[HN Gopher] F-Droid and Google's developer registration decree
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F-Droid and Google's developer registration decree
Author : gumby271
Score : 1336 points
Date : 2025-09-29 02:10 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (f-droid.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (f-droid.org)
| vinibrito wrote:
| I was waiting for fdroid's voice about this. Google's move is as
| bad as I initially thought. This makes me a bit sad honestly,
| android development is getting worse every year. I wonder if the
| same will happen to web as well.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The EU age verification system for the web is currently planned
| to rely on the Android/iOS anti-tampering device controls:
| https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-
| technic.... None of the plans to achieve China's level of
| internal control over communication can work without banning
| all user-administrated devices from the web, so I guess that's
| what you can expect next.
| rtpg wrote:
| > None of the plans to achieve China's level of internal
| control over communication can work without banning all user-
| administrated devices from the web
|
| Not that I want that future, but it's not like China has
| banned all user-administrated devices from the web. Seems odd
| to say this is necessary when, axiomatically, China has
| China's level of internal control over communication.
|
| There's a part of me that really wishes that we could have
| policies around things like age verification that implictly
| understand the existence of workarounds and accept them. If
| we're going to have these policies, anyways.
| dudisubekti wrote:
| Even China doesn't rely on controlling information from the
| user-side, they know any devices can be hacked lol. They rely
| more on controlling the server-side (WeChat, Douyin, Weibo,
| Bilibili, etc) and infrastructure (GFW).
|
| Well mostly, aside from some exceptions like (allegedly)
| Apple's AirDrop limitations.
|
| Many Chinese brands still support unlockable bootloader:
| https://github.com/melontini/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-
| shame...
|
| Although going forward, there's a strong incentive for
| manufacturers to follow Google and lock their devices.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Most chinese small brands are trivial to unlock and root. I
| doubt that will change; they dont care, which is great.
| asmor wrote:
| This is a reference implementation, national governments are
| expected to make their own versions. Last I checked the
| longest discussion thread on there had a comment from a
| developer who stated it's included in the Digital Identity
| Wallet app (of which the AV wallet reference is a fork)
| simply because it's a checkmark item on OWASP Mobile.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Nothing instills more confidence than a reference
| implementation that does the wrong thing. Sorry for being
| so sarcastic.
| shirro wrote:
| Australia's phase 2 industry codes build on phase 1 which was
| blocking csam and terrorist stuff and are into the child
| protection phase with age assurance and content restrictions.
|
| There are draft documents across a range of services
| including search, social media and internet carriage.
|
| The most relevant ones for Android are:
|
| - app distribution services https://onlinesafety.org.au/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/07/CLEAN...
|
| - manufacture supply of devices (including operating systems)
| https://onlinesafety.org.au/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/07/CLEAN...
|
| The future is looking bleak for open computing and open
| hardware. They have gone from being a place of education,
| freedom and empowerment to a loophole in regulation.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Of course it will, given how many every day help Google take
| over the Web, using features that are effectively ChromeOS
| Platform, complaining when Firefox and Safari refuse to adopt
| such features (they are holding Web back!), and shipping
| Electron crap.
| elchananHaas wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if F droid signed all software under
| their keys even though they aren't the developer? Make Google ban
| them instead of just giving up?
| zx8080 wrote:
| Any centralisation like this is bad: it's too easy for Google
| to delete all f-droid apps with their play protect one day.
| weikju wrote:
| This is addressed in the article as well, and while there's no
| technical reason they couldn't do this, it would break the
| licensing of the apps as well as the dangers of centralizations
| mentioned by a sibling reply.
|
| > The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register
| their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot
| "take over" the application identifiers for the open-source
| apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive
| distribution rights to those applications.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| That might be the least-worst option here.
| em-bee wrote:
| f-droid could distribute their apps with a different
| identifier.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Oh... this makes things much clearer to me actually. The
| issue is that you don't want apps that impersonate other apps
| showing up. For example, if someone put an app in another
| market that could sideload to impersonate Facebook's intents
| and do evil-maid type things. In the new system it would
| become very difficult to install a fake Facebook that is able
| to convince other apps that it is in fact Facebook's own app.
| Google's announcement can be seen as them operating
| essentially like DNS for app ids and intents and making
| things safer for a multi-app-store universe.
|
| For example, there is an annoyance that happens sometimes
| with apps that are distributed in both F-Droid and Play Store
| related to updates. F-Droid and Play Store will think they
| both can update the app (they have the same tld.what.ever
| identifier) but the signing keys only match the store they
| were installed from. I think F-Droid is now a bit more
| careful about this and only tries ones it has specifically
| installed. This is different... but somewhat related.
|
| F-Droid in general is a model good actor as far third-party
| app stores go, but from the perspective that malicious app
| stores might exist you would want to try and isolate apps
| from each other (and prevent unauthorized re-distribution of
| tampered versions etc). I think what Google is doing forces
| apps in each store to be cleanly namespaced from each other
| and prevent collisions (accidental or otherwise). This lets
| each app store tend and be responsible for its own walled
| garden.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Maybe users could provide their own keys into the F-Droid app
| and the F-Droid installer swaps keys as part of the download
| and install. At the end of the day we're just talking about a
| signature.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| No. You pay Google for the license and Google can kill your
| app, even on f droid.
|
| We don't need a work around. We need Google to stop killing
| our apps.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| The new registration system is not the paid the full
| developer registration--that's only needed for Play Store
| distribution. The new thing everyone is complaining about
| is a different registration system that will be free (but
| likely requires identity verification). Google's
| announcement said that a solution was being developed but
| is not yet available to support individual and hobbyist
| use. They said it will be available before the system
| becomes mandatory (except for a few high-risk countries)
|
| Frankly, I don't see why anonymous app distribution is
| necessary. The "I own my own device goddammit" thing is
| hobbyist category. Why should it be friction-less to
| install crap that has no provenance? That specifically
| seems like a really dumb hill to die on.
| deivid wrote:
| FDroid owns the keys for any app submitted without reproducible
| builds. But I believe they would prefer 100% reproducible
| builds and to own no keys
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| maybe they can distribute the apps with a different identifier?
| just add a suffix? like fdroid.__original_identifier__ ?
| rock_artist wrote:
| Sadly, our current age of computing is getting locked in devices.
| Not only most computing today is SoC with closed drivers but it's
| actively locking the user.
|
| Ironically it all started with Cydia and "hacking" the iPhone
| until executives understood they can make a cut.
|
| The EU did help to some extent by requesting Apple to enable non-
| appstore apps. but sadly, instead of doing the right thing of
| simply having a user switch that allows me to decide if I want to
| put my device at risk, they went with provisioning that seems to
| be agreed.
|
| So now, we're getting the same slap from Google/Android which I
| must say very strangely gets blessing from very specific
| governments:
|
| > The requirement goes into effect in Brazil, Indonesia,
| Singapore, and Thailand. At this point, any app installed on a
| certified device in these regions must be registered by a
| verified developer.
| instagib wrote:
| There are so many scams going around many nations they are
| resorting to whatever they can do to stem the flow of scams.
|
| You can still install via cable or adb but less tricking
| peoples grandparents to download malware.
|
| Now they need to trick developers to release malware or scam
| apps which is a little more difficult.
| defraudbah wrote:
| how did you make your comment in gray?
| Y_Y wrote:
| Just write some offtopic nonsense and it happens
| automatically ;)
| tmarsden wrote:
| per the FAQ: Faded text means that a comment has been
| downvoted. You can read the comment in normal text by
| clicking on its timestamp to go to its page.
| sunaookami wrote:
| There are thousand scam apps on the iOS App Store and Google
| Play Store, this will change nothing. It will only punish
| those that seek privacy.
| rvba wrote:
| > any app installed on a certified device in these regions must
| be registered by a verified developer.
|
| I can imagine crooks paying some random junkie / drunk 100
| dollars to become a "verified developer"
| 5d41402abc4b wrote:
| It was never meant to stop criminals.
| beeforpork wrote:
| Of course.
|
| But pesky adblockers are malware and thus will get barred.
|
| It's about money, of course.
| NSPG911 wrote:
| wait i live in singapore. this sucks, i loved using fdroid and
| didnt want to take the risk of rooting + flashing a custom rom.
| i felt the impact of the 'security' the moment i switched from
| my oneplus nord ce to 13r, i lost access to most android/data
| folders even with shizuku this is just so annoying in general
| for me, i might have to go the custom rom route then
| user_7832 wrote:
| Related thread from a month ago: We should have the ability to
| run any code we want on hardware we own, link:
| https://hugotunius.se/2025/08/31/what-every-argument-about-s...
|
| (Discussion link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45087396)
| stebalien wrote:
| I still haven't seen anyone discuss the issues with distributing
| applications containing GPLv3 components under these new rules
| given the clause (from the GPLv3):
|
| > "Installation Information" for a User Product means any
| methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information
| required to install and execute modified versions of a covered
| work in that User Product from a modified version of its
| Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that
| the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no
| case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has
| been made.
|
| At the moment, the workaround here is that keys can technically
| just be generated on the fly (with some caveats). With Google's
| new requirements, that's not possible.
| jenadine wrote:
| In my interpretation, this clause is for when someone ships a
| user product that contains GPLv3 software. That means it would
| apply to the phone vendor if the phone contained GPLv3 (or
| anything using LGPLv3) software.
|
| But if you're just a developer who ship software GPLv3 software
| for Android, you are good because any developer that want to
| modify your software on their phone can, as long as they
| register to Google to get these keys. It should therefore be
| respecting the licenses.
|
| But that's just my interpretation.
| danielheath wrote:
| > any developer that want to modify your software on their
| phone can, as long as they register to Google to get these
| keys
|
| Pretty sure the GPLv3 requires you not have any such barrier.
| jenadine wrote:
| I couldn't find such requirements when reading the GPL.
|
| The paragraph cited by GP is from the explicitly about
| "convey an object code work under this section in, or with,
| or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the
| conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the
| right of possession and use of the User Product is
| transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed
| term". So in other words, only if you sell hardware with
| binaries under GPL.
|
| Also, from reading other comments, it seems it would still
| be possible to use the adb console to load apps without
| having signatures? So that should cover it as far as the
| GPL is concerned.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| IANAL but isn't that the purpose of the passage below
| (emphasis mine)? I agree it's subject to interpretation
| whether the license also allows one to provide detailed
| instructions on how to obtain new keys from a third party
| and install the application using them. However, it seems
| to me the passage implies that if Google is to deny
| someone developer keys and installation of the modified
| application, then the original distributor of the
| application is in violation of the GPLv3.
|
| ----
|
| '"Installation Information" for a User Product means any
| methods, procedures, _authorization keys_ , or other
| information required to install and execute modified
| versions of a covered work in that User Product from a
| modified version of its Corresponding Source. The
| information must suffice to ensure that the continued
| functioning of the modified object code is in no case
| prevented or interfered with solely because modification
| has been made.
|
| If you convey an object code work under this section in,
| or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and
| the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which
| the right of possession and use of the User Product is
| transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed
| term (regardless of how the transaction is
| characterized), _the Corresponding Source conveyed under
| this section must be accompanied by the Installation
| Information._ '
|
| ----
| jenadine wrote:
| But the "original distributor of the application" is not
| convoying the binary in "a transaction in which the right
| of possession and use of the User Product is transferred
| to the recipient", so that clause doesn't apply.
|
| In this context, the "User Product" would be the phone,
| as defined in the previous paragraph of the license.
| stebalien wrote:
| Sure, but that means that either Google or the application
| author would be required to give me working keys with no
| restrictions, which would make the entire system rather
| pointless.
|
| However, now that I think about it, the fact that
| "unauthorized" apps can still be installed via ADB exception
| may cover this?
| kuschku wrote:
| > as long as they register to Google to get these keys
|
| As soon as e.g. an Iranian user gets access to your GPLv3
| app, you've got a problem. They cannot register with Google
| (due to sanctions), but you are responsible for ensuring they
| can install and distribute their modified app just as you
| have.
| tzs wrote:
| They aren't responsible for ensuring that others can
| install it.
|
| That part of GPLv3, commonly called the "anti-Tivoization"
| clause, only applies if you "convey an object code work
| under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in,
| a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a
| transaction in which the right of possession and use of the
| User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity
| or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is
| characterized)".
|
| This was narrowly written to only cover situations like
| Tivo, which was a hardware vendor locking down GPL code on
| the hardware they sold.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Whilst details matter in law I assume this will be equivalent
| to Apple's terms and the FSF believes they are incompatible
| https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-
| store....
| marcprux wrote:
| I do think that this very much puts Google in the same boat as
| Apple in terms of how the GPL is deemed compatible or not for
| distribution to their platforms and proprietary stores.
|
| Personally, I think that the GPL is still compatible with
| _both_ platforms, as I 've written about before[1]. There's
| plenty of GPL software on both the Play Store and App Store
| (Signal, Element, Wordpress, SimpleNote, Bitwarden, Mastodon,
| Telegram, and Proton Mail, just to name a few), but people tend
| to feel that iOS is a more hostile environment. The mandatory
| developer registration requirement may bring a more even-handed
| assessment of how the GPL and these app stores can live
| together.
|
| [1] https://appfair.org/blog/gpl-and-the-app-stores
| devsda wrote:
| I'm glad fdroid is voicing its concerns and asking people to act.
|
| This is not just another technical challenge. If your country is
| ever in the crosshairs of "American interests" and bears the
| brunt of its sanctions, it is possible that you cannot install
| apps from your fellow citizens i.e. your own local government,
| bank and store apps.
|
| Countries that are likely to face sanctions are also likely to be
| predominantly Android users, so it affects them
| disproportionately. Good luck teaching your fellow citizens to
| root phones their phones(which is getting hard and outright
| impossible on certain phones) if that happens.
|
| This is a real challenge that countries need to think and plan
| for.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Lineageos has probably the most compatibility among the
| android-compatible opensource and open (not vendor-locked)
| phone OSes. However the list of compatible phones is too small.
| There's almost devices one can go and buy (except Pixels, but I
| would not use Google's Pixels just to avoid feeding the
| wolves).
| OldMatey wrote:
| What a disaster this will be. The end of any really open phones.
| By the time I cannot sideload apps or torrent onto my device, I
| might as well move to an iPhone and at least get less data
| tracking and better security.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I'll never reward Apple with another dime. They started and
| normalized this. Plus whatever rights Apple takes away next,
| Android will likely continue to lag behind in implementing for
| years.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| I don't believe for one second that Google is doing this
| because Apple does so too. They would have done so long ago.
| I would rather bet this has to do with recent political
| shifts that are also pushing for mandatory digital IDs and
| spying on encrypted messages (see UK and EU). This and
| Windows 11 depending on certain hardware are all pointing in
| one direction: a war on general computing.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"a war on general computing"
|
| This. It gives too much freedom to people.
| beeflet wrote:
| It is strange that this is happening all at once. Pretty
| much no major advances in the war on general purpose
| computing for the past decade, but in 2025 there are a
| number of major attempts to lock everything down.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Let's think about what happened in 2025. Say, January
| 2025. Say, 20 January 2025.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| That's called 'Reductio Ad Trumpum' and it is just as
| absurd as its spiritual predecessor, 'Reductio Ad
| Hitlerum' (https://www.fallacyfiles.org/adnazium.html)
| Idesmi wrote:
| This website is amazing, thank you for sharing!
| alex989 wrote:
| Do you really believe it's Trump's fault that politicians
| in the EU are pushing for the end of encryption,
| mandatory digital ID, and age verifications?
| pas wrote:
| never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
|
| but the same processes that put the orange man there put
| similar people in other places too
|
| and similar sentiments led to voters preferring
| authoritarian measures
| stavros wrote:
| You left the DMA and GDPR out of that, which makes the
| entire argument conveniently one-sided.
| realusername wrote:
| Yes and no, Safetynet and Play Integrity were also major
| attacks against computing.
| debazel wrote:
| And Apple has been in the forefront to normalized the "a
| war on general computing" for more than a decade now.
|
| 15 years ago this is exactly what we said was going to
| happen with the normalization of Apple's locked down
| ecosystems, and now here we are.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| Why single out one company? Microsoft's mobile platform
| was just as locked down. Microsoft's hold over boot keys
| is a lock down that even spreads to other OSes and will
| be very relevant in the future I foresee. All pieces are
| falling into place for the final rag pull.
|
| And like I said, I do not believe this move is because
| Apple paved the way. If they hadn't, Apple would make a
| similar announcement to Google now in 2025.
| jenadine wrote:
| > The end of any really open phones.
|
| One could argue whether Phones with the Google android were
| ever really open.
|
| As for the really really open phone with alternative OS or
| Linux based OS, they will continue to exist as before. Perhaps
| even become more popular after this?
| creesch wrote:
| > One could argue whether Phones with the Google android were
| ever really open.
|
| In recent years, you can argue that android has no longer
| been open. In the early years of Android that argument would
| be much harder to make. To be clear, I am not talking
| hardcore FOSS libre open. But _meaningfully_ open for the end
| user to do what they want on their device without much
| restriction. Early android didn 't have sandboxing, had no
| permission system, was easy to root, etc.
|
| Certainly with Nexus devices you had pretty much the freedom
| to what you wanted.
|
| Could it have been more open? Sure, but I feel like it is
| almost disingenuous to say it was never if we are comparing
| it to the real world situation we find ourselves in today.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Early android _did_ have sandboxing and a permission
| system. It 's just that you had to accept all permissions
| on app install. (Which is still a lot better than common
| practice on the contemporary desktop.)
|
| That didn't make the system less open though. The user gets
| to make an informed (or not) choice.
|
| What _was_ different is that the Play store back then was
| basically a free-for-all. There was no meaningful approval
| process. This _did_ contribute to making the system as a
| whole more open, but at a cost...
| ZiiS wrote:
| Doubling the number of people on a custom ROM dose not nearly
| balance the loss of options for those that remain on a stock
| ROM. I do not want my less technical family to have to give
| away all the genuine (though imperfect) safety the Play Store
| currently provides.
| ZiiS wrote:
| tbc I think F-Droid is much _more_ secure than Play. What I
| am saying is I have many family members who can just about
| follow the rule "First search F-Droid then search Play".
| No, they are not going to use a phone with only F-Droid
| software*. Most will probably take the deal with the Devil;
| and those that won't, even if they chose a great ROM, will
| end up using apkpure.com and be substantially less secure.
|
| * Guessing you have to search for Fennec to get a
| relatively respectful Browser is one thing; no banking,
| doctors, taxi apps rules out anyone who has ever run stock.
| xandrius wrote:
| Consider trying Ubuntu Touch, very active community and fun if
| you're interested to be a developer.
|
| Jumping from a shark to another is maybe not the solution we
| should aim for.
|
| I released an app on the Ubuntu Touch store: took a minute to
| fill in the form and then you get people giving you
| feedback/help if anything doesn't work (since you can link your
| source code too).
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| i guess it would be 'trying' indeed, as per usual it would
| mean that i'd need multiple devices. 2FA, e-Banking,
| messaging, instant payment apps and more would probably be
| missing, right?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| they've been waiting long for this moment to make us all
| addicted
| xandrius wrote:
| Anything that is not native and Android-based can be run
| with Waydroid. Of course it depends on how intertwined with
| the OS but it would be interesting to try.
|
| If you were to pick 3 apps which you needed to have running
| to switch, what would they be? (if too personal, pick from
| your top 10)
| array_key_first wrote:
| Its not that these things are missing, it's that it's
| physically impossible to implement them. That's done on
| purpose, so you're forced onto your current phone for the
| foreseeable future.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Nice that's still moving forward!
|
| What's the current state of hardware? Is there a phone that's
| decent at being a phone, with an OK camera and a battery that
| last through the day running Ubuntu?
|
| What's the current state of Waydroid? Any chance to get my
| banking apps running, or at least standard fare like public
| transit apps?
| xandrius wrote:
| I recently got a FairPhone 5 and it is working pretty well,
| especially for the price.
|
| UbuntuTouch as an OS is quite refreshing as it's not just a
| copy of Google/Samsung/Apple UIs. I like how they use the
| sidebars.
|
| Definitely it still needs more work on getting more devices
| fully supported but that's an ever going effort, since OEM
| do not provide any help here (for now).
| pbmonster wrote:
| Did you try using waydroid with it? I assume banking apps
| are still a problem, but can I just take the apk of a map
| app like OSMand and it will give me offline maps,
| including my GPS position and compass heading? Because I
| think openstreetmaps is still lacking a native Linux app,
| but the Android apks are decent.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't understand, what's the point of reinventing UI and
| apps from scratch when there is Android Open Source, with GUI
| and millions of apps? Wouldn't it be better to cut away all
| the telemetry from AOSP, add a custom wallpaper and call it a
| day?
| reddalo wrote:
| Good luck running AOSP without Google Play Services.
| mzajc wrote:
| I do that. F-Droid also requires that applications do not
| depend on any GMS component, but if you need anything
| from GMS, you can install https://microg.org/ and
| selectively enable the features you need.
| codedokode wrote:
| Google Play Services are mainly ads and telemetry, why
| would anyone need them? Do you have not enough ads and
| want more? Also I install apps mostly from F-Droid, and
| as I am aware, there are Play Services emulators.
| Aachen wrote:
| Look at it from both sides. Ubuntu has a vibrant ecosystem
| of software (commonly known as the Debian repositories,
| with some attempts at launching their on on top like PPA
| and Snap)
|
| Launching a mobile OS with all that software already
| available was miles better than what Android can offer
| today: loads of things exist open source for Debian that
| haven't been recreated as an Android app (closed or open)
| because the OS doesn't allow it anyway. Let alone when the
| project was started in 2011!
|
| Conversely, in the 14 years that Ubuntu Touch now exists,
| Android developers have been busy and you'll now find
| mobile software that can do things that laptops can't, e.g.
| because they're not normally put in a car as a navigation
| device and don't normally have GNSS built in. So now we're
| in a state where you'd think: why not take AOSP and run
| with it? But fourteen years ago you'd think: wouldn't it be
| amazing if we could just run all of our tried and true
| software on a phone? (Fwiw, that's exactly what I did when
| I got my first Android (and still do today): get root and
| install a Debian userspace to run tools within, such as
| Restic for backups. I compiled a Bitcoin miner for ARM back
| in the day just because that would be fun and cool. There's
| so much you can do when you have a Linux distribution in
| your pocket!)
|
| So I see your point, but consider the history. My
| understanding is that this project comes from a time when
| it made perfect sense. By now, though, I wonder the same.
| But I haven't tried Ubuntu Touch yet so I can't really
| speak ill of it and say we should use AOSP instead of them
| codedokode wrote:
| > Ubuntu has a vibrant ecosystem of software (commonly
| known as the Debian repositories, with some attempts at
| launching their on on top like PPA and Snap)
|
| Yes but the most of the packages are either CLI tools
| (not really usable on a phone) or tools with desktop GUI
| (with tiny elements, not usable on a phone). And probably
| there is a way to port Wayland/Pipewire to Android, which
| seems an easier task that writing full OS.
|
| For example, take GIMP, or Qucs (electric circuit
| simulator), or Kdenlive (video editor), or LMMS (audio
| editor), in their current form they would be unusable due
| to tiny UI elements. One needs completely new UI for
| small screens.
|
| > There's so much you can do when you have a Linux
| distribution in your pocket!)
|
| Maybe but I am not really interested in compiling
| anything, I have a laptop for that, I am interested in
| having an open source OS without restrictions, telemetry
| and backdoors.
| jhasse wrote:
| Yes and it has already been done: https://e.foundation/ You
| can also buy a phone preloaded with it:
| https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-
| gen-6-e-operating-s...
