Caius Nocturne

If you're not aware of the concept of car dependency, it's the idea that in many parts of the world (notably, but not limited to the US and Canada), there is no reasonably viable way for someone to travel that does not involve that person owning and driving a car, and that municipal and national infrastructure has been built around making this the only choice - billions get put into highway and road infrastructure and expansion, with barely anything for smaller forms of mobility, cycling or public transportation.

Car dependency is bad because cars are a fundamentally inefficient mode of transportation with a great toll on the environment, their roads take a lot of money and resources out of local and national governments to maintain them. But also really importantly - they rob people of having the freedom to choose alternate means of transportation that might suit their lifestyle better, or might be cheaper and more convenient for them to participate in.

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I'm starting to think of the status of Android¹ phones and iPhones in society as emerging in a similar situation. For instance, in my city, you can't use street parking or rent a bike if you don't have either of these phones. I was thinking about this when curiously looking at the recently-announced Light Phone III, which has a fully-custom OS for privacy reasons. My brother pointed out that it's cool, but he would have to give up on the city's bike rental scheme that he uses a lot if he wanted to use one of these.

The EU DMA touches on this a bit - the people who make these platforms shouldn't get to dictate what people do on them and crush competition, but doesn't get to the fundamental problem of the actual devices in the first place. At least any company with the right skills, tools, capital and compliance can make a car that is street legal. It's not easy, but it's possible and there are recent new examples. Nobody can legally make a phone that can run Android software that is not dependent on the people who make and run the services that are key to making it work (usually Google), and nobody other than Apple is making an iPhone, and there's no chance of any viable competition at any point in the near future. We don't just have a smartphone dependency, but an iPhone and Android dependency.

Certain utilities are necessary in society and they should be easily or freely available, I would consider Phone, Internet and World Wide Web as public utilities - they are technological but are ostensibly open standards that have significant societal benefit that can (at least hypothetically) be taken on by a wide range of stakeholders and organisations, iPhone and Android intrinsically are not; they are dense layers of technologies, hardware and software patents, kernels and APIs, often protected by international copyright law.

A little preamble - my brother and I were long time macOS users since the late 00's, eventually moving to Hackintoshes before giving up and moving to Windows in 2020, just in time before Apple Silicon started rolling out. Neither of us have been particularly satisfied with Windows as a desktop computing ecosystem/platform as they lack coherent, neat and smartly designed GUI apps that Macs have been graced with for a long time (Let alone the bugs in Explorer, the uselessness of Search, and so on). He's also had an iPad Pro for a long time, and has been constantly bewildered by how Apple doesn't know what to do with it and can't make it a holistic computing platform instead of a series of disconnected applications.

As the Enshittification wave keeps crushing tech, my brother has recently been working out how to make Linux work. This wouldn't have been possible for him without GNOME and it's fairly wonderful ecosystem of 1st and 3rd party native applications, which feel reminiscent of the best examples in the Mac ecosystem - applications that have small, focused use cases that are designed to work seamlessly in the OS itself.

It's not perfect - he says Fedora is about as janky as Windows, but at least he can fix things when they go wrong. He's still working on compatibility with certain critical Windows applications.

Yesterday, he made a really interesting point about GNOME and Mac (at least before Apple started locking up the platform more, I have no idea what it's like today), and what it takes to make a healthy, diverse and interoperable ecosystem. He does not do social media much and said I could just copy this quote and share it, so here it is:

I think GNOME has helped me contextualize the failures of iOS in a way I hadnt thought before.

Both macOS and GNOME have developer ecosystems where people release holistic software, because you can afford to do so in an open computing platform.

• On an open computing platform the costs of developing and releasing software is lower.
• This means the burden to recapture the time you sacrificed is lower.
• Holistic app design requires offering the value of the app as freely as possible, because to be a holistic app is to offer seamless and frictionless functionality with the rest of the operating system, to require to user to engage with it only as long as they need to, and to forego a brand or identity that you otherwise might use to capture value.
• When people do this, I think it also creates a virtuous cycle where others are more inclined to offer value freely when they in turn have received that value.

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE ON iOS, you have to pay yearly developer fees, the developer rules are burdensome and kafka-esque, Apple will take 30% of anything you make even if it's a donation and most apps are subscription or ad-based.

In that world you have no incentive to be holistic in spite of what Apple encourages developers to do, and why even if Apple had good developer relations their requests for developers to integrate with their APIs like App Intents and Shortcuts will fall on deaf ears, because that requires sacrificing value in an environment where the incentive for doing so is very low.

This observation reminded me about a great article that talks about the Internet as ecology, and how it's breaking down because it's been taken over by controlling and extractive forces. I think we can see the same forces on computing platforms themselves.

A company that develops Minecraft modding tech returned their seed funding (basically pre-VC funding) when they realised that it was not gonna put them on a good or sustainable path.

I hope that we see more stories of companies refusing and returning investor money.

Serif (responsible for the Affinity line of products) got acquired by Canva, a VC-funded company.

Enshittification will ensue, do whatever you need to, just don't act like Affinity is being run by a business that would do such a loser move as just selling a good product people like at a good price anymore.

Given that Affinity is on its first step towards full Enshittification, I would recommend that if you haven't done so yet - DOWNLOAD AND KEEP YOUR INSTALLERS. Do this for every new version of the application.

Use the EXE version of the app on Windows because updating can't be done so easily.

Basically make sure you are able to revert your application version once it starts going bad so you can continue using it in spite of Canva.

This of course, isn't a full solution but there isn't a good alternative (yet) and transitioning to a new piece of software always takes a lot of time and effort. Give yourself all the time you need.