121–130 of 156 posts
Because many important apps (banking and other financial services, major shopping sites, most Authenticators ) don’t provide open source versions, I don’t see how this thing can end up be practical for daily usage. Maybe it can be useful for criminals, underground hackers, but not a normal person.
No but they have web sites that work fine. Authenticators usually are open source.
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What's the problem there? If the code is there but not executed, and no data is sent to Google, is there any risk as a user?
It is executed to test the presence of the Google Play Services on the phone when the app is launched. Then, it's probably not risky, but it is still proprietary code that you can't inspect and verify. You can't easily know if the library will not silently do something. If you are seeking to avoid running any proprietary code, then it's something you want to avoid.
My primary pain point, last time I did the research, was that UBPorts for example, doesn't support full-disk encryption. That might have changed by now, and I'm not sure about the others. But I'd say encryption-at-rest is a basic requirement for a privacy-enhancing OS.
1) AOSP, not ASOP, you even spelled out the acronym and made this mistake twice,
2) OSM is phenomenal. OSM maps are not bad. IMO the accuracy, even in the US, is better than Google, particularly in rural areas. There's this project https://github.com/pnoll1/osmand_map_creation also that bundles in address data from OpenAddresses, plugging what is the biggest gap that gave Google a de facto monopoly. IMO it is a very, very important project. The only things I can see being a problem for some people at this point is traffic data, which is not a problem for me, and POI which to me is a non feature, it's basically advertising. And you can do much more with it than with google, I have overlay maps for example that show me all public lands in the US and which department controls them, as well as a light pollution overlay map. I would recommend OSM for navigation over Google any day of the week even beyond the fact that it is FOSS.
Switched to GrapheneOS with the Pixel 5. Email/Calendar integration works fine (K-9 Mail). Signal as instant messenger. Organic Maps as Map application. Replaced Apple Watch with GadgetBridge and a Mi 6 band (cheaper and I have easy access to all data, you need to sync once with their app after you get the key you can delete it ... did the setup on the iphone and copied out the key with a commandline python script fr…
You can use Google's camera application, which is optimized for the Pixels of course. I think it will probably work with the new sandboxed play services implementation, but there is a simpler way: https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider This is a stub implementation of what gcam needs and it works great. I believe, independent of sandboxed play services, GrapheneOS team plans to implement stub play serv…
Author here. Feel free to ask any questions.
I'm pretty heavy into this stuff, been using exclusively unlocked and rooted AOSP for over a decade, 100% FOSS degoogled (minus hardware drivers of course) for 6 or so, and contributed anonymously to the community pretty significantly over the years. At this point I think the days of FOSS Android are numbered, I still use it for now, but I don't see our community having the leeway we currently are barely holding onto in 10 years. If Libre mobile computing has a future it is in the currently in development Linux mobile ecosystem.
One thing I have yet to understand and maybe I am missing something is that why is there no web-only OS for mobile? Something which literally is based on websites only and there's no concept of apps. Is there something like this which can be installed on an Android phone?
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It is executed to test the presence of the Google Play Services on the phone when the app is launched. Then, it's probably not risky, but it is still proprietary code that you can't inspect and verify. You can't easily know if the library will not silently do something. If you are seeking to avoid running any proprietary code, then it's something you want to avoid.
Right, but you were talking about "even if you don't have the Play Services on your phone", which is what I'm worried about - but OK, if it's just because there's a chance it might be running, then I'm not too afraid of that.
Now you have several options:
- you trust Google and trust this code not to do anything when the Play Services are not running
- you don't trust Google on this, but you don't care neither
- you don't trust Google and care, but you are willing to take the risk
- you don't trust Google and care, and are worried, or are not willing to run any proprietary code out of principle: you need to adapt Signal's code or dish the app entirely
WayDroid has been making progress on Android emulation for Linux, building upon the code of Anbox. Demos of WayDroid on a OnePlus 6 running postmarketOS, and a Moto Z2 Force running Ubuntu Touch: https://www.xda-developers.com/waydroid-android-apps-on-linu... Source code: https://github.com/waydroid
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I have been using Saifish as my daily driver and only phone since 2014. I bought a Nokia N9 secondhand in 2013, but the battery was not great anymore and I could not use Whatsapp on it. The choice for Sailfish was then easy. For 5 years I used the Jolla 1, which has received updates from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 I am on a Sony XA2. I bought it secondhand and after a commercial license for Android app support it still…
The website indicates there isn't a legal way to purchase Sailfish OS outside of the EU. Is this something they enforce, or can I bypass this with a VPN because they don't actually care but have to say that for legal/economic reasons?
In practice you just need to buy the license from a EU IP (so via VPN, europen VPS, etc.) and then you are good to go from anywhere in the world. This can be seen on these global stats for the Sailfish OS community software repository:
https://openrepos.net/statistics/global
Lots of traffic from outside the EU. Also I took my Sailfish OS device for a trip across Japan twice, and everything worked fine for me as well. :)
So in general I recommend getting a EU based VPN and then buying the Sailfish X license for the device of your choice (I would personally recommend xperia 10 II). If you succeed, then I would get the device, just in case. :)