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| ubuntu touch requires you to twrp which might not be
| available to your device
| xandrius wrote:
| You can see here the supported devices
|
| https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| But then you will have to deal with lots of shit from Apple,
| because they do everything they can to prevent their ecosystem
| to interact with open source solutions and to make it difficult
| for normis to get data off their phone, so that after a couple
| of years the phones are always full and a new one "needs to be
| bought".
| Animats wrote:
| I trust F-Droid more than the Google Play Store. I have F-Droid
| installed, but not the Google Play Store.
| benrutter wrote:
| I agree with the first point! On the second- how do you access
| apps tied to services like banking, utilities, transport, etc?
|
| This is one of the main things keeping me tied to the Google
| ecosystem, a lot of services require me to have an app that's
| only available on the play store.
| metalman wrote:
| bank through a web browser, works for me, every new phone
| gets de guggled right out of the box, turning off the
| notifications requires loadeing alternate phone apps, which
| for some reason de-grayout's the notifiction/harsments from
| guggle on everything else currently gathering all of the
| alternate OS phone info I can find, and will start a thread
| when things get hotter
| Animats wrote:
| Web sites. Uber works from its web site. I mostly do things
| from desktops, not phones.
|
| I don't have any financial stuff on my phone. More secure.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I'm seconding this. I can use my digital bus tickets from
| the bus company's website so I can activate them on my
| Ubuntu Touch phone. Any banking stuff I do on my desktop.
| DarkFuture wrote:
| I install MicroG (on my LineageOS on Pixel) which allows me
| to install my UK banking apps and Google Maps, etc. MicroG
| just reimplemented the Google APIs:
|
| > microG GmsCore is a free software reimplementation of
| Google's Play Services. It allows applications calling
| proprietary Google APIs to run on AOSP-based ROMs like
| LineageOS, acting as a free replacement for the non-free,
| proprietary Google Play Services (sometimes referred to as
| the more generic term "GApps"). It is a powerful tool to
| reclaim your privacy and freedom while enjoying Android core
| features (although apps you use that take advantage of it may
| still be using proprietary libraries to communicate with
| microG, just as they do when communicating with the actual
| Google Play Services).
|
| Source: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki
|
| I add the official MicroG repo to my F-Droid using this QR
| code: https://microg.org/fdroid/repo/
|
| Also, I download apps (like my UK banks) from official Play
| store using Aurora Store, which connects to Google servers
| directly to download the APKs, keep them updated, etc. No
| need to use those dodgy APK websites. Aurora Store is itself
| also available on F-Droid too.
|
| I guess in time Google will target these apps :(
| t_mahmood wrote:
| Okay, this is interesting! I thought it's just a cut down
| version of Google's base packages. I didn't realize it's a
| complete reimplementation.
|
| So, I complete LineageOS installation without MindTheGapps,
| then install fdroid, add the microG repo, To install any
| Playstore dependent application use aurora store.
|
| No gotchas?
| matoro wrote:
| For me at least I just use the prebuilt MicroG-flavor
| ROMs at https://lineage.microg.org/
|
| This comes preloaded with the MicroG settings app, so no
| need to install the extra FDroid repo. But otherwise yes,
| Aurora Store gets you access to all necessary proprietary
| apps.
| logtempo wrote:
| thanks you a lot, I did not know about Aurora store.
| DarkFuture wrote:
| Yes that's all I do, official LineageOS image for Pixel 6
| (I bought it used on eBay).
|
| I haven't tried it but apparently Aurora Store also
| supports login with your Google account, which means you
| can download apps you've paid for on the Play store
| directly.
| pabs3 wrote:
| The Aurora Store lets you access Play Store apps without
| having a Google account by using their shared accounts, it is
| recommended on GrapheneOS (a privacy/security Android fork).
|
| https://auroraoss.com/
|
| Of course government, banking, McDonalds and other apps ban
| non-Google versions of Android, so you might be stuck with
| either Google or Apple until lawmakers catch up with this
| situation.
|
| https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-
| gu...
| 0312831209381 wrote:
| Aurora Store is generally _not_ recommended by the GOS folk
| as it offers minimal privacy benefits over running the
| full-fat google play within the GrapheneOS Google services
| sandbox, while introducing supply chain risk.
|
| It is convenient though and I've used it from time to time.
| I prefer "APKUpdater" for one-off play store downloads
| which I think uses the same client code aurora does:
| https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
| tazjin wrote:
| (GrapheneOS user, no Google services)
|
| My bank provides the APK of their app directly on their
| website, and it supports updating itself after that. Actually
| a surprising amount of apps do this!
|
| Other proprietary stuff I either get from RuStore (Russia-
| specific), or occasionally from APK mirrors / Aurora. At the
| moment I have no such apps (they're usually for some specific
| thing, e.g. an airline app that I need for a day or two).
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| I do banking, bill paying, etc from a laptop. I have the
| minimum number of apps on phone, mostly from Fdroid, plus
| Uber (my location turned off except the rare occasions when I
| need to call uber).
| panny wrote:
| Same, and when all my apps stop working, I'll just stop
| carrying a phone.
| scorpioxy wrote:
| So for Australia, what can someone do?
|
| I don't believe that regulation these days can stand against
| corporate interests. I have seen this happen many times already.
| So what can I as a consumer do? The two practical options seem to
| be either Apple or Google.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I heard there are Linux based phones but I haven't tried any
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Expensive (well, except pine) and behind but i buy them
| anyway, as I cannot stand this corporate crap.
| haakon wrote:
| What is the most tolerable of these phones, in your
| experience?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| The Purism ones. They work mostly fine - outdated
| hardware sure, but it is all fast enough and works and is
| very usable as workstation of course depending on what
| you do. I do some rust, go, node dev and it works very
| well when plugged into a larger screen.
| komali2 wrote:
| I've messed around with funky phones, and after having an
| emergency call fail on two different ones, I've decided not
| to mess about with them anymore (GrapheneOS on some random
| pixel and a funky e-ink phone). Maybe it works great on
| whatever linux phone you mean but my path forward has looked
| more like just always using secondhand androids until I can
| install fdroid anymore, and then just using a linux phone
| tethered to a dumbphone that can hotspot. Finding out you
| can't call emergency services when you really super duper
| need to is something I never want to risk happening to me
| again.
| rbits wrote:
| GrapheneOS is probably the answer?
| pabs3 wrote:
| Attestation means you probably will need an Apple/Google
| device in addition to the GrapheneOS one:
|
| https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-
| gu...
| preisschild wrote:
| Letting the app developers know that it doesnt improve
| security and that it blocks you from using the app and it
| enforcing a monopoly sometimes works.
|
| I/We managed to get two apps (banking and eID) to remove
| SafetyNet attestation through complaining a lot.
| pabs3 wrote:
| I'm assuming those apps are still proprietary and
| probably privacy violating?
| preisschild wrote:
| > I'm assuming those apps are still proprietary and
| probably privacy violating?
|
| Yes. Not sure about "privacy violating" though. But since
| its not open source I have to trust them...
| strcat wrote:
| Only a tiny subset of apps ban GrapheneOS. Several such as
| Swissquote recently decided to permit it via hardware
| attestation. Swizerland's government ID app is also going
| to be permitting it. We're working on getting more apps
| using the Play Integrity API to do that, but it would be
| better if the EU and other governments required permitting
| alternatives which are at least as secure as what Google
| permits (currently an extremely low bar, since they permit
| many years without privacy/security patches and only check
| for licensing Google Mobile Services).
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Yes, Evil Corp is doing bad things so let's switch to project
| that is tightly coupled to the Evil Corp's hardware.
| shakna wrote:
| Its our government plan, too.
|
| Controlled distribution:
|
| https://onlinesafety.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CLEAN...
|
| Controlled hardware:
|
| https://onlinesafety.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CLEAN...
| uneekname wrote:
| The time to fight is now!! We are careening toward a bleak future
| of mobile computing.
| komali2 wrote:
| Unfortunately the fight seems to be _enormous_. It 's not just
| this little slice of computing freedom, it's all the random
| bullshit that various world governments get up to that I keep
| seeing in EFF newsletters: big tech enforcing government
| censorship or ratting you out to your government that's having
| a play at fascism, or making you verify your identity to access
| services, or trying to get access to your encrypted
| communications, but on top of that it's also: weaponizing
| copyright law to get you in trouble for repairing things you
| bought, choking out small businesses that might compete with
| regulatory capture or copyright shenanigans, shadowbanning your
| content if it doesn't look nice next to coca-cola ads (everyone
| putting little stars on sui*ide or whatever other nonsense),
| adding fees on all your payments or completely un-humaning you
| if you don't pay to play (credit card companies; UK allowing
| "CC only" shops).
|
| Not to be the strings on the pegboard guy, but, it's all
| looking to be connected, and it's all looking to be the natural
| outcome of organizing our societal value systems around profit
| motive and letting gigantic inhuman profit-seeking algorithms
| (corporations) run rampant and allowing capital to be
| transferable to political power.
|
| Walkaway by Cory Doctorow seems the most feasible path forward
| for people that are tired of this sort of society. Modern
| society seems too prepared to be able to overcome with
| widespread revolution, and in any case such an overthrow seems
| too vulnerable to co-opting by bad, authoritarian actors.
| gmueckl wrote:
| It is connected, but not in the "man behind the mirror"
| sense. It just happens to be the result of important
| governments across the world shifting politically right
| simultaneously and pushing/tolerating agendas that value
| government-enforced security over personal freedom.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| A duck just happens to be the result of the way it looks,
| walks, swims and quacks.
|
| What use is this decomposition in case of the undeniable
| enfascistification of the world, other than giving a set of
| bullet point excuses for the devil's advocates?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| > Unfortunately the fight seems to be enormous.
|
| It is, but the longer the general public plays ostrich in the
| sand and prefers losing their tail feathers one by one to
| unburying their eyes and admitting where all this has been
| going, the more enormous it will be.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The time to fight back was when Microsoft got a slap on the
| wrist 25 years ago from the Justice Department.
| sn0n wrote:
| I turned on "Advanced Protection" a couple weeks ago, and
| promptly turned it off the other day when it blocked f-droid
| updates. What a scam android has become.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Samsung [^1] has an autoblocker. I have no idea what it does
| exactly. I always need to turn it off while installing or
| updating anything from F-droid. Then I enable it again in the
| naive hope it might prevent dome drive-by attack.
|
| [^1]: My employer paid for it. I never would pay for the
| crapware full of uninstallable stuff I don't want. Is Pure
| Android still a thing if you don't want to pay The Evil
| Company?
| mjd wrote:
| I've been using Motorola for years, for that reason.
| pogue wrote:
| Interestingly, I read in a recent article on upcoming
| features for OneUI 8.5 (based on a leaked build) is the _"
| Ability to temporarily disable Auto Blocker"_ [1]. This is
| _specifically_ to allow the sideloading of apps. That really
| makes me wonder why Samsung would have such an option in an
| upcoming version if they were aware that Google is planning
| to block all unverified sideloading in the very near future.
|
| [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-phones-
| new-u...
| gmueckl wrote:
| Twoo scenarios:
|
| 1. Samsung hasn't adjusted the product roadmap yet.
|
| 2. Samaung plans to modify Android to remove the extra
| checks that Google wants.
| codedokode wrote:
| I have a Samsung and I can install apps from F-Droid. I
| don't even understand what is "Auto Blocker" and why you
| need it when there are permissions, but I have it disabled.
| pipe01 wrote:
| NothingOS is as clean as it gets
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Motorola is quite close to the 'pure' Android, ie with all
| that Google... stuff.
|
| But most of the time it is easy to disable most of the Google
| apps through the built-in settings without using any 3rd-
| party tools.
| abraham wrote:
| > What a scam android has become.
|
| An optional advanced security feature targeted at non-typical
| users doesn't seem like a good indicator of this statement.
| 63stack wrote:
| How is blocking fdroid updates an "advanced security
| feature"?
| abraham wrote:
| The opt-in security feature is blocking all installs from
| outside the play store.
| modeless wrote:
| If Google really goes through with this I might seriously
| consider GrapheneOS. At least Pixel hardware ought to still
| support unlocking the bootloader. But for how long...
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I have installed Graphene and Lineage in the last couple months
| and had good experiences. Easy as ever. Not on my daily driver
| though
| usr1106 wrote:
| I already use 2 Android phones. One for main usage without the
| evil company. Another one with 2 apps from Playstore installed;
| it would cost me significant money not to use one of the
| duopolists there. I really hate having to pay the Google/Apple
| tax. The only choice I have is to decide which bad actor
| receives it.
|
| (Typing this on my 3rd phone, Sailfish OS. Unfortunately the
| software lacks sufficient maintenance efforts and the hardware
| does not suit me for primary phone use)
| pabs3 wrote:
| GrapheneOS will help with being able to install F-Droid, apps
| from it and sideload other apps, but it means you will be
| blocked from installing government/other apps, so you will need
| a second phone with an Apple/Google OS.
|
| https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
| miloignis wrote:
| _If_ you use those apps. All of the apps I use, including my
| banking app, work fine on GrapheneOS.
| snerbles wrote:
| For now.
| tommica wrote:
| This whole situation sucks. I enjoy F-Droid exactly. Because I
| can use stores like F-Droid or just download a package from
| github and be able to run it on my phone. That going away for
| corporation and governmental greed is just... Sigh.
| shirro wrote:
| While Google are capable of being evil all on their own I wonder
| if the regulatory environment companies are facing around the
| world is contributing. It is going to lead to increasingly
| restricted systems with less choice for consumers.
|
| I recently tried to install Thunderbird email on my 17 year old's
| phone so he could access our self-hosted email for education,
| jobs, government things that young adults require. After jumping
| through hoops with age verification it turned out not to be
| allowed for his age for some unfathomable reason. Increasingly
| content providers, app stores, os providers etc are coming under
| chilling industry codes here requiring age verification and age
| restriction. So I used f-droid so my young adult could start
| making applications.
|
| What I see as freedom might look a lot like circumvention to
| regulators.
|
| As all the big commercial services step into line with government
| codes and turn restrictions to their commercial advantage I am
| not sure where that leaves those of us who use FOSS software. My
| apps come from Flathub, arch, debian, f-droid not Apple, Google,
| or Microsoft stores. My devices come OS free when possible. The
| volunteers involved haven't participated in the development of
| industry codes and aren't in a position do all the compliance
| stuff that governments increasingly demand from tech companies.
| How much longer will free and open source be tolerated?
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| My impression is that the order of causality is the opposite.
| Google and similar companies are lobbying heavily for these
| industry codes so that app developers have no choice but to
| introduce the restrictions which only allow you to operate via
| them.
| shirro wrote:
| I think it is probably a bit of both.
|
| There are some compelling reasons to regulate tech companies
| for the benefit of society and I often have no issue with the
| intention. The problem is governments invite the industry to
| design the regulations and it quickly turns into regulatory
| capture.
|
| If vendors were to start locking out competition or further
| invade privacy it would upset government regulators but now
| they can point at another regulatory authority and claim they
| are forced to do these things to protect the kiddies.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > developers have no choice but to introduce the restrictions
| which only allow you to operate via them
|
| ok, but what does that mean? Identification, and a fee for
| that service? Is this unreasonable?
| Aachen wrote:
| What's the service when I've purchased a phone?
|
| If they were to require subscribing and paying a fee to use
| their required online service to be able to use the
| hardware, that sounds like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
| Chris2048 wrote:
| You're talking about a hypothetical situation where end
| users pay the app store directly, rather than indirectly
| via developer fees?
|
| Also, Tying is usually applied for unrelated,
| unnecessary, or non-beneficial services. It's not obvious
| to me that it applies here.
| array_key_first wrote:
| > You're talking about a hypothetical situation where end
| users pay the app store directly, rather than indirectly
| via developer fees?
|
| It doesn't matter much, you pay it regardless.
|
| > Also, Tying is usually applied for unrelated,
| unnecessary, or non-beneficial services.
|
| Yes, Apple and Google charge 30% for basically nothing.
|
| I know some people will complain about that. They will
| say, "no, they do stuff!"
|
| From what I've seen, they do as close to nothing as
| possible. Malware makes it through, deceptive apps make
| it through, nobody gives a single fuck. If you report
| anything to Apple they will spit in your face. They do
| not care.
|
| This is less of a service fee and more a of a mafioso
| "pay me, for your sake" type fee.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| You are generalising - I didn't even mention Apple, and
| afaik small developers are charged 15% for using play
| store.
|
| I am talking only about _this_ specific developer fee wrt
| registration and identification, not fees associated with
| using play store or otherwise.
|
| From what I can tell, it is a fixed, one-off $25 for an
| account, with a plan to have a free account option for
| "limited distribution" developers (hobbyists, students,
| families and small businesses fwict).
| zavec wrote:
| It reminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes strip where the dad
| jokes that throwing out junk mail makes him a terrorist.
| Running your own software on your own device? That's hacker
| talk.
| AJ007 wrote:
| In F-Droid's case this is absolutely a regulatory reaction --
| this is directly related to the DMA (and to some extent, the
| Epic lawsuits.) Google does not want third parties bypassing
| Google in any way -- which probably ties in to the whole AOSP
| thing.
|
| > How much longer will free and open source be tolerated?
|
| I don't think they have a choice. Imagine what would happen to
| Google if half their software stack was Oracle and the EU had
| backdoors in to all of the management and CEO's devices and
| private communication. Why not use Chat Control to verify that
| they are complying with the spirit of EU law? Turn on the
| remote microphones while they are at it too.
|
| On one hand we can lament the death of open source. Yet, open
| source has never been healthier. There has never been more open
| source software available to use and in development. Even when
| in it comes to AI, the best open source models are actually
| really damn good, better than anything that existed roughly 12
| months ago. As much as Google, Apple, and Microsoft want to
| force you in to their closed ecosystems they fear being locked
| in to their competitor's closed ecosystems even more!
|
| This could be a 10 page comment, but yes, the regulatory
| environment is a real threat to open source and the open
| internet in general. Most of those threats have been coming
| from the EU, with things like Chat Control and PLD. Which is
| unfortunate, because the future of the free world will rest
| entirely with the United States (Also possible that the EU will
| be dissolved, the monetary union will have a very difficult
| time during the next financial crisis.)
|
| On the other hand, software developers and users, have become
| too reliant on Android which is functionally a fake open source
| project now. I can't think of a stronger incentive to stop
| Android development than telling them you can't develop here
| without paying us.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Calling downloadable weights and biases open source is like
| calling compiled binaries open source.
| okanat wrote:
| It is more like the assembly dump generated from the source
| code with maybe some symbol information for the functions.
| The download licenses are also quite limited.
|
| The full text training data isn't really shareable though.
| Since it is copyrighted when it comes to plebs like us
| reading them.
| yonato wrote:
| My Pixel 6 just broke, and after 15 years of using Android (I
| still miss that Nexus One trackball!), I've finally been
| convinced to move to iOS.
|
| If I have no options left and must live in a walled garden, I
| suppose I'll choose the one with nicer flowers.
| kykat wrote:
| never thought that I (lifelong gnu/linux user) would ever
| seriously consider getting an iPhone, but here we are.
| miloignis wrote:
| I _highly_ recommend GrapheneOS - it really is Android as it
| should be. More secure, more open, no ads or tracking.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| F-droid has been stellar in steering the alternative app store
| environment over the past 15 years or so, and I'd heed their call
| on this.
|
| A small call to any googler on the thread - put your support
| towards this internally. I understand the internal dynamics, and
| it may seem current option is best amongst imperfect choices, but
| in this case F-droid is right in that closing out anonymous (but
| good) software is a line crossed with peril for any open
| ecosystem. Today it's play store, tomorrow it will be the web,
| and that will have a significant negative impact on Google.
| cft wrote:
| "Best among the imperfect choices"?
|
| What's wrong about the current situation? Why imperfect?
