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

861–870 of 927 posts

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#861

Post by kulahan »

eks391 wrote: post #562
kulahan wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unbelievably useful within its own walled garden. There are lots of instances where commands, tabs, and other pieces of data transfer seamlessly between your phone and computer. You can bring your phone up as a digital version ON your laptop so you can call, text, etc. straight from it while your phone sits in the bedroom charging or whatever. Everything works really, really well. Their walled garden has always…

So would you say that the value of Apple products increases as you have more of them (higher than just the linear benefit of more products)? I've used them, but always as one offs. For example, Ive had a Mac(book? The one that you connect periphery to use) as a work computer at a previous software job, the iPhone because of a girl I dated who wouldn't be with a green bubble man, and iPad also in a previous job, so ne…

Yes, significantly. That’s a great way to put it. My dad is all-in, and I’m pretty surprised at how nice things can be.

Still, it’s like a credit card with a fee. It’s great so long as you can pay, but oftentimes it’s a nightmare to get out of if times are tough.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#862

Post by fsflover »

TommyTran732 wrote: post #852
fsflover wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487 You keep repeating this everywhere. Consider reading what a Librem 5 developer says instead, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487

Because it's true, and I know what he said, I am not confused at all. Did you not read anything at all? On the Librem laptop, the tampering is done by PureBoot and inject into /run/firmware. The other user was linking the stuff with the laptop. *On a Librem 5, it is stored on a separate chip, then they read it with the initramfs, then mount it on top of the regular filesystem at /lib/firmware*. Like I said, it's just…

I'm tired of arguing with you. I see no effort from your side to come to some understanding or to clarify anything. Here's why.

> On the Librem laptop, the tampering is done by PureBoot

What do you mean by "tampering" here? Is uploading firmware to peripherals a "tampering"? Why is this a problem, compared with other devices? Does anybof those blobs run on the CPU? I don't understand what you are trying to say.

> If you don't know that the firmware for components/peripherals can either be

I do know. How is this relevant? I never denied that the device does have some proprietary blobs.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#863

Post by xphos »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #837
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…

"But this is not all Google's doing there: all the Android manufacturers are actively preventing users from doing it." Google is (a) restricting "Android" functionality through trademark and software licenses with manufacturers and (b) paying the manufacturers, e.g., through placement agreements and revenue sharing agreements Given Google's actions in this regard, why would a manufacturer want to allow hardware purch…

I feel like you haven't read enough HN reply but I've said the exact thing about Apple OS they can have it and have HW but they should be seperate companies and the OS regulated like the monopoly service it is.

OSs are few in number and are special pieces of software supported by extreme network effects and locking in effects. Its virtually impossible to abandon mainstream OSs even in the desktop world which is much more permissive their are basically 2 OSs. You can count Linux as a third but its not a serious market share competitor yet! EU and France might change that.

But essentially total OS control allows a type of anti competitive behavior that is unavoidable. You either need 10s of options which are different in the services which isn't viable because modern OSs are some of the most complex pieces of software in existence. Your only other option is to regulate them like the power company because its not practical to build your own grid to have fair pricing and access

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#864

Post by kybernetikos »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #793
kybernetikos wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've still got a firefox OS phone in a drawer somewhere. I was disappointed it got discontinued like so many other mozilla projects.

I was as well. It was very early, but not necessarily too early. I think part of the problem is that they decided to have the flagship devices be low-end hardware, rather than high-end hardware. They were trying to ensure that development took low-end hardware into account, but they failed to consider that by the time the platform grew, high-end would become mid-range.

It's hard for me to know for sure, but to me it felt like the fact that none of the firefoxOS phones were targetted as devices developers would themselves want to use as their main phone was a big misstep in strategy.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#865

Post by dghlsakjg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #703
dghlsakjg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, many early computers were tied to the OS.

But they didn't have technology yet to do it properly , so it was trivial for people to sever the tie and install alternative OSes - trivial enough that it was also easy to teach others how to do it. Now, the tech to make that tie near-unbreakable exists.

