251–260 of 764 posts
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Yes it is, and no they didn't. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I'm not clear on whether any actually exist right now.
My understanding is that how Apple is restricting the alternative app stores is also illegal in EU, so I don't thinkt this is the end of this story.
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Thanks for responding.
Yeah, dude thanks for the good faith. A lot of people are allergic to this rhetoric and will just assume I have a deep irrational bias, but I was actually a staunch free market supporter before. Once I decided to be more intellectually honest with myself and read more about what both sides meant historically and currently, it really just made sense.
I take honest conversation where I can get it, even when I don't agree. And to be clear I don't agree with most of your points and think it's idealistic and couldn't work in the real world. But I appreciate the spirit of what you're arguing for (in my interpretation) power with the people vs power with corporations and government and I think that's a very fundamental principle that is very important common ground.
edit: clarity
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Who else is going to maintain and develop it? It's the same issue as with Chrome, even if you force Google to give it to some other company, they're all just as bad. And it's too big and too costly to maintain for anyone else but tech giants. The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source de…
I welcome feature stagnation on mobile! Every single release is a step backwards. Android 15 cannot hold a candle to what cynogenmod did on top of android 2.3. And that's objective.
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>Come on, that's absolutely laughable. It's not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices. It's going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of "phone calls only mode" and forced us to rely on their h…
People buy high-end Android phones like crazy, I don't know what bubble you live in. Samsung Folds and Flips are the luxury phones, not the iPhone Pro Max S eXtreme Edition 32 GB that looks exactly like the base model but has a slightly better camera. People show off their S Pen and perfectly stabilised 100x zoom lens, not their liquid ass. Multi-window and DeX are features for professionals who need to Get Shit Done…
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Desktop OSes and their derivatives are woefully behind in this regard, and unfortunately the will to bring them up to par is incredibly weak. Of those in mass use (Qubes OS is neat but its user base isn’t even a rounding error), macOS probably does the most, but it’s still lagging behind iOS and what’s been implemented has come with much consternation from the technically inclined peanut gallery. I understand some am…
> We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time I do agree with that, and I strongly believe that the iOS and Android security model is way ahead of Desktop Linux. But what I observe is that nobody seems to care about the security model. A recurrent complaint I see against anything AOSP-based (including Android) is that people "want to be root".
The fact that Android complains and tells any app that asks whether the owner actually, you know, owns the device they paid for is an implementation detail.
A Linux distribution that adopts an Android style security model could easily still provide the owner root access while locking down less trusted apps in such a way that the apps can't know or care whether the device is rooted.
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It's relatively easy. It's basically a command for each step you want to do and it tends to fail gracefully nowadays. If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone. If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
That describes relatively easy for you, but not for the average person who can’t even be bothered to change the default ringtone.
It is a disgrace how Google has managed this situation. To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an "advanced flow" for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe. But this promised feature hasn't appeared in any Android 16 or 1…
If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones, then this will end up being a good thing, and the greatest favor that Google could do for the open source community. Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years…
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It's relatively easy. It's basically a command for each step you want to do and it tends to fail gracefully nowadays. If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone. If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
It's also high risk. I've bricked two phones doing it.