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The Case of the Unchanging Config

2026-04-09T00:00:00Z

Last week I was attempting to make it so I could share pictures on IRC directly from my client. This sounds simple, but it involves a bouncer¹ that proxies the request to a standalone image hosting service that I had to modify to be compatible. At one point my testing loop was:

Make a change to the hosting service
Commit it
Tag a new release
Wait for it to build
Update the version I’m running on my server
Reconfigure the bouncer to pass the new parameter or change the URL or whatever
Try uploading a photo from my phone
Realise I’ve overlooked something and go back to step one

I could have set up a local copy of everything and tested it sensibly. I should have set up a local copy of everything and tested it sensibly. But it seemed like such a trivial change, and setting up the whole environment seemed like such a pain. After the third or so iteration of failure I was pretty annoyed with myself, computers, and basically everything.

My biggest annoyance was that my bouncer would not pick up the new URL from the config when I changed it. It’s meant to reload the config when it receives a SIGHUP, and it claimed to in the logs, but I could clearly see it was still hitting the old URL. Restarting the bouncer to update the config is a pain, as it disconnects me from all the IRC networks, and has to reconnect to them all, reauthenticate, etc. It also mildly spams everyone who shares a channel with me².

When I finally got everything working I had a look at the bouncer source, and thought I’d spotted the issue. I raised a bug report, ending in this remark:

It looks like the config is reloaded properly, but the handler for uploads is created once at startup and has its own copy of the uploader, so effectively snapshots the config to whatever it is at startup:

fileUploadHandler := http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    cfg := srv.Config()
    h := fileupload.Handler{
        Uploader:    cfg.FileUploader,
        DB:          db,
        Auth:        cfg.Auth,
        HTTPOrigins: cfg.HTTPOrigins,
    }
    h.ServeHTTP(w, r)
})

I’m not quite sure what I thought I saw there, but that’s not right. I want to call it a hallucination, but that feels like a very overloaded word these days. I guess I was just seeing what I wanted to see, and that was a good excuse to stop investigating. Still, even if I misidentified the cause, the bug was still present, right? … Right?

The Science of Deduction

When the developer got back and said he couldn’t reproduce my issue, I went back to my install and immediately reproduced it. With a calmer head, I figured it was probably something with my particular set up. First thing to check: am I actually running the version I think I am?

Unfortunately the bouncer doesn’t actually seem to expose the version anywhere that I can see. It’s not in the logs, it doesn’t have a -version flag, and none of the IRC-based status commands seem to include it. But I know it’s a Go app, and I know Go embeds the version information. go version -m <binary> will dump it all out, but the binary is inside a Docker image, and the Docker image is one of my nice, minimal, artisanal ones so doesn’t ship a go binary. No problem, docker compose cp bouncer:/bnc ./bnc yoinks the binary out of the container, and then dumping the version shows that, yes, I am running the version I thought I was. Hmm.

The next tool I reached for in my toolbox was strace. Maybe it’s not actually reading the file for some reason? I immediately executed strace -p <pid> -e trace=openat,open,read,pread64 -f without having to look any part of that up. Yep. Definitely. Then I edited the config, HUP’d the bouncer, and saw that it was… reading the config file. As it’s meant to. By default strace truncates strings to 32 bytes, so I couldn’t actually see the line I’d changed. Some more definitely-not-RTFMing later, and rerunning it with an extra -s 65536 let me see the full config. Surprise! The config hadn’t changed!

To confirm my findings, I used docker compose cp again, this time yoinking the config file from inside the container. The inside config file was definitely different to the outside config file. What? My hypothesis at this point was “something something Docker nonsense”. I mount the config as read-only, and was wondering if that meant that Docker was doing something weird instead of just bind mounting it. A quick trip to /proc/<pid>/mounts showed that it was, in fact, not doing anything weird, and was just bind mounting it.

If the file is bind mounted, then surely it’s the same file? I ran stat on the file on the host, noted the inode number, then pondered how to actually run stat on the file inside the container, given the aforementioned awkwardly minimal image. The solution was easy: access it via /proc/<pid>/root/. I could’ve saved myself a bunch of docker compose cp if I’d thought about that earlier. Oh well. The inode of that file was different. What?