|
| I have had Android phones starting from G1, and never had any
| problems with them, that I could install any APK that I wished
| on my own hardware. There's nothing imperfect for me, as a
| user. What's "imperfect" is that there are apps like ReVanced
| and PipePipe that deprive Google of the advertising revenue.
| But that's imperfect for Google, and perfect for the user. Just
| charge me 30 bucks for Android OS instead.
| kragen wrote:
| Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool--the original
| "killer app" for personal computers such as cellphones, and
| the best way that has been found so far to put computational
| power in the hands of end-users. Last I checked, there was no
| spreadsheet in F-Droid, largely because it's a relatively
| small ecosystem, and most Android users still aren't using
| F-Droid. Instead they are subjected to the outrageously
| abusive apps that fill the Play Store, as described for
| example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411897. And
| many Android phones ship with non-uninstallable malware and
| shovelware. Backing up an Android phone without a Google
| account--indeed, even activating an Android phone without a
| Goolge account--is challenging. From my point of view, these
| are imperfections.
| styanax wrote:
| > Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool--the
| original "killer app" for personal computers such as
| cellphones
|
| I do not agree with your supposition. Like the parent using
| the G1 as I did (and still have it), never used a
| spreadsheet app on any of my many, many phones both
| personal and work. I am/was a systems engineer by trade.
|
| > Last I checked, there was no spreadsheet in F-Droid
|
| The most popular _viewer_ is the LibreOffice one[1], which
| can handle ODS and XLS (amongst many others) formats. You
| may have meant editing /creating which I agree they're not
| around. See item (1) above though.
|
| > largely because it's a relatively small ecosystem, and
| most Android users still aren't using F-Droid
|
| Or possibly, a large number of users simply do not need or
| use generic spreadsheet apps on their mobile devices, which
| is why I disagree with your opening statement as I am a
| direct counterexample.
|
| [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/
| technothrasher wrote:
| I think they just got carried away with the term
| "personal computers such as cellphones". I believe they
| were referencing the common recognition of VisiCalc as
| one of the first "killer apps" for personal computers.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm sorry my comment was so unclear. I'll try to explain
| in more detail.
|
| 1. Cellphones are a kind of personal computer.
|
| 2. Numerical computation is something that computers,
| personal or otherwise, are very good at. Conservatively,
| your cellphone is ten orders of magnitude faster (ten
| billion times faster) than you are at tasks like
| averaging a set of numbers.
|
| 3. The spreadsheet user interface is expressive enough
| for many numerical computations+ that are impractical to
| carry out with more limited user interfaces such as
| pocket calculators, but it is simple enough to understand
| that large masses of people can take advantage of that
| expressivity. (The popularity of VisiCalc on early
| personal computers such as the Apple ][ is one piece of
| evidence for this.) It is the "low-code development
| platform" that inspired all the current no-code and low-
| code platforms.
|
| 4. Such numerical computations are so commonplace in many
| people's lives that they do them on their cellphones,
| despite the small display and lack of a keyboard; one
| reason is that many people have cellphones as their only
| programmable computers. When they do such complex
| numerical calculations on their cellphones, they often
| use spreadsheets to do them.
|
| 5. Therefore, we should regard the availability of
| spreadsheets as a central indicator for the viability of
| a computer software ecosystem, even on cellphones.
|
| I think all of these claims are obviously correct,
| stipulating the ones before them, except for #4. As
| evidence for #4,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCpJ441g-Y4 shows that
| the Google Sheets app for Android was at the time #7 in
| their "productivity" category with 793000 ratings and 4.8
| stars. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.
| google.and... says that it has been downloaded more than
| a billion times and has 1.27 million ratings. The fact
| that people exist who do _not_ use their cellphones for
| spreadsheets does not constitute evidence against this
| claim.
|
| What I believe is happening, to elaborate a bit more, is
| that F-Droid users who need numerical computation that
| goes beyond what calculator apps can do are mostly just
| using the Google Sheets app. The radical fringe of
| F-Droid users like me who do not have Google accounts
| often make do with Termux programs such as Python,
| LuaJIT, PARI/GP, bc, Racket, or the C compiler, even
| though for many purposes a spreadsheet would be much more
| convenient.
|
| ______
|
| + Spreadsheets are also used as simple databases, in fact
| more frequently than they are used for numerical
| calculations, but numerical calculations alone are a
| strong enough argument for my purposes here, and F-Droid
| _does_ have a number of adequate simple database apps.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I think this just fundamentally does not track, because
| the vast, vast majority of phone users are not regularly
| using a spreadsheet app.
|
| When we imagine phone applications, we think messaging,
| social media, web browsing, and email. That's 99% of
| stuff people do on their phone.
|
| The statistic of "how many people have this app
| installed" is fundamentally flawed. Why? Most apps are
| worthless. Throwaways, single purpose.
|
| Its entirely possible, and dare I say extremely likely,
| that people install (or it came installed!) Google sheets
| for one document that was shared one time, then forgot
| about it.
| kragen wrote:
| It seems improbable to me that photography, video
| recording, video games, phone calls, digital payments,
| video calls, tethering, and charging the battery would
| all be outside of that 99%. Possibly you don't know very
| much about how the vast, vast majority of phone users use
| their phones, for example because your friends and family
| aren't typical of Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians, and
| Chinese people.
|
| Or because you aren't especially interested in whether
| what you're saying is true or false, since it is--to me
| at least--obviously wrong. And you're surely somewhat
| aware of how atypical your circle of friends is among,
| for example, either Malaysians or Texans, and probably
| both.
| Hizonner wrote:
| > Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool
|
| It's nice to know that you use spreadsheets all the time.
|
| I use them rarely, and often end up regretting that I
| didn't write a real program instead. And I'd definitely
| never see myself using one on a phone; it's too painful to
| type, and the screen is usually too small.
|
| I'd guess that _maybe_ one percent of mobile phone users
| have spreadsheets of any kind installed, or would want
| them. _Maybe_.
|
| What I'm getting at here is that you seem to have a pretty
| skewed idea of "fundamentally important".
|
| Admittedly an awful lot of mobile users _do_ have a lot of
| game and eye candy apps that have no F-Droid counterparts.
| And some users have professional apps that also don 't have
| F-Droid counterparts. But spreadsheets aren't the center of
| the Universe.
| kragen wrote:
| As I showed in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413633, which I
| hadn't posted when you posted your comment, about 10-25%
| of mobile phone users have the Google Sheets app
| installed, because it has over a billion downloads. So it
| seems like your atypical personal experience is leading
| you into orders-of-magnitude errors.
|
| I also use spreadsheets rarely, most recently three weeks
| ago, and often end up regretting it, but I do
| occasionally find them very valuable. I would find them
| even more valuable if I didn't know more powerful
| programming languages, which presumably is what you are
| alluding to with "write a real program".
|
| I agree that cellphone screen input methods are clumsy.
| On the other hand, I've written probably ten thousand
| words of prose on this one, plus a fair bit of Python,
| Lua, and C, so a few spreadsheet formulas would hardly be
| an obstacle.
| OvermindDL1 wrote:
| To be frank, Google Sheets came installed on my phone,
| don't think it's ever been opened though... Easy way to
| inflate numbers there.
| kragen wrote:
| That's the download count from the Google Play Store. I
| don't think it counts preinstalls. If it's preinstalled
| on many phones, the number of Google Sheets users could
| be much larger than my number suggests.
| crabbone wrote:
| Oh, you opened a can of worms... In terms of user experience
| Android is garbage. It forces on you features you cannot
| remove unless you break into the system (which is kinda
| illegal or, at a minimum, voids your warranty).
|
| Stuff like "do not disturb" that turns on accidentally and
| makes me miss calls, and is impossible to remove. It's
| impossible to remove a bunch of trash from the lock screen,
| and with some workarounds sometimes only the picture is
| removed, but it stays interactive or affects other widgets,
| like the audio player, for instance. Lockscreen randomly
| trying to dial random numbers, especially if I don't answer
| an incoming call. Also, taking screenshots randomly, so after
| almost every run I have to spend some time deleting these
| screenshots.
|
| Now, when it comes to the subject in OP, it's not really
| about Android, it's about Google's policies around developers
| and app store. The whole idea behind Android is very similar
| to MS Windows: oppress the user because the system provider
| "knows better". Make choices on user's behalf, prevent users
| doing from useful things jut to blanket "secure" them from
| some imaginary threat. Manipulate users into doing a thing
| that's harmful for them, but beneficial for the system
| provider.
|
| So, the app store managed by Google is one example of such
| policies. Google doesn't have the best interest of the user
| in mind. They are maliciously complying with regulations that
| want them not to abuse their users. They check the
| applications submitted to the app store, but they check them
| for the wrong things. Just to say they did.
|
| I ended up using an FTP server app from F-Droid and a file
| manager from F-Droid because the stuff that was available for
| the same functionality found in app store is some atrocious
| predatory trash. It doesn't matter if I can afford to buy an
| app. Whatever I tried was just garbage. Once you get used to
| freedom and the approach of free software after you've spent
| some time with eg. Linux, using Android will make your blood
| boil because of how hostile both the system and the programs
| written for it are.
| jowea wrote:
| A bit of devil's advocate here but the current situation is
| that there's sideloadable malware around.
| poisonborz wrote:
| "A small call to any Googler"
|
| Do you think any single one remained who cares over their
| payment, stock options, office perks? They care about not
| getting laid off with the next wave.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| The context is I've worked at Google, and internally was
| surrounded by many who do care. I also saw other sides of
| controversial calls - business and other considerations which
| are not apparent publicly. But one thing Google does well
| internally way more than others is listen to it's engineers'
| opinion.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm curious when this was, if you don't mind saying. (I
| have a small hobby of trying to figure out Google culture
| over the years.)
| planetafro wrote:
| ...and fatalistic attitudes like this are what erode our
| freedoms imo. if we don't _try_ , then what?
| squigz wrote:
| Then we post on the Internet about how doomed we all are.
| Keep up!
| IX-103 wrote:
| They still exist, I know a few. Most of them are busy
| protesting Google taking over Microsoft's contract to provide
| surveillance and targeting information in Gaza, but I can ask
| about this issue.
| snerbles wrote:
| Like any other large corporation, Google has selected for
| compliant employees over all else. It's more akin to a
| bureaucracy than a startup now.
| rlpb wrote:
| > closing out anonymous (but good) software
|
| I don't think we should be framing their new rules like this.
| They are closing out F-Droid, which is not anonymous, due to a
| technicality of their implementation. At best, they are
| collateral damage. At worst, it is malicious compliance in
| response to a directive that was supposed to ensure their
| continued existence.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| It's f-droid that's clearly calling this out. from the post:
|
| >The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register
| their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot
| "take over" the application identifiers for the open-source
| apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive
| distribution rights to those applications
|
| F-droid does not want to take responsibility for the app.
| rlpb wrote:
| > F-droid does not want to take responsibility for the app.
|
| That's not how I read it. They cannot "take over" exclusive
| control of application identifiers, that's all. For
| example, this would prevent a developer publishing the same
| app to both F-Droid _and_ to the Google Play Store. I see
| nothing that says that they aren 't willing to take
| responsibility for what they publish.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| What is meant by responsibility? If something happens
| because of the app - you go to the responsible person.
| F-droid does not want to be the outreach person/org for
| any issue on an app.
|
| But per Google policy - they will go to the f-droid if a
| govt request came in for that apk, as that's what the new
| policy would have on file. This is hence what f-droid is
| voicing concern on.
| rlpb wrote:
| Unless you speak for F-Droid, I think you're reading far
| too much into their statement that isn't there.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| The only one who knows why they need this info is Google,
| and I doubt they'll explicitly and publicly call out the
| full rationale for attaching real-world identity to apps.
|
| In my experience, it's better to infer on the side of
| potential abuse when it comes to privacy.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >Unless you speak for F-Droid, I think you're reading far
| too much into their statement that isn't there.
|
| Bad faith commenter.
|
| If you actually reach far into their statement you would
| have gotten to this part
|
| >Regulatory and competition authorities should look
| carefully at Google's proposed activities, and ensure
| that policies designed to improve security are not abused
| to consolidate monopoly control. We urge regulators to
| safeguard the ability of alternative app stores and open-
| source projects to operate freely, and to protect
| developers who cannot or will not comply with
| exclusionary registration schemes and demands for
| personal information.
|
| >If you are a developer or user who values digital
| freedom, you can help. Write to your Member of
| Parliament, Congressperson or other representative, sign
| petitions in defense of sideloading and software freedom,
| and contact the European Commission's Digital Markets Act
| (DMA) team to express why preserving open distribution
| matters. By making your voice heard, you help defend not
| only F-Droid, but the principle that software should
| remain a commons, accessible and free from unnecessary
| corporate gatekeeping.
| rlpb wrote:
| A plain reading of your quote still does not provide any
| evidence of GP's claimed "F-droid does not want to be the
| outreach person/org for any issue on an app".
| marcprux wrote:
| > A small call to any googler on the thread - put your support
| towards this internally.
|
| Post author here. This.
|
| Google toyed with a scheme like this a few years ago and
| reached out to F-Droid, and they were told the chaos it would
| cause. They backed off. This time, no one has deigned to
| contact us.
|
| Anyone who wants to talk can reach out to us
| (board@f-droid.org) or me directly (Signal contact in my
| profile).
| charcircuit wrote:
| Fdroid owning the signing keys for the apps of other developers
| was always a security mistake. This announcement should make them
| realize this instead of doubling down on it.
| beeflet wrote:
| No it isn't. I trust fdroid more than random app developers.
| someNameIG wrote:
| Why? Isn't that how most linux distros do their repos?
| charcircuit wrote:
| It is, but Linux distros are not the pinnacle of security.
| They use a security model decades out of date, so they are
| not something you should try and copy off of.
| someNameIG wrote:
| But has there been many actual reported security issues due
| to it? Like has anyone downloaded malware fro the official
| Ubuntu or Fedora repos?
| charcircuit wrote:
| CVE-2008-0166 a maintainer added a security bug to
| openssl and it was distributed to many machines resulting
| in many weak ssh keys being generated. Between openssl
| releasing their library and it making its way to end
| user's machines a security vulnerability was injected.
| AAAAaccountAAAA wrote:
| That was literally before the first production Android
| phone become available. Does not seem to be a
| particularly common occurance. Though due to the current
| world situation, supply chain attacks might admittedly
| become more common.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Sure, but the reality is that your average Linux distro
| repo has WAY less malware than the play store.
|
| Your security model doesn't matter much when the people
| doing the security are bad actors. Google is a malicious
| actor - they actively incentivize malware on the play
| store.
| deivid wrote:
| Fdroid need to build the apps themselves to ensure they match
| the upstream source. They've moved away from owning the keys by
| recommending reproducible builds, however reproducible builds
| are hard and many app authors don't do it
| _flux wrote:
| They have a reason mentioned by others, however what was news
| to me that the Google Android application registration also
| requires them! https://developer.android.com/developer-
| verification#registe... says
|
| Register your apps: You'll need to prove you own your apps by
| providing your app package name and app signing keys.
|
| Couldn't this also be verified with a challenge-response
| signing, using the key? Why should Google have the ability to
| sign apps of the developer, instead of it being an end-to-end
| deal? Perhaps they need to have the ability to slip in some
| additional code if the government so wishes?
|
| Or perhaps there is actually a legit reason for Google to have
| those keys or I have a misunderstanding of the requirement?
|
| Maybe F-Droid could relax that requirement if it were feasible
| to do reproducible builds. Then the developer could just
| deliver the package to F-Droid, F-Droid would check that it
| matches what they have, and then publish it. But that's
| probably not going to happen. Alternatively some deeper proof-
| based certificate could be devised, but that's even less likely
| to happpen..
| charcircuit wrote:
| They already have required it since 2021.
|
| https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
| developer/answ...
|
| The main benefits is that Google is able to optimize
| downloads for individual devices. It also makes the situation
| where the developer loses a private key and then they can no
| longer push anymore updates to their app no longer possible.
| I'm not a fan of this approach of essentially allowing Google
| free reign to use your key for deploying jpdates.
| veeti wrote:
| To be clear it sounds like the upcoming "Android Developer
| Console" (distributing APK outside Play Store)
| https://developer.android.com/developer-
| verification/guides/...) does *not* require you to disclose
| your private key, only prove ownership:
|
| > Select your key: Choose your public SHA-256 fingerprint
| certificate from a list of eligible keys.
|
| > Complete a cryptographic challenge: You must sign a dummy
| APK with the corresponding private key and upload it to
| Android Developer Console. This formally verifies your
| ownership of the key used to sign your existing Android app.
|
| Play Store on the other hand does require you to share keys,
| so they can optimize your APK for each device. And maybe
| inject some state malware if you want to be snarky.
| usr1106 wrote:
| The article has corrupted paragraphs towards the end? Only for
| me? Read it with niche browser, did not verify with any
| mainstream browser.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| It has corrupted formatting throughout for me.
| card_zero wrote:
| It looks like 8 out of 17 footnotes didn't become footnotes
| properly. Every second footnote is displayed in the middle of
| the text, with a name tag like [^regappid] instead of getting
| a number.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Looks like the markdown source had some misformated footnotes
| which were not properly processed.
|
| Whoever uploaded/published this didn't see to review it first.
| skowalak wrote:
| Same for me, the source for the article can be found here:
| https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-website/-/blob/master/_post...
| Thorrez wrote:
| Yes. It's sad because this is an otherwise well-written and
| important article that needs to be widely distributed and taken
| seriously. But people will be put off by the formatting errors.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| Well, that's because of trusted computing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
|
| And again, to quote Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would give up
| essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve
| neither Liberty nor Safety".
|
| Sadly nobody cares nowadays.
| marc_abonce wrote:
| > F-Droid is different. It distributes apps that have been
| validated to work for the user's interests, rather than for the
| interests of the app's distributors.
|
| F-Droid's curation saved me at least once when I wanted to
| upgrade my Simple(tm) apps and couldn't find them in F-Droid
| anymore, which led me to learn that SimpleMobileTools was sold to
| a company that closed sourced the apps[1] and that there's a free
| fork called Fossify[2].
|
| Had I installed these through Google Play, they wouldn't have
| cared about this particular change and I would've gotten whatever
| random upgrades the new owners pushed.
|
| Each app store's policies have their pros and cons, but that's
| why it's so important to have a diversity of marketplaces.
|
| [1] https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-
| Discussion/issu...
|
| [2] https://github.com/FossifyOrg
| Sarky wrote:
| I used Simple apps in the past but lost track of them. Now i
| know why. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
|
| Indeed we need diversity of the ecosystems.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, and it is crazy that Apple/Google want us to think that
| AppStore, OS and ContentFilter are not mutually orthogonal
| concepts.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| > F-Droid's curation saved me at least once when I wanted to
| upgrade my Simple(tm) apps and couldn't find them in F-Droid
| anymore, which led me to learn that SimpleMobileTools was sold
| to a company that closed sourced the apps[1] and that there's a
| free fork called Fossify[2].
|
| > Had I installed these through Google Play, they wouldn't have
| cared about this particular change and I would've gotten
| whatever random upgrades the new owners pushed.
|
| sheesh. I've spent my whole mobile device life on iOS and am
| just now learning an Android device. While I feel I have more
| control over the finer details of my personal privacy and
| security, this ecosystem is a total minefield if you care about
| avoiding spyware and malware.
|
| I'm glad I trusted my instincts and only installed F-Droid
| first before any apps from the Play Store. Just now found the
| Isolation app so I can create a Work Profile and separate
| personal life from the life that the relentless data vacuums
| are constantly trying to pull from the simplest apps these
| days.
|
| Neither mobile OS is perfect, but I feel like I was correct
| about Apple having the user's personal privacy still much more
| of a priority than Google. There was never any question if
| those were the two options, IMO. But it does seems like now,
| finally, Android might be ready to deploy as a mobile operating
| system for the public. I'm fairly certain that this Android
| ecosystem that's used its users for so long as guinea pigs (not
| just Android, but the full unrefined and frankly
| unsophisticated media sphere as a whole that's been figuring
| out how to effectively work on us) has harmed the last
| generation or two beyond repair.
|
| This became all too clear when the first thing I did on my
| first Android device a few weeks ago was install an offline
| keyboard from devs with my privacy interests in mind. Spent a
| few minutes thinking about what it would have been like living
| with this shitty keyboard system on iOS and realized that
| honestly, I am lucky that I stuck with iOS through all of this
| and feel like my mental health is much better than it would
| have been had I been fighting a malware-riddled Android device
| this whole time.
|
| edit: I'm not saying you shouldn't use Android or that it's a
| bad idea, I do think that it is solid enough now (and maybe has
| been for a while, I don't know) that I can safely protect
| myself after learning. But ask yourself if all Android users
| would take the time to properly learn? What about kids?
| vasco wrote:
| Billions of people use android phones without malware, you
| are exagerating slightly.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I don't really see how you can guarantee your Android phone
| doesn't have malware, I feel like you may be exaggerating
| here.
|
| I also don't mind the downvote, but if you would please
| tell me how you _are_ able to guarantee your Android phone
| doesn 't have malware, please tell me instead of hiding
| behind a downvote. Otherwise my solution is don't use an
| Android device.
|
| wow, downvotes on all three comments! thanks, stranger.
| vasco wrote:
| I didn't downvote you, and it's against the rules to
| focus on the voting anyway.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Ok, thanks for saying that I guess. FYI I wasn't talking
| directly to you on the second line.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > I don't really see how you can guarantee your Android
| phone doesn't have malware, I feel like you may be
| exaggerating here.
|
| Can you do it on an iPhone? (You can't.)
