This is not about security, it&#x27;s about control.Of course we know, but they always spin it as being about security.

i&#x27;ve had a positive experience with OnePlus 6 and Mobian, but if you want something more modern with a business behind it, check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;furilabs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;furilabs.com&#x2F;</a>

If you&#x27;re cheap like me a used Pixel3a is a grand device.

My primary for the time being remains GrapheneOS, which, ironically enough, only runs on Pixel hardware for now (though the GOS team is working with an unnamed major Android OEM to produce a handset that meets GOS&#x27;s strict platform requirements).My Linux phone is a PinePhone pro, which I believe is no longer being sold. It&#x27;s not great. Phosh could generously be described as &quot;in progress&quot; last time I used it. UIs for many applications aren&#x27;t built for small touchscreens like that.I&#x27;d have to review the hardware market again if I were going to make a fresh recommendation. Librem looks cool conceptually, but they&#x27;re a bit pricey, and their framing of a &quot;Made in USA&quot; variant as a premium feature rather than a red flag, a reputation risk, and a supply chain risk make me skeptical of whether Librem is a trustworthy entity at all, or might just be controlled opposition. That could just be me erring on the side of paranoia, though.

gonna say: the pinephone has been hell over the last few weeks. Phone auto-boots whenever power is applied (either by their keyboard case or via USB-C), then the battery dies very quickly, and you need a minimum charge to boot the phone, so that means you have to swap an SD card in there with JumpDrive just to charge the darn thing. There are some mitigating factors (larger battery, Tow-Boot + loading OS from SD card, potentially some SMT soldering shenanigans), but I genuinely feel like this is a fire hazard. I -do not- recommend inflicting this on others.someone suggested (I can&#x27;t lost the link) flipping the script with a GLiNet Mudi hotspot with SMS forwarding (to e-mail); I really like this idea. It would be suuuper neat to play around with the tethered model: make SIP calls with a hacked Switch with Android installed &#x2F; dedicated ruggedized VoIP phone for emergencies, or justify making and carrying a cyberdeck.Personally, I&#x27;m hoping to revive my 3DS because I fell in love with the darn thing again (and its near infinite battery life). I heard you can make calls on the original DS with SvSIP, so suuurely that can work on the 3DS too. As a fellow gamer and android dev I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;d appreciate the idea.I don&#x27;t want a phone owned and controlled and spied on by governments and mega corporations. I want a Gibson-Neuromancer style obelisk disk blob thing that does Internet, Telephony, and Computer stuff and uses whatever I tether it to as the human interface.

Which brand do you suggest ?Google wants my apartment lease to let me distribute free games, so I just won&#x27;t support their platform.This is not about security, it&#x27;s about control.

when the radio chip requires a digital signature from the host OS signed by google or appleChina will never let that happen.

Mobile hotspot with a wireguard tunnel wrapping all traffic. Different RF bands (e.g. Starlink). Unauthorized private autonomous mesh networks. I don&#x27;t care how hard they make it. I am never going to stop uncompromisingly exercising my right to absolute control over hardware I bought and paid for.

This works now, but good luck in 10 years time when the radio chip requires a digital signature from the host OS signed by google or apple and your current phone is deprecated by 6g or whatever.

You can still run an Android build that doesn&#x27;t require a Google signature for apps. You&#x27;ll just lose access to Play Integrity APIs, which you wouldn&#x27;t get from non-Android Linux phones either. A better technical solution is to set up a federated replacement for Play Integrity that third party ROM developers can opt into and a library that can use that or Play Integrity for app developers that want it to use.

&gt;VWYF, folksVolkswagen Your FaceVincent Wants Yummy FriesViewing Worked Yesterday, FrankVoyeur Whom You FuckVeiled Widows You FancyVore Website? Yes, Free!

I&#x27;ve got my Linux smartphone running and ready to go. VWYF, folks. I&#x27;ll take shitty software and poor battery life over digital authoritarianism every single time.&quot;Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.&quot;

never been a better time to donate to postmarket os, mobian or friends.

Unfortunately, I think attestation is being pushed by other parts of the Australian government. Particularly ACSC.

I think you are better off making a complaint to the Australian Australian Consumers’ Association (CHOICE) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;accounts.choice.com.au&#x2F;contact-us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;accounts.choice.com.au&#x2F;contact-us&#x2F;</a> than to the ACCCTell them to lodge a designated complaint to the Australian Competition &amp; Consumer Commission (ACCC).ACCC complaints are designed for individual grievances while a designated complaint from a designated complainer is supposed to address &quot;significant or systemic market issues that affect consumers in Australia&quot;.

As I said in the other thread:Australian users of alternative app stores should make a complaint to the ACCC: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.accc.gov.au&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;contact-us-or-report-an-issue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.accc.gov.au&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;contact-us-or-report-an-iss...</a>In the past, they forced Steam to implement proper refund policies, and they are currently suing Microsoft about the way subscribers were duped into paying more for &quot;AI features&quot; they didn&#x27;t want.

The Year of the Linux Desktop is kind of happening. Not at the scale that the meme implies, but I&#x27;ve never seen anywhere near as much adoption of the Linux desktop as this year. The combination of Valve&#x27;s efforts, more usage of Linux gaming handhelds, distributions like Bazzite that have strong selling points for Windows gamers, and Microsoft pissing everyone off with everything that is Windows 11, the Linux desktop has some legitimate momentum for once

Some people don&#x27;t care and build on top of Linux anyway. This lockdown will accelerate this. At some point a critical mass will eventually be reached, perhaps with the assistance of some corporate entity or organization of some sort that pushes it over the edge. Then there will be a real open competitor. Will take some time though.

&gt; Abandoning Android for Linux is not viable for software developers who need to eat.We&#x27;ll finally get our ecosystem diversity back when the next geopolitical happening happens and Google bans Chinese android apps on bullshit pretexts.Wait a few years more.

Waydroid does surprisingly well at running Android apps on Linux.Sure some apps won&#x27;t work for whatever reason &amp; HN commenters will have incredibly scathing things to say about that, but I bet there&#x27;s a lot of folks who&#x27;d be cool with missing an app here or there.It sucks to be losing Android, but IMO it&#x27;s an ecosystem in free-fall. Bootloaders are locked more and more, there&#x27;s literally zero AOSP hardware buyable now, and the roms scene has diminished not grown over time.I totally think theres a Steam Deck moment waiting around a corner, where what seemed impossible a year ago shows up and is dead obvious &amp; direct, and we all wonder why there were so many doubts before.

so the thing is, as an Android dev if I get embedded linux experience then I have lateral career movement to the peripherals that I&#x27;m usually writing apps for. While the intersection of app developers to embedded linux developers is probably very small, there is a smidge of incentive there, and that can be a powerful thing for the community: a lot of the pain points on linux phones feel hardware oriented (I complain loudly about the pinephone battery elsewhere in this thread).another tailwind might be in the gaming scene. I have the general sense that SteamOS has been an interesting gateway for technically-minded folks to be impressed by this Linux thing. A similar model for mobile phones might be a tailwind (like a SteamOS for ARM?) The reason why that&#x27;s perfect is because it undermines the Google monopoly and creates an app ecosystem that people will absolutely flock to, at least for games ($$).

