@garbados all of that is true but I'm not sure it's quite as horrible as it sounds. we have things like F-Droid that bring some measure of freedom to the locked-down devices people have. it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, and we can work on moving the boundary ever closer to freedom.

if hardware manufacturers ever manage to do trusted boot correctly and only give the keys to big companies, then we may be hosed. fortunately nobody can write bug-free software yet, I guess?