|
| Between android and ios, which platform is considered
| more secure or safer? It's not easy to find out directly,
| but bug bounty programs can be used as a heuristic. Guess
| which one it is, after both being the same for a long
| time? (It's android).
|
| You can check out https://www.wired.com/story/android-
| zero-day-more-than-ios-z... and
| https://cyberscoop.com/ios-zero-day-zerodium-high-supply/
|
| > I also don't mind the downvote, but if you would please
| tell me how you are able to guarantee your Android phone
| doesn't have malware, please tell me instead of hiding
| behind a downvote. Otherwise my solution is don't use an
| Android device.
|
| The same way you guarantee it on any other OS, be it
| windows or macos or linux. You do your best, don't
| download sketchy apps, and don't be a political figure.
| Of course that doesn't _guarantee_ it, just makes it 99%
| likely.
|
| > Otherwise my solution is don't use an Android device.
|
| Do you think you can guarantee this on an iPhone? May I
| ask you how _you_ are able to guarantee this on iOS?
|
| (I haven't downvoted you)
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I haven't said anything about Apple guaranteeing this, I
| just am saying that Apple seems more trustworthy to me.
| And unless you can prove Android is actually better, then
| I still believe that. I feel like people are
| misunderstanding my original post.
|
| You would probably not be surprised that I would still
| trust a heavily regulated government that's occasionally
| broken rather than one that's run in a totally free
| market by all varieties of selfish interests.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It seems like you're missing the most important part.
|
| If you had to rank app stores by probability of malware,
| the lowest probability would be F-Droid. After that it
| might reasonably be Apple followed by Google Play.
|
| But F-Droid isn't available on iOS, so if you want to use
| the app store with the lowest probability of malware,
| it's only available on Android. And more to the point,
| the safest app store is available on Android only
| _because_ Android has third party app stores.
|
| To have a single store to the exclusion of all others,
| that store has to be a big tent, and big tents get full
| of clowns.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| No, I feel like rather you are misunderstanding my main
| point.
|
| I do understand that I am stuck with the Apple equivalent
| of the Google Play Store. Android is more like a
| completely open ecosystem, Apple's is much more closed
| filled with walled gardens. Still, walls provide
| protection if the ones building them know what they're
| doing.
|
| So, I feel like Apple has the edge with what we have,
| over Google's stance of "do nothing" rather than trying
| to give users a good sense of privacy. If Apple were
| fully open and allowed such a thing as F-Droid to exist
| on their OS, you would have a point.
|
| edit: and both OSes are not perfect. That was also part
| of my main point, not that Apple's is clearly far
| superior. All I said was I'm glad I trusted my instincts
| and explained why.
|
| last edit: I've read back the comments to try and see
| where the misunderstandings are coming from and hopefully
| have addressed them. While the most secure App Store does
| exist on Android, it's taken us a while to get there (I
| know F-Droid has been around a while as well). I am
| talking about the time period since very early Android
| and iOS up until now. If I had been using Android, no
| doubt I would have tried to do it the proper way, but
| knowing what I like to do freely on my mobile device
| instead of feeling like I need to worry about privacy
| with every. single. app. I pick iOS for my mobile OS from
| 2008-2025 again and I am glad that I did. None of the
| exploits, vulnerabilities, etc have affected me and I
| have to give Apple the credit for at least giving me my
| money's worth on that.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't think your point of "I think Apple is safer
| without much evidence, it's on you to prove otherwise"
| isn't very solid. You can think whatever you want, but
| the evidence is clear (as presented here) that the
| official stores don't do much to prevent malware.
|
| A historical review of app store security also doesn't
| have much applicability to the current point of Google
| trying to raise its garden walls even higher.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| The point I'm trying to make is less about what Apple and
| Google are doing for us, and more about what their
| policies allow developers to do with their apps on their
| platforms.
| stavros wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is, though. If you want an
| experience like the App Store, use the Play Store,
| they're basically the same. If you want to vet your apps,
| use another store, or install the APK.
|
| Google gives you that freedom (or used to), Apple
| doesn't. The discussion here is that we Android users
| want to keep that freedom of choice.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| > I'm not sure what your point is, though.
|
| Ok. I am saying GrapheneOS and F-Droid is the answer, but
| I don't think 17 years of what I would describe as Early
| Access Android was the way to get there.
| stavros wrote:
| Well, the issue with that was that iOS _didn 't_ get
| there, so it does appear like Early Access Android was
| the only thing that got us there in the end.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Still not what I'm saying. I think we are paying the
| price for Android being so open right now, with the chaos
| happening in the US and worldwide. 17 years of messy
| Android evolution got us to a point where we could
| possibly start to examine what this has done to us. But
| based on how my original comment was received, I have
| much less hope than I did before I wrote it. Especially
| since I would consider some of the best minds on the
| internet to be regulars of Hacker News, and before we can
| even address this issue we need to clarify and understand
| it. I'm trying to do that here.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Still, walls provide protection if the ones building
| them know what they're doing.
|
| And what I'm saying is that they put the walls in the
| wrong place. They belong around the store, not the
| platform, so that each store can have its own walls and
| the user can choose the store independently of the
| platform.
|
| Suppose a platform wanted to do what F-Droid does, i.e.
| offer only a manually curated selection of apps and
| impose high standards for privacy and openness. If that
| store was the _only_ store on a platform, would that
| platform be popular? It would immediately have to e.g.
| reject the Facebook app, so no.
|
| In order to be the _only_ store for a platform, the store
| is put under insurmountable pressure to compromise
| privacy in order to sustain the popularity of the
| platform. Even when the proprietor is as powerful as
| Apple, Facebook is still there.
|
| Whereas F-Droid doesn't have to do that in order for
| Android to be popular, because the people who insist on
| compromising their privacy by installing the Facebook app
| can get it from Google Play and still use Android, and
| still have the benefit of the assurances F-Droid provides
| when installing other apps, and allow people who use only
| F-Droid to benefit having from a popular platform. And
| then the iOS app store contains apps that compromise your
| privacy like Facebook, and F-Droid doesn't.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > I just am saying that Apple seems more trustworthy to
| me. And unless you can prove Android is actually better,
| then I still believe that.
|
| And I say, windows XP seems more trustworthy to me. Fewer
| vectors to attack than the latest windows 11, it's the
| best! And I believe that.
|
| How is this any different from your argument? You are not
| even providing a reason for your source of belief.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| So everyone really did read what I was saying as an
| argument. Maybe you can help me here and clarify what you
| interpreted as a point I was trying to argue? I believe
| that it was a better decision for the average mobile
| phone user to use iOS in a smart way between 2008-2025
| than Android. Both ecosystems are in a sad state
| currently, but Android is the clear choice now. Did you
| think I was making the old iOS vs. Android debate? People
| really need to move on from that winning side thinking
| and think more about what matters, if that's what
| happened. Anyone care about talking about anything else
| besides that shit anymore?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I guarantee no malware by using fdroid
| rpdillon wrote:
| You're getting down-voted because you're structuring the
| argument in an unwinnable way, and I think you know that.
| None of us can prove that any phone doesn't have malware.
| Seems like you're arguing in bad faith.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| the thing is, I didn't mean to argue. I'm merely
| responding to people's comments, who started an argument?
|
| I am very, very concerned about our ability to
| communicate with each other as human beings these days.
| Maybe this thread was meant to be an example of that, I
| don't know. I didn't realize everyone was trying to prove
| me wrong with this. sheesh.
|
| further, I am seeing why some folks decided to close
| themselves off completely to stuff like this. I enjoy
| intellectual curiosity and try to find others who do, but
| I realize many people don't enjoy it and many even hate
| it. it's not because it's a lack of intelligence. It's
| that everyone seems uninterested in the thoughts that
| made me type that initial comment, they're more concerned
| with proving me wrong. Am I accurate in this assessment,
| or can I trust you to not treat this question as an
| argument, if that is a better way to put it?
| conartist6 wrote:
| I had never seen Android malware until my mom showed me her
| phone. I think she's barely ever installed an app on
| purpose in her life, but there it was this malware that
| looked like the husk of a legit app repurposed to show
| banner ads after every phone call
| beAbU wrote:
| My MIL has an ungoogled huawei phone. She was trying to
| get some app and family told her she needs to get the
| play store to get the app.
|
| Holy fucking shit. What a hive of scum and villany you
| encounter when searching for the play store. The first
| link on google launches a full screen PWA that looks
| _exactly_ like the play store. It took me a hot minute to
| realize that I was about to install something unsavoury.
| I almost wanted to dunk the phone in some bleach.
|
| I'm an android user, and I prefer it over iPhone, but the
| surface area for attacks is way way way too large. Users
| who are less technically inclined are so damn vulnerable.
| I don't know how to fix this.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| this is what I'm talking about. I wish more folks in this
| thread had gone this direction.
|
| I think those types of people like your MIL represent a
| very concerning bulk of Android users. So people are
| walking around with god knows what in their pockets,
| doing every single thing in their life through them these
| days. I thought others who had arrived at this thought
| would be alarmed too, but I'm not sure what to think
| anymore I guess.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| When I bought an ipad a few years back, it had been at
| least 10 years since I was on the ios ecosystem(last
| iphone was the 3gs). I was shocked how hard it was to
| find what I was looking for. Instead of the Playstore
| minefield of free spyware apps, you now have cheap
| knockoffs, likely still spyware, but now everything costs
| $5 dollars.
|
| I think there's two different sets of perverse
| incentives. On the apple side, it's how to trick you into
| a "small" purchase of 5 dollars. It's just a cup of
| coffee man, c'mon just a coffee. Essentially banking on
| some user will just add it to their apple tab for
| convenience.
|
| On the android side, the expectation is primarily free
| apps, with paid generally being a premium app. There are
| some free apps that just do what they say, typically
| small side hustles from solo devs banking on some add
| revenue with the option to upgrade(Shout out to
| GoneMadMusicPlayer, paid for it back in 2013 and the devi
| is still out there supporting and responding to emails).
| If they're not that, they'll be spyware infested trap
| holes.
|
| Fdroid is typically where I go when I'm looking for an
| app with a unix philosophy. Just do one thing simply.
| Voice recorder, guitar tuner, etc.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Depends on your definition of malware.
|
| If you consider adware to be malware, which I personally
| do, then I would estimate close to zero Android phones are
| operating without malware.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Odd take. On iOS there is no F-Droid so your options for
| simple apps is the same ad riddled "in app purchases" crap it
| is on GPlay.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Apple has made policy changes and changes to the app store
| to make it clearer which apps to avoid. Apple really cares
| about my privacy, or they tell me they do and I believe
| them. I think they do because they know how important brand
| loyalty is to their customers. It's pretty much the thing
| Apple lives on, never losing the customer's trust. Google
| clearly leaves it more or less up to nature.
| shakna wrote:
| And yet, SparkCat ran around on the iOS store for at
| least a year. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/malware-
| adware/malicious...
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I'm sure there are lots more, too. There's no way Apple
| kept a complete hold on this.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| >Apple really cares about my privacy, or they tell me
| they do and I believe them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I am aware. I've been around a while.
|
| I'm not worried about nation-state surveillance. What I
| am worried about is all the keyloggers on kids' Android
| phones these days, since I've seen a shady game company
| or two in my day.
| codedokode wrote:
| What valuable info can one get from a kid's phone?
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I'd rather not speculate on that, surely you understand?
| I'm not saying a general "save the children" but would
| you consider thinking of them, if that doesn't sound too
| trite?
| dzikimarian wrote:
| What keyloggers? That would have to be keyboard
| replacement. Which is highly unlikely and can happen on
| ios as well.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| My impression is that the very first thing a privacy-
| conscious person would do with a new Android device is
| install a secure keyboard. Is that not the case? Why
| should people trust any old software keyboard the company
| selling it sets as the default?
|
| For a very long time, Apple didn't allow installing
| custom keyboards. And I would still bet a bit of money
| that they are more restrictive than the keyboards Android
| allows.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| To be honest, Apple lives on their walled ecosystem and
| people fanboying them.
|
| I am sure that you aren't a fanboy but I would be
| skeptical of any company saying that they value about
| your privacy when the recent debacle went on.
|
| Like hear me out, Apple encryption was being backdoored
| and the only reason that it got leaked was by a
| whistleblower and it was illegal for apple to even
| discuss it.
|
| So chances are, that if that whistleblower hadn't leaked,
| I am not sure if he's facing jail time or not and if
| Apple wanted to live in the UK which I am sure they are,
| then they most likely would've enforced a backdoor.
|
| Would we be any better knowing it? Like when a company's
| profits incentives is affected because a country wants
| them to have a backdoor in secret closed doors and not
| even reveal to the public...
|
| I wonder how many other backdoors there are that we just
| don't know of y'know.
|
| So I wouldn't say that they care about your privacy. They
| show that they care about your privacy because that's
| become a USP to them and quite frankly, after this whole
| scene, I am not sure how they can prove that back.
|
| The only thing that's literally not tracking you is open
| source for the most part. That is the only thing and
| f-droid takes open source apps.
|
| There are even games on f-droid but yes I know that games
| are just a weird niche which has a lot of
| malware/exploitative. I hope that more people can create
| open source games and we can contribute to them along the
| way.
|
| Whenever, there is a company involved, Deep down, they
| care about themselves and not you, they really care about
| the shareholders,everything else is temporary imo.
|
| But there are some companies run by people who have a
| moral spine and we need to applaud them/use them but in
| my opinion apple is too big to have a moral spine when
| they can repackage the same Iphone for god knows how
| long, but they are still better than google whose
| literally an ad company but open source graphene os with
| f-droid is a better option and you are showing a false
| dichotomy of sorts.
|
| I hope that I can point you into better direction with
| graphene os + f-droid, both are open source and they are
| the only one I would sort of trust with my privacy
| because its code and the code is generally neutral, it
| has no incentives to sell me anything most of the times
| yknow. It is like clippy of sorts lol.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Listen, I don't disagree with any of that. I think a lot
| of confusion is happening because people think I'm
| talking about how to inform consumer choices better or
| what exactly about either OS to fix to make them meet the
| standards that I'm trying to describe. What I think is
| very important if not one of the most important things
| facing us as a species is that _we need a better mobile
| OS option than what we have._ And you don 't have to
| convince me on GrapheneOS. I am in the process of moving
| to Android and F-Droid until I can afford a Pixel phone
| with GrapheneOS.
|
| What I am attempting and apparently failing to describe
| effectively is that this excellent option we have now
| (GrapheneOS + F-Droid) was in NO way accessible to any
| general user of mobile phones since their use has become
| widespread. What we have had since 2008 is two shitty
| options, and my point was that Apple has actively done
| more to keep users safe than Google has. No one seems to
| be arguing on that at all, but there are many people
| pointing out the failing of Apple's efforts over the
| years. Does that make them a complete failure? Absolutely
| not in my eyes, but I'm not going to tell you what to
| think.
|
| So, I feel like Android's ecosystem set us up for a HUGE
| minefield from various entry points from an American's
| perspective by allowing such an open system into the
| wild. It has been Early Access level of quality up until
| recently I would argue. GrapheneOS + F-Droid is safe
| enough to protect idiots from themselves, probably. If
| not now, then with time.
|
| How in the world anyone here is saying Google's hands-off
| approach was the way to go... well it _is_ how we got our
| acceptable option, finally, but surely you don 't think
| that every mobile phone company with a custom fork of
| Android kept its users more safe than Apple did?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hm that is a fair argument in the sense that I also wish
| to move forward to graphene but I got a shitty redmi
| phone which barely works but it still has f-droid and I
| also want to move forward to graphene as I said.
|
| I mean, yes, graphene is fairly recent getting traction
| and I can understand why you felt that apple did a better
| job at saving the end user than google did.
|
| That is partially because imo google is essentially an
| ads company and there are lots of ads of spyware/malware
| that google does nothing about and also they are
| esssentially spying on you yourself for selling ads.
|
| Apple takes a more on hardware approach in the sense that
| they don't want to spy on you as much because they have
| less incentives to do so because they don't have an
| advertisement system aaas much as google y'know, so they
| definitely took a bite at apple = privacy which has
| worked for many people.
|
| Google bought android and android was always an open
| system and it had both its pros and cons. There is also
| an open system of marketplace called aptoid which was
| literally apt + android but it also might have malware
| sometimes and f-droid is the best option for most use
| cases.
|
| Apple had never really had an open system and it had both
| its pros and cons and google is seemingly shifting into
| it which is like a nightmare because now we have very
| less choices of sorts.
|
| And android has sort of innovated/transitioned into
| grapheneos for general public privacy imo.
|
| So, yes I do think that we are in agreement that
| grapheneos is now here to stay and I can understand why
| you atleast appreciated apple for not being as privacy
| invading as google for some time which you were pointing
| out
|
| We are in unison, I agree with your points. Its just that
| I thought that you were just fanboying over apple for the
| sake of it in the original comment and glad we understood
| each other points as really we are talking about the same
| thing and agreeing at essentially everything.
|
| Thanks for explaining your original comment better
| through this comment and have a nice day.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to write your comment, too.
| I think it's extremely important that all sides of
| communication come together ASAP and discuss most of the
| things that might have been very polarizing in our near
| past. For the sake of not just our country (speaking to
| fellow Americans here) but humanity overall.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Agreed. Our differences are very little and we have a lot
| of similarities
|
| Yet we fight over differences and brush over the
| similarities.
|
| Why? because hate sells.. People are selling
| hate/internalizing hate/ragebaits.
|
| I had actually written one shit post comment about
| something echo chambering of sorts or how or why we
| should love each other and try be discussing of sorts you
| could say while still bringing action towards thing.
|
| I think that the one thing most people agree over is big
| tech's oligarchy of sorts and how they can somewhat abuse
| it and I can think of ways that I can make the right
| people understand it I suppose too, never tried it tbh.
|
| idk I just want to bring you attention to the one
| shitpost I wrote which I intented to write a shitpost but
| I think I wrote really relevant things in there and I am
| proud of them
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45406430
|
| We all need to be understanding of each other and
| enlighten us to the real issues that we have the power to
| solve but we don't because of numerous reasons. Lets make
| a world a better place because We Do Not Inherit the
| Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our Children.
|
| Have a nice day.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I think that's one of the most mysteriously insightful
| comments I've ever read anywhere on the internet. I can
| see why some might be dismissive without considering it
| further though, maybe like my initial comment in this
| thread that I feel like was misinterpreted, when really I
| wanted others to consider this same thing, their honest
| opinion about whether the last 17 years of mobile OS
| experience was worth it to get to where we are now. If we
| could avoid it, would we do it differently or would we do
| it all over again? After commenting in this thread all
| day I feel like we should be smart enough to avoid it,
| but I don't have an answer of how we would either, so it
| seems like it would just happen again how it did.
|
| There were lots of excerpts from your comment that I
| highlighted and hit Ctrl+C, then thinking "well this
| would be better to comment on or this would be better or
| now maybe the other way....". It's not important how I
| would pick apart your comment (and in a really nice way,
| I don't mean "pick apart" like criticize down to the last
| detail... but right there's something that would get lost
| in communication normally, I expect). This was my
| favorite part of your comment though, and I was going to
| say something like, Reagan thought we needed trickle-down
| economics but what we really need is growth with love,
| all the way down to the roots:
|
| "Yes we are human but dear reader, I feel like corruption
| only goes to top if it reeks from bottom too as well. Its
| messed up but maybe we can all try to acknowledge it and
| try to just know that we are all gonna die anyway and
| well, giving a other unique human smile and happiness
| might be the most precious thing."
|
| Make sure you have a nice day yourself, dear reader.
| pxoe wrote:
| Would you even find out if an app has been sold to another
| company on iOS app store? It's confusing to see all of that
| diatribe when it doesn't even do much (if anything it almost
| lulls you into a false sense of security), and you just have
| less options to choose from to get around being locked out of
| using your device for apps you want.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| > Would you even find out if an app has been sold to
| another company on iOS app store?
|
| On this particular issue, no. But I also make a habit of
| not leaving old apps that I don't use lingering around on
| my phone. And I'm pretty sure I know all of those haven't
| been bought out by a data predator, apart from 23andme.
|
| I just trust what Apple has done in other areas for my
| personal privacy and security, and I know they have
| insanely high and probably unreasonable standards for their
| app stores. and I don't install obviously predatory garbage
| apps. I feel like I could have only achieved this level of
| confidence in my mobile device with iOS. And to be clear
| that's just an opinion :)
| pxoe wrote:
| Insane and unreasonable standards sounds right, but I'm
| not sure about privacy and security all that much. It's
| just naive to assume something is totally malware free,
| and they're not actually disincentivized from just
| keeping some more subtle scammy apps around if they just
| generate them 30% fee revenue anyway. There's a bit of
| magical thinking that goes into assuming just how "good"
| they are at it, when they literally just don't even do
| some of those vaguely insinuated things.
|
| (to me, if some os is unable to have both freedom of
| installing apps/sideloading and security (with help of
| malware checking and other measures that keep bad stuff
| away), and only able to achieve that "security" only by
| completely locking down what apps can be run and how apps
| are obtained, it seems like either a failure to
| accomplish actual security there, or rather just a
| pretense to keep a platform locked down.)
