It wasn’t so long ago that the windfall which came along with success in the mobile industry was able to buy something that manufacturers today would consider nearly priceless: a leak-free launch. Back when Steve Jobs was introducing one blockbuster product after another at Apple, or Samsung was studying the iPhone’s success to make its own Galaxy S specter-like before the annual grand unveiling, the top companies prided themselves on complete control over their devices’ lifecycles.
But that was then, and this is now; and in many ways, it’s the manufacturers themselves who are most to blame for their current predicament. Not because they deserve to have their secrets revealed due to capitalist over-achievement, but rather, thanks to the rabid fervor their popular devices stoked in the marketplace. They were, in a very real way, victims of their own successes: the better they got at hiding their treasures, the more people wanted to see those treasures as soon as humanly possible.

Call it a self-fulfilling prophesy, if you like, although that term doesn’t quite fit the phenomenon properly. It’s more of a study in human nature, an innate reaction that can be observed even at the youngest ages: ingrain something as secret in a child’s value system, and more often than not, he or she will develop an even greater interest in that taboo than had it never drawn the shine of the spotlight.

In the case of cellphones, there has always been an extra incentive to discover what’s right around the corner, even more so in America, land of subsidized two-year contracts. Although your phone purchase is always going to end up showing its age at some point during that twenty-four-month period, the natural yearning is to only sign on the dotted line when you’re able to pick up the most cutting-edge model you can afford at the split -second it hits carrier lineups. Anything less than perfect timing will undoubtedly leave you kicking yourself during the waning, excruciating countdown to contract expiration.

I’ll suggest that the single most important factor which led to the death of the leak-free launch, was actually the rise of the Chinese middle class, and the increased buying power that comes with the competitiveness inherent in the early days of a free market economy. For the very first time, some of the people who were assembling the iPhones and the Galaxies and the XPERIAS were able to afford to purchase the fruits of their labor.

Now of course, leaks out of developing nation assembly plants are nothing new. Wherever there is money to be made by revealing the secrets of a popular, annually-revised product, there will be people willing to cash in on their access in order to supply a gossip-hungry public with details and images of their objects of desire. What made the rise of the middle class in China so dangerous was that the consumers and distributors of this gossip were neighbors in a single country; in some cases, they were actually the very same people.

So is it any wonder that the Chinese-assembled Galaxy S6, or LG G3, or pair of iPhone Sixes — to say nothing of phones from popular home-team OEMs Xiaomi, HTC, and Huawei — regularly show up on Weibo, sometimes courtesy of the very executives ostensibly tasked with safeguarding their secrets? After all, the multiple pressures on those with access in China is substantial: not only do Westerners want to see what you’re working on, so do your neighbors, your family members and, hell, even that curious little fanboy inside your very own head.

As recent full body, full spec, full benchmark leaks of some of the most well-guarded devices in the industry seem to prove, no manufacturer is safe from the thousand-headed leaking monster. A cottage industry has taken hold in China and elsewhere to sate the public’s nearly endless appetite for flagship spoilers, meaning that, almost to a device, every single popular brand is targeted by leakers from the factory floor to the Wall Street Journal newsroom — and everywhere in between.

Device makers, most especially the former untouchables like Apple and Samsung, are seeing their most valuable products laid bare for the world to ogle time and again, from their very conceptions to their eventual, usually surprise-free launches. It’s become a world ruled by the spoilers, one in which those who still enjoy a good, choreographed unveiling have little opportunity to avoid the outpouring of early information.

Occasionally manufacturers find clever ways to work within this new status quo, to either preemptively leak their own products or, more impressively, to leak decoys that allege to represent the product(s) in question. HTC has gone this route in the past, and while at first it looked like the company may have doubled down on the strategy this year, evidence has begun piling up to the contrary.

So what are lovers of a good show to do in this world where no secret is safe, no detail too mundane to leak and leak and leak again? Unfortunately, your only recourse seems to be voting with your eyeballs — rewarding those publications which keep leaking to a minimum, and label non-public information well. Even in an ecosystem which rewards the clickbait that leaks practically define, it need not be in your face, practically self-propagating,like so many other undesirable modern phenomena have taken upon themselves to do.