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Your phone is about to stop being yours

keepandroidopen.org

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Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#81

Post by bakugo »

gruez wrote: post #25
jnovek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there are issues. You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device and losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community. GrapheneOS might not be a big enough community to sustain work on the projects delivered by F-Droid.

>You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device IME such apps are few and far between. The most trouble I ran into is play store refusing to show apps because they claim the app isn't compatible with the device, but that can be worked around with aurora store.

They really aren't. The number of apps requiring Play Integrity grows every day, my own bank's app hasn't worked in years and I've long given up on it, I just use it on a second stock device now.

And Google has an answer to the "just install the APK from somewhere else" workaround, too. Many apps now integrate a check that prevents them from running if they're not properly linked to the Play Store.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#82

Post by tombert »

gdulli wrote: post #67
tjpnz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point anymore.

There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading. In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this. And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.

You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years.

Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.

To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.

With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#83

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

On one hand, having a free for all is very good, especially for developers, and for programmability of our devices as such. Screw iPads.

On the other hand, malware which coaxes normies into installing unverified apks, is an undeniable fact of life. It's nice to be pontificating as a power user who has never been phished or whose devices never became botnet zombies in their life.

On yet another hand, higher-end malware (made by those who can afford the store fees) is there on the freaking play store and app store, so, I guess, shrug

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#84

Post by BatteryMountain »

pngwen wrote: post #68

This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch. You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that away that ju…

I'm on this path too. Waiting a few more months to see what happens. If they indeed block my 4 apps on my phone (which aren't published anywhere), I will simply move to Apple.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#85

Post by at-fates-hands »

gdulli wrote: post #67
tjpnz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point anymore.

There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading. In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this. And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.

From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order.

I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#86

Post by diydsp »

selectively wrote: post #36
rcxdude wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.

Those developers will pay $25 for identity verification and have no issues.

Drivers license leaks are surging.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#87

Post by zeta0134 »

criddell wrote: post #61
NDlurker wrote: post #30

>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it. This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.

For you, is the openness of Android appealing as a matter of principle or does it enable you to do things you couldn't otherwise do?

I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other.

So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance.

In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#88

Post by selectively »

kodablah wrote: post #65
TGower wrote: post #52

This is a wild misrepresentation of the situation. Saying there is no opt-out is just false, they even provide the information on how users can opt-out. The "mandatory 24 hour cooling-off period" is also misleading, it's easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB.

> Saying there is no opt-out is just false I can't see where one can opt-out of this new behavior and into the existing behavior, only a description of the new behavior's bypass (which is not the same thing at all) > easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB I don't think this is a reasonable use of the term "easy". I should be able to give my non-technical friend an apk and they can use it right then, with the…

The way you give your non-technical friends an APK and they just install it is by you signing it.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#89

Post by selectively »

kahrl wrote: post #80
mmooss wrote: post #49

There is a negative network effect: The opt-out is so complex and time-consuming that it will deter almost all users (even if some on HN say they will do it). With so few users, many fewer developers will release apps that don't comply with Google's requirements. Then the value of opting out will decline significantly, which will reduce the number of people doing it, which will reduce the number of apps released ...…

ZERO. ZERO developers who don’t comply will make a living selling applications and services to the general public.

This is correct. The people who will refuse to pay $25 and sign their stuff are people with a political objective, not businesses.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#90

Post by criddell »

surgical_fire wrote: post #71
criddell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For you, is the openness of Android appealing as a matter of principle or does it enable you to do things you couldn't otherwise do?

Yes.

Can you expand on that? I'd like to understand the kinds of things millions of people are no longer going to be able to do.
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