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Your phone is about to stop being yours

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Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#891

Post by modo_mario »

dpark wrote: post #803
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?

That’s still a car. You could own a race car that cannot legally be driven on any public roads and it’s still a car. I agree with brookst that this sort of redefinition is a poor rhetorical tool.

Well it's still a vehicle but once something sufficiently deviates in form or function or the like it will no longer primarily be called that. People usually say they took a taxi for example rather saying they came by car even when every taxi is a car. Once that happens they start taking up different mental spots and comparisons between them start to make less and less sense. (saying you don't see the value of self driving capabilities because you can just get a taxi for example.)

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#892

Post by modo_mario »

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.

Sure. But a taxi is a car yet it doesn't quite take up the same mental spots. People will say they came by taxi instead of by car. People won't say they don't see the value in selfdriving capabilities or repairability because they can just get a taxi. Etc

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#893

Post by palata »

kuhsaft wrote: post #874
xphos wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, I think regulation is what keeps them in power. They are major companies that comply with government regulations. Why would the government regulate to allow people to have devices that forgo government regulations? If you want a successful mainstream operating system. It needs to work within the rules of society. It needs to comply with regulations. It needs to cooperate with mobile device manufacturers a…

> If you want a successful mainstream operating system. It needs to work within the rules of society. It needs to comply with regulations. It needs to cooperate with mobile device manufacturers and network operators.

Which can be done with a small team by building on top of AOSP, like GrapheneOS does. How is that not pragmatic?

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#894

Post by palata »

fooqux wrote: post #873
palata wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bank isn't banning graphene os. They're banning anything Google labels as untrusted. I don't agree here :-). AOSP provides an attestation mechanism that totally works with GrapheneOS [1]. Google provides Play Integrity on top of that, as an easy way to check that the phone is signed by Google. It doesn't say "it's unsafe if it is not signed by us", it just says "here is a way to verify that it is signed by us".…

I feel like this is semantics. I don't know all what they say, but I'd eat my breakfast cold if the word "safety" didn't come up in the PowerPoint deck. We may have to agree to disagree on this. My point was that this is the direction the world is moving to. Maybe it's not total coverage yet, but every year more and more of our stuff only operates with verified trust through the entire process. Everything from video…

> My point was that this is the direction the world is moving to.

And I agree with that, but it feels to me like it reinforces my initial point: fighting the Google flavour of Android is a lost cause.

> We're already sitting here complaining about Google enforcing developer verification

Which isn't a problem on alternative Android OSes like GrapheneOS.

> how long until Google turns on play integrity by default

Agreed. The solution is to be able to use an alternative Android OS like GrapheneOS :-).

> It'll come if something doesn't change.

And what needs to change is that regulations need to make it illegal to actively choose to ban alternative Android OSes.

The thing with regulations is that you need to find something applicable. When people complain about centralised system and lobby for regulations that will help their federated system, without even debating about whether or not the federated system is "better", the fact is that it is not applicable. It is not reasonable to say "so now, if you write a messenger app, it has to use the Matrix protocol because Matrix convinced us of it". If I want to write a different protocol, I should be able to do it, right?

But what I am suggesting here is both reasonable and applicable: currently those banks have to add code to their app in order to ban alternative OSes. If a regulation makes it illegal, they just have to remove it, and banks who don't have it yet just don't add it. It's easy to verify: if my banking app doesn't boot on GrapheneOS, I can complain to the regulator, and the regulator can trivially verify it.

Same thing for allowing to unlock/relock the bootloader: super easy to verify, a regulation would work great.

Now back to the article: what are we asking? That the process of installing an unverified app manually is not made "so hard", with "hard" being some variant of "it's terrible if I have to wait 24h one time in order to enable this", for something that approximately nobody does. Look at all the effort that has been put against this change... and again they will lose. And if they managed (very unlikely) to get regulation for that, they would be screwed next week by the next change.

