Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Android without the mothership

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 167 posts

Re: Android without the mothership

#101

Post by motters »

mbq wrote: post #78
aw3c2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TextSecure uses Google's push service because there is no viable alternative available.

Than, what's the point of using a secure communication app if you must also install a spying rootkit to make it work? For me it makes the whole TS not viable.

I'm also running CyanogenMod without the mothership, and that's exactly what I thought. While apps such as TextSecure appear to have a good reputation needing to install probably backdoored proprietary software to obtain them seems to defeat the objective.

Re: Android without the mothership

#102

Post by pessimizer »

euank wrote: post #55
unabridged wrote: post #52

Android is a lost cause, all the man power being donated to the project is just going to line google's pockets and lock us further into closed hardware and barely opensource phones. The only future is a real linux phone, debian or ubuntu mobile, where one day there will be effortless desktop/tablet/mobile unified development. Why push for developers to waste time porting between c++ and java?

Why no mention of FirefoxOS? The Mozilla foundation has our best interests at heart much more than Google and while it's not C++, html5/javascript is certainly an open enough platform which basically everything has started to target anyways. Sure, a pure linux phone would be cool in some ways, but FirefoxOS seems much closer, realer, and every bit as awesome.

>Sure, a pure linux phone would be cool in some ways, but FirefoxOS seems much closer, realer, and every bit as awesome.

Linux phones are real. I've been using one exclusively for the past 5 years.

Re: Android without the mothership

#103

Post by DominikR »

jlujan wrote: post #18
privong wrote: post #2

I have been running this setup (Cyanogenmod + f-droid, no google apps) for the past 9 months and have been quite happy. I use owncloud for keeping my calendar, contacts, and files sync'ed. K9mail + APG for (signed/encrypted) email. As the article notes OsmAnd is workable, but the what is available through f-droid is 2 versions behind (apparently with low chance of future updates due to difficulties building it). Many…

>I have occasionally downloaded apps through one of the APK downloader services mentioned in the article comments -- I've had mixed luck. One of the biggest issue of running Apps (open source or not) is the inclusion of the Play Store API in the app itself. These apps when not logged into the play store usually crash with NullPointerExceptions. Please... if you are an Android developer... expect your third-party serv…

I agree that an app shouldn't crash, but piracy is a problem.

Google In-App purchases are safe, so if that's how you monetize, I don't see why the app should be allowed to work anywhere else but in Google's environment.

It's different if the app is open source or you don't need to monetize (sadly, not everyone can afford that luxury), but even there it depends on how important those Play Store API features are to the functionality of the app.

Re: Android without the mothership

#104

Post by diafygi »

unabridged wrote: post #66
euank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why no mention of FirefoxOS? The Mozilla foundation has our best interests at heart much more than Google and while it's not C++, html5/javascript is certainly an open enough platform which basically everything has started to target anyways. Sure, a pure linux phone would be cool in some ways, but FirefoxOS seems much closer, realer, and every bit as awesome.

FirefoxOS is definitely a step forward and I'd love to see it overtake Android, but its only a half measure. The problem is a phone does not need to be an operating system, it would be fine as just a program/desktop environment running on linux. A phone is not a special case, there are plenty of mission critical applications that run on top of linux without having to resort to building a whole new OS.

Ummm, that's exactly what Firefox OS is. It's the Firefox engine (gecko) sitting on top of the linux kernel.

Re: Android without the mothership

#105

Post by pessimizer »

diafygi wrote: post #104
unabridged wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FirefoxOS is definitely a step forward and I'd love to see it overtake Android, but its only a half measure. The problem is a phone does not need to be an operating system, it would be fine as just a program/desktop environment running on linux. A phone is not a special case, there are plenty of mission critical applications that run on top of linux without having to resort to building a whole new OS.

Ummm, that's exactly what Firefox OS is. It's the Firefox engine (gecko) sitting on top of the linux kernel.

What unabriged means is that you don't need an entire reimplementation of the underlying OS to make calls, all you need is an Linux app that makes calls.

