651–660 of 927 posts
Russian here, a former Android and iPhone user. I had to switch to Graphene OS in full paranoid more due to our worsening situation regarding VPNs and phone searches. After about a month of using Graphene OS, I'm not looking back – it's great. I'm not recommending it as a 100% solution for everyone, but it's definitely a very solid practical step towards keeping the phone yours: 1. Your phone will be able to operate…
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Sometimes reality is one sided, I personally see zero advantage to the new system. And I don't see how this change adresses the number one source of scams, the Play Store.
Is the Play Store the number one source of scams though? It might be in absolute terms, but Google has said malware off Play is 50x higher, and clearly Google does a huge amount of work to keep scams off Play. It seems logical to have a multi-faceted approach and try to reduce malware distribution elsewhere.
If I search for "DeepL" the first hit on the play store is "Preply" whatever that is, only the second one is actually DeepL.
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I don't know if that is sarcasm, but a chair I buy is mine to do whatever I want with it. Same goes for clothes, a mattress, paint, or any other non-software enabled physical item. Why does having software/hardware make a difference?
Because your clothes and paint do not need security updates, since they do not talk to the internet. Your mattress cannot be made part of a botnet.
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If you look at the workflows for these changes, you'll notice that some of them are actually there to prevent you from doing stuff under duress. Like it or not, if one wants security some freedom will need to be moved elsewhere. And since the market is heading that way, the only thing we can do is form an android sandbox SIG and maintain a fork for enthusiasts.
Let's not be naive by pretending improving user security is the main purpose of that move.
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Speaking as someone who has built local-only apps (partially because I don’t want the hassle of maintaining a server): There are plenty of useful apps that run locally on a phone. You can even run a whole LLM on your phone. The shiniest and most popular apps are cloud terminals but the iPhone is actually a pretty darn powerful device.
Plenty of useful apps != general purpose computing capabilities. You are not allowed to run computations that have not been approved by Apple if you are using an iPhone. Yes, the hardware is powerful, but it is cryptographically locked down. It is physically local, but the control of the hardware is entirely non-local and 100% owned by Apple.
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Alongside TV we had cameras, and families across the country filming birthdays and other special occasions. Alongside newspapers we had 'zine culture and mail-order pamphlets. There has always been the option to contribute - the Apple iPhone is quite possibly the first exception.
You could film and put it on your tv, but you couldn’t create and distribute to the medium at large
Let me play out a scenario, imagine to use a Desktop Hardware like a complete built rig, you would need a specific OS like Windows 11 and you could not run Linux on it, just because it's a vendor lock-in. Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above? I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
All modern devices are appliances, not computers.
They perform the specific functions that they were programmed to perform, and do not allow arbitrary execution of calculations on the underlying hardware.
Many people, mostly folks who adopt the Apple ecosystem, see this as a positive thing that allows them to delegate undifferentiated decisions on security and ways of working to the vendor.
I am one of those people and hope that Android remains open so that people don't expect Apple open up their hardware, which will result in fragmentation.
On my Android phone's home screen I have 23 apps, 11 of them are my own. If Android prevents me from installing my own apps I will switch to something else.
Tell us more about your 11 apps!
- spending tracking app
- notepad
- RSS reader just for my YouTube subscriptions
- dumbed down browser that can only show YouTube video and nothing else (no suggestions, no comments)
- space sim game
- RC boat remote control
- micro photo led ring Bluetooth control app
- magnetometer control app
- RSS reader for news
- browser
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I've been using it for a bit over a year. Installed in a few minutes thanks to WebUSB. A bit of research needed to set the right permissions on Google Play Services. After that? I only had one application fail due to Graphene's memory allocator. No weird bugs, no need to restart like some siblings are commenting. As close to the "Graphene just works" as it could be. However, I'm not heavy into Google's ecosystem. Goo…
The interaction of secondary users with RCS is borked to all hell. It just plain doesn't work. Firefox + stock keyboard stopped properly working three days ago, it's back to normal now. No idea what that was about. Restarting was the only way I found to get things working again during that period. While on the stock Android keyboard, it is clear that the Google one is much better at correcting my taps than the stock…
I don't use RCS and Android Auto.
I have HeliBoard to replace Stock/Google Keyboard. It is way ahead the stock keyboard experience but far behind Google Keyboard's, especially when writing in two languages.
Tap-to-pay works with my bank apps. But that means I can only use one card unlike with GPay.
I rarely use second account as the latency to switch from one account to the other is a pain. I only have a secondary sending notifications to the first one.
I don't let the phone auto-reboot for installs, I let it install automatically and click reboot when I want it to install.
I am on a physical SIM / different carrier and never encountered network issues so I can't comment on that one.
Let me play out a scenario, imagine to use a Desktop Hardware like a complete built rig, you would need a specific OS like Windows 11 and you could not run Linux on it, just because it's a vendor lock-in. Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above? I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
So you mean, Macs and macOS? All modern devices are appliances, not computers. They perform the specific functions that they were programmed to perform, and do not allow arbitrary execution of calculations on the underlying hardware. Many people, mostly folks who adopt the Apple ecosystem, see this as a positive thing that allows them to delegate undifferentiated decisions on security and ways of working to the vendo…