[xondono]

I’m honestly very tired of this argument, everything about it is bad.

Features aren’t rights, if you want a phone that let’s you run whatever you want, buy one or make it yourself.

What you’re trying is to use the force of the state to make mandatory a feature that not only 99% users won’t use, it vastly increases the attack surface for most of them, specially the most vulnerable.

If anyone were trying to create a word that gives a “deviant” feel, they wouldn’t use “sideload”, and most people haven’t even heard the term. There’s a world of difference between words like “pirate”, “crack”, “hack” and “sideload”.

If anything I’d say it’s too nice of a term, since it easily hides for normies the fact that what you’re doing is loading untrusted code, and it’s your responsibility to audit it’s origin or contents (something even lot’s of devs don’t do).

If you want to reverse engineer your devices, all the power to you, but you don’t get to decide how others people’s devices work.

[juris]

It's a proper argument on its surface, complete with claim, warrant, and impact.

"Features aren't rights" > see: Consumer Rights.

"Force of the state making sideloading mandatory is bad" > ...Except we have antitrust laws? The Play Store becomes the only source of apps, all transactions are routed through Google Billing? Not a problem for you?

"99% users won't use" > Except for when Google demands that transactions happen exclusively through Google Billing, which resulted in the release of the Epic Games Launcher for the world's highest grossing games by download.

"Sideloading is too nice" > Listen, either it's the case that "sideloading" is a threat to normies or it's not. Are normies your 1% or 99% of users? I thought according to you 99% of users won't sideload.

"You don't get to decide" > That language ties in pretty well with your fear of the use of the 'force of the state'; that tells me that you support freedom. Great-- you're right, why not let corporations be corporations and do anti-consumer things, they'll be very good to us (while they lobby the state).

[xondono]

> "Features aren't rights" > see: Consumer Rights.

Consumer rights aren’t features, and they’re very intentionally written to not be.

> "Force of the state making sideloading mandatory is bad" > ...Except we have antitrust laws?

Then sue them over those.

> Listen, either it's the case that "sideloading" is a threat to normies or it's not. Are normies your 1% or 99% of users? I thought according to you 99% of users won't sideload.

I meant that 99% of users aren’t afraid by the term “sideloading”. That you’re not using something doesn’t mean you’re afraid of it, it just means you don’t want it.

> you're right, why not let corporations be corporations and do anti-consumer things, they'll be very good to us (while they lobby the state).

Because corporations tend to die when they do anti-consumer things, but governments keep doing anti-citizen things without much trouble.

[Kim_Bruning]

> You don’t get to decide how others people’s devices work.

Perfectly reasonable. It's important that people can decide how their devices work for themselves. No one else should decide for them.

But I'm genuinely curious how you see this principle working in practice when there's effectively a duopoly. What's the path for someone who wants to still have any choices for their device? I'm not seeing an obvious answer, but maybe I'm missing something.

[xondono]

There isn’t a duopoly, it’s just that the two top contenders are way ahead of the rest, so wanting that niche feature requires a big sacrifices.

Nowadays it’s not even that hard to build your own phone, but it’s not going to be a slick smartphone for sure