I feel like iPhones had a sweet spot between the 4 and the... I dunno. A few generations after that? Where jailbreaking was rampant and incredible, and the phones are basically like the 16 now.

Then Android had a 'sweet spot' after that. Their quality and UI fluidity really caught up, to the point where my old Razer Phone 2 (SD845) still feels faster than an iPhone 16.

After that... well, I dunno where to go :(. Feels like both platforms are locking down.

You made me wonder if there could ever be an avenue for Apple to support this, especially with Google just getting worse and worse with android.

Apple makes a ton of money on just hardware sales. Imagine if the next iPhone had an option that would delete iOS, possibly blow some kind of security fuse in the CPU that voids your warranty (because they still have to be dicks), and reboot into an unlocked bootloader. They could boost sales and be even shittier to Google by rolling their own distro of Linux/Android/BSD for the phones with solid drivers for everything.

That veered off into fantasy land immediately, since that is not how Apple does things. And they do have services to sell too. But even if they only enabled open access on older models it could move a ton of units. Interesting to imagine.

wheeze

everybody could use more money. gotta be turning more and more of your life into a hustle for capital's insatiable maw.

so now we pay for mods.

windows 98 bootup noises

Damn such good days. My phone is a trash can these days.

Is LineageOS not good? I thought that was forked from Cyanogen?

I had matching Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, I was in modding heaven.
God I miss my Nexus 7...

Sailfish exists: https://sailfishos.org/

Its all fun and games when your bork a custom rom, force flash a stock rom and delete your EFS directory (the one with the IMEI)

Ah good times, now that phone is just my OBS controller.

I held onto jailbreaking till the end. I have a iPhone on iOS 17.0 and TrollStore for permanent sideloaded apps. It’s pretty awesome! There hasn’t been anything like a jailbreak or TrollStore since then. I wish I had bought an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0 at launch so I could hold onto this as long as possible. Having a lower end iPhone I’ll probably need an upgrade in the next year or so.

You can get a similar experience to TrollStore by paying for an Apple developer account or a third-party signing service that abuses Apple developer accounts. It seems android users may have to do a similar thing in a few years.

Mine has postmarketOS on it, probably should update sometime.

One thing I would like is decent offline maps with good performance, don't even care of it supports GPS or not. Pinephone has no SIM in it these days and that sits in a CatB40.

How so much? Mine was about £200 after delivery and import taxes. Still my most expensive phone but the best computer I have ever put in my pocket.

Shame that calls/SMS are not perfect, but I have since for a dumb phone for that so the SIM sits in that instead.

they court the nerds with cool tech, then ditch them whenever their shit takes off and the nerds are an irrelevant minority.

I think world peace is more realistic than that

the oligarchy is already set, we won't get a grassroots competitor to apple/google at this point without shenanigans. android is open but the entire ecosystem around it is closed.

all sorts of bureaucracy and interaction with corporations and governments are now requiring squeamish proprietary apps that will not work at the mere hint of something they arbitrarily (or maliciously?) dislike.

Doesn't help that Apple wants €100/year + a supported Mac (average €100/year for the hw upgrade treadmill)

They had to throw out lots of customization options, because Google made a ton of changes to Android/AOSP and it wasn't compatible anymore.

Like, LineageOS is still a more feature-rich and cleaner OS than what comes preinstalled on most phones. But yeah, even relatively simple stuff like setting a system font never got a real replacement.

No idea, if it is still easily possible to implement that. You can fake it by replacing the Roboto font file with a different font, but you get weird font issues in various apps then.

it's been 3 years or so but I may have bought a pinephone pro because the simple one was out of stock? Plus convergence package, plus shipping, plus outrageous money transfer fees - German banks are basically thieves when it comes to international transfers outside the EU.

I had a nexus 7. Great little device. Sad that Google is fucking shit up. It’s what they do best sadly