I'm not anti-iOS, I'm anti-all current mobile OSes. I think you present a false dichotomy. I shouldn't have to know how the engine in my car works, but I should have the option of tinkering with it if I wish.

And I do expect my car to be componentized. I expect it to have a transmission, an alternator, a radiator, etc. While I have no preferences for how those components are designed, I expect them to work, on the whole, as one would expect those types of components to work. That is they have an input and output. I wouldn't buy a car where all of these components were replaced with 1 proprietary, untinkerable, thing.

What I want is Canonical or Mozilla, or whoever, to be able to write an OS that can be installed on just about any phone hardware, the way it can be done on any x86 computer. Whether it's the crazy patent situation or harder engineering challenges that prevent that today, I'm not sure.

In the theory that comes from a cursory glance, someone could make an OS that's portable, composable, open, free, changeable and tinkerable, etc. and that's easier to use than any system that's available today. That'd be great.

But in practice, as systems exhibit more of those traits more strongly, they, as a general rule, become less and less of a coherent, unified whole and more of the internal workings become exposed to the user. This has a direct impact on usability.

Until somebody resolves this seemingly-fundamental engineering constraint, we'll have to settle for different systems that varyingly trade-off flexibility and usability. iOS has been so successful because Apple has deliberately chosen to fall more on the usability side and a tremendous number of users have found that the tradeoff is worth it: that decreased flexibility doesn't harm them remotely as much as poorer usability would. Happily, there are also extremely flexible systems available.

Looks to me like this setup allows everybody to win as much as we know how to in this "imperfect world".

I disagree, and I would use desktop linux as the counter example. A distribution like Ubuntu is nowadays opinionated on user-experience questions while still maintaining the ability to easily swap out the DE for something else if the user so wishes.

That this hasn't happened on mobile just means we haven't reached the point of interchangeable hardware. I just worry that patents are the primary reason for this, and that we may never enjoy the same level of freedom in phones that we have on PCs.

The poster you replied to noted that they become much less of a coherent whole due to those factors. Bringing up desktop Linux is not helping your case against that assertion in the least.

I wonder if the rise of Chrome at the expense of Firefox is a counter-counter example. FF has grown bloated and more chockfull of features. Chrome, on the other hand, has retained a unified and coherent structure.

There's no free lunch. Flexible and easy are dichotomous. In the past the average user has paid the price for the greater choice we hackers have enjoyed. Who are we to say that this tradeoff was fair? Modern cars are not hackable but you'll be hard pressed to find a typical driver that doesn't consider this a fair bargain for increased reliability and ease of operation.

You can talk all you want about how things should be but the facts on the ground are that Apple has done more for the experience of the average user than any of the hacker idealists at the FSF/GNU etc.