The answer was DNS. It’s always DNS. Oh, sorry, force of habit. I meant the answer was vim. I was editing the config in vim, and when it saves files, by default, it writes the new content to a temporary file and does an atomic rename. That’s normally a good thing: it prevents corruption if the write fails midway through³. In this case, though, that means the new file has a new inode. Bind mounting a file binds to the inode, so the container just keeps clutching onto the original config from when it was started, blissfully unaware that the party has relocated down the street.

This problem is likely to happen whenever you bind mount a file into a container. When I mentioned this to a friend, he immediately responded “oh yeah, never do that”, and went on to describe the horrible hacks he’s had to add to Ansible to sidestep the issue. The nicer solution is to just bind mount an entire directory if you can, as then it doesn’t matter what happens to the files within it. I really like having the config files sat alongside the Docker compose files, though; having to create a directory just to work around some bind mount weirdness upsets me.

Now I knew what the problem was, I found there was an issue raised against Docker twelve years ago⁴. The first response was “that’s expected”, and I fully agree with the author: “respectfully, that might be expected by you, but it was not expected by me”!⁵ As a result of the issue they added a nice note to the docs:

Note: Many tools used to edit files including vi and sed --in-place may result in an inode change. Since Docker v1.1.0, this will produce an error such as “sed: cannot rename ./sedKdJ9Dy: Device or resource busy”. In the case where you want to edit the mounted file, it is often easiest to instead mount the parent directory.

But in the intervening twelve years, both the note and the functionality described have gone missing. Ho-hum.

I found it interesting how I’ve only just hit this problem, given how long I’ve used Docker. But I realised that almost everything I run I’m happy to just restart. Cattle, not pets, and so on. My IRC bouncer is one of the few exceptions to that. The only other thing I regularly hot reloaded was Centauri, my reverse proxy, but that had a whole config directory mounted because it was shared between containers, so nicely sidestepped the foot-gun.

So lesson learnt: check for weird bind mount issues before raising issues about config hot reloading. It’ll join the esteemed company of “maybe the drive is full and causing completely unrelated problems?”, “perhaps everything is dog slow because the kernel ran out of entropy?”, and “did systemd sneakily take over that functionality while you weren’t looking?” in the troubleshooting checklist.

An IRC bouncer is basically an always-on proxy. It connects to the IRC networks for you, then your clients connect to your bouncer. The bouncer can then send incoming messages to all your different clients, cache them when you’re offline and replay them later, and lots of other nice things people take for granted in their chat apps these days. ↩︎
Join/part/quit spam is part of IRC, and clients have ways of handling it, but I still feel bad about doing it excessively. ↩︎
You can disable this in vim by setting backupcopy=yes. Good luck redoing all the debugging if you ever accidentally remove that from your vimrc, though! ↩︎
Which is weird, because Docker can’t possibly be that old. That would make me much older than I’m prepared to accept. ↩︎
If you read the thread they didn’t actually mean to sound so dismissive, but it’s still pretty funny. “Yes, it’s expected that the foot-gun causes your foot to hurt. Duh. What did you expect?” ↩︎

An interesting Tailscale + Docker gotcha

2026-01-29T00:00:00Z

As I’ve written about before, I use Tailscale for a lot of things. I thought I had it set up in a reasonably secure manner, but I recently noticed a problem.

I use Tailscale’s ACLs to limit what each node can access, based on the tags I apply to it. So an app node can’t access anything via Tailscale, while an integration or server node can access things tagged with either app or integration. This is expressed pretty simply in the Tailscale ACL JSON:

{
	"tagOwners": {
		// Servers that can be SSH'd into
		"tag:server": [],
		// Applications that are exposed on tailscale but never connect out
		"tag:app": [],
		// Things which talk to other services over tailscale (connecting to apps etc)
		"tag:integration": [],
	},
	"grants": [
		{
			// Users can access everything
			"src": ["autogroup:member"],
			"dst": ["*"],
			"ip":  ["*"],
		},
		{
			// Servers and integrations can access integrations and apps
			"src": ["tag:server", "tag:integration"],
			"dst": ["tag:integration", "tag:app"],
			"ip":  ["*"],
		},
	],
}

Over the past week I’ve been setting up a private Forgejo instance behind Tailscale, complete with an actions runner that runs things using a docker-in-docker container. I didn’t want the runner knowing anything about Tailscale, so I had it configured to speak to Forgejo direct over HTTP (forgejo:3000) instead of using full Tailscale HTTPS URL that I use when accessing it (http://git.example-net.ts.net/)¹.

