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.
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.
This does kind of sound like an open source argument, and I'm not advocating for that - not only because open source movements have done very little to move the needle to serve the needs of average users, but because computing platforms are just complicated. There may be desktop Linux, but many different ways to get it, not all of which is interoperable and it definitely won't be a coherent or pleasant experience depending on how you go about it and what you need from it. The only thing vaguely resembling a universal computing experience is the world wide web, and even that is complicated and is increasingly captured in part due to its complexity.
This isn't a generic 'smartphone bad' argument either. It's just that there is a pattern of dependency and power imbalance here that is generally never a good thing to have.
My argument is more that in certain aspects of life, we are putting ourselves into a position where we need these specific devices run by these specific companies to fully participate in various aspects of life, and there is no clear alternative apart from viable alternatives to Android/iPhone apps for public services. Like with cars, I think people just need another strong and convenient way to get the thing altogether.
- AOSP Android is basically a completely different system without Google Play Services, and very few people venture out of Google Play Services. Even if you do, it's often just Amazon services or Huawei services or just another big tech company's proprietary thing.
