bigC5560

Sounds to me like you just became aware of it in 2025. This has been happening for forever. Keeping with the electronics example, the Phoebus cartel was lowering the lifespan of lightbulbs in the 1920s. The US government seemed to be stricter on it at that time (I mean in the 1920s), but billions of dollars in lobbying will change that over time.

You can buy a used phone that will give no money to Google. I also hope for it to come to other smartphones, but not at the cost of compromised privacy and security. The reason that GrapheneOS only runs on Pixels is that they support the specific hardware requirements of GrapheneOS, including having an unlockable and relockable bootloader which is pretty cool of Google. I am sure that the GrapheneOS team would love to move on from being tied to a specific vendor's hardware and are working with Motorola to do just that.

I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.

This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.

As someone who graduated from high school in 2025 I completely agree with this. I am glad I had to work it out on my own, and I don't think this is a place that a school should take control. If I had to figure this out along with the stress of college, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. I also think that it has helped with my overall time management skills and prioritizing my time.

I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.

PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube.

It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.

I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.

All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.

They recently allowed emulators, like RetroArch, to be on the app store. They still require the emulators to be written in Swift AFAIK. Still quite a bit more restrictive than Android, but they have slowly been opening up.