Everything was going fine, until I forgot to do that translation… and it worked. My Forgejo action runners could access anything on my tailnet. I run several things on Tailscale that just have authentication turned off, on the basis that only authorised devices can access them. Things like the admin interface for this website. I definitely didn’t intend for any workflow I run on my git server to have access to edit my website!

This wasn’t just limited to Forgejo, either. Any docker container I was running could access the tailnet. In hindsight it’s fairly obvious why: the host is running Tailscale, connected as a node tagged with my server tag. That creates a tailscale0 interface, and automagically sets up iptables rules to route Tailscale traffic over the interface. Docker also automagically sets up iptables rules to bridge traffic, and apparently these two sets of rules interact in such a way that traffic from Docker containers is allowed to route via the tailscale0 interface.

I say it’s fairly obvious in hindsight — there’s no reason why Docker would special case any particular host interface after all — but it still feels pretty surprising. Because both bits of software inject their own iptables rules, I never really had a good mental model for how they interact. The host Tailscale node was a completely separate building block to Docker. It would be a pain to use either of them if they didn’t do these rules, but it’s also one of the reasons I don’t really like “magical” things².

There are lots of ways to fix this, but none of them feel particularly great. You can configure both Tailscale and Docker to not automatically fiddle with iptables and handle the rules yourself, but I really hate dealing with iptables³. As a stopgap I did hold my nose and add some iptables rules to drop traffic to the tailscale0 interface if it originated from the IP ranges that Docker was configured to use:

iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o tailscale0 -j DROP
iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 172.17.0.0/12 -o tailscale0 -j DROP

The DOCKER-USER chain is a nice little escape hatch; it comes before the main auto-generated DOCKER chain, and Docker leaves the rules in it alone.

So I added these rules, and felt pretty good about myself, and then… everything started breaking in weird ways. After some debugging I realised the problem was DNS⁴. The server’s DNS resolver is 100.100.100.100, a special Tailscale address. This is so that it can resolve tailnet hostnames via MagicDNS (and so I don’t have to configure my custom DNS servers manually on each device; Tailscale does it for me). My new iptables rules inadvertently dropped all the DNS packets coming from docker containers. D’oh.

Obviously the solution here is to double down and add MORE iptables rules:

iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 192.168.0.0/16 -d 100.100.100.100 -o tailscale0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 172.17.0.0/12 -d 100.100.100.100 -o tailscale0 -j ACCEPT

This got DNS working again, but it all feels a bit gross. Not least because to actually make these persist you need to use iptables-save, and then you also get all the rules that both Docker and Tailscale have inserted. I came across a script to filter out the Docker ones, but… yuck⁵.

I realised a cleaner idea might just be to lock down what server tagged nodes could access within Tailscale itself. That way I can avoid touching iptables at all. It’s handy to be able to curl services from the host when debugging, but it’s not really necessary. So I removed that access, and… stuff broke again. I’m using my Forgejo instance as a registry for some of the docker images I run, so the docker daemon needs to be able to reach it. I ended up making a new tag for infrastructure, which can be accessed from server devices. This does still allow all the docker containers to reach Forgejo, but I already have it set up with appropriate access controls and public/private repository splits. Forgejo is a service designed to run publicly, so this seems a reasonable trade-off for convenience. I used the tests feature of Tailscale’s ACL config to make sure I’d got the rules right:

{
	"tests": [
		{
			// Servers can only access infrastructure
			"src":   "tag:server",
			"proto": "tcp",
			"allow": [
				"tag:infrastructure:8080",
			],
			"deny": [
				"100.84.16.43:8080",
				"me@example.com:8080",
				"tag:server:8080",
				"tag:app:8080",
				"tag:integration:8080",
			],
		},
	],
}

The whole situation still feels a bit messy. If I ever get around to switching to nftables I might loop back and manually craft some rules for routing traffic, instead of leaving Tailscale and Docker to do their own thing.

