> Yeah millions of people out of billions, I was talking in relative terms.

In relative terms, Linux market share is increasing and Windows market share is declining.

> Good to know that Debian could have a fighting chance in a world where everyone had zero marketing budget and there weren't any rich corporate backers that used anti-competitive practices.

We could enforce the antitrust laws, yes.

> Anyway in the world we both live in, if Google abandoned Android then most people would instantly switch to a megacorp fork of Android with that megacorp's own proprietary APIs and services because people will follow the proprietary things they care about like for eg fast & battery-efficient centralized notifications, an out-of-the-box app store with popular apps like Instagram, and tap to pay.

None of that requires anything proprietary in the operating system.

Centralized notifications are implemented as a lock-in mechanism. Idle TCP connections don't consume battery unless they need keepalives, and in the latter case you provide applications with a non-proprietary API to have the OS handle keepalives by sending them together for any open connections that need them. Then the radio only has to wake up the same number of times it does with a single connection and there is no real advantage to centralization.

App stores are likewise only glued to operating systems for anti-competitive reasons. Spending 30 seconds once to install one that didn't come with the OS is such a low barrier that it can't be the thing preventing anyone from choosing an OS, and apps can be listed in more than one store, so there is no reason to expect any one store to dominate the market in the absence of anti-competitive practices.

The way tap to pay ought to work is you tap to get a payment request from the merchant which is then passed to your bank app using a standard protocol to make the payment, and then money is transferred from your bank to the merchant's bank with no intermediaries leeching a percentage. In the absence of sane regulations allowing this, you could also use any existing payment processors, but this is still something that an app does and not something that the OS does and the app doesn't have to be from the same entity as the OS.

> You know this because "millions of people" is derived from you knowing that the peak Linux desktop marketshare is like 4% out of billions of people.

Once again, Debian isn't what came with their computer. "Most people keep the defaults" works the other way when the default is Android.

> You know this because you said users are "worrying about losing access to those [proprietary, spying] APIs" which is why megacorps who provide these proprietary spying APIs will actually win over users.

The proprietary APIs don't provide anything good, they exist for the purpose of lock-in, because then third party developers use them without realizing or caring that it creates a dependency on proprietary code or services, since the existing installed base of phones that don't provide them is negligible.

Linux often does provide implementations of these things (e.g. wine), and certainly provides its own non-proprietary alternatives to them, but because the purpose of those things is lock-in the incumbent takes measures to prevent interoperability.

If there was no one providing proprietary APIs to begin with, or the antitrust laws were being enforced as they ought to be, that wouldn't be an issue. As it is, Linux market share keeps going up, but slowly, because the incumbents fight tooth and nail to keep the users in their cages.