This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.
Since they can’t see it, think they’re above it, and see stuff that makes them laugh, they just keep going. Never mind all the misinformation these same people send me or how worked up they get about various political issues they never seemed to care about before.
This is the boat a lot of people I know fall into. They will get upset about a lot of stuff, but have a massive blind spot when it comes to online and device privacy, even if I try to point it out. I’m usually trying to point it out as they are trying to convince me to join Facebook and Instagram. If I get worked up over some privacy overreach in something I’m trying to use, they just kind of shrug. A fiend of mine spent all morning ranting to me about streaming services, but isn’t cancelling any of them.
Most people I know aren't particularly technical, and many of them are at least concerned or aware of these topics, even if they haven't taken any concrete actions (yet).
Keep trying to gently spread the word then, that's a good thing to do (without being annoying!). It takes time, but it eventually pays.
- Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford
Ask an exercise, ask yourself this: if you could offer every iPhone or Android shopper the choice between their current OS, and an otherwise exactly identical one that just wasn't listening to them, spying on them, tracking them, selling their every thought to advertisers, and shoving irrelevant ads into their face all day long, how many do you think would honestly prefer the one with all the spyware and ads?
Ordinary people do want privacy of their data, autonomy over their device. They just feel so hopelessly powerless in the fight that they don't believe it's even possible to achieve any meaningful degree of privacy or control these days, and those values are less important to them than the value of having a smartphone itself, so they sacrifice those values to have a smartphone.
You were reading something on your phone, switched to a different app for 3 seconds and then back, and now it's an error page because you're in a poor cell coverage area but the device is nefariously aggressive at unloading apps to try to eek out a marginal advantage on battery life reviews. Worse, for well-behaved apps that actually degrades battery life because having to reload the app requires the device to do more work than letting it stay idle in the background.
Separate the software from the hardware and you don't have to worry about that, because they can mess up the stock image however they want for the reviews and you just have someone replace it with a version with those bugs removed.
* Feature
* Price
* Looks/status
Everything else is completely irrelevant. Now, what features and what looks varies over time. But something as intangible as being 'more open' or 'more private' just isn't significant for most people. People on HN care. Average consumers do not. It's too ethereal and meaningless.
If a new phone or service had a specific certification, like how IP certifications work for waterproofing, then that might change. If it was certified by a third party that X phone with Y service would never sell your data in Z ways.
But without something concrete, it's irrelevant.