I discovered later on that logging into the container registry at forgejo:3000 actually issued a redirect to https://git.example-net.ts.net/ so this was all basically for naught… ↩︎
I didn’t use Tailscale’s MagicDNS for a long time just because the word “magic” put me off. Only when I eventually got around to learning how it worked, and seeing that it wasn’t really that magical under the hood, did I change my mind. ↩︎
nftables seems far better in lots of ways, but I can’t really be bothered migrating. Maybe next time I reimage the server for whatever reason… ↩︎
It’s always DNS… ↩︎
Again, nftables would almost certainly help here. It actually has (gasp) configuration files. But again, I really didn’t want to spend the time migrating. ↩︎

How tech companies failed to build the Star Trek computer

2025-07-16T00:00:00Z

A computer core room on the Enterprise-D

In most Star Trek series, the ship or station computer is ever-present in the background, waiting to be called on by the main characters¹. It nearly always does exactly the right thing, and there’s little limit to the functions it can perform. Take this mundane example from DS9:

KIRA: Computer, establish link with the Bajoran Medical Index for the Northwestern District.
COMPUTER: Link established.
KIRA: Access all information on Doctor Surmak Ren.
COMPUTER: There are no records matching that name.
KIRA: Try the Northeastern District, same search.
COMPUTER: Doctor Surmak Ren, currently serving as Chief Administrator of the Ilvian Medical Complex.
KIRA: Computer, open a channel to the Ilvian Medical Complex. Administrator’s office.

The computer is doing some kind of networking to a database only identified by name. It does a search and summarises the lack of results. It then repeats the process with another database, and succinctly announces the results. Finally, it opens a communication channel to a specific room in a facility, based only on its name.

This whole interaction is remarkably boring². Kira doesn’t have to know any URLs or API endpoints, or what protocol she wants to use. She doesn’t have to open a specific app and then login and then try the query again. She just says what she wants and the computer does it.

It seems like this should be one of the most easily obtainable bits of sci-fi wizardry with our current technology. We have multiple massive companies throwing lots of money at digital assistants, LLMs that are improving at an insane rate, but we’re somehow not even close to the usability or usefulness of the Trek computers. What gives?

Boring is, well, boring.

Larry Page once said something that might help explain it:

The Star Trek computer doesn’t seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.

This is the same Larry Page that founded Google, whose mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Of all people, surely he should find an omnipresent computer that can answer ‘random questions’ interesting?! It seems like it should be the epitome of Google’s mission!

Google’s “better than that” seems to have been to stuff LLMs into every product they can, even when you don’t want them there. Even when they’re worse than the normal content they displace. These things look exciting when they’re part of a scripted demo at Google I/O, but they fall flat and just get in the way when they’re exposed to the reality of day-to-day use.

The Star Trek computer is the opposite: it isn’t snazzy, but it is genuinely useful. That means it’s not an attractive target for the company execs who want marketing opportunities, and it’s not appealing for engineers who need to demonstrate “impact”. But even if Google did try to make the Trek computer, there are other problems…

Assistants need to be free

A significant amount of tech companies’ business models currently revolves around trapping users in walled gardens. They want you using their ecosystem; that way they get more data from you, and you’re more likely to spend more money on their other offerings that work together. There’s barely any incentive to allow any kind of interoperability with other platforms outside carefully contracted integrations.

I remember trying to help a family member move their photos from iCloud to Google Photos. At one point they turned around and said, exasperated, “why is this so hard? Aren’t they both in the cloud?!”. It’s easy to dismiss that as someone who hasn’t quite grasped the fundamental idea that “the cloud” is just someone else’s computers, but that’s not the whole story. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a quick and easy transfer: both services already allow uploading and downloading, there’s just no incentive for the companies involved to make it so³.

