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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

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Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#461

Post by Explore4526 »

anonym29 wrote: post #317

You don't have to sacrifice your privacy to use Android. GrapheneOS is a tremendous alternative, and even if you still need some Play Store applications, you can install a GMS compatibility layer and Play Store in either a secondary profile (recommended) or your main profile (not recommended) without granting Google unfettered control over your entire operating system. This compatibility layer offers a better reducti…

The problem is GrapheneOS is Pixel only. They are prohibitively expensive, especially in India where the mobile market is very crowded and you get Snapdragon 8s gen 3 for ₹25k.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#462

Post by Explore4526 »

dvrj101 wrote: post #456
bloomingeek wrote: post #342

Perhaps crazy question: is it a good idea to have two phones now? One for making calls only, with as many apps as possible removed. And another phone for email, web surfing, photos, etc...? edit: Oops, I left out texting. Which phone for that?

phones had/some still have user profile/account option so you can do this on a single phone

Why is that feature removed by companies? It still exists in vanilla Android, but for some reason the phones sold don't have it.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#463

Post by crazygringo »

nazgul17 wrote: post #437
crazygringo wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not providing concrete examples is a weakness. You're awfully arrogant in making a judgement about my empathy... if you want to make this personal. Or maybe you can justify why people need to be able to select menu labels in the first place? That's not standard on any OS I've ever used, so it's up to the person who wants to change things to justify why. Maybe be less judgmental of people here on HN, and contribut…

A simple and concrete example is, go to Japan, find yourself in need of using any Japanese-only app, be extremely frustrated in not even being able to select text to translate it. At least in recent versions of Android there is that OCR (?) powered functionality to select text when you're in switch-app view.

Thank you for the example!

I would suggest that these days you'd be much better off taking a screenshot and putting that into Google Translate.

That way all the text remains in-place, and you can keep it as a visual reference to refer to.

If you were selecting text, it would wind up in a kind of jumble that would be much harder to use.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#464

Post by ignoramous »

NotPractical wrote: post #404
ignoramous wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more recent (2023) sandboxing + isolation overview by the Android team: https://arxiv.org/html/1904.05572v3/ (section 4.3)

> Android’s security design has fundamentally been based on a multi-party authorization model: an action should only happen if all involved parties authorize it. > these are user, platform, and developer (implicitly representing stakeholders such as content producers and service providers). Any one party can veto the action. How is this not anti-user? It explicitly states that the app developer should be able to veto…

Under the shared responsibility model, such veto makes sense. Just because the end-user (the app has no way to determine if it was a thief or a spy or a monkey or the actual device owner) approves of an action doesn't mean the OS and the app have to grant authorization.

I can see how such a setup is hostile to power users, but then Android is used by 50% of all humanity, and your guess is as good as mine as to just how many want "sudo make me a sandwich" level of control.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#465

Post by robertlagrant »

fluidcruft wrote: post #364
captn3m0 wrote: post #69

The ACTION_MAIN loophole has been written about before: https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/04/05/android-r-package-vi... Google refuses to patch this. I wonder what would happen if you submit it to the Android VDP as a permission bypass. There’s also this SO question by the author about the bypass: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79527331

It seems like the ACTION_MAIN loophole could be fixed (eventually) if apps that declare it are required to actually be launchers. It seems like legitimate integrations should have more specific intents. At that point, Android prompting if random game you just downloaded should be your defaut launcher seems pretty dangerous interaction for sneaky apps to risk. They either cause the user to bounce and report or the foo…

That sounds very sensible.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#467

Post by fudged71 »

graemep wrote: post #284

The HSBC UK Android app look s at what apps you have, and refuses to run if you have apps with certain permissions (such as an alternative launcher) and now refuses to run if you have any apps from outside the Google app store. I have complained about this here before, but the end result was that I asked for a hardware security device and use the website instead.

That's pretty funny, right? They have to spy on you to tell you what else you are using could be spying on you. Do they happen to say this data is not transmitted to the company?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#468

Post by nsonha »

divan wrote: post #336
mojuba wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, browser apps do have their advantages: - text is selectable - content is zoomable - you can have an ad/nuisance blocker - page source is open While native apps have their own advantages: - much smoother experience esp. navigation, scrolling, animations, etc. - better overall performance (JavaScript will always lose to the native binary) - access to hardware opens new possibilities; audio, video accelerato…

> browser apps do have their advantages: These are more like byproduct of the fact that web apps are built on the stack not suited for modern UI apps. It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI. So, it can also be framed as: - everything is selectable, even what shouldn't be - buttons, drawers, video players, etc - content is zoomable, which most of the time j…

Web just have defaults that are not suitable for apps. Disable text select is one line of css, not that hard.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#469

Post by nsonha »

rezonant wrote: post #298
jonplackett wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to wonder about the motivations of the company making the browser that makes it impossible to disable some of these things, and therefore makes real apps so much superior (like swipe to go back on safari - I have never ever swiped back intentionally in over 100000 swipe backs).

> I have never ever swiped back intentionally in over 100000 swipe backs Real question here, what are you trying to do when you "swipe back"?

This swipe thing violates one of the most basic ux principles by making a destructive action easily triggered by accident.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#470

Post by nsonha »

jb1991 wrote: post #252
turblety wrote: post #137

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

This is a bizarre take. Are you also suggesting there’s no reason to have a native app on a laptop? Because it’s essentially the same question. There are many things which a native app can do that a browser just cannot do well, or at all. I don’t know what your needs are, but for example if you’re doing heavy video or audio editing, accessing heavy amounts of RAM or utilizing GPU compute or doing other things on the…

On desktop you do productive work, your apps need native capabilities. On mobile, apps are primarily consumption, displaying, browsing... no complex interactions.
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