I know it&#x27;s been tried before (eg by Mozilla), but perhaps now the time is right for a web apps-only OS.Many developers would need some help to get offline functionality and updates right though.. And it would be really nice if these apps didn&#x27;t require parsing megabytes of JavaScript libraries on startup.One can dream! :-)

The problem is for developers. Abandoning Android for Linux is not viable for software developers who need to eat. Sure, we can use Linux smartphones ourselves, but if the software we make has a grand total of three people who ever lay eyes on it, that&#x27;s less than ideal. And given how The Year of the Linux Desktop has gone, I think it&#x27;d be strongly preferable if we managed to stave off the tightening of control over Android rather than placing bets on the future Year of the Linux Smartphone.

(2018) makes me more than a bit sad. I have a OnePlus 6, and it was ok with the software I tried out ~3 years ago, and basically fast enough. But it&#x27;s soul crushing how running mainline Linux is just so impossible for consumer mobile chips.It felt at the time like there was positive progress, more bits getting mainlined at a trickle but at least steady trickle rate. But it feels dark now. At least the GPU drivers everywhere have been getting much better, but I get the impression Qualcomm couldn&#x27;t even ship a desktop&#x2F;laptop after years of delay, is barely getting that in order now. It feels impossible to hope for the mobile chips anywhere to find religion &amp; get even basic drivers mainlined.

buy a used OnePlus 6 and load Mobian on it. quite functional these days running a mainline kernel.

&gt;than for privacy&amp;security and the user&#x27;s interests.Even if that was true, AOSP is better for privacy and security than any other Linux distro.

I wish you were wrong, but I don&#x27;t disagree with assessment. I am on grapheneos ( edit: on pixel ) now, but even that should only be a pitstop now since google has decided to show its hand in such a nasty ( if not that unexpected ) manner.

AOSP is open source so it could be forked.

The hope is lost for Android, there is no moving forward with google antagonizing its foss roots. Libre phone it is. We have to forcibly remove the bandage.

&gt; You just have to somehow speedrun the decades of development that went into Android to make it decently run on mobile hardwareIsn&#x27;t this mainly due to proprietary drivers and firmware?

The closest I got to Linux mobile is GPD Pocket 4 with LTE and regular apps.  Since I can get it to cap at 5 watts, it can give 9 hours of battery life.  It does most things I care about, but it is just a mini laptop (which is good enough for me).

flatpak has existed for a decade, and namespaces even longer.  They could stand some improvement, but work well enough.

&gt; think getting mainline Linux on viable and sustainable on multiple hardware devices is warmer, fuzzier foundation.You just have to somehow speedrun the decades of development that went into Android to make it decently run on mobile hardware.. never really understood this &quot;throwing out the baby&quot; direction - the UNIX userspace model simply doesn&#x27;t work on mobile (I would wager it also doesn&#x27;t work on desktop anymore), has no security (everything runs as your user which made sense when you ran some batch job on a terminal with multiple other users, but nowadays when a single user has as many processes as all the user had back then it effectively means no security between any of those programs), there is no real resource control, no lifecycles, so the device will burn scorching hot and have terrible battery life.On Android (and iOS) apps were always living in a world with lifecycles so if they wanted to operate correctly, they had to become decent citizens (save state when asked, so they can be stopped and resumed at any moment). This also fits nicely with sandboxes and user permissions, etc.So without developing an alternative user-space for &quot;GNU-Linux&quot;, it&#x27;s simply not competing with android in any form or shape.And even if you do, now every GNU app has to somehow be ported to that userspace API (you can&#x27;t just kill GIMP or whatever Linux process)

&gt; Android is such a massive code base, and was designed more for surveillance and consumptionI disagree. I have been using de-googled &#x2F; de-spywared Android for a decade now and I really love it. Once you remove google mobile services and rely on open source applications Android feels really good.Also its questionable if projects such as purism or even the pinephone will ever offer such good security and privacy as a de-googled Pixel with GrapheneOS will.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.social&#x2F;@GrapheneOS&#x2F;112712864209034804" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.social&#x2F;@GrapheneOS&#x2F;112712864209034804</a>

&gt; I disagree. The Android security model is better than the Linux one.In some ways it probably is, but it still isn&#x27;t that good in my opinion (although some of the problems have to do with the way the settings and controls are working rather than the security model itself, there are also problems with the security model itself too). (I think there are other problems with Android (and other operating systems) too.)

&gt; Android was designed more for surveillance and consumption, than for privacy&amp;security and the user&#x27;s interestsI disagree. The Android security model is better than the Linux one. I am very happy with GrapheneOS, I don&#x27;t have much to complain about.The problem is that Google sucks and nobody enforces antitrust laws. But it&#x27;s not just Google: how many Android manufacturers don&#x27;t suck, really? Do they contribute to AOSP at all? Probably not. Do they build reasonable devices that could run something like GrapheneOS? Nope. Just relocking the bootloader is often a problem.

No matter how this turns out, I&#x27;m sure GrapheneOS will make a smart effort. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;</a>But long-term, Android is such a massive code base, and was designed more for surveillance and consumption, than for privacy&amp;security and the user&#x27;s interests.I think getting mainline Linux on viable and sustainable on multiple hardware devices is warmer, fuzzier foundation. (Sort of a cross between Purism&#x27;s work on the Librem 5, and PostmarketOS&#x27;s work on trying to get mainline Linux viable on something else.)

This won&#x27;t be true for much longer iiuc. Look at the outcomes of the Epic lawsuit. That&#x27;s probably why Google is changing how they tackle this problem.

The ability to &#x27;sideload&#x27; is already off by default, and warns you before turning it on.  Maybe just a bigger or sterner warning?  I mean there&#x27;s only so much you can do there...

Anyone who has lived through the windows PC era knows it&#x27;s a legitimate problem. Google has tons of data to show malware exists for Android as well. Being able to prevent that malware from affecting the lives of Android users is a moral imperative for Google. I understand why folks are skeptical, but it&#x27;s worth trying to dig into the fact rather than just react blindly.

The malware boogeyman is really paying off tangibly for Google. They&#x27;ve got actual fans of their profit-motivated paternalism.

99% of all malware with real world consequences is caused by unverified developers, ergo, all unverified developers should be removed from app stores.99% of all car accidents with real world consequences are caused by licensed human drivers, ergo, all licensed human drivers should be removed from roads.Same argument. It&#x27;s true, and simultaneously, it skips right past all of the ramifications of the proposal, even when the ramifications conceivably result in more harm than the original problem did.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton&#x27;s_fence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton&#x27;s_...</a>

I&#x27;m not sure about the NewPipe angle, as Grey Jay exists (Backed by FUTO&#x2F;Louis Rossman) on the Play store, which has ad-block and sponsor block incorporated into it.
Google is just being malicious towards opensource and privacy, under the guise of security

&quot;NewPipe&quot; I use &quot;PipePipe&quot;, which does less stracktraces.

Having a trustworthy channel for verified app loading is a vital security tool. F-Droid is such a channel; the Google Play Store is not. F-Droid inspects the source code of the applications they build, removes malware and other antifeatures from them, and compiles them from source to ensure that the binaries they deliver correspond to the source code they&#x27;ve inspected. The Google Play Store doesn&#x27;t do any of those things. Consequently it&#x27;s full of malware.The topic here is Google nuking F-Droid from orbit, probably because it has NewPipe.

