvoting you

That’s just the lemmy hivemind. Nothing to really worry about. When leaving reddit for lemmy, I was 100% expecting that one thing to stay, and I was correct.

I understand the wallet holding aspect, but we should be expecting informed decisions from consumers

Absolutely, I totally agree with that - I’m very sure that many problem we currently have wouldn’t even be a thing if consumers made informed decisions and not ordered everything off amazon because “it’s easy lol”.

How do you leave when your friends, family and coworkers are all on iMessage and refuse to use anything cross platform

“Hey, since I don’t want to use apple devices anymore because the company sucks, I’ve decided to ditch it, therefore, I will not longer have access to iMessage. If you need to contact me, you can use XYZ (insert alternative here) or just call me/send a SMS.”

That’s what I did when ditching whatsapp. Is it easy? No, ofc not. Ditching something for moral reasons is never easy. Do you think it was easy for me to ditch microsoft for linux when I started out? Hell no. But it gets other people to think about it. Some will laugh about it and say: “haha my funny nephew who wants to save the world himself (insert laugh emoji here)” while other will be genuinely interested in why you made this decision and might follow it. That’s how you get people to think by the way.

Pretending like you need a specific messenger like iMessage for communication is dishonest at best and straightup stupid and manipulative at worst.

Voting with your wallet doesn’t work in a market dominated by uninformed consumers.

… then maybe the people should just get more informed.

I don’t see how we need to regulate something that doesn’t benefit anyone as everyone is uninformed anyways and probably doesn’t even care?

Not only that, it’s also to prevent outside entitys from “hunting” on your playground.

That doesn’t really change anything - you can switch from iOS at any time if you so desire. Most people just find it too inconvenient.

Voting with the wallet is mostly bullshit

Disagree completely. It’s the most effective tool we have to control corpos that does not rely on another entity.

they bought a politician or twelve … the only way to fight corpos is the governmental power or regulations

So, you yourself say they buy politicians, but in the same sentence, you want the people they are buying to fight their power with regulations?

Do you see where you went wrong here?

you don’t care about how other people are treated

True, I do not care about how apple users are treated. They have - voluntarily - decided to buy a device that is known to be anti-consumer.

If we talk about restricting stuff like rent, food prices etc, so essentials, I’m on board. But Apple? Nah. Nobody forces you to shell out that much money for a smartphone.

Companies that do anti-consumer practices shouldn’t think it’s the norm

Yes, and they would know if people would start voting with their wallets.

I’m not affected by this in the slightest, and I do not think people that buy iOS devices will care about their newfound freedom

Not the biggest fan of this tbh. People who want open standards should just not buy iOS devices. It’s not that hard.

The only sector where that is applicable is games.

Simple reason - dependencies.

Modern devs dump any dependency and sub-dependency under the sun into their project and don’t bother about optimizing it. That’s how you end up with absurdly large applications. Especially electron is a problem in this regard.

You can still write optimized and small software. However, for most businesses, it’s just not worth their time. Rather using an additional couple hundred megabytes of dependencies on the client system.

Because that would cost you money, so just “abusing” someone else’s infrastructure is much cheaper.

Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.