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Your phone is about to stop being yours

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Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#791

Post by busssard »

palata wrote: post #770
echelon wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Respectfully, I think this is the wrong fight. Respectfully, no. There are no mainstream OS alternatives. You're standing up to fight for 0.000001% of users and leaving everyone else stuck. Fighting to win our phones back is fighting for the 99.99999%. These devices are the most important part of everyone's digital world. Certainly the non-technical folks. You can't even order food at restaurants anymore without th…

I feel like you missed my point. I am fighting for the 100% (and you are not, as you say). We should all own our devices, and owning a device means that we can install whatever OS we want on it. The beauty of it being that if you can install whatever OS you want on it, then the problem raised by the article does not exist anymore. Today, if you own a Pixel, you can just install GrapheneOS and it will mostly work. Why…

well if in the 10year future new OS are as easy installed as apps now, maybe. But that future is far off. Getting my grandma to install NewPipe is easier if Fdroid works on her phone, than to get her to install the new totallyFLOSS-OS

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#792

Post by literalAardvark »

cryptonym wrote: post #731
literalAardvark wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May or may not be. It does significantly improve security.

I miss data to confirm any of this does significantly improve security. Anecdata: I have yet to meet someone who have been targeted by unknowingly side-loading apps. If they really want to improve security they can work on much more impactful changes. I know people having been scammed by ads proudly delivered by instagram and google. I read about malicious apps that somehow went through official store filtering.

They're doing good work on those fronts as well, but in war you don't win all the battles.

It's also especially difficult to tighten security in the direction your money is coming from.

Android has no such constraints

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#793

Post by JoshTriplett »

kybernetikos wrote: post #405
bloppe wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I really wanted Capyloon to take off [1]. The idea was to build a whole mobile OS around PWAs. App Stores are just CDNs. There are no weird rules about payment processors. The ecosystem did not need to start from scratch. Unfortunately, it just never gained the necessary momentum. [1]: https://capyloon.org/

I've still got a firefox OS phone in a drawer somewhere. I was disappointed it got discontinued like so many other mozilla projects.

I was as well. It was very early, but not necessarily too early.

I think part of the problem is that they decided to have the flagship devices be low-end hardware, rather than high-end hardware. They were trying to ensure that development took low-end hardware into account, but they failed to consider that by the time the platform grew, high-end would become mid-range.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#794

Post by Anonyneko »

nikonyrh wrote: post #701
Anonyneko wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the thing is, here you can't use banking on your computer without having a bespoke authentication app on your phone. There used to be a system of one-time codes sent via paper mail, but even that has been scrapped by now, so using bank ID apps is literally the only option across all of the local banks. In my bank the ID app and the bank app are even different apps, and it's the ID app that's the truly important…

At least in Finland's Nordea bank you can order a physical code calculator, they used to be small enough to keep on your wallet but the new one is the size of an old small phone. It even has a QR scanner. So I just keep it at home.

I actually had no idea, I thought they retired these, but it seems that one of the models is still available. Thanks for the heads up!

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#795

Post by TommyTran732 »

kuhsaft wrote: post #789
fsflover wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case I do not understand why you are ignoring the words of a Librem 5 developer saying that no blobs are running on the main CPU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487

I'll take his word that no blobs are running on the main CPU. But the process itself is error prone. It's mounting flash storage with blobs into the filesystem of the OS. The OS can load modules directly from the storage. > There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do). "unless you put some there by yo…

The SOC still has firmware baked in as per usual.

And the firmware for Bluetooth/Wifi is loaded in by having the initramfs read it from the NOR flash, mount it in /lib/firmware, then it is business as usual like a desktop Linux distribution.

It's not something special. It's just a hackjob. They shuffle the files around and made it much harder to update.

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/librem5-fw-jail/-/blob/pureos...

https://puri.sm/posts/shipping-new-sparklan-wifi-cards-with-...