That's why I say it's the wrong fight: not only it's a lost cause, but it is strictly less useful than the simpler solution of defending alternative Android OSes with simple regulations.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#895

Post by palata »

toss1 wrote: post #867
palata wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know what you are talking about. Did you read the article? It was communicated by Google too [1].

ONE TIME, you go to the developer settings, you do the confirmation dance (wait 24h and whatnot), and at the end you choose to "allow indefinitely".

Then you will be able to install unverified app... indefinitely. Indefinitely meaning forever, not "until the next install".

[1]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#896

Post by fsflover »

fsflover wrote: post #782
storus wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enforc…

Nevertheless, postmarketOS manages to run Linux without Android on quite a few phones.

Link for the downvoters: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#897

Post by theK »

microtonal wrote: post #807
theK wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one you can actually buy an /e/ device right now. Also, once you have it, it just works. Some people like that.

You get a device that still runs proprietary Google blobs in privileged processes (for Play Integrity), talks a lot with Google, gives certain Google applications (like Google Maps) higher privileges than normal Android apps (you can find the signing keys of apps that get elevated privileges in the source code of the /e/OS microG fork), uploads your speech to OpenAI for speech to text, uses a shady middleman (which t…

That link you shared in your other comment actually counters your "runs google blobs" argument.

Speech to text is afaik completely anonymized and if you care that much, it actually is possible to just not use it, rip it out or even replace it with something that runs locally in your home.

> hopelessly behind on Linux kernel versions

Can you substantiate that? Given that many OEMs still run linux 4 and 5 in their Flagship ROMs today, I'd like to see how open source does so much worse.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#898

Post by [deleted] »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #102
dethos wrote: post #75

To be sincere, they were never truly ours. A proof of that is they were able to come up with this, and you don't have a way to reject it. What we actually need are (open) alternatives, not to double down on Google's ecosystem and Google-controlled OS. We need to control the device we bought and be able to run whatever we wish on it. Just like we do on PCs.

Is it time to bring back the Windows phone? I keed I keed! But unfortunately there really isn't a great alternative. I painfully attempted to use Ubuntu Touch and its always the same thing. The lack of available apps, the lack of app development in general for the platform was pretty eye opening. Add in having it only run on really old devices isn't much help either. Its promising, but a long ways off even from some…

[deleted]

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#899

Post by kuhsaft »

palata wrote: post #893
kuhsaft wrote: post #874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think regulation is what keeps them in power. They are major companies that comply with government regulations. Why would the government regulate to allow people to have devices that forgo government regulations? If you want a successful mainstream operating system. It needs to work within the rules of society. It needs to comply with regulations. It needs to cooperate with mobile device manufacturers a…

> If you want a successful mainstream operating system. It needs to work within the rules of society. It needs to comply with regulations. It needs to cooperate with mobile device manufacturers and network operators. Which can be done with a small team by building on top of AOSP, like GrapheneOS does. How is that not pragmatic?

I would group GrapheneOS with Android. If you handed a layperson a GrapheneOS phone and asked them what OS was on the phone, they would probably say Android.

But considering it as a separate OS, I wouldn’t consider it mainstream. It’s not on any device by default. And it has an estimated 250k users out of ~3.9 billion Android users, or 0.0064%. It might seem mainstream for the tech community, but it goes to show how small the tech community is.

It might be mainstream once Motorola, a corporation, starts releasing phones preinstalled with it.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#900

Post by fsflover »

fsflover wrote: post #845
Andromxda wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an outdated, insecure, and extremely overpriced phone, sure, go ahead. It's literally 2018 hardware being sold for 800 bucks. 3 GB of RAM? Seriously? The iPhone XS, also from 2018, has 4 GB of RAM, just saying. And regarding the security: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html

> you want an outdated, insecure Please stop spreading FUD. I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945696 > 3 GB of RAM? Seriously? https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

This was a wrong HN link. Should be this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953176
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