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Your phone is about to stop being yours

keepandroidopen.org

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Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#741

Post by storus »

palata wrote: post #732

Respectfully, I think this is the wrong fight. And I fear it may be counter-productive, because all the effort put into asking Google to make it a little less painful to install an unverified app is not put into the real fight. IMHO, it should be fine for Google or Apple to do whatever they want with their OS. What should be forbidden is to prevent people from installing an alternative OS on their hardware. But this…

ARM doesn't have any initialization/boot standard enforced on phone manufacturers so everyone is doing their own and never upstreams anything. It's a general ARM problem. PC with some lucky coincidence avoided that fate and we got used to it. RISC-V is in even worse shape than ARM as the fragmentation is even at the CPU instruction level. Both ARM and RISC-V have some discussions/proposed standards but nothing enforced anywhere.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#742

Post by palata »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #208
drnick1 wrote: post #8

I don't care, I run Graphene, and my phone is definitely mine. Most Android apps just work, and the ones that don't are the kind of malware I am happy to do without.

How can you trust graphene or it's contributors and supply chain?

Same as you can trust Google. Though GrapheneOS is entirely open source, and Google is not. And Google has been screwing you in the past.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#743

Post by palata »

mmooss wrote: post #32
drnick1 wrote: post #8

I don't care, I run Graphene, and my phone is definitely mine. Most Android apps just work, and the ones that don't are the kind of malware I am happy to do without.

Google could lock out Graphene too, whenever they like, with no warning. I hope Graphene has a plan.

That's the real fight. We should fight to make this illegal. It should be mandatory to provide the technical ability to install an alternative OS on a computer, period.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#744

Post by palata »

ninininino wrote: post #17
drnick1 wrote: post #8

I don't care, I run Graphene, and my phone is definitely mine. Most Android apps just work, and the ones that don't are the kind of malware I am happy to do without.

That's a great attitude until slowly but surely 90% of apps used in day to day life won't function for you: banking, dating, social media, e-commerce, communication/messaging etc slowly freeze you out.

Well we should fight against that, then.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#745

Post by surajrmal »

alecsm wrote: post #714
effdee wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do not actually give the user access to general purpose computing in the sense that the users can control exactly what computations the device is going to execute What prevents the creation of an App that allows one to do exactly that?

The official store won't accept it and you can't sideload it.

You can in fact side load it. There are no restrictions on apps loaded via adb. The 24H restriction period on side loading only applies to apps retrieved by other means.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#746

Post by akho »

leke wrote: post #540
NDlurker wrote: post #30

>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it. This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.

This is going to make it more difficult for non-open source projects to get a foothold in the future because people are not going to trust a promise any more. Like, I have this thing called a smart phone. Is it open source? No? Oh well.

That would be good, but somehow didn't work all the other times.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#747

Post by greenavocado »

surajrmal wrote: post #745
alecsm wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official store won't accept it and you can't sideload it.

You can in fact side load it. There are no restrictions on apps loaded via adb. The 24H restriction period on side loading only applies to apps retrieved by other means.

Oh wow, you can sideload it? Amazing. All grandma has to do is install Android Studio, enable developer mode, tap the build number seven times, flip on USB debugging, plug into a laptop, accept an RSA key fingerprint, and pop open a terminal. You know, the way normal people install apps.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#748

Post by codedokode »

palata wrote: post #732

Respectfully, I think this is the wrong fight. And I fear it may be counter-productive, because all the effort put into asking Google to make it a little less painful to install an unverified app is not put into the real fight. IMHO, it should be fine for Google or Apple to do whatever they want with their OS. What should be forbidden is to prevent people from installing an alternative OS on their hardware. But this…

This should apply not only to phones. Every device with CPU and programmable memory should allow user to reprogram it. However, the user may waive this right for purpose of theft protection.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#749

Post by palata »

danpalmer wrote: post #573

> "dismiss more scare screens" This whole website is a scare screen. There's a lot that is not being said on this page, such as the advantages of the new system, and the motivations of the authors of this site. There's a reasonable discussion to be had about trade-offs here, but this is entirely one sided, in somewhat bad faith in my personal opinion.

I agree, and this is the problem with lobbying: everyone has an agenda.

IMHO, this is not a problem: it is possible to disable the check (though it takes some clicks and 24h), and those who care should actually lobby for alternative OSes like GrapheneOS and LineageOS.

My biggest problem is that when I run LineageOS, at least on the phones I tried, it is signed with the Google test keys and the bootloader is not relocked. At the very least, it should be mandatory for manufacturers to allow running an alternative OS with proper secure boot, and it should be illegal for companies to ban OSes that are not signed by Google (through Play Integrity).

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#750

Post by toss1 »

So much for vibe-coding apps for personal or niche use (e.g., club/sport/charity, etc.).

Or will Google carve out an exception for Gemini/Antigravity/CoLab/AI Studio/Whatever? At least a usable exception, but smells a lot like antitrust lock-in if you prefer Claude/ChatGPT/DeepSeek/Whatever.

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