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

Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 221 posts

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#31

Post by fifteen1506 »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #29

I wonder what the overlap is between people who put custom ROMs on their phones and those who use their phones to make actual phone calls more than once a week. I think I made my weekly phone call a couple of days ago, only because my ISP doesn't allow cancellations via email.

Android ROMs allow telephony well. Personally, I'm on GrapheneOS.

Your comment does make more sense if you're talking about non-Android ROMs. None of the existing ones convince me. See also: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospectiv...

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#32

Post by fifteen1506 »

glodalitazic wrote: post #21
jraph wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu actually pioneered the domain with Ubuntu Phone, and then abandoned it. It's been taken over by UBPorts, a community effort, with Lomiri for it's graphical environment. I don't know these much, as I think they don't let you run regular Linux apps. There are many linux mobile distributions, I think the most mature / widespread ones are Mobian, PostmarketOS and Manjaro. And UBPorts of course. Mobian has been ups…

SailfishOS is totally usable. It is not as open as some others, but they get more stuff to work

How are they, as a company, with all the Russia shenanigans (trade bans, etc.?)

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#33

Post by deng »

Has the author of this article ever used a custom ROM? There are so many free alternatives for these apps out there. If I remember correctly, LineageOS ships with their own version of Dialer/Messages anyway. I usually replace them with the versions of SimpleMobileTools, which work just fine.

The main difficulty for custom ROMs are not these standard apps. The real issues are bootloaders which cannot be unlocked, undocumented binary&buggy firmware blobs, SafetyNet, Google Play Services, and so on. Just look how Google effectively broke the AuroraStore App recently. It's getting more and more difficult to use Android without a Google Account.

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#34

Post by luca020400 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #13
tripdout wrote: post #8

Very interesting article that talks about the progression of Google's closed source app alternatives: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on... I always thought that sure, they're deprecating old apps for the closed source Google version, which sucks, but at least AOSP still comes with barebones versions. But now AOSP, a mobile phone operating system, will come without calling and texting abilit…

They're just saying they've stopped maintaining it, I'm pretty sure that puts these apps in the same situation as the Android 2 style music player that's still part of AOSP.

Their plan is to remove them altogether. Still those apps have not been maintained in years, that's the normal course of action for apps in AOSP.

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#35

Post by luca020400 »

notorandit wrote: post #14

I would like to hear from the LineageOS developers. Closed source blobs and closer-and-closer source os are calling for the disaster.

You'll hear that it's been happening since years, and while a lot of us tried to upstream some of our enhancements/changes hardly any of them got accepted ( or anyone is actively working on those apps to review them properly ). This changes nothing, we'll keep using our forks that didn't see a single change from Google in years at this point :)

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#37

Post by yMEyUyNE1 »

0xedd wrote: post #30

Great opportunity to take the plunge into a Linux phone, like Pinephone. Still in beta quality but with more people, more can be done. Personally, I daily drive it with compromise. Had I been a secretary, it wouldn't cut it.

I am waiting for PostmarketOS to go mainstream.

Re: Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

#39

Post by luca020400 »

CrampusDestrus wrote: post #22
crote wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you call Windows "open source" just because you run a few open source apps on it? Google is slowly but surely turning more and more components of Android into closed source code. This is a targeted effort to kill AOSP and lock consumers into their ecosystem. The end result will probably look a lot like macOS: a few open source parts, but primarily a proprietary stack.

Windows is not open source, AOSP is

A lot of people still don't see how the operating system as a whole is open source, not having properly supported open source apps is not the best, but while we can make apps and/or update the aosp versions, we can't make an operating system...
Post reply on HN