A price-tag of one dollar is passive smoking. You’re killing people around you, for your own short-term benefit. But again, that wasn’t the case here. It wasn’t piracy due to a high price. Instead, this was the endemic casual piracy of convenience.

Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong. Nerds care about choice, and nerds are such a tiny minority of people that nobody else much cares what the hell they think. Android is designed with far too much nerd philosophy, and open is gravy to those people because it’s synonymous with customisation.

If you’re an open-source advocate taking objection to this article on the grounds that I’m somehow different from you, then I’m sorry to tell you that I’m not. I’ve walked the walk. If you’re using an iOS device or a Mac, chances are that some of my code is running on it. You’re genuinely welcome.

But that doesn’t scale to a platform, and it sure as hell doesn’t scale to the third-party developers who are supporting that platform by releasing software for it, thus adding value to the hardware and OS. Open doesn’t work. Open is a route to fragmented user experiences, handset-maker “value-adds” that are actually the old PC preinstalled crapware problem all over again, and customers who can’t get a software update for a year-old device.