Can you install an alternate os on the original Mac or a C64?

I was only aware of that possibility for pc clones

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#866

Post by danpalmer »

63stack wrote: post #652
danpalmer wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fair to question whether the play store is the number one source of scams, but you should also question whether google actually does enough to keep scams off of Play, or is that just a pretense. If I search for "DeepL" the first hit on the play store is "Preply" whatever that is, only the second one is actually DeepL.

Is Preply a scam, or an ad? You can dislike advertising, but ads aren't scams themselves.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#867

Post by toss1 »

palata wrote: post #824
toss1 wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article has a whole page about how, while it is still technically possible, it is a massively messy, deliberately intimidating, 9-step process that takes 24 hours. That looks to me like an entirely unusable and unacceptable situation if you want to just vibe-code up a little app to track your bike club rides or something. The 15 minute cycle of: Looks good -» save-» install -» start debugging, oops, I've got to f…

> Becomes a 25-hour cycle involving It's not a cycle. You do it once. One time you wait 24h, and that's it.

Yup, for your first version.

Now, you run it for a while, realize you need to make changes, make those changes and now have a v1.01 to use. Do you know it doesn't require a new install? It likely does, since you are not using the Google Play update mechanism.

And even if they do "allow" automatic updates of the same app without the delay, you really find this delay acceptable?

I'd be ok with a free self-certification of your own app, but forcing a 24hr delay, nope

This is way worse than "you're holding it wrong" — this is bad functionality by intentional design

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#868

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

xphos wrote: post #863
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But this is not all Google's doing there: all the Android manufacturers are actively preventing users from doing it." Google is (a) restricting "Android" functionality through trademark and software licenses with manufacturers and (b) paying the manufacturers, e.g., through placement agreements and revenue sharing agreements Given Google's actions in this regard, why would a manufacturer want to allow hardware purch…

I feel like you haven't read enough HN reply but I've said the exact thing about Apple OS they can have it and have HW but they should be seperate companies and the OS regulated like the monopoly service it is. OSs are few in number and are special pieces of software supported by extreme network effects and locking in effects. Its virtually impossible to abandon mainstream OSs even in the desktop world which is much…

"I feel like you haven't read enough HN reply but I've said the exact thing about Apple OS they can have it and have HW but they should seperate[sic] companies and the OS regulated like the monopoly service it is."

Was this under a different HN account

I went through all replies by xphos and found nothing that discussed removing IOs and running some other OS on an iPhone

What I want is for Apple to sell hardware that has no OS installed. This is actually how I prefer to buy computers today, with no OS. I just want the Apple hardware, not the Apple software

The AirPort Extreme was the closest I have seen to this wish for Apple hardware without Apple software coming true. It included Apple software, but it could be operated using a NetBSD 6.x kernel

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#869

Post by Zak »

criddell wrote: post #484
Zak wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android was very open when it was released and for some time after. Installing APKs directly was easy. Most devices had unlocked or unlockable bootloaders. An Android phone treated its user much like a PC did. More sysadmin-as-a-service type stuff is fine as long as the opt-out is easy. This isn't. I'm upset about the rug pull.

I understand. I was one of the 25 people excited about the OtherOS option on the PS3. When Sony removed that in an update I was bummed because that’s one of the reasons I bought it. You never know though. Sometimes things go the other way. When the iPhone launched there was no way to create apps for it or install third party applications except as web apps.

People keep framing it as tinkerers versus normies. That's not the real problem.

The real problem is that prior to verification, Google can't ban ICE tracking apps (or whatever the next problematic government doesn't like) from Android, and after verification they will be able to for most users.

They say they won't do that. I might even believe the people currently running things won't do that, but they will be incentivized to do that in the future, and incentives are much better at predicting outcomes than intent.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#870

Post by mmooss »

Andromxda wrote: post #838
mmooss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're partnering with Motorola to build devices with official GrapheneOS support. https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116159602850585685

GrepheneOS depends also on Google's Android OS, not only on Google's hardware.
Post reply on HN