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No, I find the vendor deliberately self-destructing the firmware to be more user-hostile than having to set up altstore once.

It is something that shouldn’t even be required in the first place, the android support model is incredibly user-hostile at the best of times. So if you punish me for trying to keep my device up to date after your shitty 2 year support window expires then I’m not going to buy it. And I know a few brands have adopted longer lifespans but most android phones sold are not from those brands.

Moreover, I think this is a perfect example of the way the anti-apple crowd has glommed onto all the terminology and appropriated it as solely meaning the things that favor their brand. There’s more to right to repair than component-level replacement for example - oem parts availability and OS support lifespans are key factors in waste generation too.

You don’t get to tell me what I find user-hostile or not, and user-hostility certainly isn’t a phenomenon that is only restricted to brands that whatever group of fanboys like or not. There are many user-hostile aspects of the whole android package and distribution model despite the fact you can sideload or install a rom (maybe, if the vendor doesn’t delete the firmware while you do it).

Even in the narrowest possible sense of “treating the user as an attacker”, I’d feel pretty damn attacked if my phone deleted its camera firmware because it thought I unlocked the bootloader! But that doesn’t count of course, because user-hostility is narrowly defined to only happen on platforms that android people don’t like. It’s all just very tedious, and when I hear endlessly about the battery throttle (that you can turn off!) but not the android phones that delete their own firmware when the user wants to unlock the bootloader it’s hard to view the whole “user-hostility” thing and right-to-repair more generally as being anything other than a bad-faith ploy. There are actually important issues there that get lost in the sea of brand warriorism and financially-interested parties.

When you are playing with language and narrowly defining things to mean only the things that don’t happen on your platform, you aren’t being serious, you’re being a fanboy.

https://paulgraham.com/fh.html




Like if only there were some word for the process of using language to reshape the discourse, by redefining words to include the aspects you want and exclude the ones you don’t. One might argue that without the words to express it, people’s thought processes themselves might be affected.

There should be a word that conveys the problems that induces in a discourse! It’s literally… something!

;)

Again: I consider a phone deleting its firmware when it thinks I’m unlocking the bootloader to be pretty damn user-hostile too! I think if you’re saying that’s the diametric opposite of user-hostile the only reasonable explanation is you’ve got something seriously wrong with either your language or your sense of reason is being drastically affected by your parasocial attachment to the issue. Because that’s literally so far from reason that we are talking terms like “Orwellian”, yeah.

It’s a shame the word is so loaded that it has lost its ability to be (correctly) used in less-loaded situations but there it is.

Maybe that’s more than you meant to imply by objecting to my point about android’s user-hostility, saying that I had it “backwards” and that apple is the “pinnacle” of user hostility instead but yeah, absolutely imploding the firmware to keep the user from unlocking the bootloader is extremely user hostile, there is very little reason to disagree with that statement except some kind of abject processing error or malicious ploy in the discussion.

Of course in this scenario it’s probably people echoing carefully focus-grouped strategies from google. “Right to repair” cleverly avoids talking about other e-waste issues like phones with self-destructing bootloaders and pathetic OS support lifecycles etc. Google focus-grouped that every bit as much as their RCS and so on (which they care so deeply about that they still haven’t implemented it themselves in google voice even 15 year on!). They know what resonates with you guys, and there is a kernel of truth to it - right to repair is an admirable goal, and who could oppose reducing e-waste? Which is why it’s selected as a marketing strategy!

But that doesn’t make it not Orwellian either. At this stage of the game, if you disagree that self-destructing firmware isn’t user-hostile and that it’s actually the opposite and apple is really the pinnacle of user-hostility… it’s working, it’s successfully reshaped your language processing, and your thought processes have followed. They successfully redefined user hostile to mean “only apple” for you.




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