Keep Android Open

The government supports this, and might have demanded it through backchannels.

The government loves the concentration of media, because it usually limits the people who can own information flows to a very few people who are already deeply connected to government, or at the very least it limits the number of people you have to threaten or bribe to get what you want.

> So the people need to make some kid if a mass movement to rebel.

The point of controlling media is that people are isolated and can't do anything like this. They have no idea what is going on other than what they are told by massive corporations, and have all interpersonal communication mediated and regulated. They're even convinced to demand this, or evil people from other countries might take over their minds and molest their children. If they advertise these beliefs as often as possible, they will see this reflected in better, easier jobs with far higher salaries.

People who ever publicly contradict these beliefs will be put on many, many lists and their friends, family, random strangers, current or potential employers, providers of credit or banking services, and people who rent housing will be encouraged to also mock, threaten and isolate the people on the lists, or be mocked, threatened and isolated themselves.

When you're isolated, it doesn't matter if you're right and if what has been done to you is obviously unfair. Nobody will notice.

I could very well be wrong, but my inclination is that it's possible, but it's going to take the sort of fundamentals R&D that desktop operating systems haven't seen in decades. It can't just be tacked on, everything to be designed with this new system in mind.

As long as everybody knows that you are just talking, but in the end you are basically fine with everything and declare "pragmatism" and all those lame excuses from the last ~20 years, there will never be any actual movement for the better. So why taking care and constantly having those lengthy debates?

Is it just your way to deal with frustration? Or what are these discussions actually for?

I'm really just asking, because I'm actually asking that myself since quite some time now. I just don't get it. The same for some other yet similar topics, e.g. having these dependencies to corporate social media, ..., ...

Additional thought: I also constantly find people somewhere, fighting some decades old fight, e.g. against Windows and Microsoft, and how bad it is in terms of privacy, sovereignty, freedom, ..., and Recall, etc.; but if you ask them "Do you use WhatsApp?", they don't even have a clue why you ask...

IMHO, if the community isn't able to recognize that entire mindset as problematic AND find some actual solutions for it, there is no value in all these discussions.

> I can't imagine what would happen if everybody was running something without any sandboxing.

I don't think anyone implied that? Having root or signature spoofing or even the ability to install kernel modules doesn't imply anything about the rest of the security model.

Because, as I said in a sibling comment and cosmic_cheese notes further below, this requires rethinking the usage model altogether: files and folders, and even file types, don't work anymore.

If an app needs to access any related files, it basically needs access to my entire $HOME, and once that is granted, well, any sandboxing is out the window.

I think Linux community is well aware of that, and basically what we get from sandboxing of desktop apps is all the nuisance with no benefit.

Android model is also broken from a usage perspective: having files "owned" by an app is just as wrong, and precludes there being multiple apps operating on the same file. Example of VLC with subtitles is a common one, but if you've never used multiple apps on the same file, this is the challenge that is unsolved by any sandboxing approach today, because it is more of a UX problem, than a sandboxing technical problem.