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| That's fair. Unfortunately, like with the national
| politics here, we have two shitty options.
| pxoe wrote:
| Well, like with "national politics" (what nation?), even
| if there may be only two options functionally, it's also
| just pretending that there are only two options there at
| all. (while almost actively ignoring any other options)
|
| Like, while it may sound annoying and nitpicky, android
| is not just "one option of the two", it has a bunch of
| versions/flavors/forks/whatever you wanna call it, that
| vary between manufacturers, and also alternative
| distributions that can be installed on devices,
| situations that iphone just does not have, at all or to
| that extent. (quite linuxy in that way if you squint real
| hard.) I'm struggling to worry about this whole debacle
| with google floating about whatever they're floating
| about (currently it's that vague) all that much, when
| android is that malleable.
|
| There are also actual Linux phones and distributions,
| postmarketOS, environments like Phosh and Plasma Mobile,
| Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish, and so on. These can also end up
| being treated as a "third option" when it's a bunch of
| different options, or even treated as non-existent, but
| these options are out there, available, modern, with
| phones you could just buy. The only case where "one
| option" is actually just one option is with iPhones.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Sorry, Google and Apple are American companies so "here"
| was the USA in my comment.
|
| I agree completely with you about the Android forks. That
| does allow for people do things right more than the way
| Apple does it. But it also allows people to do things
| wrong, and how many predatory mobile phone companies
| would see an opportunity to spy on customers if they
| won't notice? Just like none of us would buy a computer
| and use it without formatting and reinstalling the OS
| first, there are tons of people who didn't reinstall the
| OS and kept installing shitty malware. That's the case
| that I'm worried is much more prevalent among the
| American population than we realized. Tons of factors go
| into it, but I think the fact that we distilled all of
| our information received regularly down to something
| that's processed thru two operating systems before
| reaching human eyes and ears is something worth looking
| more into. Or at least I think it's a damn good reason to
| start over and begin with doing things the right way,
| given everything that we know now.
| pxoe wrote:
| This just sounds like two different sets of standards,
| although for two different platforms, but one is getting
| goalposts shifted to 'but flashing is scary and nobody
| does it and also what if other phone makers spy on
| people' (just spreading FUD, really), while the other
| gets a pass pretty much on every one of those things
| while blindly buying into privacy marketing. Kinda
| reminds me of those lawsuits about app stores on ios and
| android that were running in parallel, where ios also
| kinda got a pass pretty much just because it's more
| locked down.
|
| While regular people probably aren't going to mess with
| custom roms on android and it's kind of self-selecting
| situation there, they very much might pick a Samsung
| phone, or Motorola phone, or some other phone, that will
| have different flavors of android, and may have some
| meaningful differences and will have some amount of
| control over them that phone makers have be spread out
| between their manufacturer and not just google.
|
| Some people also aren't really gonna be any less
| susceptible to scams that aren't tied to app stores or
| apps at all. Might as well lock down the browser and
| phone app then as well.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| GrapheneOS.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| This does look like the one from what I've read. Will
| definitely be giving it a try once I can afford to pick
| up a Pixel phone.
| grepex wrote:
| I'm running it on a secondhand pixel 8a I picked up for
| 200 bucks! It's great
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| wait are you serious? I will buy one right now if those
| are available. paid $100 for the cheapest acceptable
| android I could find (samsung galaxy a05s). but I was
| seeing $500+ for Pixel phones. coming from iOS, I have no
| idea about any of this. I am right now going to look
| again. I just wish it was easier for my mom and dad to
| switch to something safe like GrapheneOS. Feels like we
| are a ways off from that.
|
| edit: Pixel ordered and GrapheneOS incoming, goodbye iOS.
| strcat wrote:
| Just make sure it's an unlocked device. Pixel 8+ is
| recommended due to 7 years of support from launch and
| hardware memory tagging. A used Pixel 8 or Pixel 8a is a
| great option. 6th and 7th generation Pixels are fine, but
| they launched with 5 years of support so they're getting
| down to 2-3 years left.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Thank you for the info. Pixel 8a was my choice, and I did
| end up paying about $50 more than what would have been
| the best deal, to make sure that it specifically said
| it's bootloader unlockable to allow for custom OS
| installations.
| treis wrote:
| I'm impressed by people that can make it anywhere near
| that long without breaking their phone. I'm on a 1-2 year
| average of dropping it and having the screen crack.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Information security's primary focus is the balanced
| protection of data confidentiality, integrity, and
| availability, so, not having availability of the things
| the user wants to do is a failing grade. In this case you
| can pretend you value other things, not security.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > I know they have insanely high and probably
| unreasonable standards for their app store
|
| [2022] https://lifehacker.com/great-now-the-apple-app-
| store-has-mal...
|
| [2022] https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-
| breaches/malic...
|
| [2024] Fraudulent LastPass-impersonating app allowed in
| App Store:
| https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/2024/02/warning-
| fraudulent-a...
|
| [2024] "Scammed by the top result for 'Bitcoin wallet' in
| Apple App Store":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685272
|
| [2020] Scam subscriptions:
| https://blog.lockdownprivacy.com/2020/11/25/how-to-
| make-8000...
|
| [2015] Thousands of malware-containing apps built using
| infected version of XCode slip through App Store review:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34338362
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Quickly looked at all those links and without any more
| commentary from you, I guess I feel like my point stands.
|
| Those all fall under the category of shitty apps I would
| never install on my iPhone or Android phone. So, Apple's
| privacy standards and policies, and walled gardens for
| better or worse, kept me closer to what I was looking for
| regarding personal privacy and security than I could have
| gotten with Android. Who knows if anyone checked those
| same apps I use to see if the Android versions are
| different or contain malware, but my sense is that it's
| much easier to slip it in the Play Store than Apple's App
| Store.
| mcny wrote:
| One more example since you mentioned shitty apps...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/672xcq/nytimes_ho
| w_u...
|
| Uber did this and didn't get abruptly terminated from
| Apple developer program...
| rpdillon wrote:
| I think the point is that you're putting too much faith
| in App Store Review. App Store Review is neither
| necessary nor sufficient to protect you.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Probably so. But still, I feel like Apple did a better
| job than Google did and I understand that's an opinion
| and everyone has one.
| port11 wrote:
| We use Nara to track our baby's food intake and sleep.
|
| A couple of months ago I noticed Little Snitch complaining
| about the app making new connections to malware domains.
| Thankfully I can run the app on macOS and noticed it.
|
| When confronted with how this violated their Privay Policy,
| they gave a condescending reply. When I contacted Apple about
| this new update to the app, they ignored my report.
|
| So... no, we're not safer on iOS. Perhaps the barrier to
| entry is a bit higher to discourage some low-hanging fruit,
| but Apple does very little for the 30% commission it takes.
| pydry wrote:
| They mean safer from apps like NewPipe which threaten their
| margins by giving users their attention back.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| we must think of the shareholders!!! No, how can you! I
| want to give billionaires more profits that would most
| likely just be a number to them while selling myself for
| them, Noo.
|
| (satirical post)
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Safer from apps that do insane but legal data collection
| is what I am worried about. Why would a foreign adversary
| need a hacking team when they can just buy what they need
| from an American company built to sell detailed personal
| information on Americans using shitty malware-riddled
| products?
| _blk wrote:
| It's not like they're the only bullies in town (@bigG:
| try to remember "do no evil" and you were an actually
| cool tech company rather worth applying to, worth having
| on your resume).
|
| I paid for Prime Video to remove ads only to find that
| now they'll play skipable ads again at the start of a
| movie and this time I don't even have the option of
| paying again..
|
| I'm not against big profits, and I'm definitely not in
| favor of more regulation to attempt to fix it but I am
| against mico-maximization of profit with obviously
| consumer-unfriendly behavior. The way to fix it, IMHO, is
| to start over with yet another small guy that comes in
| and does it right. Angel Studios is doing pretty good and
| although the content selection is much more limited, the
| overall vibe is great, feels safe to leave children
| around for more than 2 minutes (unlike youtube kids).
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| > Perhaps the barrier to entry is a bit higher to
| discourage some low-hanging fruit, but Apple does very
| little for the 30% commission it takes.
|
| As someone who is diligent about staying on top of these
| things, I thank you for sharing this because this is what
| I'm talking about: it is not clear at all to an average
| user who is trying to do task X with their phone (note
| that's *not* "do task X securely while protecting personal
| data").
|
| I figured Apple didn't do a whole lot, but I still feel the
| policies must do something. Please do tell if you know
| specifics though. And I am very disappointed with all the
| near-literal shit that's flooded the iOS app store the last
| few years. Overall, my opinion about it all is that we need
| to take some time to think about everything we've learned
| and rebuild something new from the ground up. GrapheneOS
| seems promising.
| smaudet wrote:
| > but I still feel the policies must do something
|
| That has been the problem with Apple, a lot of feeling
| inspired by nice UI design, and a lot of screw-you-over
| in the background (draconian dev policies, nonsense
| security requirements that make you less, not more,
| secure, and money grubbing that doesn't make the users
| any better off)...
|
| Maybe in a world with Steve Jobs, it could have been
| different, who knows. I don't get the sense that Tim Cook
| "gets" it.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| I have lost faith in Apple as a current best choice
| because of the things you say. Maybe it's dumb for me to
| think of it this way, but I was just expressing that I'm
| happier overall with how Apple handled it while I've had
| an iPhone. I felt like I was in better hands, even though
| I know just about all their shortcomings that have been
| made public. Still, I don't think there was a better
| choice for the general average Joe than an iOS device.
| They have kept my parents safe from identity theft, any
| malware (that I know of), stolen credit cards, etc. And I
| think they deserve some (intangible, feelings-based)
| credit for that.
|
| This morning I ordered a Pixel phone after realizing they
| are available in my price range after all (thanks to this
| discussion, specifically one of the few who didn't try to
| argue with me) so GrapheneOS is what I would personally
| recommend if anyone was thinking I was trying to say "iOS
| is better, prove me wrong". I was more looking for others
| to share similar thoughts, not attempt to shut me down,
| but such is life.
| oofbey wrote:
| Can you give examples of nonsense security policies that
| make you less secure? I've always thought Apple's
| security policies have been exemplary, forward thinking,
| and balanced.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| To be clear, Apple's authoritarian tendencies are
| directly downstream of Steve Jobs' authoritarian
| tendencies. Tim Cook's just continuing what was already
| there in 2014. It was Apple policy to lock down
| everything with code signing since the iPhone. Hell, I
| think it started being a company mandate around the 4th
| or 5th gen iPod.
|
| The one thing Jobs didn't account for[0] was that iOS
| apps were going to take off and thus owning the signing
| keys to iOS would be _extremely_ lucrative. Jobs '
| original iOS development mandate was "webapps only", at
| least until the jailbreak developers embarrassed him
| enough to change his mind. Even then, he genuinely
| thought 30% was going to just barely defray the costs of
| running the App Store.
|
| The actual difference between Jobs and Cook is that Tim
| Cook isn't nearly as charismatic. Jobs had the "reality
| distortion field" - the ability to confidently lie so
| hard that the engineers believe the lie and actually make
| it true. It's the sort of authoritarian manifestation
| that Donald Trump is desperately trying (and failing) to
| tap into.
|
| [0] In Jobs' defense the last SDK they'd shipped for
| portable devices was iPod games.
| port11 wrote:
| Companies are made of people, not just their figurehead.
|
| Jobs wasn't a nice person, as it's been documented. And
| if he was surrounded by MBAs and PMs trying to make a
| career, the results might be similar to what we have.
|
| I do think Cook is a terrible CEO on the product side.
| But he's made Apple richer than ever. I'm not upgrading
| to the 26 version of the OS'es (btw what a stupid version
| bump).
| port11 wrote:
| I've ran Graphene for a year to complement an iPhone;
| sadly, Device Attestation makes it non-viable as a main
| phone. Banking apps and what we used to id ourselves are
| a whack-a-mole of incompatibility. For everything else, I
| do think it's a great solution.
|
| For reference on Nara, it tries to connect to domains
| such as dewrain.*, vaicore, akisinn, etc. (many TLDs)
| Little Snitch was the only way I'd know. Sadly it means
| we're unsafe on iOS and Android, so we've stopped using
| any features that might be or leak PII. Just milk and
| sleep.
|
| This unnerved me so much that I'm building an app for
| parents on the side. I can't believe our options are free
| with trackers or expensive (with trackers). And Nara was
| clean before the update around March.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| Wow! Well you never know where simple frustrations will
| lead, or in your case noticing something that you just
| can't shake that no one else seems to think is important.
| I'd say keep me posted, but that's not on you especially
| while you're developing that app. I wish you the best of
| luck, and it sounds like you're doing it with a really
| unique and authentic perspective that I wouldn't be sure
| that any of the apps that become popular on either App
| Store can guarantee. Seriously, the world might depend on
| you :)
|
| I had a feeling about what you described with GrapheneOS
| would be the case, and that's what kept me from really
| considering it as a replacement for my iPhone until
| talking with some folks in this thread. I really don't
| see myself getting out of using an iPhone as my "main
| phone" tied to my phone number since my wife is neck-deep
| in the whole Apple ecosystem (and I truly believe that
| being flexible in this regard is worth it and makes our
| lives a whole lot better, even when the issue in question
| is what I would consider a simple moral non-negotiable,
| securely protecting my and my family's personal data.
| just means that I have more solving to do before the
| solution).
|
| My solution for now is to always run everything through a
| trusted VPN and NextDNS on the iPhone, or as much as iOS
| will let me I guess, and using this as my new Pixel's
| gateway to the internet when I'm away from a trusted
| connection. I will also be running everything through the
| VPN when I'm using GrapheneOS, so when I am out and about
| I'm not treating my not-entirely-trustworthy iPhone any
| differently than a Starbucks hotspot. Sometimes the
| convenience really makes a difference, not all the time
| but it does matter occasionally.
| crtasm wrote:
| :( Would you be willing to share Nara's full reply?
| port11 wrote:
| Oh, I remembered it wrong. It's just an automatic reply.
| The condescending one was to my suggestion to use median
| values instead of averages.
| lukan wrote:
| "What about kids?"
|
| They usually have someone more mature watching over them as
| there are also other dangers in life except malware on their
| phones.
|
| (Also, when I was a kid there was no one to explain me the
| internet, so I learned on my own and understood it better
| then those responsible for me.
|
| But it was a different internet back then. )
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Don't know about a mature but I wanted to play pokemon
| yellow on my mum's phone and I was in 2nd grade iirc and my
| brother just told me to search pokemon yellow rom myself
| and learn how to download/pirate it. He didn't help me at
| all, even though. he had pirated it earlier.
|
| Made me learn pirating which went into more and more
| technical untill I think nowadays I dabble in playing
| pirated games in linux and linux scripting and just general
| coding.
|
| There was no mature watching over me. I was downloading
| everything dude, heck I had once downloaded hollow knight
| as an apk to play it and I am pretty sure that it was a
| malware which i had quickly deleted as it wasn't working
| but now yes we've even migrated over from the phone.
|
| So in a way my mature watching over me was saying, Idk
| learn it yourself, fuck around and find out.
|
| I kinda think that grapheneos would be really nice for
| protecting your phone from something like malware from what
| I've heard.
| jackstraw42 wrote:
| downloading ROMs helped me learn how to do things the
| right way too. but even back then those kinds of places
| were filled with traps, remember pop-ups and pop-under
| ads? from that point forward, learning how to safely
| download ROMs and whatever else I wanted to do on the
| internet just felt natural.
|
| What worries me though is that maybe we weren't the norm,
| maybe we were the exceptions.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| r/piracy was something that I discovered really late but
| I am glad I am.
|
| I recommend it to every of my friend who comes to me
| begging me to download X or Y or pirate it.
|
| I remember those links where you had to go through the
| entire article and it would give a (1 of 2) and you have
| to do that again and again for them to finally get to the
| final download.
|
| Yes downloading them were indeed a hassle but idk i guess
| those feelings are really compensated by me playing
| pokemon, like I genuinely have forgotten some of those
| popups but I do know that they were really shitty.
|
| here's what I would recommend anybody now:
|
| r/piracy is your best friend, try to read it and prefer
| to get the goated version of things use brave browser if
| you don't want ads/ librewolf/firefox with ublock on pc.
|
| I am not advocating piracy because well, I just can't pay
| for products and my frugal living doesn't really find it
| to have peace. I would much rather donate to them
| directly with a thank you message but maybe that's my
| ideal.
|
| The only game I was thinking to buy was silksong but my
| brother has a ps5 and he would've had to download it
| seperately and I wanted to split even 20$ lol.
|
| I wanted to buy silksong as a way of saying thank you to
| the devs for finally making things cheap enough and
| making me feel like my money is worth it even if I am
| frugal y'know.
|
| I feel like everyone iscammed by 70$ games bro, I am
| never paying them.
|
| One time, idk what i downloaded, but it was prob malware
| in the sense that even if no app is running/removed that
| app, it would still open up browser and open up some link
| automatically sometimes..
|
| And pop ups on websites were a nightmare to dodge, pop
| under ads yeah. I remember it all now. it used to take me
| definitely 15 minutes or more to download a rom but that
| was compensated by the hours I used to play bro.
|
| I love pokemon johto with my ampharos of level 75, it
| used to one shot everything except rock/steel. Electric
| was goated in johto. And I had a water type pokemon
| too/there was one fighting type move that I taught my
| ampharos. I think I even defeated red from gen 1 ( I am
| talking about the actual gen 2 pixelated game and not the
| next silver games, I think it was the crystal or silver
| or gold, I am not sure mareep was only available to play
| in one of these games and dude mareep is goated and makes
| me remember my childhood)
| sans_souse wrote:
| Is Simple Gallery known to do anything shady now, behind the
| scenes? I had no idea it was sold either, and it's been my go
| to gallery app on all my devices for a long time. Just curious.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Fossify Gallery os a drop in replacement with no risk of data
| siphoning.
| eulgro wrote:
| Uh, I was still using it up until today... I did block its
| Internet access though.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Simple Gallery Pro hasn't been updated since the takeover and
| doesn't even have the Internet Permission, so it is still
| perfectly safe to use. It is still superior to Fossify
| Gallery because of its proprietary photo/video editor
| (IMG.LY). Fossify's photo editor is extremely limited, and
| there's no video editor at all.
|
| If you don't use the editors (or if you're using the non-Pro
| Simple Gallery) then you should probably switch to Fossify
| now.
|
| If you do use the editors then you should probably disable
| automatic updates in Google Play, so you get a heads up if
| they ever push a shady update.
| goku12 wrote:
| The SimpleMobileTools fiasco and the way FDroid stayed
| resilient against it is the perfect example case of how their
| 'security' argument behind the side loading ban and developer
| registration mandate is hollow, misleading and harmful.
| enriquto wrote:
| please fix your ambiguous use of "their"... you mean google
| and apple, don't you?
| goku12 wrote:
| Yes. I thought that was clear from the context.
| Unfortunately, it's no longer editable.
| rudderdev wrote:
| thank you for posting this, emotional roller coaster the
| parent comment was
| disiplus wrote:
| This weekend I needed to send a few PNGs by email. They were
| huge, so I figured I'd just grab an image compressor from the
| Play Store.
|
| I checked out five different apps, each with millions of
| downloads. Every single one was riddled with data collection
| prompts and stuffed with ads.
|
| Fine, I thought, I'll pay to remove the ads. But the options
| were:
|
| - "Free trial" that defaults into a $5/month subscription
|
| - Or a $19 "lifetime" purchase
|
| It's so clearly designed to trick people into a recurring
| subscription for what's essentially nothing. These apps are
| just wrappers around existing Android libraries. And if you
| check the reviews, they're obviously bought.
|
| This was literally the first time in a year I tried to download
| something from the Play Store, and the experience was so bad I
| just gave up and solved it faster in the browser instead.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Yes browser is a really good tool for utilities like this
| actually.
|
| But also I suppose that f-droid doesn't have paid reviews or
| well, everything in f-droid is mostly open source, so I am
| curious if there are apps in f-droid that could've well
| suited your need.
|
| I just search on whatever I want on duckduckgo,"open source X
| android app" or "open source alternativeto Y" or just
| directly trying to search it in f-droid too.
| brnt wrote:
| This is why I find the thesis that Google and Apple are good
| stewards hilarious if not malicious. There is absolutely
| nothing safe about their app stores. Certainly not more safe
| than something like f-droid.
| metadat wrote:
| Are Google and Apple's stores safer than the open web? It
| really doesn't seem like it, in a lot of ways.
| freedomben wrote:
| I strongly don't think they are, because the ability to
| be invasive to the user with a native app is much higher.
| There is also a stronger financial incentive to do so
| since payments are easy.
|
| And that's before we consider the much stronger user
| control presented by the open web. I can run an extension
| like uMatrix and take back control of my browser. On
| mobile now I can't even proxy and inspect the network
| requests that the apps are making without resorting to
| insane hackery tricks.
|
| The more these things evolve, The more against native
| apps I am becoming.
| kbenson wrote:
| Importantly, I think it's much more obvious what you're
| doing with a web app when you upload data. There's an
| erroneous belief when you're using native app that the
| data you provide to it never leaves the device. That
| _might_ be the case, but even in cases where the native
| app isn 't just a shim to do something through a service,
| there's little guarantee they aren't utilizing your data
| for their own purposes, legally (e.g. Adobe) or not.
|
| This isn't unique to mobile vs desktop, but from my
| experience people use those different device types with
| different levels of care. It's possible app stores play
| into this by giving people an incorrect sense of security
| about aspects of application usage and updating that they
| don't actually provide.
| rpdillon wrote:
| There is a cost to a centralized app store that I never
| hear anybody talk about, which is that due to the
| perception of safety, it becomes a very juicy target for
| anybody that wants to distribute malware (or even just
| exploitative apps that e.g. charge $5 a week for a
| flashlight). If you can get over the wall, then you get
| access to a very lucrative market.
|
| My personal hypothesis is this is the reason that app
| stores are filled with so much trash. The app store
| provides a mechanism of discoverability that would
| otherwise never be available to such apps.
|
| And this then leads to what you're talking about, which
| is the stores actually feel less safe than the open web.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I feel like this is disingenuous. I have never used
| F-droid, but it seems they only publish open source apps
| and they take the initiative selecting them.
|
| This isn't a good app store for the majority of app
| developers, since they wouldn't be able to publish there
| out of their own accord.