AFAIK most of the victims actually fall for social engineering in combination with legit apps. If you force developer registration criminals will simply find other attack vectors.You are restricting a fundamental digital right in exchange for a minuscule reduction in risk.

Akshually 99% of malware with real world consequences comes preinstalled on your phone.

That&#x27;s rich knowing that both Apple and Google get most of their store money from dubious casino like games which I&#x27;m uncomfortable giving to my family.Before they are allowed to make any comment on scams, they should clean up their own store first.

When was the last time you read articles about malware in F-droid? When was the last time you read articles about malware in the play store?

What those &quot;people-who-don&#x27;t-understand-the-risks&quot; will do then, with more money left? I think they will give their money to all sorts of political populists, who will cause danger not only to themselves, but everyone.

A ton of malware is pushed through Google&#x27;s adsense network, which already requires some level of verification afaik. It doesn&#x27;t stop jack shit. You are naive if you think more verification is somehow going to stop this.

99% of malware with real world consequences of people losing much or all of their money is from unverified developers.This is a step in the right direction to keep people safe in my opinion. Most people around the world don’t understand the risks.

If, and I do mean if, government is a solution here, its only role is to ensure that app use cannot be required for service ( and we can argue over what services can stay app-only ).

This is doubleplusungood. The war on General Purpose Computing is the death of innovation and a direct attack on digital freedom.If you&#x27;re in the US, UK or EU, please contact your government.

Considering Andy Rubin is a massive creep, let&#x27;s not have him publicly comment about anything at all, ever: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;andy-rubin-google-settlement-sexual-harassment-android-creator-310-million&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;andy-rubin-google-settlement-se...</a>

Has anyone seen Andy Rubin publicly comment on Google&#x27;s stewardship of Android? I wonder what he thinks about his creation and the way its evolving.

IMO the bigger recent issue is that Google stopped pushing AOSP updates timely. As far as I know the QPR1 source is still missing in action after almost two months (!).

Between this and a growing number of oems not permitting bootloader unlocking (latest being Samsung with OneUI 8) Android&#x27;s &quot;open&quot; future is pretty bleak.

A direct link to the UK&#x27;s Competition and Markets Authority, in case you don&#x27;t want to go via a blog post:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contact-the-cma.service.gov.uk&#x2F;wizard&#x2F;classify" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contact-the-cma.service.gov.uk&#x2F;wizard&#x2F;classify</a>It&#x27;s very simple to submit a complaint.

We just had a thread about this on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45740383">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45740383</a>.

Not in markets without significant Huawei and Xiaomi presence. Local banks (Czech Republic) are not using integrity APIs to keep being usable for most clients.

That small little caveat already makes it a non-option

Most DRM &#x2F; banking apps work fine for me through the browser and you can add them to your home screen. Android &#x2F; Samsung Pay will stop working, but if you have a Garmin watch, you can still pay with that.

Even phones from Motorola require you to literally ask permission to unlock your bootloader via a form on their website, which they then unlock remotely or you enter some generated code.Other manufacturers do the same, where you have to wait a period of like 45 days before being able to unlock, and then have to ask permission on their website to unlock your bootloader.

This is the place where I think lawmakers needs to be involved. Bearing in mind that laws aren&#x27;t engineering specs, being able to pay for things and use a bank are about as close to fundamental rights as anything is for participants in society. If you have to buy a second device to use Netflix, so be it, but we need laws that guarantee people can make digital payments without Apple or Google&#x27;s permission.There are societies today (I live in one) where some businesses are starting to accept payment only through a banking or payment app, no cash, no card, nothing else. And these apps will only function in the very narrow circumstances of &quot;I bought a device which runs software from one of two American tech monopolies and follow all their frequently changing rules for using various software that&#x27;s unrelated to the payment I need to make.&quot; This limitation is mostly in place due to the banks believing it will make things more secure. Security is important, but not important enough that you get to start denying innocent people the ability to make payments or exile them from the banking system because they had some kind of dispute with Apple or Google. Governments need to step in with access mandates here, otherwise this problem WILL come to a jurisdiction near you sooner or later.

Bank apps work fine (at least UK ones) on Graphene OS installed via the play store.

I wouldn&#x27;t want the bank to access my phone, so it doesn&#x27;t matter that the app doesn&#x27;t work, and in a weird case where you urgently need to transfer your money to scammers while not being at home, you can use bank&#x27;s web app.

Android and said manufacturers purposefully do everything in their power to make this as awful as possible.For example, you can&#x27;t relock the bootloader on any device except pixels. Why? No reason. Just fuck you, I guess.That&#x27;s a huge security hole that they&#x27;re creating, intentionally.What&#x27;s going on is they are hoping that if you do use other software that you get malware or get scammed. They are literally, actually, undermining their own device&#x27;s security just to send a message.These people are psychotic.

Most vendors (at some level) allow flashing custom distributions, as long as you didn&#x27;t buy that device from carrier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zenfyrdev&#x2F;bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zenfyrdev&#x2F;bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...</a>You will lose DRM-based apps (e.g. Netflix), Payment apps, and bank apps though.

I just wish they had two sizes, a pocket version please. I have small Trumpian hands.

GrapheneOS is in some ways not an open OS. The official builds don&#x27;t provide root access. So for example apps are able to hold your data hostage from you.I get that this is in the name of security hardening. And you can make a build that has limited root access and is officially supported. But GrapheneOS isn&#x27;t the end-all solution to computing freedom. Although hopefully on those devices you will be able to install custom OSes (root capable build of Graphene or otherwise).

&gt; Looks like GrapheneOS will be available on another &quot;major Android OEM” soon.I&#x27;m secretly hoping that this will be Framework or Nothing.

On my samsung phone, I just tested, the search bar was as easy to remove as any other widget.

Looks like GrapheneOS will be available on another &quot;major Android OEM” soon [1].Regulation should prevent Google from subsidising manufacturers to use Android. Arguably the recent antitrust legislation [2] applies in this case because they&#x27;re effectively paying manufacturers to place that horrendous and impossible to remove search bar on the home screen.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidauthority.com&#x2F;graphene-os-major-android-oem-partnership-3606853&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidauthority.com&#x2F;graphene-os-major-android-o...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;department-justice-wins-significant-remedies-against-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;department-justice-wins-signi...</a>

They are pretty bad when it comes to security:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eylenburg.github.io&#x2F;android_comparison.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eylenburg.github.io&#x2F;android_comparison.htm</a>

Indeed, and starting at 360€ for a  CMF Phone 1 with OS already installed, no tinkering, feels relatively affordable and easy to try.

Did you check the stuff murena has on offer? Most if not all of their phones come with an unlockable bootloader and the OS they come with isn&#x27;t that bad to start with either.

All the Fairphone Versions support e&#x2F;OS&#x2F; as far as I know. I have the Fairphone 5 with the current e&#x2F;OS&#x2F; version completely un-googled. But you also have the option to allow partial google-fication in e&#x2F;OS&#x2F; so you don&#x27;t miss out on most of the features and paid-apps you had.

Security only works if you can control what software is trustworthy. If some software has been proven to be untrustworthy, it is worthwhile to prevent all software that the producer has ever made from working at scale. Adding some nominal process and fee to make it too expensive to create a lot of accounts prevents them from creating hundreds of alternative aliases. There is a lot of precedence for why this is a good idea and works. I think if there was another company involved with performing the audit which folks trusted it might now seem so scary.

