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Keep Android Open

keepandroidopen.org

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Re: Keep Android Open

#511

Post by torben-friis »

mindcrime wrote: post #492
TeMPOraL wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm happy to have a bit higher friction to check my bank's balance for example. I find this to actually be a great litmus test for the overall problem. Bank account balance is a basic piece of information that's about me, and that I need to keep track of to effectively live in our modern times. I should be able to access that information non-interactively at any time. But I can't. Ask many banks, you'll get as many…

It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device. I hate to risk sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, but when I hear this I flash back to Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. I interpreted his message in that book as something approximately like "you can't out-tech the bad guys", where "bad guys" can…

I see your point, but I disagree that you need direct involvement in the legal process.

Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.

Say that you get to a point where 90% of desktop users are on linux. Is there any doubt that banks, messaging platforms and the like would have their own linux apps? no matter how many hoops you make them pass through, they won't let that piece of the cake go.

The problem is that the current way of doing things will never reach those numbers, because we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities; I think changing that is the mising piece.

Re: Keep Android Open

#512

Post by BeFlatXIII »

torben-friis wrote: post #133
jeena wrote: post #58

Back in the 2007 or when it came out in Sweden I bought the iPhone and started developing for it. This was cool, new and exciting and it was fine as long as my company was paying the $100 fee every year. But then I switched jobs and worked at a company which produced mostly open source code. Suddenly I would have to pay $100 every year just to be able to put my own software on the phone ... This is why I switched to…

Im a millennial dev which happens to have a Gen Z brother who also chose this profession. Seeing him walk my steps 15 years later has been eye opening for the brutal cultural change. They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that…

> They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal

Piracy is technically illegal, but that didn’t stop us.

Re: Keep Android Open

#513

Post by luisml77 »

pietro72ohboy wrote: post #481
luisml77 wrote: post #475

The discussion between open-source and closed-source is essentially a discussion between communism and capitalism. Anything that reaches a certain threshold of value to society and requires enormous effort to build and maintain has to fall back to a capitalist, for-profit, closed-source structure. That's all that's happening here. Of course, small stuff like a software library that doesn't require much effort to buil…

> I personally think this obsession with open-source software is simply an obsession with communism and getting things for free, and not wanting getting rewarded for the value of the stuff you build, etc. Except that both platforms (iOS as well as Android) were either born out of OSS or are still reliant on active development in such projects. They created nothing, they took something from the commons, polished it an…

> they threatened to choke all competition and trap and rent-seek the entire world

They did so legally and didn't break any rules. This is the game of capitalism, and the fact is, IOS and Android are extremely well built and developed, and no open-source project would ever come close to the hundreds of thousands of paid engineers that built IOS and Android.

You can either have capitalism and IOS and Android, or you can have communism and a society that is 10+ years behind in development. Do you really want to give up IOS 26 for a blackberry?

Re: Keep Android Open

#514

Post by TeMPOraL »

senko wrote: post #503
BeetleB wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Most of us do not want to carry two phones around. The reality is that there is strong utility for those non-open apps and they will never be replaced by open ones. In some parts of the world, WhatsApp is as necessary as the phone itself. Official business is conducted via it.

So what. Enough of us do that it just might be feasible. I've used Linux for a loong time before some business-critical software ran on it. I had to have a Windows VM for years for netbanking, or before that, dual-boot for gaming. If we're all too spoiled to give a free alternative a chance because it might be slightly inconvenient, we don't deserve the free alternative.

> Enough of us do that it just might be feasible.

Not nearly enough. Not by three orders of magnitude for the market to care.

This isn't the 1990s. Computers are now mainstream.

Re: Keep Android Open

#515

Post by mistercheph »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #434
dangus wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo, this right here. Linux desktop wasn’t a daily driver until one day it was. Although the only problem with this strategy is that Linux got that way because of a lot of private companies that actually wanted that. Valve didn’t want to be locked in with Microsoft. Many of Microsoft’s direct competitors also don’t want to be locked in. IBM famously switched to Mac, Google has been using Mac and Linux workstations…

It's a transient state. Food for thought: how much of Linux being a daily driver depends on you having a modern Android or iOS smartphone ? If you need a locked down phone that passes remote attestation to authenticate yourself to a remote service, then whatever you use to access the service UI doesn't really matter: the only device that's necessary to have to use the service is the one you don't fully control, and w…

Bitcoin :D

Re: Keep Android Open

#516

Post by raxxorraxor »

liendolucas wrote: post #282

I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes: Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives. A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily dr…

Problem is the hardware vendors often very much like closed systems. And banking apps too. We sadly have a much less open hardware ecosystem compared to the PC landscape. And even here driver problems are more pronounced the more exotic the OS platform.

For me mobile OS are a broken mess, irrespective of Apple or Google, so I would love to have an alternative. Mobile phones are powerful devices that are severely handicapped by bad software. Restrictions are sold as security and there are a lot of people that even buy into these crap argument. So much so that even legislation has adopted them to some degree.

But for hardware vendors to jump on another train, a new OS must probably offer something shiny. And the average user has no idea how easy it could be to interface your smartphone with other devices without needing some ad riddled vendor specific apps. I mean you can install an ssh client on your phone, but meh... That is more or less the only app I install these days.

Re: Keep Android Open

#517

Post by jayd16 »

kube-system wrote: post #445
liendolucas wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webapps solve this completely. You login to a service as we have been doing forever. And the control is still on their side when you use a webapp. Almost every single app that is on my phone can be a webapp.

But, it doesn't. The browser is unsupported for many of the above-mentioned applications.

Can I get an example of a single one that can't be found on the web?

Re: Keep Android Open

#518

Post by mistercheph »

paxys wrote: post #429
liendolucas wrote: post #282

I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes: Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives. A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily dr…

Because money. Yes Android is open source, but Google is spending billions of dollars a year paying engineers to develop it. If you want Android to be "free" find alternate funding, with no strings attached.

See: linux

Re: Keep Android Open

#519

Post by BeFlatXIII »

giamma wrote: post #145

While I understand the reasons behind this campaign, I have mixed feelings about it. As an iPhone user, I find it frustrating that deploying my own app on my own device requires either reinstalling it every 7 days or paying $100 annually. Android doesn't have this limitation, which makes it simpler and more convenient for personal use. However, when it comes to publishing apps to the store, I take a different view. I…

> Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespace

What are the requirements around domain renewal?

Re: Keep Android Open

#520

Post by TeMPOraL »

mistercheph wrote: post #515
TeMPOraL wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a transient state. Food for thought: how much of Linux being a daily driver depends on you having a modern Android or iOS smartphone ? If you need a locked down phone that passes remote attestation to authenticate yourself to a remote service, then whatever you use to access the service UI doesn't really matter: the only device that's necessary to have to use the service is the one you don't fully control, and w…

Bitcoin :D

All fun and games until you want to exchange it to traditional fiat - at which point regular banking suddenly feels like FSF heaven in comparison :).
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