| saratogacx wrote:
| It isn't an invite only club. Anyone can submit an
| existing application[0] and an app author can provide a
| metadata pack to speed up the process. They have some
| requirements to accept but it isn't a situation where a
| developer is just waiting around for the letter of invite
| to arrive[1].
|
| [0] https://f-droid.org/en/contribute/ [1]
| https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Submitting_to_F-
| Droid_Quick_Star...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can also use other repos than F-Droid's if you want
| to get apps from elsewhere.
| MayeulC wrote:
| These apps do exactly that, but are not easy to find from the
| F-Droid app (I had to use a search engine to find the first
| one):
|
| https://f-droid.org/packages/mobi.omegacentauri.SendReduced
|
| https://f-droid.org/packages/com.caydey.ffshare
|
| Oh, and also, specifically for PNG optimization:
| https://f-droid.org/packages/com.wrmndfzzy.atomize
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Obligatory mention: ImagePipe[0]. It lets you compress
| pictures and edit them. You can share images to ImagePipe
| and it automatically shows a dialog to share compressed
| versions with another app (hence the "Pipe" -- it's a
| pipeline!)
|
| [0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.kaffeemitkoffein.im
| agepip...
| FrequentLurker wrote:
| Here is another one: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ru.tec
| h.imageresizershrinker...
|
| It also has a bunch of other features
| ekianjo wrote:
| Next time you can also use magic wormhole.
| vid wrote:
| KDE Connect is an open source party pack of system to
| system tools.
|
| Another option is to block ads using Netguard.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Google has a track record of turning a blind eye to malware and
| fraud delivered through their own channels. I like how F-Droid
| tackles them both - they've been my default app store for years
| at this point.
| getpokedagain wrote:
| This sort of application acquisition game happens on ios as
| well and is part of the reason I am experimenting with a
| graphene OS phone sans any Google. I guess daddy Google is
| trying to come fuck me too.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| HA! I use the "Simple" apps as the poster child for my rants
| about apps kneecapping themselves on purpose.
|
| It's funny how the more one gets burned the more one becomes
| the kooky old fart the cliche requires us to be...
| beezle wrote:
| Thank you for this info. I had no idea why a couple weeks ago
| the calendar app was suddenly needing to connect to the net on
| startup and then doing a splash ad. Will be installing the
| Fossify version shortly!
| brendyn wrote:
| I had no idea fossify was fork. Until this moment I had apps
| from both of them, some orange, some green, but the calendar
| started bugging out by opening a different date to what I
| clicked on. I see my phone hasn't updated it since last year.
| Now finally I've deleted them all in favour of the fossify
| ones. Thanks.
| cobertos wrote:
| I did the exact same research and came to the same conclusion.
| I wouldn't have been prompted to do it without F-Droid
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| regulators asleep as usual
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| I've built a couple of tools for myself over the years, some of
| which includes android apps. They were never released to the
| public.
|
| If we go down this path, I will stop all development on android
| (and at work too, as it is up to me how we deliver,
| coincidentally). I implore all other developers to resist this.
| This will completely lock down the platform forever, there will
| be no going back.The entire reason why android is so attractive
| is because we have linux in our palms and all the amazing
| benefits of that. If google wanted to do the right thing, they
| would go in the opposite direction and make it easier to gain
| root access on mainstream devices instead of locking it down
| further.
|
| It seems the only last bastion left is Firefox, so I will be
| focusing on making all my tools work well on Firefox (mobile &
| desktop) instead of app ecosystems.
| kykat wrote:
| Developing for Android and iOS is already a huge pain, browser
| based experiences can be even better than native apps in some
| cases. I will also not invest any more time in
| developing/following these closed platforms, and try to push
| web based solutions as much as reasonably possible.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Seriously, HUGE pain in the psu. Javascript is a pain on web
| but mobile development significantly more painful, even
| though we have nicer languages & compilers - all the ceremony
| around it is just too much.
|
| I freaking hate gradle with a passion, as every other week I
| have to reconfigure my ide, again. As it cannot seem to just
| chill out and do its work, it demands blood every week or
| two.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I freaking hate gradle with a passion, as every other
| week I have to reconfigure my ide, again.
|
| Is there a Googler here that can enlighten me what makes
| Android so unique as to break IDE between every release?
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| It's not just Android. I've encountered frequent broken
| gradle caching when using Kotlin outside of Android and
| when using Fabric for building Minecraft mods. In my
| experience, the only solution is wiping the user-wide
| gradle cache. Maybe it's a gradle issue or maybe it's an
| ecosystem issue (i.e. gradle plugins not respecting
| Gradle's cache semantics). Regardless, it does not
| reflect well on Gradle that such issues are so
| widespread.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > browser based experiences can be even better than native
| apps in some cases
|
| Not in some cases, in most cases. Clicking shared Google maps
| link easily opens correct spot on Web, but redirects me to
| the App Store for God knows reason why on iOS. If I ever need
| to interact with a new resource, I go check if there's a web
| site first. If there's no website but there's an app and I
| don't really need the resource I just drop it altogether
| without checking the app.
|
| The only apps, besides built-in ones, that I use are chat,
| bank clients and some home app automation tools that would be
| problematic to operate as a web app.
| input_sh wrote:
| I recently explored wrapping my somewhat-popular website as
| an app, only to discover that Google wants apps to offer some
| unique functionalities that the website doesn't support,
| otherwise they'll reject it as spam listing.
|
| The examples they list of such features are offline support
| (PWA already allows that), push notifications (browsers
| already support that), integration with hardware (not
| applicable), mobile-optimised UI (really?)... all nonsense.
|
| I know they're not strict about this policy as I can name
| many local apps that are just wrappers of the web version,
| but I abandoned by idea immediately as it's not beneficial to
| me in any way to prioritise one particular platform over the
| others.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Firefox is only a browser, you could target libre Linux/BSD/etc
| platforms instead?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Firefox is only a browser
|
| Modern web is a platform.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Not for native software though
| Aachen wrote:
| If by native you mean compiling to machine code, then
| Android's Java VM isn't a native platform to run Android
| apps on
|
| If you mean that it won't work offline, websites
| apparently can. I've not seen it done reliably yet but in
| theory that's there and I'm sure we can work out the
| kinks if needed
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Quite honestly, developing for Android and iOS is no longer
| worth it. I was planning a set of cross-platform native
| products using Flutter and other tools, but after a careful
| analysis came to the conclusion that it makes no sense. You
| have to distribute 5 different apps (Linux, macOS, Windows,
| iOS, Android) with 5 different packaging, signing, and
| distribution requirements and have to fight with all kinds of
| garbage, from Gatekeeper over expensive certificates for
| Windows to avoid being flagged by antivirus, to anti-
| competitive app store requirements by Apple and Google.
|
| Web apps have become unavoidable. Native is beating a dead
| horse.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Let me unpack something: I've been building a commercial
| product with flutter for the past 2 years. I think after this
| project is "done" I will never touch cross-platform
| frameworks ever again - only native. Cross-platform
| frameworks (like xamarin, flutter, react=-native) - its all
| lies all the way down. The benefit of having the "one"
| codebase is so tiny you might as well skip it. The moment you
| build something more complex than a todo app, when you need
| reliable background services etc.. guess what, the only
| reliable way is to revert to kotlin/swift and call it from
| the framework anyway, as the community packages are truly
| half-baked messes, abandoned messes, anonymous messes (who is
| the maintainer?). So never again. Huge waste of time and
| effort. Then during the release build, you need multiple
| signing keys, multiple build servers, often multiple
| pipelines, so what exactly is the point?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Was Qt not possible?
| detaro wrote:
| That's not better in any way for mobile.
| cageface wrote:
| This has not been my experience with Flutter at all. It's
| made building a non trivial cross platform app so much
| easier and for the few things I've needed to drop down to
| native it's been very easy.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Firefox - you mean Mozilla with its dozens of scandals, money
| squandering, that is entirely dependent on Google financing
| (and now endorses its AI tool within the browser). There are
| some good Chromium and Firefox forks. There is nothing else
| much left.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| I meant more in a technical sense & openness.
| pessimizer wrote:
| They could flip the switch on that in a second after a
| phone call from Google (or more likely a personal visit
| with no potential recording devices around.) We could call
| it Manifest V4, "the compromise."
|
| _We really stuck it to those bastards at Google, and they
| conceded that we could continue allowing the interfaces
| that efficiently enable adblocking, and still be conformant
| with the new Manifest V4. We 'd just have to put every new
| add-on through a simple process to make sure that they
| weren't abusing that privilege._
|
| I mean, they long ago disabled unsigned add-ons in
| everything but developer nightly iirc? It can't even be
| considered an entire step to say that only add-ons _signed
| by Mozilla_ will run; more like a slight lean.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| I wounder how long would they last if they would have to do
| browser engine development themselves.
|
| Until Ladybird is ready (which may take years) for all the
| Mozilla's scandals there is not a lot better around.
| fuomag9 wrote:
| I've stopped developing for android as I did not want my
| address to be public for everyone thanks to google's decisions
| on how to interpret the EU regulation laws. I'm definitely not
| surprised by their current behaviour
| getpokedagain wrote:
| Would you be willing to outline this in more details. I feel
| like I am in the same boat but arrived at a different point.
| Are you building your tools as pwas that you run in Firefox?
| I've landed at porting my things to pure Emacs lisp but this
| limits me on ux to well an Emacs frame.
| specproc wrote:
| We need to start treating phones differently. We're entering a
| world where we can't choose what we run on them. Their primary
| purpose is to gather data on us and serve us advertising, they're
| engineered for addiction, yet engaging in the world is immensely
| difficult without one.
|
| Phones are as much a burden as benefit in 2025, and our behaviour
| towards them should reflect that. Mine is currently off and in
| the drawer of my desk. I'll turn it on again when I need 2FA,
| some service provider's app, or when I'm likely to be out of the
| house for an extended period. I'll turn it off again when I don't
| need it.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I think this is the right take. Other commenters are mourning
| the death of general-purpose computing, but general-purpose
| computing is very much alive and kicking in laptops, desktops,
| and servers. It's just smartphones and tablets that are being
| turned into limited-use appliances. The overwhelming majority
| of users just want a smartphone or tablet that's a limited-use
| appliance, and those of us on HN who want general-purpose
| computers are a tiny minority, and our insistence that we be
| allowed to make our own decisions is drowned out by those who
| need their hands held in this dangerous world.
|
| My smartphone is used for interacting with systems that I
| expect to surveil me anyway - my bank, my navigation app, and
| so on. Serious work is done using serious machines.
| foxrider wrote:
| People mourn general-purpose computing, because the writing
| is on the wall for future generations. The living room
| computer is dead, your average "normie" only has a phone, and
| maybe a tablet these days. What really opened my eyes to this
| is how kids I was teaching 3D printing design to were
| constantly asking if they can use a 3D printer with their
| phone. Laptops, desktops and servers are becoming more and
| more niche, and if we don't do anything it dies with our
| generation (or maybe a generation after that).
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I used to be a physics teacher, and very few of my students
| gave a shit about science. The most popular 'science'
| content on social media is elephant's toothpaste videos and
| inspirational quotes photoshopped onto astrophotography.
| Most people struggle to have a conversation about ideas,
| they just want to talk about people, and that's perfectly
| fine.
|
| General-purpose computing was always for nerds, and always
| will be. There will only ever be a tiny proportion of
| people who find this stuff interesting enough to actually
| learn how to engage with it on its own level. Everyone else
| needs it to be packaged in an idiot-proof way so they can
| use it to get on with their day.
| 5d41402abc4b wrote:
| >but general-purpose computing is very much alive and kicking
| in laptops, desktops, and servers
|
| Not for long, remote attestation will put and end to it.
| cesarb wrote:
| > but general-purpose computing is very much alive and
| kicking in laptops, desktops, and servers.
|
| Two words: Secure Boot.
|
| The only reason we still can run operating systems without
| Microsoft's approval on these devices, is that alternative
| operating systems like Linux were already popular enough when
| Secure Boot was introduced, so to prevent the risk of
| antitrust enforcement Microsoft allowed (and AFAIK required)
| that firmware has an option to disable Secure Boot or enroll
| your own keys, and Microsoft also signs the bootloader of
| several Linux distributions (as long as they meet some
| stringent requirements).
|
| But this can change, since all of that is part of Microsoft's
| hardware requirements for running Microsoft Windows (which
| hardware makers must follow if they want their devices to run
| Windows). And it already has, at least twice: some ARM-based
| laptops were shipped without that option (the hardware
| requirements back then were that you must be able to disable
| Secure Boot or enroll your own keys _on x86-based hardware_
| ), and a class of devices (the so-called "Secured Core"
| devices) comes with the "third-party" key, which Microsoft
| uses to sign Linux distributions, disabled by default.
| Nothing prevents it from being locked down even further in
| newer versions of Microsoft's hardware requirements, in the
| name of "security".
| cjs_ac wrote:
| For PC-class devices, there's an established market segment
| of buyers who won't buy anything that won't run a Linux or
| BSD OS. For smartphones and tablets, that segment is yet to
| form, because projects like postmarketOS are yet to deliver
| something that's suitable for use as a 'daily driver'. So
| PC manufacturers have commercial incentives to push back
| against Microsoft, but smartphone manufacturers have no
| incentive to push back against Google.
|
| Also, current UEFI implementations allow for disabling
| Secure Boot. If that changes, we can discuss that when it
| happens, because I'm not terribly interested in getting all
| het up about imaginary things.
| Aachen wrote:
| Doesn't seem all that imaginary to me. Having a bit of
| foresight -- discussion _before_ something bad happens --
| just seems like good sense rather than saying it 's
| imaginary. We don't need a crystal ball to discuss
| possible scenarios and prepare options
| heavyset_go wrote:
| First roll out of Secure Boot to consumers locked them
| out of installing Linux on their PCs. It's not imaginary,
| it's what actually happened.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Laptops and desktops are nearly as bad.
|
| You can't share an app you develop without first paying Apple
| and Microsoft a recurring fee and also get their explicit
| permission for every update to it.
|
| At any point, for any reason, they can decide they don't like
| you and Gatekeeper and/or Defender will block your app from
| running on nearly every computer.
|
| Open source operating systems are closer, but there are still
| PCs that have locked bootloaders.
|
| All the pieces are in place, all vendors have to do is flip a
| bit and you'll never run anything without permission again.
| And it will happen because think of the children/national
| security/hackers/scammers/trillion dollar companies' bottom
| lines.
| rokkamokka wrote:
| So what would I do when daycare needs to reach me about my
| child? Get a 3310 as my actual phone?
| pferde wrote:
| They still make "dumbphones", you know. You could get one of
| those. I did.
| 1gn15 wrote:
| Actually, yes! It's cheap, and the battery life is awesome.
| One could go for a second hand old style flip phone.
| Macha wrote:
| Assuming you still have a 2G network for it to connect to.
| sznio wrote:
| I use a Nokia N95. It works well as a phone, and does have
| some smartphone features. I can listen to podcasts on it, and
| Google Maps somehow still works fine.
| zecg wrote:
| I only tolerate the piece of shit phone because of F-Droid.
| Most of google's apps are banned from connecting to the network
| (like their fucking keyboard, I don't need or want any
| internet-requiring options) via Rethink VPN through which all
| network traffic is routed.
|
| If this goes through, I'm taking my sim card out and putting it
| into the cheapest dumbphone I can find, using the smartphone
| strictly offline for OSMAnd navigation and media, uploaded over
| USB cable.
| hks0 wrote:
| Reminds me of Nokia/Symbian. To install a `.sis(x)` with any
| useful capabilities (permissions in Android) one needed to sign
| it with Nokia's keys; which they normally couldn't, at least with
| non-business email addresses. Until someone found a way to hack
| the roms and it became a Tom&Jerry struggle between hackers &
| Nokia who wanted to suffocate them by patching those loopholes.
|
| Then came Android. The freedom to sideload any `.apk` on any
| device was magical. And now we've come full circle.
|
| Except that Symbian wasn't source-available, so there was a
| bigger hope for a successful rebelion.
| therein wrote:
| > so there was a bigger hope for a successful rebelion.
|
| Not if you want to run banking apps on that device.
| stavros wrote:
| I'm willing to lose the banking apps and just use the website
| if it means I can have an open device.
| therein wrote:
| Same but banks are cramming in more and more app-only
| features.
|
| That's why a dedicated device for them is going to be my
| workaround. I could see myself having GrapheneOS on my
| primary device and having that act as a hotspot for my
| small "certified" device that I do my banking on.
| codedokode wrote:
| Why do you need a banking app, do you want to share your
| contact list and geolocation with the bank so badly? Do you
| need a bank app's antivirus to scan your phone and flag you
| as a suspicious user? Are you missing notifications offering
| a credit card with 45% yearly rate? Do you want to make
| investments while riding on a train while several
| suspiciously looking beggars carefully look at the numbers?
| Do you want to allow anyone who has a Linux kernel exploit to
| access your bank account?
|
| I don't understand. It's unsafe and inconvenient.
| Macha wrote:
| You need a banking app to use the bank's provided 2FA to
| log into the bank's website (no, they don't support TOTP or
| passkeys or other vendor-neutral solutions) if you want to
| do any online banking on your other devices.
|
| You also need it to receive the PIN for the
| credit/debit/bank card that allows you to pay for things in
| stores, or to withdraw money from the ATM if you'd rather
| use cash.
|
| If you'd like to send money to your friend, for example to
| split a bill or for any other reason, then you either need
| to do that in the app, or do it on the website but with 2FA
| on the app.
|
| ---
|
| This is the norm for all the banks here, citing PSD2
| compliance. I'm sure it's not the only way they could have
| complied, but it's the lowest effort and banks are nothing
| if not conservative, so once one bank gets the OK for a
| given solution, they all follow suit.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Thanks EU.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/17/developers-address-phone-numb...
|
| > The requirement is part of a series of new rules for online
| platforms established by the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). One
| of them requires Apple and other companies to verify and display
| contact information for any "traders" distributing digital apps.
| And of course, this affects the App Store.
| baobun wrote:
| AIUI, the law puts restrictions on "traders", ie businesses,
| people making a revenue, integrating ads etc.
|
| A free FLOSS app would be exempt from these requirements under
| the DSA. Apple and Google don't make a difference betwren
| commercial and non-commercial publishers, so in this sense they
| both do malicious compliance.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| I'm sure they are just slightly ahead of EU regulations, and
| EU will find a way to out-draconian Apple and Google in some
| short months.
|
| The problem is also, if Google makes the decision of who is
| and is not a "traders", they take on additional liability, as
| the EU can still hold them accountable for making the wrong
| choice.
|
| We all know where the EU is going, and it will make China and
| Russia look like bastions of liberty.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| In theory. In practice Germany requires your private non-
| commercial web page to have Impressum and there is an army of
| legal trolls who would destroy you for not having one.
|
| I guess the same will happen with signed apps.
| heinrich5991 wrote:
| No, your private non-commercial web page doesn't need an
| Impressum AFAIK. Once you add ads to generate (small)
| income, it becomes commercial, though.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| this applies to Google and Apple app store, anything side
| loaded shouldn't be touched by this
| umrashrf wrote:
| Yes and our company is planning to stop distributing to google
| App Store in near future.
| ddxv wrote:
| Google should lose control of the app store and it should be
| managed by a group rather than any single company.
| geokon wrote:
| I still don't understand a lot of the specifics of the signing.
| So they're going to force through this change with a Google Play
| Services update? This will affect even old devices - like ones
| running some kiosk app?
|
| How does this work with Chinese ROMs - that don't come with
| Google Play Services? How do it affect secondary app stores? A
| developer releases their app on Vivo's app store - and he has to
| register with Google's ID procedure?
|
| If you're running some old Android version and you block Google
| Play Services from updating, will the Play Services stop working
| entirely and brick the kiosk phone/tablet?
|
| If this was a change required in the next version of Android,
| then I could kind of understand. You buy a new phone and this is
| the Faustian bargain you choose to accept. Google's search ad
| cash cow is dieing. Time to milk all their assets. Google
| obviously doesn't want people making money off of their Android
| work - to me this was inevitable. But the fact they're forcing
| this down the throats of existing users.. this seems messed up
| and maybe illegal?
