I went to redeem my compensation - free battery replacement unavailable in your country, $100 credit unavailable in your country. I guess I'll take the $50 cash...? I fill in the form with my IMEI, full name, address, etc etc. After a week they send a response saying unfortunately after thoroughly looking into my case, I'm not eligible, and no further explanation is offered as to why. In effect it's as if they hacked into my phone and installed a virus that cripples the battery and there's nothing I can do about it, like this is just a normal way to do business now. You don't really own your phone after all...

All Huawei phones, which uses Huawei AppGallery after sanctions

FairPhone 6 /e/OS

Practically all modern feature phones: Nokia phones, HMD phones, etc. As I understand it, predominantly used by elderly and kids. But it's also gaining traction among millennials and Gen Z for digital detox and defeating mobile addiction.

Linux phones (Jolla Phone, PinePhone, FuriPhone, etc) - these you probably won't find in your local retail store but this is another competing platform being built from effectively an entirely different lineage minus the kernel

In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this today in the digital world. As a specific example, GTA 5 (singleplayer) is a game that has been pirated for about 10 years now, and has received zero content updates in that time, yet somewhat recently (maybe a few years ago?) they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days. Nothing worthwhile was produced by this endeavor, that's for sure.

You could create the best possible face verification system that processes everything completely locally, uses CPU security features to make sure the photos stay exactly where they're supposed to, etc etc. You could design the best possible chat age segregation system that makes sure nobody can ever get groomed over chat again. You can get so deep that you forget you're forcing children to take pictures of themselves, and fail to consider the wider effects this will have on the safety of those kids in general.

How's Jimmy supposed to know that taking a picture of himself for roblox.com is okay, but taking a picture for somescamwebsite that he found in a Roblox game is absolutely not okay? This solution creates a much worse problem. Sane parenting would tell kids to never take pictures of themselves or put it on any website, but now we're clearly shifting the role of parenting to tech companies and we are going to see bad consequences of this.

If Android isn't open, we lose the last open mobile operating system, which will have immeasurable negative effects on computing as a whole. People will need permission from either Apple or Google to create any mobile program. If you don't fit into their neat little system, you don't get permission. If I hadn't been able to publish my app for another 2 years I probably would've shelved it, decided it was stupid, forgot about it, got busy with other things, and never published it.

I guess to protect kids, we need to restrict them from.. checks notes music?

    Why we collect telemetry

    ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs.

At the same time, 5.78 billion people have a smartphone worldwide. It is obviously wildly unsustainable to live in a world where 5.78 billion people have to throw away their old phone and buy a new one every 2-3 years. However, phone manufacturers have figured out that if they force people to, they can amass ridiculous levels of wealth because the demand for new phones would be constantly high. So obviously the incentives here are completely wrong. This has happened before with lightbulbs in the 20th century and is a legitimate form of market failure that needs to be resolved, as it wastes a lot of consumer spending to replace what consumers already had (like the parable of the broken window).

For many years since phone manufacturers started gluing phones together with a consumable part inside, consumers have been denied the ability to replace their battery. Where the option does exist, it's often very inconvenient, difficult, or with a price inflated to be nearly as expensive as buying a new one.

Phones stopped advancing significantly many years ago. Phone manufacturers now re-release practically the same phone with slight CPU and camera improvements, something completely unheard of until relatively recently. Lately the main marketing trend for new phones has been AI, but this is a nonsense trend because most of modern AI runs in the cloud, and very few are actually utilizing any local AI features, so the only "AI" thing about the phone is just a preinstalled ChatGPT-like app you can get on any other phone. So clearly they have run out of things to improve, and things to market around. In a normally functioning market, this would mean phones have become a solved technology and we can stop replacing our phones as often, maybe once every 10 years if you're careful with your phone. But this is not what we see precisely because phone manufacturers have been manufacturing problems that are most easily solved by buying a new phone, which they will push people to do whatever way they can for profit. The phone industry has failed to regulate itself, and so this is why we are seeing a push for this type of regulation.

Although Polymarket is currently spending a lot of money trying to market itself to working-class regular people to get hooked and scam their paychecks out of[0]

[0] https://nypost.com/2026/02/12/us-news/nyc-gets-its-first-fre...