These kinds of misaligned incentives and walled garden business models cause even more problems when it comes to digital assistants. Siri is basically never going to be able to interact with, say, your Google Drive; ~~Bard~~ Gemini is never going to be able to send a message via iMessage. Even when there are appropriately blessed interactions, they’re so clunky. Can you imagine Captain Picard saying “Computer, ask the turbolift skill to take me to deck 5”?

Someone else’s computer

Software issues aside, there’s still a key difference between the Star Trek computers and our current batch of digital assistants: where they run. The Trek computers are all housed within the ship or station they serve; they can connect elsewhere to gather information, but they run entirely independently. If they go wrong, a local engineer can go in and fix things. While some of our assistants may have physical hardware in your home, they don’t work without a vast cloud apparatus behind them. If your Internet connection fails, they become paperweights. If the company running them decide to remove some functionality you depend on, you have no recourse.

That kind of helplessness isn’t limited to assistants, either. There’s a rapidly growing trend of being unable to modify or repair hardware you fully own and control. Part of this is just that they’re becoming more complex: it’s a lot harder to replace a microchip than a gear, but companies are also going out of their way to make it more difficult for users through draconian DRM regimes⁴ and aggressive intellectual property enforcement. If the US Navy can’t repair their own equipment because a corporation says so, what hope do consumers have?

We’re approaching a point where you don’t actually own anything. Software is cloud and subscription based, hardware is unrepairable. Even cars can be remotely updated and have features added or removed. The Federation wouldn’t allow a third party control over their ships⁵, so why are we so happy to put up with it in everything we consume?

A small ray of hope?

The most promising way of tackling all of these problems is through legislation. The EU’s Digital Market Act is an attempt to force ‘gatekeepers’ like Google, Apple and Meta, to allow third-party access to their services. It seems like a pretty reasonable approach, but the tech companies are unsurprisingly resisting it. Apple in particular have gone out of their way to refuse to comply, and when forced to do so have limited the functionality to people in Europe. Still, the DMA is a promising start, and if similar legislation is introduced (and robustly enforced) elsewhere it might start forcing companies to behave a bit better.

There are also smaller companies that actually do the right thing. Framework make laptops that are user-serviceable; Fairphone do the same for mobile phones. Smaller software companies provide useful, open APIs. The average person on the street will probably have never heard of these, unfortunately, but they do still exist. Maybe as the bigger tech companies tighten the screws more, people will turn to alternatives like this? Or maybe we’ll just keep accepting that our computers work for everyone but us?

Unless, of course, the computer is playing the role of the episode’s MacGuffin and has contracted space-computer-COVID or something, then it’s a lot less in-the-background. ↩︎
It’s almost like it only exists to move the plot along. ↩︎
You can generally export your data, thanks to a combination of legislation and efforts like Google’s “Data Liberation Front”, but I’ve never seen an export format that could then just be imported into an equivalent commercial product. ↩︎
Oh, you’ve changed the screen on your iPhone? Better hope it can do the secret handshake with the Apple hardware. ↩︎
I think there might actually have been an episode where that did in fact happen. We’ll just ignore that as a plot contrivance. ↩︎

Docker reverse proxying, redux

2022-12-06T00:00:00Z

Six years ago, I described my system for configuring a reverse proxy for docker containers. It involved six containers including a key-value store and a webserver. Nothing in that system has persisted to this day. Don’t get me wrong – it worked – but there were a lot of rough edges and areas for improvement.

Microservices and their limitations

My goal was to follow the UNIX philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work when applied to network services that have to interact with one and other. UNIX tools are built upon a common file system and simple data passed over STDIN. Microservices don’t have that shared foundation. You could make one: companies that use microservices in anger often have a team that deals with the “developer experience” of creating and using microservices. But as a solo developer that’s not something I wanted to spend my time doing.

