This is a result of the duopoly. You abdicate too much responsibility to the platform because it is easier for you. It ends up in a spiral of more lock-in to the platform and more power to its owners.
Yeah that’s my read too. Mistakes like this might fly under the radar with the general public but I think a much larger portion of Protons user base, as opposed to Zoho or Google, reads 404 and HN.
I’ll definitely not be renewing my subscription to their service, I can tell you that much.
We need a third option. Be it SalfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Nura, or whatever picks up with a sizable community. We just need to start developing and investing in that one. It won't be perfect, but it will offer an alternative and control to the users.
There are plenty of alternative OS options. None are accepted by phone companies and shipped in orders of 100m devices worldwide.
Android has ~4b cumulative users, iOS 2.5b. Combined 1-2b phones are shipped annually, so phones are replaced over 3-6 years or so. Total production numbers of Sony PS2/Nintendo Switch are ~160m each, and there haven't been enough of those to be a viable alternative consumer platforms. China moves couple hundred million units per year of de-Googled phones internally(Google services are default banned in China except through Hong Kong VPN and such), and that doesn't seem to be changing situations much. Windows Phone was like few hundreds total.
The third option has to ship like 1000m - 1b units total and/or annually to be viable. Code quality... isn't going to matter, but it'll have to be literally 10-100x more popular than Nintendo. That is going to be the bar.
If GP and you were both correct, Android going fully proprietary should not be a problem at all. Either you're lying(you're not), or GP is wrong and the problem is NOT in the lack of options but adoption of such an OS.
My point is that they need to be adopted at scales that almost dwarfs Nintendo, in the realms of billion devices in circulation(why does that phrase remind me of a certain purple-blue-yellow UNIX company...)
I've been saying that for a while. We need a viable third option.
But it is not easy, and it takes a huge amount of effort. As others have said, theres SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS and a few others.
I'm not sure which one is in a better position to become that third alternative we need, but this year I'm experimenting with all of them on different devices, to try to understand where they stand.
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