Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your phone is about to stop being yours

keepandroidopen.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 927 posts

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#761

Post by empyrrhicist »

Klonoar wrote: post #165
empyrrhicist wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the vastly superior apple experience After switching away from GrapheneOS to iOS after RCS stopped working for me, I can safely say my experience has been the opposite. The camera is the only thing better for me on iOS - everything else is buggier and worse. A few of my favorites: 1. Safari is buggy as hell, and requires installing apps to run things like ad blockers. 2. The settings are ALL over the place and very…

(4) is 100% you having a particular user preference and not a real bug with the system.

Fine, the whole post was explicitly "my experience" but I think it's a reasonable gripe - why is it not configurable, and why did it take me so long to sift through the impenetrable settings structure to figure out that it wasn't configurable?

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#762

Post by falcor84 »

kuboble wrote: post #688
modo_mario wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s like saying my car isn’t really a car because I can’t adjust spark timing. What if it only drives along select predetermined monetised routes?

Even a car that you are not allowed to drive at all is still a car. It just isn't your car.

Exactly!

Our argument shouldn't be about the device's capabilities, but about its ownership. And increasingly, as this enshittification progresses, the person buying the device is becoming less and less its owner.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#763

Post by echelon »

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…

> Respectfully, I think this is the wrong fight.

Respectfully, no.

There are no mainstream OS alternatives. You're standing up to fight for 0.000001% of users and leaving everyone else stuck.

Fighting to win our phones back is fighting for the 99.99999%.

These devices are the most important part of everyone's digital world. Certainly the non-technical folks. You can't even order food at restaurants anymore without them. You can't date or socialize as a young person without one. It's becoming your state-issued ID. It's everything.

And two companies control everything you do.

They need to be stripped of all of their power to constrain these devices. Once you buy the device, it's yours.

These belong to society. Not the two giant monopolies that won a battle decades ago and forever get to sit atop their pile of gold like dragons. They should never be able to dictate the world downstream, and certainly not with the authority they have today.

Web installs. No scare walls. No hidden menu settings. First class distribution and support for web sans app store. No ability for these companies to strong arm.

They're taxing all of human innovation. Any time you want to reach someone, they stand in the way. They ask for 30%, they mandate the tech, the updates, they divorce you from choosing payments, login, your ability to talk to your customer.

As a consumer this means new tech companies can't start and grow big and fight the incumbents. The incumbents can move anywhere and dump on it. They can put a ceiling on outside innovation and copy or acquire it on the cheap.

All of tech is becoming a lock and shackle authoritarian regime with permanently fixed leaders, ossified tech, and banana republic fleecing of everything new. This is bad for consumers and freedom and innovation.

Respectfully - no. You're wrong. These companies need to be slapped hard by every regulatory body in the world.

They shouldn't have freedom. They should have responsibility they're fearful of. And they should have competition.

Competition is good. Capitalism should be hard. Apple and Google should be sweating, not coasting. This should be a responsibility, not a fish in barrel situation.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#764

Post by falcor84 »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #722
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken. But I think we can say that smartphones and tablets are definitely not "general-purpose computers" because they are not programmable, at least not freely so.

But they are programmable, very freely even. Whether you can start any desired program on the device is the crucial point. Having gates, doesn't influence what's inside the gates.

I'm reminded of Zed Shaw's argument about how python3 should not be considered Turing-complete if it can't run python2 code. It was a fun rhetorical exaggeration that I felt helped clarify that it isn't unable to run python2 code, but rather that the people in charge decided that it shouldn't.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#765

Post by paulnpace »

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.

I think the real issue here is hardware attestation. GrapheneOS will not protect you.

I will believe the GrapheneOS-Motorola project is a thing when I receive the phone.

Google hates real competition. They blasted out Chrome when Firefox was really taking off and normies were discovering adblocking. Chrome allowed adblocking as a honeypot until everybody was safely in their garden.