The purpose of reimplementation is generally to screw consumers. There's nothing special about a phone that requires you to put everything into a VM. I don't know why firefox is doing it. I did order a development phone, though, because if it takes off, I want a share:)

Re: Android without the mothership

#106

Post by pessimizer »

mike_hearn wrote: post #74
grey-area wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be really nice would be seeing a language-agnostic device. Based on linux, with the same APIs available to everyone, so that as on desktop linux, a thousand languages can bloom, and everyone can use the development language of their choice (including yet to be invented languages). GUI bindings would be the issue here of course, but it is not insurmountable. It's a shame that the software landscape is so do…

Great idea! It would make sense to define a high level yet minimalist type system, a large standard library, and a CPU independent bytecode format that many languages and compilers could target. They could then add to that basic type system as they wished whilst still retaining interoperability. We could call the infrastructure that makes this possible ... a virtual machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_l…

You're saying that we could implement a general purpose operating system inside of our general purpose operating system?

Re: Android without the mothership

#107

Post by miguelrochefort »

There should be a name for this privacy craze.

It's one of the rare instance where people can act completely irrationally (to the point of paranoia), and people will accept it as completely normal and expected.

I hope you realize how silly all of this will sound 20 years from now.

Re: Android without the mothership

#108

Post by josephlord »

jacquesm wrote: post #79
mike_hearn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reference in Java can be null, as is the case in most languages. So developers only check the ones they know "could" be null, in normal operation. If you only distribute your app via the Play Store, attempting to access it will never fail, thus there's no more point in checking for null pointers than there is in checking the result of String.split: it will never fail, short of something wacky and unexpected like…

> So developers only check the ones they know "could" be null, in normal operation. Not the good ones. Normal operation isn't when you're dealing with a mobile device, there could be any number of reasons why your app can't reach a certain service delivered by some API so better to be prepared for that eventuality.

I don't think it is a matter of not being able to reach Google the network service but the Google provided services that run on the phone (they may well then access the network and provide useful error messages that you fully handle). It is more like a case of a missing library than a loss of network connectivity. There is a good argument that you should always check anyway but there is also the argument that the app is only designed to run on devices with the Google Play services installed and that you only sell it that way so anyone without must be pirating anyway.

Besides that what do you do to handle the loss of something your app requires as a basic service? A nice error beats NullPointer but not by much.

Re: Android without the mothership

#109

Post by josephlord »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #107

There should be a name for this privacy craze. It's one of the rare instance where people can act completely irrationally (to the point of paranoia), and people will accept it as completely normal and expected. I hope you realize how silly all of this will sound 20 years from now.

There should be a name for this absolute trust in corporations to manage intimate personal details of all sorts on out behalf.

It's one of the rare instances where people can act as corporations of thousands of people will act in their long term interest and continue to do so indefinitely into the future with no oversight or transparency into their actions.

I hope you realize how silly all of this will sound 20 years from now.

Edit: This is obviously a parody of the parent comment. It doesn't absolutely reflect my views but I feel it is at least as valid a view as the parent. I do sometimes trust in certain places but I'm often uncomfortable and Google is one of the last companies I want to trust with massive amounts of personal information.

Re: Android without the mothership

#110

Post by privong »

mbq wrote: post #58
privong wrote: post #2

I have been running this setup (Cyanogenmod + f-droid, no google apps) for the past 9 months and have been quite happy. I use owncloud for keeping my calendar, contacts, and files sync'ed. K9mail + APG for (signed/encrypted) email. As the article notes OsmAnd is workable, but the what is available through f-droid is 2 versions behind (apparently with low chance of future updates due to difficulties building it). Many…

Isn't TextSecure already built into Cyanogen SMS app? And anyway dependent on the Google Play Services?

Correct, the push notification aspect is dependent on Google Play Serices (in both the stand-alone app and the CM SMS integration). But sending encrypted SMS messages works without Google Play, so the app still has functional aspects.
Post reply on HN