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| This likely won't affect Chinese or open source Android
| distribution. It will affect Android as distributed by Google's
| partners.
|
| People using LineageOS, Calyx or alike will be unaffected. The
| other 90% of western android users will be affected.
| geokon wrote:
| LineageOS and company aren't Certified Android Devices.
| However, I think for instance a Vivo OriginOS device is. They
| will have a separate Play Service for Chinese-bound devices?
|
| Where are you getting your information btw?
| ravshan wrote:
| Then what is the point of having an android phone? I might buy an
| iphone.
| janvlug wrote:
| Better totally leave Android.
|
| It will be a long tough uphill battle, but digital freedom is
| possible.
|
| Purism is for example providing the Librem 5 phone with PureOS.
| Closing the app gap is big challenge, but I use the Librem 5 as
| my daily phone. Yes, I may have some inconvenience, but I have
| freedom, and the software is getting better and better.
|
| For more info see also:
|
| * https://puri.sm/posts/googles-new-sideloading-restrictions-w...
|
| * https://puri.sm/posts/closing-the-app-gap-momentum-and-time/
| wraptile wrote:
| > Better totally leave Android.
|
| to where? Everything else is either worse or non even remotely
| close to matching Android's features and accessibility.
| xandrius wrote:
| You got to take a small toll on comfort if you want anything
| not backed by a huge evil corporation to have a chance.
|
| Before it was Linux and now it's Ubuntu Touch, sure it's not
| perfect but it's a very much usable system which needs more
| people to try it out as their daily driver. I made the shift
| a month or so ago because I don't want to have to choose
| between two evils.
| stavros wrote:
| How can I use an OS that's not iOS on Android as a daily
| driver? 99% of what I do on my phone is chat to my friends
| and pay for things, which I won't be able to do at all with
| the free OSes. I might as well go without a phone at that
| point.
| a96 wrote:
| I guess the offered way for problematic apps is Waydroid?
| I'd be interested to hear how that works in practice.
| xandrius wrote:
| What's the problem? Use Ubuntu Touch with Waydroid and
| install the WhatsApp apk, or Signal, or whatever else.
|
| You don't need to be using Android to run Android apps.
| foxrider wrote:
| > 800$ for 720p screen and 3GBs of RAM > Can't even use a bank
| app with it I'm sorry, but this will never see adoption wide
| enough to be useful. I can't imagine paying 800 and still
| having to carry a "backup" phone for payments, public transit
| and such.
| keyringlight wrote:
| At that cost I'd think more about seeking out a second hand
| phone that's survived and has good parts
| availability/repairability to keep it going. It would seem
| with both you're in the situation where google doesn't about
| you but at least the phone would be semi-smart enough to do
| some tasks and less drain on the wallet.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| i read the exact same comments about the Librem 5 on HN back in
| about 2017/18. hope they'll continue with progress but it is
| giving, "This year is the year of the Linux [phone, desktop]!"
| airhangerf15 wrote:
| Purism is a shit company. It took 6 years to get a refund for
| my Libem 5 order (it was ready to ship after 3 years). I had to
| file a complaint with my credit card company.
|
| Other people who paid over $1,000 got their shit out of date
| phones before me! Fuck Purism. They can go die in a fucking
| cesspit.
| karlkloss wrote:
| "You may also need to upload official government ID."
|
| That would be illegal in Germany, and probably also in other EU
| countries. Only the gouvernment and banks are allowed to make
| copies of IDs. Alle others aren't. Can get you in serious legal
| trouble. Not that a data hog like Google would care.
| gmueckl wrote:
| This is no longer true. Copies of IDs are legal in Germany as
| long as certain conditions are met, which aren't particularly
| onerous.
| goku12 wrote:
| Forget the legality altogether. The fact that they need real
| world validation of any form should be alarming in itself.
| Never forget how hard it is to resolve any issue - even falsely
| flagged ones - resolved with Google's support. Do you really
| need such a gatekeeper?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Exactly. When the laws become antihuman and lawmakers
| absolutely corrupt, it is obeying those laws that is the true
| crime.
| buyucu wrote:
| Like Google cares. There will be a 5-10 year long court case,
| and Google will be forced to pay a few billion. That will be
| it.
| codedokode wrote:
| Maybe the person who made a copy and sent it, will have to
| pay the fine?
| Rogach wrote:
| I see a lot of comments here talking about "end of free
| computing" and similar stuff. However, I'm trying to find ways to
| be somewhat optimistic. There are already companies that attempt
| to make smartphones that actually try to preserve our freedoms
| (Fairphone and PinePhone come to mind, I'm sure there are more).
| So even if mass-market smartphones become locked-down completely,
| we will still have alternatives. Sure, in some ways these
| alternatives might be less convenient, and they might be
| expensive - but if you can put a price tag on your freedom then
| you might not need it too much in the end.
| geff82 wrote:
| ... Shift Phones! They even have an installer so you can
| install a phone OS of your liking (e/OS, Lineage, Ubuntu,
| etc...).
| zb3 wrote:
| You're missing the part where government-mandated apps will
| rely on remote attestation which will only work on "certified"
| phones.
| cesarb wrote:
| > So even if mass-market smartphones become locked-down
| completely, we will still have alternatives. [...] (Fairphone
| and PinePhone come to mind, I'm sure there are more)
|
| You're not looking far ahead enough. Use of these alternatives
| will be banned.
|
| I already cannot use any of these alternatives: all cell phones
| must be certified to be imported into Brazil, and so far I
| could find none of these alternatives certified by ANATEL. My
| only options are Android, Apple, or non-smartphone "feature
| phones" (they still exist). Yes, Brazil is one of the first
| countries on the list for this change from Google, and Apple
| already does something similar.
| xyzal wrote:
| It irks me to no end that for proper GrapheneOS support one has
| to buy a Pixel.
| focusedone wrote:
| I wonder if Google actually makes a profit on Pixels, or if the
| idea is to sell at / below cost and make up for it through
| advertising the sale of user tracking data from the device.
|
| If it's the latter, buying a pixel to run Graphene might be a
| particularly solid counter.
| kristjank wrote:
| I demand some degree of freedom as an end-user. If all of the
| possible alternatives strip that basic freedom from me, I will
| simply fall back to the option which has the most features, which
| means moving to Apple.
|
| (Also, losing to competition seems to be the only way companies
| nowadays can perceive loss of users' trust)
| goku12 wrote:
| Wait. Is the same freedom available on iOS at all? Don't you
| need a developer license there as well? Forget the fact that
| side loading and alternate stores are not possible at all.
| hkt wrote:
| I live for the day when regulators sat Android (and iOS) should
| not ship with a default store, and should allow users the choice.
| Break the platform monopoly.
|
| In the meantime, I guess it is time to return to degoogled
| Android, for me at least.
|
| Another good example of Google's worst instincts, though:
| backups. The backup API can only be implemented by things which
| are included at build time, so apart from e/OS/ I've never seen
| an option except Drive. (e/OS/ supports nextcloud as a target)
| buyucu wrote:
| F-Droid is the best. I have around 20 apps from them on my phone,
| more then half of them can not be found on the Google Play Store.
| Evidlo wrote:
| Are there any Google people that have commented anonymously about
| what is going on internally?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are reports of intense cackling coming from within their
| Scrooge McDuck-ian money vault.
| netfortius wrote:
| Don't Do Evil!
| greatgib wrote:
| Isn't it an editor, an app store or the FSF that would start an
| antitrust litigation against Google? I would easily do a donation
| to a fund to do that.
|
| In my opinion, Google is doing that to keep control as there is
| now the European regulation that said that they can't force
| manufacturer to install exclusively what Google asks them to "to
| be certified". So, in theory there could have been big brand
| smartphones with only the vendor or alternative app store by
| default anytime soon without this change.
| gmueckl wrote:
| This confuses me. Google uses their closed source apps as
| leverage in the certification process. If they are no longer
| able to enforce bundling, then what?
| goku12 wrote:
| Thinking that you can litigate every matter of user freedom
| against two ultra-wealthy co-monopolies of mobile OSes is
| frankly short sighted, if not misguided. They throw around lots
| of money to lawyers, lobbyists and politicians on every case.
| They may not win every case. But they don't need to. Each case
| they win is a step forward for their ambitions of total device
| control and indefinite money grab. On the other hand, we need
| to win every case with meager resources to keep our freedoms.
| At best, this will slightly delay our inevitable surrender to
| corporate greed.
|
| We really need to get off these abusive rent-seeking spyware
| platforms and go for something similar to how Linux distros or
| various BSDs work. The main hurdles are the hardware, drivers
| and essential applications like banking and transportation. The
| hardware is an even bigger problem than the OS platform itself.
| But this is getting desperate. We really have to start moving
| in that direction before we're left with nothing else.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| - there is no escape from digital techno feudalism
|
| - you will have to obey corporations
|
| - sooner or later everything will work using digital ID, or some
| other IDs
|
| - sooner or later phones, PCs, browsers, will be locked in
|
| - majority of populations will have no problems about that, aka
| golden cage
|
| - I do not such a future exists when it will not look like this
|
| - I am uncertain what is the future of open source. I think it
| also will be regulated by accounts, digital IDs. You will not be
| able to participate in open source without verification
| gmueckl wrote:
| Open source on a large scale is a double edged sword because it
| is at odds with an economic reasoning that it prevents the
| realization of monetary value provided by this software as
| profit. A crackdown on OSS would be devastating, but also not
| totally surprising to me in the current political landscape.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| > I do not [believe] such a future exists when it will not look
| like this
|
| This is the deepest root of the problem. Decades of
| psychological conditioning took effect.
|
| No future is 100% predefined, my friend. Please do believe.
| janpmz wrote:
| After developing an app for Android and iOS, it has become clear
| how wonderful it is to just publish a website in the internet.
| zoobab wrote:
| I contacted the European Commission DMA team on this gross abuse
| of power (Google just followed Apple in this regard, who reacted
| to the DMA by coming out with this notarization of developers),
| here is they flacky answer:
|
| "Dear citizen,
|
| Thank you for contacting us and sharing your concerns regarding
| the impact of Google's plans to introduce a developer
| verification process on Android. We appreciate that you have
| chosen to contact us, as we welcome feedback from interested
| parties.
|
| As you may be aware, 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.
|
| We have taken note of your concerns and, while we cannot comment
| on ongoing dialogue with gatekeepers, these considerations will
| form part of our assessment going forward.
|
| Kind regards, The DMA Team"
|
| The DMA is in fact cementing their duopoly power, the opposite of
| the objective of the law.
| mid-kid wrote:
| Those kind of concessions were likely necessary to get them to
| pass the law at all.
| nicce wrote:
| Have to say that someone played this really well if this was
| preparation for Chat Control in reality.
| goobatrooba wrote:
| I think your take is a bit unbalanced
|
| 1. You cannot expect a public body to take a legal conclusion
| with significant financial impact on the basis of a single
| citizen report or in reply to that report. This takes analysis,
| technical and legal work, etc. So your expectation that they
| respond to your message eith something akin to "of course, you
| provide evidence of a breach. I, the single case officer
| responding, confirm the facts are true. Thanks for telling us
| we will now fine them 5 billion" is a bit unreasonable.
|
| 2. I don't see how even inadequate application and a non-
| committal response leads to the conclusion that this is
| intended to (or even just allows) to entrench the Android/IOS
| duopoly.
| nicce wrote:
| > You cannot expect a public body to take a legal conclusion
| with significant financial impact on the basis of a single
| citizen report or in reply to that report. This takes
| analysis, technical and legal work, etc. So your expectation
| that they respond to your message eith something akin to "of
| course, you provide evidence of a breach. I, the single case
| officer responding, confirm the facts are true. Thanks for
| telling us we will now fine them 5 billion" is a bit
| unreasonable.
|
| Both judging or supporting are conclusions. The message is
| more supporting than necessarily required and that also can
| have a significant financial impact. If there is even some
| unclarity, they should just state that they are investigating
| it, while noting that DMA may allow this. Otherwise this
| creates foothold for Google, which is not fair either.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Regarding (1): I don't see why you cannot expect it. If the
| matter at hand is significant enough, all it should take is a
| single person spreading the awareness of something going
| terribly wrong, like in this case.
|
| I find it rather infuriating, to get treated like a low
| rightless peasant, as if to say: "How dare you speak to us
| above?"
|
| It is the difference between people doing their job and being
| transparent about it. An answer like: "Thank you for
| reporting, we currently are already looking into this and are
| taking your report serious. Please note, that drawing legal
| conclusions takes time, but that we will keep you updated,
| when we reach a conclusion." would already be great. To know,
| that one didn't just waste ones time, but that actually
| people there hear and look into things.
|
| That is, assuming, that there actually is something
| significant at hand. If it's rubbish, then no need to get
| processes started.
| mathw wrote:
| That's not actually what the reply said, it was extremely
| noncommittal as you'd expect. If you contacted one of your MEPs
| they might have a stronger opinion they'd want to promote, but
| the DMA team are just not going to render judgement based on
| one email.
|
| But my initial reading of F-Droid's explanation was "hang on,
| Google are going to get slammed for the same thing Apple got
| slammed for" so I hope they do come to the same conclusion and
| do it quickly, before F-Droid is entirely dead.
|
| Maybe that's Google's intention - that the time lag on
| enforcement is going to be long enough that they achieve half
| the goal anyway.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > that the time lag on enforcement is going to be long enough
| that they achieve half the goal anyway.
|
| This is the primary legal strategy of (1) tobacco companies,
| (2) investment bank pushing risky products to unknowing
| customers, and (3) big oil&gas' environmental policy.
| Regarding EU DMA laws, I feel that Apple and Google are
| pursuing the same strategy.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| They have answered you that they have no answer to give.
|
| Everything hinges on what "strictly necessary and proportionate
| measures" effectively are and the EU has yet to state if
| notarisation is ok. I personnaly doubt it will be considering
| the spirit of the law but the currently German dominated and
| mostly focused on German interests commission is spineless so
| who knows.
|
| If you want actual change, pressure your MEP to fire Von Der
| Leyen and stop voting for the PPE.
| spaceport wrote:
| > The DMA is in fact cementing their duopoly power, the
| opposite of the objective of the law.
|
| Power centralization is a key component of control and we live
| in times of unprecedented control being exerted on citizens.
| immibis wrote:
| I saw some new announcements about new Linux phones (other
| than Librem and Pine). Unfortunately I don't remember what
| they're called. Hopefully this is starting a new wave of
| Linux phones.
| s20n wrote:
| For Europe, I'd say there are quite a few good options now
| like Volla[1], Fairphone 5 (the best supported phone for
| ubuntu touch) [2] and the Furi FLX1s [3]
|
| I'm from India and I cannot import any of these devices
| (due to extreme import tariffs) so I went with an unlocked
| Redmi Note 10 which I found on the used market and flashed
| postmarketOS on it, so that is an option as well.
|
| [1] <https://volla.online/en/operating-systems/ubuntu-
| touch/>
|
| [2] <https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp5/>
|
| [3] <https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1s/>
| a96 wrote:
| > https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1s/
|
| $550.00 and 6.7" 1600x720 Eesh.
| immibis wrote:
| Sounds pretty typical for Linux phones. They have
| _really_ low sales volume, after all. I think Pine only
| gets away with their prices by borrowing other hardware
| 's production lines - often they say they're unable to
| change their designs because they're very tightly
| constrained on matching whatever other devices they're
| copying.
| jjav wrote:
| This is why the only way forward is open standards not owned
| by anyone, like SMTP.
| pixl97 wrote:
| When you have a duopoly they just ignore them. There were
| plenty of open standards that Microsoft just ignored for
| the longest time. Lawsuits took years or decades. Companies
| this size buy congresses to ensure laws don't get past
| demanding things like this. And lastly, the average person
| is ignorant to why we would need things like this.
|
| Some days it's rather depressing to think how most people
| would just gladly sign themselves up for slavery.
| M95D wrote:
| Try setting up a SMTP server for youself. You'll instantly
| get added to a spam blacklist.
| jjav wrote:
| To be clear, you don't need to run email servers yourself
| just to use email which is an open protocol.
|
| There are plenty of providers, even if you steer clear
| (as you should) of the big monopolies of gmail and
| microsoft.
|
| But to address the specific comment,
|
| > Try setting up a SMTP server for youself. You'll
| instantly get added to a spam blacklist.
|
| I do and no. I run my own email infrastructure, including
| delivery. Works just fine.
| blibble wrote:
| it's also the EU's[1] raison d'etre
|
| it was created, and exists entirely to centralise power
|
| [1]: the organisation itself, not the countries in it
| adastra22 wrote:
| > Google just followed Apple in this regard, who reacted to the
| DMA by coming out with this notarization of developers
|
| Apple has required developer "notarization" since the very
| first App Store in iOS 2.0, no?
| sunaookami wrote:
| When I wrote to the Commission regarding the Chrome Web Store
| monopoly and that Google can remove any addon that they don't
| like (which already happened) they told me that the Web Store
| isn't a gatekeeper (...of course it is, there is no other way
| to install Chrome Add-Ons and Chrome is designated as a
| gatekeeper):
|
| >Thank you for your email in which you raise concerns that some
| browser extensions are not allowed by Alphabet in its Chrome
| Web Store or are removed as unwelcomed extensions after they
| have previously been available. As you may know, the European
| Commission has designated Alphabet as a gatekeeper for a number
| of its core platform services on 5 September 2023 under the
| Digital Markets Act (DMA), including its browser Chrome. As a
| result, Alphabet must comply with a set of obligations as from
| 7 March 2024. The Commission has not designated its online
| intermediation service Chrome Web Store, since it does not meet
| the criteria under Article 3 DMA, to be designated as a
| gatekeeper. We would like to thank you for the information
| brought to our attention and assure you that the Commission
| will monitor compliance of gatekeepers with the applicable
| obligations as well as monitor any other core platform service
| that may meet the criteria to be designated as a gatekeeper
| under Article 3 of the DMA.
|
| So this doesn't surprise me at the slightest. DMA, DSA and GDPR
| only strengthen the big american companies because they have
| infinite money in complying with this bullshit while smaller
| plays get shafted. You will never be able to "just install an
| IPA" on an iPhone, mark my words.
| zoobab wrote:
| What the heck.
| jorams wrote:
| The term "gatekeeper" is strictly defined in the DMA and
| currently doesn't cover the Chrome Web Store. Perhaps in the
| future it will. The DMA and DSA don't strengthen the big
| American companies; it rather specifically targets them.
| Smaller players can do whatever they want.
| xg15 wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but seems to me the term "strictly necessary and
| proportionate" is doing a lot of work here.
|
| I could imagine lobbyists have been trying to do a classic
| motte-and-bailey there, painting the picture of some poor
| granny whose phone is instantly taken over by a malicious third
| party app, because without Google's loving oversight, every
| dodgy candy crush clone would of course immediately get root
| and bootloader access.
|
| So they managed to get in a "common sense" exception, which
| they're now trying to use for things that are entirely not
| common sense.
|
| At least I would find it hard to argue that a measure is
| "strictly necessary" to ensure the "integrity of the hardware
| or operating system" if everything has been working without
| problems for decades without this measure.
| wg0 wrote:
| A single email can't be expected to shake Google but it has
| done it's job and from the response, it seems they have
| included that into their discourse and it can't be ruled out
| that this concern comes up in not so distant future allowing
| free side loading of apps.
| alerighi wrote:
| Of course they want them: if not one could install a modified
| Signal client from F-Droid and bypass the mass surveillance
| they want to introduce with Chat Control.
|
| I'm considering that the UK did not take a bad decision of
| leaving the EU. The EU is demonstrating itself as a more and
| more corrupt institution that is not democratic (in the sense
| of doing what the people want it to do) at all.
|
| They are also shooting themself in the foot: the USA impose to
| us tariffs, we make laws from which benefit 2 big American
| companies, instead of pushing for developing alternatives to
| these companies.
| codethief wrote:
| > The EU is demonstrating itself as a more and more corrupt
| institution that is not democratic (in the sense of doing
| what the people want it to do) at all.
|
| While I agree that democracy could be strengthened at the EU
| level, representative democracy for better or for worse
| doesn't imply the representatives' decisions have to match
| the public's opinion at all times.
|
| > I'm considering that the UK did not take a bad decision of
| leaving the EU.
|
| That's ironic, given that the UK has always seemed way ahead
| of the EU when it comes to mass surveillance.[0]
|
| [0]: See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-government-
| knows-ho... for a recent example.
| djha-skin wrote:
| > ongoing dialogue with gatekeepers
|
| "Gatekeepers"? "Ongoing dialogue"? Tell me more!
| marcprux wrote:
| Post author here. I've also been in various DMA enforcement
| workshops and consulted with EU regulators on the topic of app
| distribution. The "strictly necessary and proportionate
| measures to ... not endanger the integrity of the hardware or
| operating system" defense comes up time and time again, and is
| clearly a primary talking point for those lobbying against
| effective enforcement.
|
| From a developer's perspective, this stipulation is obviously
| intended to ensure that the existing on-device protections
| (sandboxing, entitlement enforcement, signature checks, etc)
| are not permitted to be circumvented by third-party app stores.
| But the anti-DMA brigades have twisted their interpretation to
| imply that that gatekeepers are permitted to ... keep on
| gatekeeping.
|
| Apple still requires that all software be funneled through its
| app review (they call it "notarization", but it is the exact
| same thing as review: developer fees and T's&C's, arbitrary
| review delays, blocking apps based on policy, etc.) before it
| is signed, encrypted, and re-distributed to third party
| marketplaces like AltStore. And now Google is going to
| introduce its own new gatekeeping for all software on Android-
| certified devices, which covers 95%+ of all Android devices
| outside of China.
|
| The lack of alarm has been, for me, quite alarming. Every piece
| of software installed on billions of mobile devices around the
| world is going to be gate-kept by two US companies
| headquartered 10 miles away from each other and with
| increasingly authoritarian-friendly leadership.
|
| If you have an Android device, install F-Droid today and make
| it be known that you won't give up your right to free software
| without a fight.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Telling users that your platform will allow them to run any
| software they like so you can quickly gain market share, only
| to break your word after driving competing platforms out of
| the market is fraud.
|
| I'm pretty sure fraudulent marketing is still illegal.
| azalemeth wrote:
| If you aren't already aware of it, here is Google's official
| feedback form on this proposal:
|
| https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfN3UQeNspQsZCO2ITk...
| _def wrote:
| Seems like it's time for more linux on phones and less android
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The days of two phones are here. Use the more "secure" no
| nonsense low spec device (e.g. the cheapest iPhone) for
| banking/govt stuff and a main phone (e.g. grapheneOS or
| lineageOS) for daily driver. Definitely inconvenient but maybe a
| blessing in disguise considering the malware/phishing risks.
| aniviacat wrote:
| Doesn't this issue get solved by reproducible builds?
|
| Using reproducible builds allows developers to publish apps on
| F-Droid using their own signing keys [1]. Those signing keys can
| then be verified by Google.
|
| In 2023 already, 2 out of 3 new apps used this approach [2].
|
| With this in mind, F-Droid should be able to continue functioning
| after this change by mandating reproducible builds.
|
| [1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
|
| [2] https://f-droid.org/2023/09/03/reproducible-builds-
| signing-k...