&gt; Do you want to fly on a plane where the flight control software was maybe overwritten?I don&#x27;t understand it. Whoever owns the place can replace any part of it, including computers. So being able to overwrite software doesn&#x27;t change it. Furthermore, plane computers are not a consumer hardware.You could make a better example with patched car software.&gt; The problem is Google and Apple locking down their Operating System, this is not a technical limitation on hardware.The initial ROM bootloader contains hard-coded signature which prevents you from replacing Apple&#x2F;Google software.

&gt;The solution, I think, would be a regulation that forbids manufacturers of any chip or device CPU from making obstacles to reprogramming the device (using fuses, digital signatures, encryption etc).Why would you make essential security features illegal? Do you want to fly on a plane where the flight control software was maybe overwritten?&gt;So if you buy a device with CPU and writable memory, you should be able to load your own program and manufacturer may not use technical measures to stop you.The problem is Google and Apple locking down their Operating System, this is not a technical limitation on hardware.

Droidian[0] currently supports a relatively new Motorola phone[1]. A Snapdragon 8+ gen 1 device, so the performance isn&#x27;t bad, and most features seem to work, including Waydroid. I&#x27;ve noticed incoming phone calls causing a glitch where the call can&#x27;t be answered, but other than that, daily drivable. Just like a PinePhone, only more powerful. In my region it can be had for ~€250 brand new.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;droidian.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;droidian.org&#x2F;</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Lenovo-ThinkPhone-by-Motorola-in-review-Business-smartphone-with-IP-certification.700348.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Lenovo-ThinkPhone-by-Motorola-...</a>

Every few years or so we collectively rediscover that general computing devices should be general and repeat the same mistake every time new format is released. We&#x27;re all a bunch of reactive losers and that will never change it seems.

Many of those devices are closed exactly due to regulations.

&gt; a regulation that forbids manufacturers of any chip or device CPU from making obstacles to reprogramming the deviceExcept regulations are now moving in the opposite direction: to mandate device locking.

You can get a new Pixel 8 for ~500$, I would say that has a very decent price to value, and will be supported for longer.

The battery probably lost its capacity in 3-4 years since release.

The Pixel 5 isn&#x27;t supported anymore. The Pixel 6a still has a little less than 2 years of support left. These have become pretty cheap.The Pixel 8 and 8a aren&#x27;t that expensive either. And keep in mind that they are supported until 2030 and 2031 respectively. [1] They not only receive security updates for 7 years, instead of the 5 years for previous Pixel generations, but also have stronger hardware security, by implementing the ARM memory tagging extension. [2][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#device-lifetime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#device-lifetime</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#recommended-devices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#recommended-devices</a>

&gt; Before buying a smartphone I tried to find an inexpensive model that supports open source OS, but I couldn&#x27;t. What open OS support is ether expensive Pixels, or outdated models.You can buy a refurbished Pixel 5 for less than 200$. Great screen, great camera, 5G, the works. It&#x27;s definitely not an &quot;outdated&quot; device, and it runs Graphene or Lineage with minimal hassle.

Not sure what exactly you mean with &quot;open source OS&quot; and if Lineage counts as one in your book: it supports quite a few cheap and also fairly recent Motorola phones, which are also easy to unlock:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.lineageos.org&#x2F;devices&#x2F;#motorola" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.lineageos.org&#x2F;devices&#x2F;#motorola</a>For family, I just got a used Edge 30 Neo for ~100$ and put LineageOS on it, and it works like a charm. Phones like the Moto g84 go for even less and still can be bought new for a decent price.Xiaomi would be even cheaper, but I would highly discourage getting one because the unlock process is plain ridiculous nowadays.And as others have already noted, if you don&#x27;t mind getting a phone that&#x27;s a few years old, a used Pixel 5 is not expensive (still happily using a Pixel 4a and don&#x27;t see why I would need to upgrade).

The Pixel 8 and 8a aren&#x27;t that expensive either. And keep in mind that they are supported until 2030 and 2031 respectively. [1] They not only receive security updates for 7 years, instead of the 5 years for previous Pixel generations, but also have stronger hardware security, by implementing the ARM memory tagging extension. [2][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#device-lifetime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#device-lifetime</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#recommended-devices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;faq#recommended-devices</a>

fyi you can buy refurb&#x27;d pixel 7&#x27;s off eBay for like ~$170great for playing around with or if you want to install something like GrapheneOS.

Before buying a smartphone I tried to find an inexpensive model that supports open source OS, but I couldn&#x27;t. What open OS support is ether expensive Pixels, or outdated models.The solution, I think, would be a regulation that forbids manufacturers of any chip or device CPU from making obstacles to reprogramming the device (using fuses, digital signatures, encryption etc). So if you buy a device with CPU and writable memory, you should be able to load your own program and manufacturer may not use technical measures to stop you. The goal of regulation would be preventing of creating digital waste, vendor locks and allow reusing the hardware.Of course, features like theft prevention won&#x27;t work, so the user should be able to waive this right.

Every company is open when they gain from it and closed when they gain from it. The idea of free general computing needs a different sponsor. Like a country or regulations. I don’t think open source projects and private companies can defend this idea adequately.

I get that requiring attestation for downloaded apps is wrong too, it&#x27;s just this website says &quot;it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google&quot; which seems incorrect from what you&#x27;re saying.Edit: Oh I get it, &quot;develop for the platform&quot; means develop and distribute. Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but seems like an important difference.

You can develop and install via adb, but you can&#x27;t just tell the package manager to install an APK you downloaded on your phone. Maybe attestation makes sense to allow Amazon App Store or Epic Games Store to be installed without a warning and to allow companies like Spotify to distribute their apps themselves from their websites without using Google Play Store and without a warning. What&#x27;s wrong is preventing people from installing apps that haven&#x27;t been attested by Google straight from their phone, even with a warning.

You can&#x27;t even develop without the paid dev account? I thought it&#x27;d just be for distribution. Like, you can build and run whatever you want on an iPhone without a paid account.

This feels similar to Sony and their OtherOS feature.[0]Many people bought Android phones because of the open capability.
Even if you don&#x27;t use it, just knowing you have an out is important.And now Google is &quot;altering the terms&quot;.[0]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OtherOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OtherOS</a>

This is worst thing ever happened to humankind.

Chinese phones, ones with GrapheneOS, new ones created to fulfill the market demand Google is creating.&gt;will not pass integrity checksThose apps can add support for other integrity APIs. Operating system owners can fund this work to help their operating system gain marketshare.

Which Android phones? If I understand correctly this will be a requirement for certification, so any devices that do not enforce it will not pass integrity checks. Goodbye banking apps, etc.

This affects all Android devices with Google Services.

If you care about it, then buy Android phones that will support sideloading. Financially reward companies that are doing what you want.

Because I&#x27;d actually be interested in an Android phone if Google locks down the play store to legitimate actors, increases the barrier for entry and improves the quality and safety of submissions. Which this looks to be doing?

What this has to do with the topic, if you&#x27;re on iOS?

I can&#x27;t emphasize this enough, your comment is 100% wrong.This is about only allowing play verified apps. Play store will remain whatever you think of it regardless of this move.

