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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

#391

Post by GuB-42 »

hypeatei wrote: post #62
jeffparsons wrote: post #17

My Android phone prevents me from taking screenshots if an app author doesn't want me to. My Android phone prevents me from recording phone calls at the request of my carrier, even though it's totally legal for me to do so in my jurisdiction. I'm not loving where this is all going.

> prevents me from taking screenshots if an app author doesn't want me to The most frustrating part about this "feature" is that you don't know it's enabled until the screenshot is taken and you're left with a picture of nothing. That and some app authors thinking they're protecting you with this (referring to banking apps in particular)

It is not for preventing you from taking screenshots, if you insist, you can do it with another camera. It is to prevent malware and "helpful" AI tools from doing it for you and then uploading the picture to who knows where. Signal does this too, though I think it is optional.

Beyond preventing screenshots, it blacks out the window content in the task switcher, which is useful if someone is looking over your shoulder. This, by the way, is a good way to check if screenshots are allowed. If the window appears black in the task switcher, screenshots won't work.

The idea is similar to the "**" password fields.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#392

Post by pasc1878 »

7e wrote: post #85
craftkiller wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the default phone app on GrapheneOS supports recording phone calls.

Did a nation state ask GrapheneOS to add that feature?

Why?

I would very much like to record phone calls made by me.

When the company on the other end denies what we agreed a recording would be useful.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#393

Post by fsflover »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #95

Apologies if the idea is absurd, but wouldn't a Linux handheld without a cell modem be easier to build and distribute? Think something of an analogue to iPod Touches, which were iPhones sans the the phone part. This would skip a lot of the regulatory red tape, bring down costs, and make the devices more accessible so they’re in more developers’ hands. They’d have to tether from your primary phone which isn’t ideal, b…

Librem 5 already exists, so there's no need to develop a handheld without a modem.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#394

Post by gf000 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #284
sharperguy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The architecture can work if enough smart people are put to work on it. That's how Apple managed to turn macOS into a mobile operating system. I think UBPorts and Sailfish prove that Linux for phones is practical if you're willing to rely on Linux applications that stick to mobile friendly APIs. You need to configure and compile your Linux kernel for aggressive power saving, of course. Seeing how Linux currently stru…

But I mean, why not take the 100s of thousands of man-hours that went into making Android this very Linux-Kernel based mobile OS and build on top?

Will you be happy with xeyes and a terminal? Like, even a technically superior solution is completely useless without an ecosystem to make use of it, and desktop GTK/qt apps won't work nicely on mobile without actual porting. Let alone a technically significantly inferior one that is a misfit in this shape for mobile hardware.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#396

Post by gf000 »

rolandog wrote: post #314
jeroenhd wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBports (the maintained fork of the dead Ubuntu Touch project) runs fine with systemd/upstart/wayland. Hell, my watch runs Tizen and that's running a bog standard Wayland + PulseAudio + systemd setup: https://docs.tizen.org/platform/porting/system/#systemd With the right kernel drivers, configuration, and tweaks, with a well-configured userland on top of that, you can run the "normal" Linux stack in a mobile device.…

That's quite interesting. How would one go about making one's app or services suspend/resume friendly? Are there well-known good practices?... Or, do they need to be rediscovered as they are perhaps proprietary know-how?

By making a soft and then a hard suspend the reality they have to abide by, or otherwise they are killed and users will think they are broken apps.

Mobile apps just had to "grow up" in this environment, plus they have proper APIs for this two-way communication between OS and the app. Android will just ask the app to save its state and then simply unload it from memory (after a while) - but this also makes perfect sense for the desktop scene, you also want to improve energy efficiency there. A spreadsheet app doesn't have to continuously run when it's in the background. You just have to add proper APIs and permissions so that apps can optionally ask for extra background work.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#397

Post by thuruv »

redbell wrote: post #395

Unrelated question: What is this feddit.org site? It seems like reddit but I have never heard about it! I checked and it appears this is the very first post ever posted here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=feddit.org

born as the federated edition of reddit, gained traction over the mass exodus.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#398

Post by gf000 »

fsflover wrote: post #380
codethief wrote: post #315

While I share the concerns about Android, it feels silly to me to go back to Linux's (nonexistent) security model and bad mobile UI/UX. Why not try to fork AOSP or GOS (for broader device compatibility, even if it means giving up some its sexy security properties)? Note that this could include packaging Linux GUI applications as Android APKs (with some additional glue code and Wayland/DBus integration of course), so…

> I share the concerns about Android > Why not try to fork AOSP or GOS Which concerns do you share? Both AOSP and GOS must follow the Google development strategy, they aren't exactly independent on Google (which is a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925 ). Nevertheless GOS on Librem 5 or Pinephone would be a nice idea, except the GOS developers are against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

> Linux's security model is based on trusting the software you're installing from the FLOSS repositories,

That's not a security model, and we don't live in fairyland.

Just take a look how well this works with npm packages. It just so happens that emacs plugins are not the most worthwhile target for attackers.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#399

Post by fsflover »

gf000 wrote: post #398
fsflover wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I share the concerns about Android > Why not try to fork AOSP or GOS Which concerns do you share? Both AOSP and GOS must follow the Google development strategy, they aren't exactly independent on Google (which is a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925 ). Nevertheless GOS on Librem 5 or Pinephone would be a nice idea, except the GOS developers are against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

> Linux's security model is based on trusting the software you're installing from the FLOSS repositories, That's not a security model, and we don't live in fairyland. Just take a look how well this works with npm packages. It just so happens that emacs plugins are not the most worthwhile target for attackers.

> npm packages

This has nothing to do with what I said. npm is not a trusted or a FLOSS repository.

> we don't live in fairyland

When did you see a malware in Debian's repositories last time?

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#400

Post by everdrive »

nc30 wrote: post #350
3036e4 wrote: post #308

My next phone will almost certainly be two phones. One cheap and super standard Android phone to just run banking apps and similar that insists on Google Play etc. Locked down and boring, turned off most of the time. Then a second phone for everything else (terminal with sshd, emacs, emulators, media players ... the stuff that allows a phone to be the general purpose computer it should be). Looks increasingly unlikel…

I am starting to do that but I still find that will be annoying to keep up. The dumb device will need to be kept up-to-date because that's important for e.g banking apps so that automatically excludes "old" devices (usually 3+ years old) because most stop getting updates that fast. Even LineageOS isn't an option because it does not pass Google's integrity checks so I am afraid I will need to buy a new dumb phone ever…

On my to-do list is to join a local credit union after checking whether all services are available in person. All this mess is not worth simply being able to do stuff from my phone.
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