I think this is living in fantasy land. Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's. There was an uptick many years past simply because this offered new functionality, but anymore there really isn't any reason to outside of small things like removing the Google Search bar from the home screen. But the amount of effort versus the result does not balance out.
Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications. There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.
As opposed to corporations extracting an insane amount of wealth from the struggling public? Such shallow dismissals ignore the fact that ordinary people know how exploitative these companies are and that they are interested in resisting - if only they knew how.
> Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's.
I have been guilty of this too. But let me say this. We on HN have been quite contemptuous towards 'normal people', especially regarding their technical competence.
Besides, you pretend as if everyone needs to know all those stuff to take advantage of it. Back in the past when mechanical watches and repairable automobiles were common place, we all took advantage of their serviceability, despite that only a rare few of us knew how to service it. We just paid those independent experts to do it for us. Everybody knew some basic economics to realize how this was in their favor. The argument that serviceability has no use to the majority is a disingenuous and harmful, all by itself.
> Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications.
Just go ahead and ask these 'normal people' whether they prefer a serviceable device or one that suffers deliberate obsolescence in less than 3 years and forces them to buy an entirely new one.
> There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.
Look at how many of these 'normal people' actively try to avoid the likes of Amazon. Their insane wealth allows them to manipulate the market in their favor. People learned this well during the post-pandemic hoarding epidemic.
So please stop pretending that essential features and freedoms are too complex to be worth it. People can take advantage of them even if they don't know how to do it themselves - like by paying independent professional servicemen. And at least in the current smartphone market, its complexity is entirely the contribution of the OEMs. Also, one of the reasons why the old PCs running windows 10 doesn't have to be junked immediately (due to win 11 requirements) is because it is so easy to install an up-to-date and modern OS on it.
Security, convenience etc are false arguments against user freedoms, and are most often the result of the deliberate choices by the OEMs. They're are just consumer gas lighting tactics.
Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications. There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.