the smartphone software scene is a joke

The smartphone as it exists today is a cornerstone of society. Everyone that isn’t an extremist, in crippling poverty, or a child, has one. So why is smartphone software so bad?

If you’re looking to purchase a new smartphone (in 2022), you have two options — buy into the Apple ecosystem, or buy into the Google ecosystem. Neither is a terribly good choice.

The App store takes a 30% fee on all in-app purchases of apps that make over $1 million a year in revenue. If your app doesn’t make over $1 million a year, they take “just” 15%, out of the goodness of their hearts.

30% is an insane margin. A real estate agent has a commission percentage of around 5-6%. A real estate agent has to convince a customer to make what is probably the single biggest expense of said customer’s life, only to take a measly 5-6% cut. Apple takes 30% by giving you the “privilege” of being part of their walled garden of an ecosystem.

This leads app developers that don’t have a 30% or even a 15% profit margin to direct users to a website every time they want to make a purchase.

On the Google side, even though they have the same bracketed “app store tax” of 15% and 30% for under and below $1 million/year respectively, you at least have the option to bypass the Play Store entirely, and download a raw .apk file from one of the dozens .apk websites on the internet, many of which are extremely suspicious. However, no one but technically-sound people do this, and only when they already know they want the app — people that browse the Play Store will never be able to know the app exists.

The entire reason Apple and Google can charge an insane margin for in-app purchases in the first place is the fact that they hold a duopoly on the smartphone operating system market.

On iOS, you can’t uninstall many of the core Apple apps, like Safari, Stocks, etc. All browsers on the App store are simply reskins of Safari. That means that if you’re shopping for a browser on iOS, you’re not really picking what browser you’re going to use, but what company you’re going to voluntarily give your data to.

Likewise, on Google, you can’t uninstall YouTube, Chrome, Google Play services, and others.

Ah, but you think to yourself — this sounds awfully familiar. It sounds exactly like the Windows or macOS predicament that desktop users have experienced for years! Surely, the solution to the mobile operating system dilemma, much like the desktop operating system dilemma, would be to install a free, open operating system? Like Linux?

Wrong.

I mean, sure, you could fill a top 10 list of mobile operating systems not named iOS or Android pretty easily. In fact, this, this, and this website have done so (surprise surprise, some of these are Android-based), but have fun with the app selection. Mobile app developers build almost exclusively for Android and iOS, because Google and Apple make it extremely easy to, with Google’s Android Studio and Apple’s XCode.

Desktop Linux, meanwhile, lives on, despite the dominance of Windows and macOS simply because the desktop app development ecosystem is much less centralized and much more cross-platform, and because (and I can’t believe I’m about to say this), desktop Linux is easier to install on a desktop or laptop compared to installing an alternative OS on an Android.

To install an alternative OS on an Android, you first have to attain root privileges. That’s right — most smartphone owners don’t even have full power over their smartphones. Attaining root on an Android was relatively straightforward in the early 2010s, but as the years passed by, newer Android phones became harder and harder to root. Rooting also comes with the wonderful consequences of voiding your warranty, so have fun with that.

After you’ve attained root, you need to flash a custom ROM (Read Only Memory) on the device, provided by the developers of the operating system you’re trying to install. After that, the steps are OS-dependent.

Meanwhile, you need just flash any Linux distribution on any regular old USB, plug it into your desktop, reboot into the USB, and install it from there. After that, it’s not as smooth sailing — Linux is notorious for hardware compatibility issues with certain components, but hey — at least you installed the damn OS.

The last gaping hole on the smartphone software scene is the update life cycle. Apple usually provides 5 or more years of updates for its iPhones — that covers iOS generations and security updates. That’s not bad.

Meanwhile, Google provides a measly 2 years. That means that after 2 years, any major cybersecurity vulnerability discovered in the last Android version that your smartphone uses will not get patched. That means if you value your security, especially if you do mobile banking, you need to purchase a new smartphone every 2 years.

Conclusion

The duopoly that Google and Apple has on the smartphone OS market has lead to terrible software design choices, lack of freedom, and possibly exposes users of this critical technology to hackers if they don’t barf up a couple hundred US dollars every 2 years.

If you’re rich (or American), you probably don’t care. You probably do already get a new phone every 2 years. But for the majority of the world that spends $200-$300 on their device and uses it for 6, it’s not as easy. And because of the lack of root privileges, there’s software in your device that you can’t control — and when you purchase a cheap phone, it’s most likely a Chinese one, and they’re not exactly the role model of respecting user privacy.