171–180 of 467 posts
I notice my battery life is much better switching to graphine from the stock google rom.
Yes, but keep in mind individual apps like Signal need to run in the background at all times if you want to receive timely notifications on Graphene, because they cannot rely on the Google backend for that. If you have enough such apps, you may well find that battery life is shorter than on the stock OS.
https://tbot.substack.com/p/grapheneos-new-oem-partnership > GrapheneOS has officially confirmed a major new hardware partnership—one that marks the end of its long-standing Pixel exclusivity. According to the team, work with a major Android OEM began in June and is now moving toward the development of a next-generation smartphone built to meet GrapheneOS’ strict privacy and security standards.
I literally just bought a pixel this week. Just my luck.
Now if you just bought a Pixel, it will be supported for 8 years, so by this time hopefully GrapheneOS will be available on many different devices :-).
You can tell it's truly secure and private because the Cellebrite leak says they can't break it (one of very few!) and some governments assume you're a drug dealer if you use it. My next phone will run GrapheneOS.
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You're getting a lot of indirect responses. If you've ever tried to mod your android phone the answer is simple. Its google play services and hardware attestation for things like banking websites. Its really easy to make a custom rom but hard to do serious "real life" stuff; companies don't want to make it easy. To most regular users, if they cant download apps from the google play store, and they can't use venmo\cas…
This just shows that the barrier of entry of a new phone OS is more than $0. You can pay app developers to port their apps off of play services, you can pay developers to add support for your attestation keys. Considering how many billions of dollars Android makes for Google, there is a room for a return on investment for an alternate OS to enable investments into a new OS.
> You can pay app developers to port their apps off of play services, you can pay developers to add support for your attestation keys.
an additional anecdote from my time then: they came to where i was working at the time and proposed funding a windows mobile version of our app (quite a large sum) but our supervisor finally said no, because the upkeep of now 3 apps would be too much for too few customers
you cant just throw money at devs and expect much unless you have the user base (potential market) to back it up
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Has no one mentioned not using a smartphone as an option?
How do you run WhatsApp or Signal without a smartphone? Pretty hard. If your answer is "don't use them", then you're not living in a country where the vast majority of communications are done on WhatsApp or Signal, good for you I guess.
Obviously this situation can't go on. If neither of the two major players can make an open, secure, _simple_, easy-to-understand, bloat-free OS, then we somehow need another player. Presently (and I confess, my bias to seek non-state solutions may show here), it seems that a non-trivial part of the duopoly stems from regulatory capture insofar as the duopoly isn't merely software, but extends all the way to TSMC and…
I really hoped that Huawei would go for a fork of AOSP (they could even pull the changes from Google :-) ), but they chose to go with their proprietary HarmonyOS.
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This just shows that the barrier of entry of a new phone OS is more than $0. You can pay app developers to port their apps off of play services, you can pay developers to add support for your attestation keys. Considering how many billions of dollars Android makes for Google, there is a room for a return on investment for an alternate OS to enable investments into a new OS.
> You can pay app developers to port their apps off of play services, you can pay developers to add support for your attestation keys. microsoft literally tried this back in the day when android/ios was rising against windows mobile... spoiler: it didn't work an additional anecdote from my time then: they came to where i was working at the time and proposed funding a windows mobile version of our app (quite a large s…
1. It doesn't require an entirely new app. You can ship the same apk on all platforms.
2. Most apps already don't have a hard dependency on play services.
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I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly? I'm imagining a future where you buy a smartphone and when you do the first configuration, it asks you which services provider you want to use. Google and Apple are probably at the top of the list, but at the bottom there is "custom..." where you can specify the IP or host.domain of your own self-hosted setup. Then, when you downlo…
> I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly? At this point? Reliable emulation that can run 99% of Android apps, to provide a bridge until the platform is interesting enough for people to develop for it "natively". I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
Sony's cameras used to have an Android userland that they used for their PlayMemories apps. No idea how exactly that one was implemented though, but it should be possible to get Android apps without going into being an Android fork.
Why was it that in the early PC days, IBM was unable to keep a lid on 'IBM compatible', allowing for the PC interoperability explosion, yet today, almost every phone has closed drivers, closed and locked bootloaders, and almost complete corporate control over our devices? Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?
Nobody gave you the actual answer. IBM was under an antitrust decree and had to openly license their technology for a nominal fee. (Supposedly about $5/PC.) So yes, they were in a hurry and used generic parts, but they still had tons of patents on it. When they got out from under this, they came up with Microchannel.