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#796

Post by palata »

busssard wrote: post #791
palata wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you missed my point. I am fighting for the 100% (and you are not, as you say). We should all own our devices, and owning a device means that we can install whatever OS we want on it. The beauty of it being that if you can install whatever OS you want on it, then the problem raised by the article does not exist anymore. Today, if you own a Pixel, you can just install GrapheneOS and it will mostly work. Why…

well if in the 10year future new OS are as easy installed as apps now, maybe. But that future is far off. Getting my grandma to install NewPipe is easier if Fdroid works on her phone, than to get her to install the new totallyFLOSS-OS

Have you tried installing GrapheneOS? I don't think it's harder than properly installing F-Droid and then installing NewPipe with it.

> the new totallyFLOSS-OS

Nobody said it has to be new and totally FLOSS. Just build on top of AOSP, which is open source and very mature, and that everybody knows (because it is Android :-) ).

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#797

Post by eatsyourtacos »

palata wrote: post #732

Respectfully, I think this is the wrong fight. And I fear it may be counter-productive, because all the effort put into asking Google to make it a little less painful to install an unverified app is not put into the real fight. IMHO, it should be fine for Google or Apple to do whatever they want with their OS. What should be forbidden is to prevent people from installing an alternative OS on their hardware. But this…

Sorry but what a ridiculous take. There are two phone options in the western world: iphone and android. 99.99% of the people aren't' going to even fathom they could install their own OS on a phone or whatever.

There is a clear MONOPOLY on phones and to even further take away the right to just install something on it is crazy. I already hate Apple for that, but there's no recourse in the monopolistic & capitalistic US and now it's going to be 100% gone.

"it should be fine for Google or Apple to do whatever they want with their OS"

Not when they are a MONOPOLY.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#798

Post by toss1 »

palata wrote: post #757
toss1 wrote: post #750

So much for vibe-coding apps for personal or niche use (e.g., club/sport/charity, etc.). Or will Google carve out an exception for Gemini/Antigravity/CoLab/AI Studio/Whatever? At least a usable exception, but smells a lot like antitrust lock-in if you prefer Claude/ChatGPT/DeepSeek/Whatever.

> So much for vibe-coding apps for personal or niche use You will still be able to do that...

The article has a whole page about how, while it is still technically possible, it is a massively messy, deliberately intimidating, 9-step process that takes 24 hours.

That looks to me like an entirely unusable and unacceptable situation if you want to just vibe-code up a little app to track your bike club rides or something.

The 15 minute cycle of: Looks good -» save-» install -» start debugging, oops, I've got to fix that -» repeat

Becomes a 25-hour cycle involving: Looks good -» save-» do five steps -» reboot -» wait 24 hours -» 3 more confirmation steps -» install -» start debugging, oops, I've got to fix that -» repeat

And then, now that you're determined and spend all week working through a few refinement cycles and have the app you want, you can just give it to everyone at the meetup, THEY all need to get it, do the nonsense, wait 24 hours, do more nonsense, and then finally your bike group can track their rides.

You seriously think that is acceptable?

Being able to technically do something is a very different thing than being able to practically do something.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#799

Post by TommyTran732 »

fsflover wrote: post #584
kuhsaft wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. They obscure the usage of non-free hardware/firmware by not shipping it as part of the OS, but as a bundle on separate flash storage that is loaded into the OS by initrd. That blob is updatable as "firmware". The 100% free open-source is just marketing. It's just for the OS. A lot of the hardware and firmware is proprietary. https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16... https://forums.puri.…

> The 100% free open-source is just marketing. 100% FLOSS is in the OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641 . It is not the end of the road, but this is the only phone that can run such OS. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487

It's basically taking the blobs that would be normally shipped with the OS in a sensible manner, shuffle it around, then calling it "free" while the same blobs would still be there, just on different flash storage chips.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#800

Post by krieger_857 »

greenavocado wrote: post #747
surajrmal wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can in fact side load it. There are no restrictions on apps loaded via adb. The 24H restriction period on side loading only applies to apps retrieved by other means.

Oh wow, you can sideload it? Amazing. All grandma has to do is install Android Studio, enable developer mode, tap the build number seven times, flip on USB debugging, plug into a laptop, accept an RSA key fingerprint, and pop open a terminal. You know, the way normal people install apps.

>> they do not actually give the user access to general purpose computing in the sense that the users can control exactly what computations the device is going to execute

i don't think we were talking about grandma use case

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