This became very apparent when trying to debug issues. In the UNIX world, if your series of commands piped together does something strange you can simply echo the data at various stages. Not so much when that data is flying around on a network, going into and out of things like etcd. Trying to figure out why a certificate hadn’t been acquired was a case of searching through logs from four containers, none of which had particularly good logging. There are many ways to get insight into what’s happening with microservices but, again, that’s not something I wanted to do myself.

Over time, and with experience in other projects, I came to realise that microservices only really make sense if you’re unable to deploy a monolith. For tech companies this naturally happens when different teams contribute to the same service: splitting it out into smaller services that are wholly owned by individual teams makes sense. For solo developers, that never happens. You can still gain the other benefits of microservices – such as code separation and having clearly defined APIs – by sticking to certain coding standards.

Proxy inconveniences

As well as being unhappy with the microservice nature of the solution, I wasn’t pleased with nginx. If you requested an unknown domain, nginx would use the first server block in its config to serve a response, instead of sending an “unrecognised name” alert as I wanted. It was a minor issue, but it irked me.

So from nginx I switched to haproxy. It has a strict-sni option when configuring TLS connections which makes it behave properly. It also performs a lot better for this type of workload than nginx. All was well for a while, but then I started getting alerts that requests were occasionally failing. I couldn’t reproduce the issue, but my nightly jobs to build and push containers managed to hit it nearly every night, causing them to fail.

After some investigation, I found that the haproxy developers had refactored the header parsing code, and neglected to properly reset flags when multiple requests were sent over the same connection. There was a patch, but it wasn’t released. No problem, I thought, I’ll just cherry-pick it onto the last release… Except that haproxy use Git in the most convoluted manner I’ve ever seen – they have one repository per release. This makes it harder to patch, but it also made me question whether I trusted them to ship stable software: there were no tests for the header parsing code (which is both fundamental and finicky, the perfect target for tests), the source code management was weird, and they didn’t seem in any rush to patch this bug.

Not long after that issue, Greg managed to encounter another bug where haproxy returned a 500 error whenever the upstream server replied with a particular, perfectly valid, header. The die was cast – it was time to move to something else.

Not Invented Here syndrome

Looking for a new solution, there were many more options than back in 2016. I’m still convinced, however, that anything exposed to the Internet should not have access to run docker containers. It’s the modern equivalent of running a CGI script as root. That single requirement eliminates most off-the-shelf solutions. What do you do when nothing quite meets your specific requirements? You make something yourself! My new solution has two components: Dotege and Centauri.

Dotege is a replacement for the microservices that monitored containers and obtained certificates. It’s fundamentally a templating engine - whenever the containers change, it evaluates a template and saves the result to disk. The template has access to details about the containers, their labels, ports, and so on. Dotege can also obtain certificates from Let’s Encrypt, and raise a signal against another process whenever the template or certificates change. I used this to generate the configuration and certificates used by haproxy for a while, and more recently changed the template so that it works for Centauri.

Centauri is my own reverse proxy. It’s configured using a simple text file and can also obtain certificates from an ACME provider. It doesn’t serve static content, has no knowledge about docker, and avoids the other bells and whistles that adorn most reverse proxies. It also has good test coverage to ensure that I don’t, say, accidentally break header parsing.

As a software engineer I enjoy writing software, but I also enjoy running simple, easy to understand software. That’s what I’ve achieved here: it’s very easy to identify where the problem is if anything goes wrong, both are small Go programs rather than vast sprawling C monstrosities, and their interaction is primarily through a file written to disk that can be inspected or edited as needed.

Apple, Google and aligned incentives

2020-10-17T00:00:00Z

The HTC Dream, the first phone released running Android.

For the past decade I’ve exclusively used Android phones. I got the HTC Dream (aka the T-Mobile G1) shortly after it came out, and dutifully upgraded every 1-2 years. In that timespan I used Android as the basis for my Master’s Thesis, took a job on the Android team at Google, and eventually became a contractor specialising in Android app development. So when I switched to using an iPhone earlier this year a few people were surprised¹.

The good old days

When Android was announced in 2007 – alongside the formation of the Open Handset Alliance – it was positioned as a bastion of openness: it would be built on open standards and the operating system would be open source. At the time iPhones were strongly coupled to iTunes and Apple was exercising strict control over what app developers could do.

