I was chatting with a friend earlier about the state of smartphone brand choices in the U.S. being limited to mainly Apple, Google, Samsung, and Motorola. Although Sony and OnePlus are technically present, they are not regularly stocked by any of the major mobile carriers. The Chinese market is magnitudes more diverse, in addition to having the same major brands that are available in the U.S., they have Xiaomi, Vivo, ZTE, Huawei, Honor, and much more. I remember Huawei and ZTE being available at Fry’s Electronics during the mid-2010s, but they were eventually banned due to national security concerns and geopolitical reasons — that has without a doubt deterred most Chinese smartphone brands from entering the U.S. market.
With so few brands bringing competition to the U.S. market, I feel that enshittification/platform decay will continue be a huge detriment to consumers. F-Droid which is the largest free and open source repository/app store for Android recently stated that with the Google policy change of requiring developer verification to install Android apps including sideloading starting in 2026, it’ll likely kill them. For most of my years of using Google products, I viewed the company as a leader in promoting free and open source software, but lately with moves like this, they seem to be consolidating power.
Overall, it seems like with everything else in society, corporate consolidation is on steroids and we as consumers are suffering more and more with higher costs, new products and services that are of lower lower quality that replace existing ones, as well as ineptitude of politicians to regulate and perform any meaningful antitrust legislation.