261–270 of 359 posts
If I wanted to buy a new phone that I could root, install a custom ROM on, and use without voiding the warranty, what's the current best bet? One Plus used to be pretty good, but they've gone down in freedoms and up in price. Samsung are an obvious no. The entire design of the iPhone is specifically aimed at keeping the user out of it. Linux phones aren't usable yet. The shop on the /e/ foundation website seems to be…
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When you buy a new car they have the VIN of the car and log any recall repairs done. So not sure how you think the same wouldn't be legal on a phone? Having a device in their database as NEVER_UNLOCKED takes away any onus from having to look for this in the first place for a large % of users. Additionally this is kind of important for a company that's had a history of selling devices with hardware defects. It'd be ve…
>Having a device in their database as NEVER_UNLOCKED takes away any onus from having to look for this in the first place for a large % of users. Which court case are you citing?
Collecting that data is about not wasting time looking for issues caused by unlocking and not grouping unlocked device issues in with locked device issues.
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Yeah, the state of affairs with Google is better than any other mainstream vendor. It seems lame that you have to phone home to unlock a new device, but it's nothing compared to what they could be doing.
OnePlus has no such restrictions that I've seen, from the One to the 8T. I haven't heard of them locking down newer ones either. You just run the usual command to unlock the bootloader, no funny business. I've run a custom ROM on all of them that I've owned.
Their security patch and update support for hardware is also abysmal.
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Maybe make a phone that cannot be bricked by any software? A phone that can always be reset to a clear state with a factory reset? I'd argue that it's possible in 2023.
The PinePhone can boot from an SD even if the eMMC install isn't working, so it kinda fits the description. You can either run an OS from the SD or boot an image to fix/reinstall on the eMMC.
> connect the device to the Internet before they are allowed to install the operating system they want Phoning home before undertaking such an activity takes away the ownership rights from the customers. They do not actually own these devices even after they have purchased them. The reason is that an important part of their ownership rights, i.e. the freedom to use the software of their choice, has been withheld from…
Yep, my Pixel 2 is as good as dead because the bootloader can't be unlocked, Google refuses to do anything about it, and software updates stopped a long time ago. Great way to lose me as a customer.
Now I kust try to make up my mind regarding CalyxOS on the Pixel 7. The pure Google andrpid looks good, I think I turned most of the tracking off (unique add ID to improve persobal adds, WTF?). But there are still some annoying things, e.g this crappy, unremovable, Google search bar. If Ibread correctly, one can go back from CalyxOS to stock android now, right? Not that I would really mind so, I didn't miss anything the last couple of years except maybe Google maps at some occassions, and I could have installed that using microG and Aurora store.
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Samsung does the same fwiw for their newest phones. Pretty annoying.
I was never able to get lineage working on my old s8
i was just considering switching to android after hitting “you’ve created too many apps in the last 7 days” and couldn’t build a project in xcode. glad to see that would be a waste of time and that everything sucks.
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> So I’m guessing with this you’d use an alternative store like F-Droid instead of the Play Store? Not necessarily, but that's the best way to do it. Between apps from F-Droid and a browser, you don't need any apps from the play store. Your bank doesn't have an app on F-Droid you might say? Well that's what the browser is for.
Don't bank apps complain if the phone is rooted or runs anything than a stock OS?
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
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So I’m guessing with this you’d use an alternative store like F-Droid instead of the Play Store? (Pardon my ignorance, I’m an iOS dev and have been for a decade; I don’t really know the Android landscape.)
> So I’m guessing with this you’d use an alternative store like F-Droid instead of the Play Store? Not necessarily, but that's the best way to do it. Between apps from F-Droid and a browser, you don't need any apps from the play store. Your bank doesn't have an app on F-Droid you might say? Well that's what the browser is for.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
You can use Aurora Store with an anonymous account or just use Google Play with a throwaway Google account.
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The unlocked bootloader warning screen isn't very different from what you described [1]. It says: > The bootloader is unlocked and software integrity cannot be guaranteed. Any data stored on the device may be available to attackers. Do not store any sensitive data on the device. Visit this link on another device: g.co/ABH It's already pretty strong language (and very accurate! which is a rare combination). [1] https:…
Ah, that's much better than the thread had me believe! Kudos to the security folks at Google.