EDIT: apologies I misunderstood that this is limiting third-party distribution. I am of course, in favour of this.Original comment:I don&#x27;t want this. The App Store on iOS has its flaws, but it&#x27;s a curated system that has a lot of checks in place to prevent malware. I have never felt unsafe on iOS and it&#x27;s the primary reason I&#x27;ve not joined Android and the Play Store&#x27;s wild west.

I bet those are just a rounding error to their profits.

&gt; why bother with walling off if you can&#x27;t get paid?To destroy competitors of Google apps such as Aurora Store or NewPipe.

Given the apple v epic ruling about in payment commision outside the app store, I don&#x27;t understand this. I assume Google would get the same ruling if they tried what apple did, so why bother with walling off if you can&#x27;t get paid?At least with 3p app stores they could have Gpay if the app developer wanted to, but now they will be pissed and can&#x27;t build a 3p app anyway since users can&#x27;t install it via 3p app stores.

Don&#x27;t you also need to buy a Macbook? That is quite expensive. I guess in Apple&#x27;s view also developping on a non-Apple device is a security risk.

Free provisioning: If you do not pay the developer fee an app installed via Xcode will work for 7 days. Afterwards the app on your phone will *stop working*, and you must open Xcode on your Mac again, and push a new build to your phone if you want to keep using it.Paid provisioning: If you have paid the developer fee, a build will expire based on the amount of time left before that payment renews, so if you build and install an app a month before your developer fee renews, that build of the app (that you installed via Xcode) will stop working in 1 month.

I don’t know what it was like back then but in today’s world you do not need to pay Apple any fees if all you’re doing is writing software in Xcode and deploy it to your own device. You do need a developer account, the free version of one, but you only need to pay the fee if you’re going to publish on the App Store.

I would call it &quot;free developer experience&quot; (using ADB), not &quot;free sideloading&quot;.If you want to send your app to a friend to download and install it directly on their phone (without using a computer with ADB), you need to be Google-approved and register your app first.

1) Oh yes of course, here friend you just need a PC and the command line tools (unless soon you&#x27;ll need to be a registered and VERIFIED developer) to install revanced or any open source app2) Unless they decide to ban you (they can if you don&#x27;t show any activity in the developer account for X months) and of course because you were verified you can&#x27;t simply apply again and pay again, because you were banned!!!!

&gt;This is why I switched to Android, just for Google now to pull the rug from under my feet again1) You can continue to install unsigned APKs via adb with the upcoming update.2) Signing APKs for sideloading requires a Google development account which is a one time fee of $25, no yearly fees.So still a free sideloading option available, and if you want to avoid adb it is a one time cost that is 1&#x2F;4 the annual rate on Apple.

We are not talking about software distribution or admitting it to a store, we&#x27;re talking about executing something on your own device, a device that you purchased.

&gt; 100$ a year for a dev in Sweden - that&#x27;s like money you wouldn&#x27;t notice if it got lost in your pocketsFor someone who is making money from it, sure, but that&#x27;s exactly who this isn&#x27;t about. The way they get screwed is by the 30%.A fixed fee -- in any amount -- is screwing the people who aren&#x27;t in it for the money. Because to begin with, it&#x27;s not just the fee, it&#x27;s the bureaucracy that comes with the fee.You&#x27;re a kid and you want to make your first app, but you don&#x27;t have a credit card.You live in a poor country and maybe the amount you can lose without noticing when you&#x27;re rich isn&#x27;t the same there. Or even if you can get the money, you may not have a first world bank account and the conglomerate isn&#x27;t set up to take the local currency.You&#x27;re a desktop developer and you&#x27;re willing to make a simple mobile app and give it away for free as long as it&#x27;s not a bother. The money is nothing but the paperwork is a bother so you don&#x27;t do it, and now the million people who would have used that app don&#x27;t have it and have to suffer the spam-laden trash alternative from someone who is only in it for the money.And suppose the amount is as trivial as you propose. Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?

&gt; and I am sure it cuts down on spammersOkay, just so we&#x27;re all on the same page: that 100 dollar fee IS NOT for publishing your app. That&#x27;s not what that is. That&#x27;s a separate thing with its own costs.That 100 dollars is just the fee to even make an app. Even if your iPhone never has an Internet connection. And even if you literally load the app via USB to your iPhone only.It&#x27;s just extortion. It cannot be justified. Apple does it because they can - there are zero technical reasons behind it.

100$ a year for a dev in Sweden - that&#x27;s like money you wouldn&#x27;t notice if it got lost in your pockets - and I am sure it cuts down on spammers and covers administrative cost.I have no problem with a store having a small admission fee - that&#x27;s perfectly reasonable and they do have operational costs. It would be nice if they had some way to waive the fee for popular OSS to garner some god will with the devs.Taking a 30% cut of revenue on the other hand ... both platforms are guilty of this

It doesn&#x27;t make sense to choose between a snake that bit you and another that bit you earlier.If you don&#x27;t want to be bitten, get out of the snake pit.

Apple pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to Android, Google pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to an iPhone – so for both companies, in effect, nothing changes.Aside from that, the masses don&#x27;t care or know about any of this. A couple of HN users don&#x27;t make a dent in the revenue of any large company. What we can do is work on alternative ecosystems or at least support the small companies and organizations who do with our wallets.

&gt; 10 years later, I&#x27;m also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of AndroidAbrupt abandoning of their Nexus line for overpriced Pixel hardware was the watershed moment. The exact moment when their executives decided to ride free on open source labor.

&gt; Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party serviceWell, it hardly works between Apple devices themselves to begin with (sending a bunch of pictures over to a 4 years old iphone works like 1 times out of 10 trial..). At least I can use regular old Bluetooth to send stuff to any kind of device from Android without the cruel gatekeeping of only Apple devices.So yeah, both platforms have their own ways they suck in.

Out of curiosity, have you seen Genode before?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genode.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genode.org</a>One of the things it works on is the PinePhone, so there&#x27;s _some_ hope of at least one viable alternative happening:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fosdem.org&#x2F;2024&#x2F;schedule&#x2F;event&#x2F;fosdem-2024-3017-genode-on-the-pinephone-on-track-to-real-world-usability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fosdem.org&#x2F;2024&#x2F;schedule&#x2F;event&#x2F;fosdem-2024-3...</a>

Ironically, somewhere around 2014, Google was doing the exact same style &quot;keep Android open&quot; campaign, recruiting developers around the world - including me, to help lobby for keeping Android &quot;open&quot; and tell the horror stories of issues that random OEMs caused by forking Android, breaking compatibility and security.Made sense to me at the time and they were really into &quot;Android should be open source&quot; vibe, so I supported it.10 years later, I&#x27;m also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of Android, but now they are haunted by their open source roots, and the walled garden is just a really tall pile of bricks laid around it.So many times we&#x27;ve been promised things, only for them to be delivered in a half-baked state with half of the parts open source while other parts were closed only to Google and Google approved apps.So many times the issue trackers for different parts of the platform ecosystem have changed, that some issues are impossible to debug without using web archive.
And just as many times, they have been closed, ignored for years or unnoticed, being ping-ponged among team members until they forget about it.Yet, even with all of the closed and privatized parts of the ecosystem, they are still not able to deliver on an ecosystem promise.They control my email, my photos, my cloud, my browser, my phone - yet cannot keep a single thing properly in sync. Still, I download something and I do not know where it went. Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party service. Still, I take a photo only for it to appear on the cloud 5 minutes later. Still, I cannot have a &quot;sandbox&quot; account for testing that just works, but have to juggle multiple accounts, causing their auth system to break 80% of the time when testing.As a developer, I do not plan to support Android anymore. I recently got an iPhone, and am now fully switching to it. Even tho I am long on $GOOG stock, because the money printer go brrr, I will be spending that money in the Apple&#x27;s ecosystem from now on.

