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Linux phones are more important now than ever

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Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#381

Post by nani8ot »

frankzander wrote: post #263
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's an unintended effect of Europe regulations. Google saw Apple exploring what's the bare minimum to comply with EU regulations regarding openness. And Google is setting their bar there.

What does it have to do with the regulations? Does they forbid open phones?

Because Apple didn't want to open their ecosystem, they invested a bunch of money (and time) into "exploring what's the bare minimum required to comply with EU regulations". Now Google is locking their ecosystem down the same way because they know they are legally allowed to do so.

This is why it's an "unintended side effect" of EU regulations, as the regulations prompted Apple to find out how much user hostile behaviour they can get away with.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#382

Post by fragmede »

jbstack wrote: post #236
socalgal2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just phones. Try asking ChatGPT/Gemini anything the hive mind in SV doesn't want you to ask. Try asking it anything the hive mind as decided has only one possible answer. It's only going to get worse

At least with LLMs you have more options (Deepseek, Grok, offline models, etc.). It's still far from perfect, but it's not as bad as phones where you basically only have a choice of Android or iPhone if you don't want to have to live with major inconvenience (such as being unable to do online banking or pay for parking). It's also a lot easier to launch a competitor in the AI market: you just need capital. With phone…

> you just need capital

The capital itself isn't going to do anything sitting in the bank. It's used to procure a team of PhDs, an team of SWEs, DevOps, business people, HR, marketing, access to a GPU supercomputer (renting a couple of 5090s off Vast.ai ain't gonna cut it). For, say, $50 million, you could get the blueprints to an Android phone and port your choice of Linux userland and get drivers working, and then do a run of 20,000, sell them for $1100. Compared to training GPT5, $50 million is cheap. If we use an estimate of $1 billion for the whole thing, making a Linux phone running a hypervisor with an Android VM to run banking apps seems not-impossible. (Based on AVF.)

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#383

Post by fsflover »

t1234s wrote: post #368

I think certain "Apps" that you need to do "X" keep this from happening. You can have a super lean, private and secure linux phone using super clean, fast OSS software to do what you need to do, but what happens if you need one of the mainstream apps (Uber, etc..) to function in society with the rest of the normies. Maybe a linux phone that can dual-boot into android? I doubt we will ever see companies pulling out of…

You can run Android apps with Waydroid. If the app doesn't want to run in a non-approved environment, then you can have a problem with Android forks, too.

See also: https://puri.sm/posts/closing-the-app-gap-momentum-and-time/

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#384

Post by CuriouslyC »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #96
CuriouslyC wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do pass through attestation with access to kernelspace. There are a few things that don't pass (play protect/wildvine, but that's by design, not a limitation of linux)

And do you think that will matter in the near future? Because every app developer will just set their apps to use the highest attestation requirement by default and every normal android phone will pass that test. The few percent of people that use something else can just fuck off.

I don't think so. Google is poisoning the well with their developer policies and play store controls. The time is ripe for a competitor, and if there's a credible competitor that demonstrates the "good because goog says so" model is broken, that will force fully open attestation.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#385

Post by Zak »

shmel wrote: post #338
mr_mitm wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the threat model here is that a different, malicious app (compromised, installed accidentally or by the means of social engineering) might take screenshots of your screen and forward them to take advantage of you. You can file this under one's "own stupidity" as well, sure, but in the end they're not protecting you, they're protecting themselves, because banks might be liable for these kind of things, and by…

Are you implying that Google is unable to distinguish whether a screenshot is triggered via a combination of hardware buttons vs via a software call from another app that isn't even on the foreground in their own ecosystem? That's a quite sad state of affairs, isn't it?

I've been unimpressed with Google's commitment to making the fundamentals of Android great. They seem to prefer doing the minimum required there and putting all their efforts into something more sexy, like generating fake photos that look like they were taken with a 2400mm lens.

I don't want my phone to generate fake photos; I do want it to always let me manually take screenshots, but require turning on a permission that's a little awkward to find to allow an app to do so.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#386

Post by fsflover »

jancsika wrote: post #193
akagusu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is ready, what is not ready is the ecosystem.

Power management and cameras are working and stable on (non-Android) Linux phones? Which ones?

Librem 5 is my daily driver. The camera is not amazing, but it works fine. The battery can last one day just fine with a non-heavy use. And you can replace the battery on the go.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#387

Post by cmdr2 »

rickdeckard wrote: post #358
frankzander wrote: post #195

What I don't get (plz help me) is why out of a sudden this vendors close up their phones and why is Google going this way? What's their intend?

Less conspiratorial answer (better late than never): Google services, integrity hardening: From outside it might be difficult to understand the distinction, but Google is acting here as the owner and maintainer of a services ecosystem, which is the entire Google service-package provided to end-users. For them, Android is provided as a foundation for that package, and they increasingly experience difficulty to contain…

> Google is acting here as the owner and maintainer of a services ecosystem... > they increasingly experience difficulty to contain issues within that ecosystem and prevent them from spreading (piracy, malware, hacking,...)

I wonder if the smartphone app industry is big enough now that allowing just two corporates to govern them is no longer fair or democratic.

It has outgrown the "ecosystem" word a long time ago. It's a genuine industry now.

Apps are such a fundamental part of most people's lives now (whether they like it or not), and these two companies have a disproportionate amount of power over an entire industry.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#388

Post by pasc1878 »

NicuCalcea wrote: post #196
looofooo0 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a special place in hell for people providing non copyable text information in the form of screenshots.

The other day I wanted to send someone proof that a transaction has gone through. A screenshot would have been the obvious choice, but of course, my banking app wouldn't let me do it.

Why does a third party want to know the transaction occured?

These seems a bit like a scam. Why can't they ask the recevier?

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#389

Post by gf000 »

sharperguy wrote: post #261
VariousPrograms wrote: post #116

As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world. Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't b…

This is a big part of why Android was developed in the first place. The operating system and application architecture that makes sense on desktop just doesn't make sense on mobile. Despite the many problems Google's restrictive APIs which you are forced to use can cause for developers, they are also highly optimized for power usage.

I would argue that the legacy OS and app architecture we have on desktop OSs doesn't make sense there, either.

It's a model that worked fine in multi-user setups where you ran a single executable, so that the security per user was meaningful, but today it just sucks.

Android is quite elegant in reusing the Linux kernel's permission system, but on a granularity that actually makes sense (apps are started as separate users, and they just elevated their concept of user a level higher).

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#390

Post by fsflover »

christophilus wrote: post #13
akagusu wrote: post #5

Linux phones are useless for common people until they can run government and bank apps.

I don't agree. They're useless until they can call, text, and do video / camera reliably. With enough adoption, the rest will come, but they won't ever get adoption without nailing those basics.

Librem 5 can do all those things fine. Video is somewhat less reliable, but it works.
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