I think grandma-mode should still be the default, but with some arcane startup ritual to enable sideloading that you only have to do once, with said process being replete with "HERE BE DRAGONS" warnings. Basically make it more like a mac or a typical chromebook. Pixel phones still let you root them, don't they?
Not only does Google let you root Pixels, but they don't appear to be interested in interfering with GrapheneOS, which is specifically for Pixels and lets you run all of the google stuff in userspace so that it has to ask your permission before doing things.
Google is plenty evil in their own ways, but they're at least not anti-tinkering.
Probably because they know FOSS is not at all a threat to their business. I love the idea that if I wanted to I could put some other OS... But Android is very reliable and Graphene OS might not support some feature or other, which I might not notice till I actually need it, so I'm not gonna risk the most expensive thing I own with tinkerer tech.
Companies really overestimate end users tolerance for tinkering.
> I'm not gonna risk the most expensive thing I own with tinkerer tech
Different strokes I guess. Until I've put the vendor in a box, I don't consider it "my" phone, and I'm not gonna pay more than $300 for a phone that serves some other master. Yesteryear's refurb pixels are doing just fine.
Yes, I don’t know exactly what it’d entail but enabling sideloading really does need to be something that’s sufficiently scary to the non-technical to help curb social engineering by fake “Microsoft support” and such.
It’s somewhat painful and inconvenient but the old desktop OS model where arbitrary code can not only be run at a whim, but also gets free reign to do whatever it pleases simply doesn’t scale to the masses. It was a problem even prior to smartphones but has only gotten worse as larger swathes of the population have come aboard.
You should check out the arguments in Epic vs Google, where an arcane process to sideload apps was used as a data point against Google. By disallowing any exceptions, Apple can make the case that this is simply not a supported feature of their product.
The EU DMA and the resulting competition may cause Apple to release a lower priced tier for apps with a smaller distribution, and I look forward to that.
> By disallowing any exceptions, Apple can make the case that this is simply not a supported feature of their product.
I know that's what the ruling essentially implies, but that doesn't sound like a reality we should be encouraging or even entertaining, IMO. It's a failure of the US legal and antitrust enforcement system if this line of reasoning is accepted, blatantly so in this case.
I, for one, hope that Apple is eventually forced to open up their platforms to sideloading worldwide.