They&#x27;re right. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and Enshittification have been the core experiences of digital life with corporations in charge of platforms.My hope is that LLMs will help open source developers provide reasonable alternatives to the gatekeeping and spyware that corporations are now making their bread and butter. Example: Recent tried to use Unity LTS for a small project - the software is a joke now, basic functionality is broken out of the box. A couple of hours with an LLM and I had all the features I needed using a more lightweight library, monogame. Not an operating system, but I&#x27;m hoping the pattern will continue as LLMs get more proficient at code - the moat of &quot;this is hard and laborious to do&quot; will be drained.

&gt; They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way.To be fair, there are also legit reason for why it evolved this way. It&#x27;s mainly for quality and reliability. There is so much crappy sloppy work from unqualified workers, and it used to be even worse.. The easy available free knowledge really helped to rise the standard even for people without proper education in an area.

&gt; They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegalPiracy is technically illegal, but that didn’t stop us.

Im a millennial dev which happens to have a Gen Z brother who also chose this profession.Seeing him walk my steps 15 years later has been eye opening for the brutal cultural change.They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way.As more doors get closed, I fear this process will solidify.

But Linux is GPL. That didn&#x27;t stop Google from using it as a basis for something that is not GPL and in fact not even open source (Google Play Services).What leverage does a community of engineers have to insist on anything? Android could be entirely closed source. So could Chrome.It would be naive to assume that the power dynamics in our society can be fundamentally altered by a 10 line software license.

Would that have really stoped google having its own cloud&#x2F;app layer on top of the base system? OEM could still lock the bootloaders.Unless, maybe the EU, enforce a right to repair and tinker we&#x27;ll be at the mercy of these companies with their walled gardens.

&gt; ... uncompromised open source (Stallmanist ...Of course, Stallman strongly eschews the ambiguity and misdirection inherent in the phrase open source, and in this particular instance the considered use of &#x27;free&#x27; or &#x27;freedom&#x27; is precisely what we&#x27;re now all upset about the impending loss of.

GPL doesn&#x27;t help you one bit in this particular situation, because &quot;regular users&quot; would still be using the locked-down stock Android that came with their device. So they still can&#x27;t install your app.Anyone who is already running a rooted Android or otherwise customized OS isn&#x27;t affected by this, only developers who want to distribute their app to users.

I have a &quot;weakly held strong opinion&quot; on this subject. I think open source has been a disaster for the state of software for normal people. On the one hand exploited developers making peanuts or nothing for their hard work. On the other hand exploited users losing control of their devices and social networks.The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is rotten.Edit: then again maybe it&#x27;s unfair of me to blame the decline in paid for software on open source.

&gt; half-hearted open source where it&#x27;s technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.I&#x27;d argue what you describe as &quot;half-hearted&quot; is actually more true to open source and libre software than restrictive licensing.

Google is the modern Microsoft spiritual successor to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Look at all the people who use gmail, youtube, etc all from a web app that Google wholly controls.

&gt; This situation would have been avoided if we, as community of engineers, had insisted on full and uncompromised open source (Stallmanist or GPL way) right from the start instead of going the ESR way of half-hearted open source where it&#x27;s technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.And we would have been in a better position to lobby for this if unions were widespread in the tech industry, which they are not.

This situation would have been avoided if we, as community of engineers, had insisted on full and uncompromised open source (Stallmanist or GPL way) right from the start instead of going the ESR way of half-hearted open source where it&#x27;s technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.Like most coders, I also prefer the permissive MIT&#x2F;Apache&#x2F;BSD licensing for most software projects but incidents like these make me question the direction we are heading towards. They raise fundamental questions about freedom itself - looking at the broader picture, is having a restrictive kind of freedom (GPL) often more beneficial than having full permissive freedom (MIT&#x2F;Apache)?

See I was similar but the big difference back then was a random little 99c app on iOS would make you several thousand dollars a month, so the $100&#x2F;year fee was nothing for a long time. It was only after around 2012 that things changed.On Google Play I never, ever had any app be anything close to as successful as on iOS. I think I probably made less than 1&#x2F;100th the amount I did on iOS back in the day.

&gt; goodwillDoesn&#x27;t seem like something they consider a positive though.

Those days are over. Being evil means there is no goodwill to begin with unless you can exploit it financially wise. Google stopped being not evil, they specifically deleted it from the code of conduct.Ofc, being evil is subjective. But also this is the first excuse of evil players!

I can see why they add the fee, but they would both garner so much goodwill by giving free accounts if the app you publish is open source. I don&#x27;t think it would be that hard to automate by requiring a GitHub link.

It’s precisely because it’s a filter, they _want_ to filter for people who take it seriously and&#x2F;or are seeking app sales. This is a company that chooses to pay people to review every app submitted to the app store, they don’t want millions of apps by tinkerers being submitted, and it reduces total crapware in the store.I’m not necessarily advocating for this approach, just explaining why they do it.Doesn’t the play store also charge a fee? It’s smaller from memory but it isn’t free

Yeah, I don&#x27;t understand why people put up with Apple for this.  I would love to write small personal apps for my iPhone.  But, I don&#x27;t want to use a mac, I don&#x27;t want to pay a fee every year and I don&#x27;t want to use the apple store (yes there are convoluted work-rounds for the last one).

Yes, you can still do that directly (I did that just the other day).I can&#x27;t entirely understand Google&#x27;s announcement, but it almost sounded to me like they will forbid sideloading if you&#x27;re not an &quot;official&quot; dev (gone through their hoops). I also saw something in their statement about wanting to support hobbyists. It sounded like an afterthought.

I totally agree with your sentiment, but can&#x27;t you still do that with Android?IIUC, you can still load apps directly via adb. Is that not correct?

You don&#x27;t need a paid dev account to build and run on your own iPhone. I didn&#x27;t have one most of the time

Back in the 2007 or when it came out in Sweden I bought the iPhone and started developing for it. This was cool, new and exciting and it was fine as long as my company was paying the $100 fee every year. But then I switched jobs and worked at a company which produced mostly open source code. Suddenly I would have to pay $100 every year just to be able to put my own software on the phone ...This is why I switched to Android, just for Google now to pull the rug from under my feet again ...

Well, the things that got him canceled were and are wrong obviously. But anything (i know of) software related was right

I haven&#x27;t seen him say anything I disagree with. But we would have to discuss specifics for me to have confidence.

I wonder, what thing does HN think Stallman is wrong about today (and which in the future we will be proven wrong and Stallman was right).

Current big tech is based on Stallman-inspired people using their free time to make software. But they are putting MIT lisence because ”someone” had convinced them that GPL is not really free and not socially acceptable!

Non sequitor. He was right about what companies would do if allowed, and that&#x27;s the most important thing to keep in mind.