When the HTC Dream was released it lived up to expectations. You could write apps for it without shelling out for a Mac! You could get root access, and it was running Linux under the hood! A whole ecosystem of custom firmwares and bootloaders started to appear, thanks to the open source nature of the OS. It shipped with some Google apps, but they were just normal apps that served as examples of what could be done.

After the Dream came a line of Nexus devices. These were Android’s flagship devices, designed to show off what a good Android phone should look like. Both the hardware and software releases tended to feature interesting, useful upgrades. Some of the original open source apps were replaced with closed source, Google proprietary ones, but that was OK - the open source versions lived on in the open source project as examples of what you could do. The devices allowed flashing custom firmware, and the OS source was always released… eventually.

The downfall

The Pixel and Pixel XL

Over time, Android has got less and less free. The Nexus line of phones gave way to the Pixel range, which got rid of the clearly demarcated border where Android ended and Google began. The Android 11 highlights list is dotted with sections that say “On Pixel devices…”, and every single one is a software feature that could be implemented on any device, but Google have decided to keep it proprietary instead of releasing it as part of the open source platform.

At the same time more and more functionality has been added to Google Play Services. This was originally a shared location for Google specific services - in 2012 it merely handled some Google+ functionality and dealing with OAuth for Google accounts. These days it contains a huge swathe of Google services, as well as platform functionality such as push notifications, barcode scanning, geolocation, and so on. Google Play Services isn’t part of the Android Open Source Project, and is only available under license from Google. You can’t really have a device without these functions, so as a manufacturer you have the choice between agreeing to whatever terms Google requires² or spending an awful lot of development time creating an alternative.

While these are fairly abstract arguments about what a free platform should look like, during the same period there has been a marked restriction in how you can actually use Android devices – both as an end-user and as a developer. iOS has always had very stark restrictions on what apps can do in the background; Android started its life allowing pretty much anything, like any good general purpose computing device. This inevitably lead to lots of apps doing lots of things that ranged from stupid to mildly suboptimal, creating a tragedy of the commons amongst apps. The victim was the phone’s battery life, and Google’s solution was a progressive series of restrictions on what apps can do and when. This includes limits on when push notifications are delivered to a device, how frequently apps can wake up, and so forth. Some of these can be bypassed by the end-user, but not all, and the process is fairly cumbersome.

Aligned incentives

From my point of view, Android and iOS are now pretty much in a similar place. They’re not general purpose computers, but app consoles: much like games consoles they consist of hardware and software that the user lacks control over but accepts in order to access the library of apps/games.

Given there’s no clear winner between them in terms of hardware and software, my decision came down to a more holistic question: how aligned are their incentives to my own? Apple is a product company: they make their money by producing shiny things that people want to purchase; Google is an advertising company: they make their money by using my personal information to show me targeted adverts.

For Google, Android was originally a strategic move to ensure that Apple couldn’t dominate the mobile web, and by extension the revenue from ads. As a company, there’s nothing to really push them forward in any particular direction other than one that facilitates advertising. Of course, Google employs tonnes of good people who want to do good things which counterbalances this, but I’d still prefer to deal with a company that has an intrinsic motivation to do things I want them to do, rather than one forced to by regulation, custom, or the good intent of their employees.

So the decision became obvious: if I have no strong opinions about the software and hardware, Apple is the clear winner because their incentives are a lot better aligned to mine.

Image credits

Photo	Creator	Licence	Source
HTC Dream	Akela NDE	CC BY-SA 3.0	Wikimedia
Pixel and Pixel XL	Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia	CC BY 2.0	Wikimedia

Or, at least, politely feigned surprise. ↩︎
And Google’s terms were particularly onerous: as well as requiring Chrome and Google Search to be preinstalled, they prevented manufacturers from selling any devices powered by alternative versions of Android - e.g., Samsung wouldn’t be allowed to sell a refrigerator that ran Amazon’s FireOS. The European Union handed Google a $5,000,000,000 fine for this anti-competitive behaviour, which Google are still in the process of contesting. ↩︎