People are using iPad OS features on their iPhones

This is kinda wonderful to see - a peek into a world where we get to see the 'other side' of what would have been possible had Apple not locked our devices down beyond belief.

Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential.

There was a comment few weeks ago - I forget the topic, maybe it was the new M-series release or something - that was talking about how freaking fast these things are. And the comment was pointing out how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless - I mean sure on device "AI" and faster apps...OK I guess. I'm not the target demographic for these things anyway, so my opinions are whatever.

But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if.

I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with.

In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes.

I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise.

To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind).

On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.