&gt; Stallman was right.Stallman did not find an economic model that works within our business&#x2F;legal environment.

It won&#x27;t get better if nothing changes.

have you seen the stupidity that is trying to develop for ie qualcomm soc if you are a small fry?

Kill it so we get a chance to see a new competitor.

You will probably run some kind of community Android distribution on that phone, like Lineage or Graphene, and those will likely not include this limitation. The world will be worse off, but you and I will be unaffected. Worst case is that future Google will decide to kick us out of the Play Store, but there has been plenty of workarounds for that before.

I just bought a fairphone6 hoping this phone would last me a decade with security patches and lineageos support. Naively I was assuming Google would keep Android open for that period. Now I might as well switch to Apple so I&#x27;m in sync with the rest of my family. 
Ugh.

You should have all embrace Windows Phone with all of its early issues.

Unfortunately the feedback period for the European Digital Fairness Act has been closed since October 24th. Does anyone know of another way to appeal to my European overlords^H representatives?

I&#x27;ve only been interested in Android phones particularly Pixels because I can just flash another OS and do whatever but if Google goes through with this I might consider iphones this time

It’s funny how the “Google doesn’t control it it’s open source” crowd has gotten very quiet as of late. See also chromium and manifest 3

&gt; We don&#x27;t call Google a monopoly, because there is Apple
We call that a duopoly, which is similarly bad as a monopoly.

It looks like eventually any company will start squeezing customers for what they are worth.But only once the company is powerful enough. We don&#x27;t call Google a monopoly, because there is Apple, but taken together they certainly behave as one. Both create expectations, create expected momentum in a certain direction, people build (companies, lives) on those assumptions and boom, you can&#x27;t get out and now the company changes the deal.Is it just our assumptions that get us in trouble? Or do we need to do more?I&#x27;m not sure how to regulate this, other than to stimulate open source, as the &quot;for the people by the people&quot; solution. But also that will just lead to poor expensive solutions (the market created some nice FOSS though). So the law it should be... And we&#x27;re back to the problem of lobbying...Perhaps there should be contracts: Google advertises Android as open: They should sign a contract: For how long will Android be open? Define &quot;Open&quot;. The contract can be enforced. Or perhaps we, the people, sue now, for false advertising, although that will just make them flex their legal and lobbying muscles... And they didn&#x27;t sign any contracts.

And after the change Google is doing now, it will still be more open than iOS.

Oh, the irony. I still remember how in the early days of Android vs iOS discussions, the main point was &quot;but it&#x27;s OPEN!&quot;. The word &quot;open&quot; was used as a comma by Google people. It was The Thing. The Difference. Good vs Evil and all that.

If you leave under a dictatorship you definitely don&#x27;t want to reveal your identity to develop and distribute an app that fights the government.

Exaclty. Play Store takes a cut from what it is selling, so they should be more strict what can be sold, not lock the whole platform.

Android already has this strict oversight, in theory, in the form of the Play Store. And yet.Personally I feel much more safe and secure downloading a random app from F-Droid, than I do from Google, whose supposed watchful eyes have allowed genuine malware to be distributed unimpeded.

My elderly father unknowingly installed an application on Android after seeing a deceptive ad. An advertising message disguised as an operating system pop-up convinced him that his Android phone&#x27;s storage was almost full. When he tapped the pop-up, and followed instructions he installed a fake cleaner app from the Play Store. While the app caused no actual harm, it displayed notifications every other day urging him to clean his phone using the same app. When he opened it, the app — which did nothing except display a fake graph simulating almost full storage — pressured him to purchase the PRO version to perform a deeper cleanup.In reality, the phone had 24 GB of free space out of 64 GB total. I simply uninstalled the fake cleaner and the annoying notifications disappeared.How such an app could reach the Play Store is beyond me. I can only imagine how many people that app must have deceived and how much money its creators likely made. I&#x27;m fairly certain the advertisement targets older people specifically—those most likely to be tricked.For better or worse, I&#x27;m pretty sure that such an app would never land into the Apple App Store.

I don&#x27;t understand how you can have mixed feelings about this.&gt; However, when it comes to publishing apps to the store,This isn&#x27;t about publishing apps to the Play Store. If that&#x27;s all this was about, we wouldn&#x27;t give a shit. The problem is that this applies to all stores, including third party stores like F-Droid, and any app that is installed independently of a store (as an apk file).&gt; Given the growing threat of such attacks, we need to find ways to mitigate them.How about the growing threat of right-wing authoritarian control? How do we mitigate that when the only &quot;free&quot; platform is deciding the only way anybody can install any app on their phone is if that app&#x27;s developer is officially and explicitly allowed by Google?Hell, how long until those anti-porn groups turn their gaze from video games and Steam onto apps, then pressure MasterCard&#x2F;Visa and in turn Google to revoke privileges from developers who make any app&#x2F;game that&#x27;s too &quot;obscene&quot; (according to completely arbitrary standards)?There&#x27;s such a massive tail of consequences that will follow and people are just &quot;well, it&#x27;s fine if it&#x27;s about security&quot;. No. It&#x27;s not. This is about arbitrary groups with whatever arbitrary bullshit ideology they might have being able to determine what apps are allowed to be made and installed on your phone. It&#x27;s not fucking okay.

If the manufacturer wants to offer verification of developers, this should be an optional feature allowing the user to continue the installation of applications distributed by unverified developers in a convenient way.Making this verification mandatory is an absolute non-starter, ridiculous overreach, and a spit in the face of regulators who are trying to break Google and Apple&#x27;s monopoly on mobile app distribution.

The threat of such attacks is not growing

&gt; Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespaceWhat are the requirements around domain renewal?

&gt; In my opinion, stricter oversight is beneficial.I agree; stricter oversight is beneficial for the official app store. It should not be necessary (and neither should Google&#x27;s (or Apple&#x27;s, or Microsoft&#x27;s, or the government&#x27;s, etc) verification be necessary) for stuff you install by yourself.&gt; The Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespace for their library.This means that you will need to have a domain name, and can verify it for this purpose. (It also has a problem if the domain name is later reassigned to someone else; including a timestamp would be one way to avoid that problem (there are other possibilities as well) but I think Java namespaces do not have timestamps.)&gt; I hope that Google&#x27;s new approach is motivated by security concerns rather than purely economic reasons.Maybe partially, but they would need to do it a better way.

Litmus test: Can you get NewPipe or other Youtube clients onto an Android phone? This is non-malicious software that users want to run but could reduce YouTube&#x27;s profits.

While I understand the reasons behind this campaign, I have mixed feelings about it.As an iPhone user, I find it frustrating that deploying my own app on my own device requires either reinstalling it every 7 days or paying $100 annually. Android doesn&#x27;t have this limitation, which makes it simpler and more convenient for personal use.However, when it comes to publishing apps to the store, I take a different view. In my opinion, stricter oversight is beneficial. To draw an analogy: NPM registry has experienced several supply chain attacks because anyone can easily publish a library. The Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespace for their library. This additional requirement, along with a few extra security checks, has been largely effective in preventing—or at least significantly reducing—the supply chain attacks seen in the NPM ecosystem.Given the growing threat of such attacks, we need to find ways to mitigate them. I hope that Google&#x27;s new approach is motivated by security concerns rather than purely economic reasons.