The goal in this for Google is to support digital ID. Every totalitarian goal currently being employed requires a digital ID and phones are how they want citizens to access their digital ID (the actual digital ID is created, owned, and managed by the regime, though they will outsource). However, this requires a phone they completely control. Google doesn't care about GrapheneOS or Agoristic users and will lock them out without even thinking twice about it.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#766

Post by tremon »

brookst wrote: post #686
jlokier wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with Google accounts, it's not hypothetical, it's a risk. People do occasionally get locked out of being an Apple developer for reasons they cannot foresee. > Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 > Apple bans entire dev account, no reason given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601548

It’s still rhetorical sleight of hand. I could have a stroke that leaves me unable to program. Does that mean I am not truly free to program today? Those are risks, but they do not change the on-the-ground reality today, and the claim was that users, today, cannot use these device as general purpose computers.

The rhetorical sleight of hand is yours, by claiming that a device requiring pre-authorization (by virtue of needing a developer account) is an open computing platform.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#768

Post by II2II »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #583

Someone here on HN used the term "cloud terminal" for modern electronic devices, and I think that is a very fitting name for phones and tablets. They are definitely not computers because 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. They are just terminals whose production costs we cover but whic…

> Someone here on HN used the term "cloud terminal" for modern electronic devices, and I think that is a very fitting name for phones and tablets.

Not really, at least not in the case of Android.

We have been able to install (and develop) software for these devices since day one. To me, that is pretty much a general purpose computer. The only real difference are peripherals, which is better suited for content consumption than creation. Even then, it is trivial to add a keyboard, mouse, or printer. Other forms of I/O are "walled off" behind permissions, but most of those have to do with privacy (very few computers have things like GPS, accelerometers, etc.). The big difference after that is the cellular modem, where security is a big concern. Yet that mostly affects phones.

I'm not sure I would even agree with it in the case of iOS. The distinguishing difference between iOS and Android is that the development and distribution of third-party software is restricted by the vendor. I don't think that makes it any less of a computer.

Contrast that to the typical ereader. Technically it is a general purpose computer, but most ereaders are developed to support a singular purpose. You aren't going to be installing third-party apps in the course of normal usage.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#769

Post by jech »

code_duck wrote: post #446
jech wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m aware of alternate mainframe OSs but I’m not sure how common using one was. Extremely common at major universities and research centres. CTSS, ITS, TENEX, Multics, Unix and even VM/370 were all alternate operating at some point. > Other than OS2, alternate OSs for other systems were rather rare, You weren't there, were you? A lot of people replaced MS-DOS with DR-DOS before Microsoft deliberately broke it with…

Didn’t Microsoft somehow ruin Dr DOS? Not technically, but didn’t they sue them or something? Which would mean this is the same issue, 40 years later. Yes, I was there on the 80s, but I had a Commodore 64. We did use GEOS, if that counts. I was not present for the 70s.

> Didn’t Microsoft somehow ruin Dr DOS?

They added some obfuscated code to Windows 3.1 that made it refuse to run on DR-DOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#770

Post by palata »

echelon wrote: post #763
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…

> Respectfully, I think this is the wrong fight. Respectfully, no. There are no mainstream OS alternatives. You're standing up to fight for 0.000001% of users and leaving everyone else stuck. Fighting to win our phones back is fighting for the 99.99999%. These devices are the most important part of everyone's digital world. Certainly the non-technical folks. You can't even order food at restaurants anymore without th…

I feel like you missed my point. I am fighting for the 100% (and you are not, as you say). We should all own our devices, and owning a device means that we can install whatever OS we want on it. The beauty of it being that if you can install whatever OS you want on it, then the problem raised by the article does not exist anymore.

Today, if you own a Pixel, you can just install GrapheneOS and it will mostly work. Why just "mostly"? Not because of GrapheneOS. Because of some goddamn companies (usually banks) who want to lock you into the Google flavour of Android.

If you own another device, maybe you could install LineageOS or /e/OS, but chances are that you won't be able to relock the bootloader, so you will lose the security model of Android. For many people, this should mean that it's not a reasonable option. But that's not LineageOS' or /e/OS' fault: it's the manufacturer's fault: they are locking you into the Google flavour of Android (which many times also means their own flavour based on top of the Google flavour).

And on many other devices, you just cannot install an alternative OS at all, so you are stuck with the Stock OS.

You are essentially saying "it is fine that 99.99999% of the people are locked into their manufacturer flavour of Android, as long as we can keep using F-Droid" (because really, the changed discussed here mostly affects F-Droid, and it would be debatable whether or not F-Droid's design is fine or not).

I disagree, it is not fine. When we buy an Android device, we should be able to install an alternative OS, period. All of us.

Post reply on HN