Pokemon Go, Security, and Obsolescence

Now Niantic's decision to disallow root devices, imo, is pretty regretful, as serious botters will likely be able to get around that restriction regardless. This only serves to punish users who are stuck between having a root-enabled custom ROM or a stock ROM where critical root exploits may exist.

One thing that I observed is that no one seems to be interested in producing a ROM that is both stable, has a variety of features, do not rely on root, and supports the device for a long time.

This is a shame really, because root itself breaks the security mechanism for android and users probably are not fully aware what it means when they grant applications root.

I personally got around this problem by compiling a build of CyanogenMod without root enabled, but with things like FDroid (with PrivilegeExtension) and adblock built-in to the ROM itself (albeit the update mechanism is to update the ROM it self). This is not a solution for the mass majority of users.

This problem is pretty difficult to solve and it is pretty deep, much deeper than what I'm willing to type in a single comment, so I'll stop here.

I wrote this about Android a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

The TLDR is that it'd be nice if Android was more like Windows/Intel: install the OS (i.e. AOSP), drivers (or binary driver package format and an SDK to auto-build it) and boom you're done. Clean, stock, standard. Same with many Linux distros on x86/64.

I need to write an update to the article though. Lately I've been struggling with a Clearfog ARM board, and coupled with Torvald's recent comments on Intel vs ARM, I wonder if a huge chunk of the problem is ARM itself.

I've noticed for every distro there are really specific images, not just for each ARM chipset, but for individual boards, even when those manufacture patches make it into the mainline kernel.

I haven't looked closely at Android and I'm really curious at the build system/workflow used by things like Cyanogen and Omnirom. Are kernels really specialized per device? Does the ARM architecture itself make it difficult to have general purpose kernels that will boot on all of them like in the x86/64 world?

Any ARM hardware people care to chime in?

See also, a comment from a Pokémon GO map developer on the latest API changes/rootblocking: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sp6pkg

The problem is that you don't need root for GPS spoofing. Botters also don't care about SafetyNet (used to detect root before the game starts), since they reverse engineer the API and make REST calls directly. Furthermore, there are ways around the root check - mostly involving hiding the su binary and some additional tweaks.

It is like the old days of home computers.

We had Z80, 6509, 68000 and so so, but everything else that was plugged into their pins was different.

So it doesn't matter if the Assembly is the same, the kernel also needs to talk to the hardware.

Also ARM just resells the base designs, each company usually adds they own set of Assembly instructions or fine tunes the designs in some other way.

The IBM PC clones were the only ones that had some kind of standardization going on, and even that seems to be gone now, with OEMs going to the same kind of hardware designs we used to have (everything bolted on the board).