| foepys wrote:
| Google will require you to authenticate with your real name
| and/or government ID which is something a lot of FLOSS
| developers don't want to do.
| kotaKat wrote:
| All of this because some asshole wanted to prey on kids' credit
| cards for an extra couple of cents per V-Buck.
|
| Thanks, Timmy Tencent.
| holri wrote:
| Maybe a sufficient number off hackers are offended enough now and
| contribute to really free platforms, like PostmarketOS or Mobian.
| There has been great work there in the last years. I think we are
| not very far away from a really usable free phone, we need device
| drivers and android emulation / f-droid as long as native apps
| did not catch up.
| harry8 wrote:
| Anyone else thinking this looks like precursor to banning Signal
| and similar?
|
| 1) Put google in control of what you can install.
|
| 2) Get google to block it.
|
| Noting that making it harder to install does most of the job as
| you need you contacts to use signal before you can.
| jhasse wrote:
| If they wanted to block Signal why wouldn't they start with the
| Play Store version which 99% of users use?
| focusedone wrote:
| Maybe not Signal in the immediate future, but for sure NewPipe,
| offline MP3 players and many ad blockers.
| tigrezno wrote:
| Syncthing-fork is only distributed by f-droid and direct download
| from github.
|
| F-droid is essential for many apps.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| F-Droid is great. It's a stark and sad outlook that the only path
| forward suggested by F-droid is to contact your representative.
| Effectively, this means there's nothing _we_ can do. Expecting
| our representatives to go to war with Google on this somehow
| doesn 't seem too plausible. I think it's more likely there will
| always be a way to sideload apps, or if not, maybe the degoogled
| OS alternatives will find their moment to shine.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| can EU save all of us????
|
| I think US gov wouldn't a care about this, do we really cant do
| anything about this??
| 9847598576 wrote:
| I wouldn't put my hope in a totalitarian regime.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I want to take something from this article which deeply
| fascinated me.
|
| The Right to Run
|
| If you own a computer, you should have the right to run whatever
| programs you want on it.
|
| I always thought that this was something natural yet Google is
| doing the developer registration and spotify is dmca'ing/suing?
| revanced team just for skipping some lines of code.
|
| it is my computer and if I want to run a open source software
| from f-droid, I should be able to without one of the largest
| companies in the world meddling in the way.
|
| If I want to run spotify in revanced, the developers shouldn't be
| sued for just skipping some lines of code. Theoretically it
| breaches on my rights to run software.
|
| Its my computer,my phone, my devices and I want to run whatever I
| want with it. I paid for it completely and I want to use it
| completely.
|
| Yet more and more, its becoming as if your device is becoming
| something similar to license, like they are making us think that
| we haven't bought a phone, we have licensed it and there is a big
| difference.
|
| They might want to slowly extract into even more of our rights to
| somehow sell a phone as a subscription even after buying it and
| what not, god.
|
| Imagine google packages up a developer service where for 5 bucks
| we could side load the apps, that WE ONCE COULD DIRECTLY.
|
| This isn't far off. But we have made almost our hardware like a
| service and that saddens me/violates my rights and I want to
| fight against them. Fuck big corpos. Fuck google.
|
| Its my damn computer and none of your damn business saying what I
| have to do with my own computer. I paid for it completely and I
| am gonna use it completely.
| IX-103 wrote:
| You still have the right to run whatever you want. You just
| have to use adb to install it, instead of letting it happen
| automatically.
|
| It sucks, but it's not the end of everything...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| That is a very very weird spot that I would be limited to.
|
| I can have my phone right now which has f-droid and download
| apps directly without requiring any other device anywhere as
| long as I have internet access to download the apk or I have
| the apk
|
| With adb, I would need to have another specific device with
| me which can get real uncomfortable/ be a real breaker for a
| lot of times.
|
| On top of my mind, I see myself being in the metro
| downloading games on f-droid to see the state of open source
| games, I couldn't imagine myself having a laptop in that
| time, and neither did I have a laptop. I just had a pc back
| then.
|
| Also a huge % of people who are using f-droid right now would
| just not do things like adb etc. which are a huge breaker I
| suppose and in the end it is a huge net negative for the
| community/ecosystem/still goes against the right to run as I
| had mentioned.
|
| But I also didn't know that adb was still enabled, I had
| actually thought that you genuinely couldn't run any app
| except google's developer registration AT ALL.
|
| but this is also a slippery slope and what prevents them from
| blocking that too. unless we fight against this, it sets a
| really really bad precedent for them to follow/essentially
| dictate my hardware in the future.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'd say the difficulty now is how online services are
| integrated as part of being able to function in many tasks
| we're now asking phones (or mobile computers) to do. If you're
| only doing local stuff then you can probably get by, but so
| much of the world prioritizes online and having secure payments
| if your phone doesn't respond correctly to those services then
| there's a risk of exclusion or a time/money cost to use them in
| a less convenient way.
| panny wrote:
| >I always thought that this was something natural yet Google is
| doing the developer registration and spotify is dmca'ing/suing?
| revanced team just for skipping some lines of code.
|
| And how does Google enforce this? With the very same copyright
| laws they ignore to train their AI.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| don't you know that its official that laws only apply to us
| small guys and not the big guys, this has been a open secret
| for so long.(maybe? satirical) /s
|
| They are just gonna be given a fine and does crime just
| suddenly become legal of sorts as it maybe bucket change for
| these companies.
| bartekpacia wrote:
| The War on General Computation continues, and we're losing.
| redleader55 wrote:
| I see this degradation of the developer and customer experience
| on mobile as an opportunity for better PWA/web application
| development. Many things done as an app today could be a PWA,
| including banking apps. WASM ensures the performance and the
| browsers have most of the capabilities to do this. I'm sure both
| Google and Apple will change course when they discover no one
| does apps anymore.
| aidog wrote:
| It's sad, that android is the only system that can be used to
| code on the device thanks to termux and now google wants to end
| this.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| Can someone explain the issue with developer registration and how
| it results the terrible outcomes described in the article. A lot
| of things have changed for the worse since the beginning of the
| century but even back in the good old days developers were not
| anonymous. Every free software I have seen has the name of the
| developer alongside the copyright. Often it lists multiple
| contributors as each copyright has to be retained according to
| the license. I understand sending your ID to Google is more
| invasive but the anonymity aspect of it is moot. Is Google going
| to charge developers for this service and hence hinder free
| software development? Is the issue that younger devs will be
| unable to complete the verification? And why can't F-Droid just
| distribute the binary signed by the developer who has confirmed
| their identity? Other than that, all concerns expressed in the
| article are quickly becoming major issues. The web is still open
| for now but many banks and other institutions have broken
| websites, forcing you to use their apps or become "unbanked".
| Once you download their apps you find out they run only on
| "certified" OS, forcing you to have Apple or Google owned and
| controlled software on the hardware you paid for.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| The issue with this is that taking many small steps towards an
| edge of a cliff without any reconsideration of the direction
| results in falling from it.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| Can anyone using GrapheneOS report if Firebase notifications come
| in consistently and reliably via sandboxed Play Services?
|
| I'm in the market for a new phone, and I'm going to buy a Pixel
| 9a this week for GrapheneOS if I can reliably get notifications
| on it. (I already have an A05 for banking apps)
| codedokode wrote:
| I managed to get around with apps only from F-Droid. No ads, no
| popups, no notifications, work without Internet access, better
| than Google Play apps in every aspect. The only thing left is to
| make a ROM without preinstalled garbage apps from the vendor.
| cyberclimb wrote:
| > The only thing left is to make a ROM without preinstalled
| garbage apps from the vendor.
|
| Would e-os fit your use case? https://e.foundation/e-os/
| codedokode wrote:
| Maybe.
| lapcat wrote:
| The "vote with your feet" argument was always specious in a
| duopoly. If consumer rights depend on the whims of giant
| corporations like Google and Apple, then consumers never had
| rights. "Just switch to Android if you don't like iOS lockdown"
| is now becoming a joke.
|
| Consumers desperately need specific legal rights to do what we
| want with the electronic devices that we've purchased, rights
| that cannot be overridden by the decisions of any vendor.
|
| Apologists have always said, "Apple has a right to do what it
| wants with its platform." Well guess what, by that principle, so
| does Google. Don't worry, though, because you have a "choice"
| between two collaborating duopolists.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| what about an android fork? just take images of android for
| given phones and remove the app store requirements? I wonder
| how will they do it? on kernel level?
|
| Of course they can block root access I guess...
| tmarsden wrote:
| I'm not an expert here so please take what I say with a grain
| of salt.
|
| It's my understanding that what's included in open source
| Android (AOSP) is FAR from a complete product and there is
| quite a bit of Google closed source/proprietary software that
| goes into the mix before it's shipped as Android (think
| Google Services.)
|
| So, while you could fork AOSP and try to use that as a basis
| for and alternative mobile OS, it would require quite a bit
| of work on top of the AOSP code. This is what's done by
| custom ROMs like GrapheneOS (ironically Pixel devices only)
| or LineageOS for example.
| jhasse wrote:
| So it wouldn't require a lot of work because LineageOS has
| already done the work and is open-source.
| pinusc wrote:
| Although it wouldn't require a lot of work to allow side-
| loading apps on LineageOS and similar, LOS users would
| still be profoundly impacted by the death of the FOSS
| ecosystem.
|
| LOS/AOSP/whatever users are a VANISHINGLY small minority
| of users, so "an app that only works on them" is an app
| that only works for a tiny minority of people. This would
| disincentivize developing FOSS apps altogether. A lot of
| projects will likely eventually die, and a lot that could
| have started will not.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Without having in-depth knowledge of what would be required
| as far as baseband drivers, the corresponding network
| requirements, etc. I think a mobile Linux distro is a better
| bet. It's been done by Fairphone, PinePhone, etc. and there's
| no reason _why_ it can't work -- the demand just hasn't been
| great enough.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Those are called custom ROM's and they are unaffected by this
| new restriction because it's a Google service which custom
| ROM's don't ship with. Same for older versions of HarmonyOS
| that run AOSP. Bigger issue there is that many major OEMs
| either block bootloader unlocking or make it extremely
| difficult. Samsung's OneUI 8 update for example turns off
| bootloader unlocking for all devices. There have been reports
| of people getting around that though. But still restricted to
| Exynos devices.
|
| Other companies like Motorola require you to phone home to
| unlock the bootloader and we saw how well that worked out for
| LG where once they shut down that effectively preventing
| devices from running custom ROMs and having root access. The
| biggest hurdle is that the overwhelming majority of users
| don't sideload software. So they aren't concerned about this
| at all. So all Google has to do is hold against some power
| users and hope there isn't a mass exodus to LineageOS or
| GrapheneOS. Which is highly unlikely.
| airhangerf15 wrote:
| Most people install GApps even on top of custom ROMs like
| Lineage and Graphene. I use to use Lineage+microG, but a
| few years back I switched to pure Lineage with no microG
| and just F-droid. I have a tiny bit stuff applications from
| the Auora store (sideloads Play apks).
|
| The trouble is, I'm like a 5% of 1%. Most people don't run
| their own e-mail/calendar/contact servers. We're a tiny
| breed and there are very few Linux phone alternatives (e.g.
| PostmarketOS, PinePhone Pro .. Purism is a scam company
| that hasn't refunded hundreds of thousands of dollars and
| can go die in a fire; fucking scumbags!).
|
| The Ubuntu Edge failed to get funding back in the early
| 2010s and very few devices run Ubuntu Touch.
|
| The SoC/ARM model (no standard architecture, some
| DeviceTrees if companies fell like it, random pins soldered
| to random chips) makes it very difficult to get Linux
| adoption on mobile devices like what was possible on PCs.
|
| It's a mess. The US failed by not forcing Alphabet to split
| Chrome or Android. The anti-trust suit results were a joke.
| maelito wrote:
| Meanwhile, the Web is still there, good enough for most use
| cases.
|
| Last week I discovered the Geolocation API's coordinates.speed
| param.
|
| Tested it with a few bike rides, it just works to display the
| current speed.
|
| How many apps are there on stores to display the device's speed ?
|
| How many people in 2025 will search for a Web app (hidden in
| bullshit articles) instead of downloading apps full of trackers
| on the Play Store ?
| user3939382 wrote:
| I have a way to get app distribution totally out of the hands of
| the app stores AND the browser but with any native OS UI you want
| ON any OS you want to any user within the TOS. Will share soon.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > every app is free and open source, the code can be audited by
| anyone, the build process and logs are public, and reproducible
| builds ensure that what is published matches the source code
| exactly. This transparency and accountability..
|
| That might be transparent, but where is the "accountability"?
| There's no identification of who is involved, how are they held
| to account?
| t1234s wrote:
| Easy sideloading using ADB is one of the things that keeps me
| from using an iPhone.
| b0dhimind wrote:
| Yeah I think ADB based solutions will be the way to bypass
| Google's Play store app developer registration and app ID
| registration crap that will kill F-Droid. Even now I grab a
| bunch of APKs and then have a script that wirelessly updates my
| devices... F-Droid ADB mode!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I think we have reached the point when AppStore / Google Play
| must be spun off from Apple / Google and made to work as a
| separate companies, and have access to Android / iOS platforms on
| equal terms with other vendors.
|
| We have a great example of such approach on desktop: while some
| people decry Steam for being a monopoly, it is totally different.
| Users aren't forced to use it, but choose to use it, and nobody
| prevents them from installing epic store or whatever. This will
| stop monopolistic anti-user abuse in their tracks and greatly
| improve conditions for everybody (except Google and Apple, but
| after all these years, they kinda deserve it).
| alerighi wrote:
| I don't thing Google will enforce this verification as an option
| that cannot be disabled. Not because they care about open-source,
| but because there are contexts where Android is used where the
| device doesn't have an internet connection to contact Google
| services to verify apps that are installed by whatever deployment
| method is used. I talk about all the industrial contexts where
| the devices (terminals that operators use) doesn't connect to the
| internet but to a local network that is only used to communicate
| internally with the server the application is using.
|
| By the way, if that is truly implemented and not bypassable using
| some methods such as some developer option, I think that I will
| return to running a custom ROM (hoping that they would not start
| restricting also the possibility to unlock the bootloader,
| fortunately that is up to the manufacturer and you would still
| find phones with unlockable bootloader, or just get an older
| phone).
| xmate420x wrote:
| It probably doesn't require a network connection for basic
| checking, as the signed key can be cryptographically checked
| even when offline as long as Google preloads their public keys
| to the phones
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is for "certified" Android devices, I'd imagine the
| industrial systems Android is flashed to aren't certified.
| lilOnion wrote:
| The thing that bothers me the most is government apps. How can a
| government require me to use a certain os or browser to use
| something.
|
| What are someways that we can be active about this and have
| support for these apps everywhere. I'm in Europe . For banking
| apps, sure ok, I can still go tho the bank but what if that
| becomes unavailable for me to do. Our countries can't build
| software based on evil companies like Google.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "When contrasted with the commercial app stores - of which the
| Google Play store is the most prominent - the differences are
| stark: they are hotbeds of spyware and scams, blatantly promoting
| apps that prey on their users through attempts to monetize their
| attention and mine their intimate information through any means
| necessary, including trickery and dark patterns."
|
| Silicon Valley's so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Alphabet's
| Google LLC, also "prey on users through attempts to monetize
| their attention and and mine their intimate information through
| any means necessary, including trickery and dark patterns."
|
| There is ample evidence of this behavior from a long litany of
| litigation where Google unsuccessfully attempted, or did not
| attempt at all, to rebut the evidence
|
| It seems that app developers producing "malware"^1 would be in
| direct competition with these Silicon Valley companies such as
| Google
|
| 1. What is "malware". It could be defined as software that works
| against the user's interests. If so defined, the definition could
| vary from user to user, depending on each user's particular
| interests. Certainly "malware" can vary in terms of possible
| criminality and severity. Not all "malware" is criminal in
| nature, nor does all "malware" pose the same level of threat
|
| "Do you want a weather app that doesn't transmit your every
| movement to a shadowy data broker? Or a scheduling assistant that
| doesn't siphon your intimate details into an advertisement
| network?"
|
| If using "Google Apps" that come pre-installed into Android, then
| one can be assured that Google is using them in its round-the-
| clock efforts to collect such information
|
| Google, too, is an "app developer"". For some users, Google's
| surveillance and data collection may be in competition with other
| "malware"^2
|
| 2. Using the definition of "malware" above, i.e., "software
| acting against the interests of the user" as F-Droid puts it, we
| are assuming there are users who interested in avoiding
| surveillance and data collection
|
| "While directly installing - or "sideloading"[^sideloading] -
| software can be construed as carrying some inherent risk, it is
| false to claim that centralized app stores are the only safe
| option for software distribution."
|
| When evaluating Google's strategy to allegedly "protect users
| from malware", one could ask, "Is there another way to do it?"
| The answer of course is yes
|
| "We do not believe that developer registration is motivated by
| security. We believe it is about consolidating power and
| tightening control over a formerly open ecosystem."
|
| By identifying app developers and forcing them to pay fees
| (consideration), these developers are entering into legally
| enforceable contracts with Google. Consider that the app
| developer, as stated above, may be in competition with Google for
| user attention and data collection. With few exceptions, the
| relative bargaining power of the parties, app developer versus
| Google, is overwhelmingly one-sided
|
| Like "YouTube creators", the app developer becomes essentially an
| unpaid independent contractor. Payment, if any, is not in return
| for the contractor's work (the software). And any payment comes
| from advertisers. Google is only an intermediary (middleman) that
| takes a cut
|
| From a user perspective, where the user is interested in avoiding
| targeted surveillance, data collection and advertising, is the
| threat of "malware" from non-Google app developers greater than
| the threat of malware from app developer Google. Avoiding
| Google's surveillance and data collection is considerably more
| difficult than avoiding surveillance and data collection by non-
| Google app developers^3
|
| By using open source apps from F-Droid a user can easily avoid
| surveillance and data collection by non-Google apps. Using an app
| from F-Droid such as NetGuard it is trivial to avoid unwanted
| remote connections, surveillance and data collection initiated by
| non-Google apps.
|
| Arguably app developer Google poses the greatest threat in terms
| of surveillance and data collection. This is in part because app
| developer Google also controls the operating system, the DNS
| settings, endpoints used by apps, major websites that most users
| visit, in some cases the user's hardware, and so on
| renshijian wrote:
| This isn't just a competition between app stores; it's a struggle
| for choice and dignity Your phone shouldn't be a cage carefully
| constructed by others, but an extension of your own will.
| Allowing apps like F-Droid to exist preserves an enclave of
| freedom, transparency, and trust in the digital world. It
| protects not a particular platform, but our fundamental dignity
| as digital citizens: my device, my choice
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Here is a sample email template you can use to send to your
| congressperson if that is helpful:
|
| Dear <Congressperson>,
|
| I am writing to you out of deep concern regarding Google's recent
| decision to require all Android developers worldwide to register
| directly with Google by providing personal government
| identification and other sensitive details as a condition for
| distributing their applications. While this policy may appear to
| be framed as a security measure, its consequences would be far-
| reaching and detrimental to digital freedom, competition, and
| privacy.
|
| For over a decade, the F-Droid project has demonstrated that
| safe, secure, and privacy-respecting app distribution is possible
| without central corporate gatekeeping. F-Droid and similar open-
| source platforms provide verifiable builds, transparent review
| processes, and applications free of hidden trackers or predatory
| monetization schemes. By contrast, Google Play has repeatedly
| hosted malicious apps, showing that centralization is not the
| same as security.
|
| The new registration decree effectively forces independent
| developers to surrender their personal identities to Google,
| erecting unnecessary barriers to participation in the software
| ecosystem. Worse, it would prevent alternative app stores like
| F-Droid from continuing to operate, depriving millions of users
| of trusted open-source applications and their ability to freely
| choose how they use their own devices.
|
| This is not only a matter of consumer choice, but of civil
| liberties. Forcing creators to register their identities with a
| single corporate gatekeeper in order to distribute software is
| analogous to requiring authors or artists to register with a
| private company in order to publish their works. It strikes at
| the heart of free expression and innovation.
|
| I respectfully urge you to take action to prevent this
| consolidation of control. Whether through competition oversight,
| digital rights protections, or support for open-source
| distribution, Congress has a role to play in ensuring that
| security justifications are not abused to restrict user freedom
| and entrench monopolistic power.
|
| Please help preserve a healthy, competitive ecosystem where
| developers can create freely and users can choose openly --
| without unnecessary corporate barriers.
|
| Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter, and for your
| continued service to our district and the nation.
|
| Respectfully,
|
| -<Your name>
| bb88 wrote:
| Trust has to exist somewhere, and these days everyone seems to be
| a target. If you have a bitcoin wallet on your phone, well you're
| a target, and have been for some time now. You might trust
| F-Droid today, but the reality is if leverage has been
| manufactured against them, there's no canary to tell you to
| uninstall F-Droid.
| ctkhn wrote:
| Stupid question but does this mess up using alternative OSes? I
| have a rooted 7" nexus from 2013 that I out lineage on and use
| for carplay when rentals don't have it installed and have been
| thinking about upgrading. Will this mess up doing that in the
| future, and should I just upgrade now? Also open to tablet recs
| to put carplay on, no familiarity with android tablets aside from
| the one I own
| FerretFred wrote:
| F-Droid apps have enabled me to more-or-less DeGoogle _my_ tablet
| and populate the device with some truly exceptional software,
| much of which just isn 't available on Google's Play Store. I've
| also made sure to pay/donate where possible: we can't afford to
| lose this resource!
| Animats wrote:
| Does someone make an F-Droid only phone?
| 9999gold wrote:
| Seems Google is trying to make the price the only benefit on
| Android.
|
| I wonder, excluding the freedom/device control and the price,
| what makes someone choose Android over iOS?
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