Does it also mean that developers in &quot;bad&quot; countries will not be able to create installable Android apps?

Ubuntu Touch is still a thing.We also have PostmarketOS (alpine base) and Mobian (debian base) as frontrunners. Supposedly Arch Linux for ARM and openSUSE Tumbleweed are also used by some on mobile.

There&#x27;s HarmonyOS [1], which is developed by Huawei, and which has a similar mix of open (OpenHarmony) and proprietary components. I haven&#x27;t used it, but it&#x27;s supported by quite a few phones and sort of surprised it wasn&#x27;t mentioned anywhere on this thread.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HarmonyOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HarmonyOS</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobian.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobian.org</a>

Are there any alternative mobile OSes actively developed? I remember Ubuntu Touch was the thing and something from Firefox, but not sure if they are continued?

&gt; please big corpo overlord do not do what is most profitable for you, pretty pretty please please

A year ago I built a React Native Android app for my wife called &quot;Pimp daddy&quot;, which she uses to track her earnings as an independent contractor.The whole concept is meant to poke fun at the idea of me &quot;checking up on her&quot; (I file her tax returns) and the entire theme is 80s pimp styled.Every time she submits something, she&#x27;ll get a random pimp remark, like &quot;Go get that money for me, girl!&quot;. She just rolls her eyes and ignores it, but it&#x27;s what made it fun for me to work on it.Edgy stuff like that could jeopardize my account in the near future. It might just be security now, but an automated &quot;naughty words detector&quot; will be an obvious next step.I doubt I will invest any more time in hobby app development if I have to deal with some humorless overbearing watchdog telling me what I can and cannot install on my own device. Very sad to see Android following Microsofts anti power user direction.

The idea of offering something for free then later deliberately restricting and or reducing its scope after securing enough takers to maximize benefits and advantages for those making the offer ought to be unlawful as they are knowingly and deliberately manipulating human nature. Those who accept such seemingly appealing offers often end up disadvantaged or harmed. And here with Google&#x27;s latest Android edict we have yet another instance.Manipulation and deception tactics are particularly relevant in internet age and they are Big Tech&#x27;s standard modus operandi because its found them to be such financially successful business models. Laws need to enacted to prevent such exploitation as it is unreasonable and unacceptable for the psyche&#x2F;reasoning of ordinary citizens to be pitched against such psychological might.As so often happens with such authoritarian and manipulative dictates, this Google edict comes wrapped in the usual paltry excuse of security. Even Blind Freddy knows this excuse to be bullshit and that the real beneficiary is Google. The time has come for Android to be decoupled completely from Google.It&#x27;s tragic that despite a monopolistic finding against Google the Law didn&#x27;t recognize the fact.

Yep, slowly moving pieces of AOSP to closed source and now silence on putting out any AOSP releases, in the name of simplifying their development..

They&#x27;re exremely tight-lipped on this.. many people asked using multiple channels but no response for months.

Whats also an issue is that Android seemingly has stopped publishing the source code for Android (AOSP). Android 16 QPR1 has been out for months but still no source code released.

The EU&#x27;s DMA team replied to a previous inquiry:&gt; [...] the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’) obliges gatekeepers like Google to effectively allow the distribution of apps on their operating system through third party app stores or the web. At the same time, the DMA also permits Google to introduce strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that third-party software apps or app stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system or to enable end users to effectively protect security. [...]They seem to be on it, but no surprise: it&#x27;s all about Google&#x27;s claims for &quot;security&quot; and &quot;ongoing dialogue gatekeepers&quot;.Freedom to use own hardware or software, no.

The play store ID process is ridiculous, their AI is making up BS why it wouldn&#x27;t let your documents pass, clearly no human in the loop.In the EU we can report this to: comp-market-information@ec.europa.euState that:
Google is abusing its dominant position on the market for Android-app distribution by “denial of access to an essential facility”.
Google is not complying with their &quot;gatekeeper&quot; DMA obligations (Article 5(4), Article 6(12), Article 11, Article 15)Attach evidence.Financial penalty is the only way to pressure this company to abide law.

Going full on Godwin today?People working for Google are not Nazis and people using Android phones are not like Auschwitz prisoners. That&#x27;s a really terrible analogy.

If people working for Google had a conscience, they would be working to break the system from within. At this point it&#x27;s leaving the confines of anti-consumerism and entering into a gray area of basic human rights abuse. It&#x27;s clearly a cartel market with the other big players (Apple and others to a lesser extend) that needed to be broken 10 years ago(if it were possible).It reminds me a bit of the book &quot;The Constant Soldier&quot;, depicting Auschwitz guards and staff enjoying their carefree holiday at a nearby lake resort, before going back to burning people. Might seem like hyperbole, but I think we&#x27;re rushing towards an ugly plutocracy.

Why do you need attestation? It seems to always either serve no real purpose (e.g. Bank apps) or be anti-user (DRM) (except for perhaps enterprise managed devices for companies with serious infosec requirements)

Why do you need attesation? Why do you think Google should own that device and not the user?

Android dev at a large company - I&#x27;ve been talking with the folks at Graphene about options for attestation without using Google&#x27;s API and it looks like there&#x27;s actually a lot I can do for attestation without them, as long as I add their cert chain to a backend service.It&#x27;s a bit of a pain because Google just does that for me normally, but we _can_ support it. It&#x27;s probably only a sprint of effort give or take. But we&#x27;re deeply undermanned so it&#x27;s hard to get done.

Android has not been really open for a long time now.- Many APIs have been moved to Google Play Services (which is not open source), and many apps have come to rely on them. You can emulate it partially but not fully, see second point below.- Some features like device attestation &#x2F; SafetyNet fail on non-&quot;official&quot; devices, for example many banking or government ID apps refuse to work on open source os like GrapheneOS

It&#x27;s finally the time for Sailfish OS &#x2F; Linux Smartphone OSes!

&gt; Ideally, major manufacturers would all contribute to AOSP to make sure that it runs well with their devices. And then we could install the &quot;AOSP distro&quot; we want, be it GrapheneOS or LineageOS or whatever the fuck we want.I was under the impression that we got that with GSI, including that Google required a device to support GSIs in order to be certified or something like that. Am I misremembering?

Linux on mobile is fun, but really I want AOSP and its superior security model and SDK.Now I hate Google as much as the next person, but I also hate all the other Android manufacturers who just don&#x27;t do better.Ideally, major manufacturers would all contribute to AOSP to make sure that it runs well with their devices. And then we could install the &quot;AOSP distro&quot; we want, be it GrapheneOS or LineageOS or whatever the fuck we want.&gt; does anyone know if Huawei is following along with this in their fork?They suck like all the other manufacturers: they forked as a quick solution, and then decided to go with their own proprietary codebase. If nobody else contributes, why would they make it open source?What I see from the Linux experience is that the only way it works is to have a copyleft licence and a multitude of contributors. That way it belongs to everybody, and it moves too fast for one single entity to write a proprietary competitor on their own. But AOSP is not that: first it&#x27;s a permissive licence, and only Google meaningfully contributes to it.

It&#x27;s a lost cause.
We need to focus on pmOS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postmarketos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postmarketos.org&#x2F;</a>With both Android and Chromium, we&#x27;re ultimately at Google&#x27;s mercy.btw, does anyone know if Huawei is following along with this in their fork?

Keep Android Open