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goldenarmtoday at 10:00 AM8 repliesview on HN

Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

Look at the AdBlocker crackdown of Google Chrome. Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it, because it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser that Google spends >$1B/year to develop.

Same story for /e/ and GrapheneOS, the day Google pulls the plug on source code releases, god knows how long they will last. We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.


Replies

well_ackshuallytoday at 10:46 AM

>Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

There are zero OSes that are 1/ open source 2/ appropriate for phones 3/ with good hardware support. There's absolutely nothing. Running Ubuntu Touch isn't a viable option. Neither is postmarket, librem, tizen, they're all terrible. Security wise, for something as critically important in our lives as a smartphone, I am also not trusting any new pet project that won't be stable for 10 years.

Sure, you might be a poweruser that doesn't care about your phone burning its battery in your pocket after 1 hour because you know how to SSH on it from your watch and put it in sleep, but that's not a viable option. Leaving Android is suicide. A large part of its critical underpinnings are already into the kernel anyways, just disabled. (although a distro running binder could be a fun project). APIs are reverse engineerable generally speaking, except for the server part of play services. But then, if your issue is "my bank won't let me access their app without play services attesting me", I have great news, you won't even have an app for it on your new OS anyways, so it will not work by default. There's already not enough people working on GrapheneOS _or_ on mainstream linux OSes, what makes you think the sitation won't be ten times worse for your custom made mobile OS ?

>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.

Android is one, and that can never be taken away. Google pulls the plug ? cool, you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community. Hell, for all the shit that Google is doing, they're still constrained by having to work with other vendors: the system privileged notification receiver is swappable at build time, the recent app signing/verification system also is, because Samsung wouldn't let them control it all.

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coldteatoday at 11:39 AM

>Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

To what?

Vinnltoday at 10:31 AM

> Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

I appreciate the vibes where this is coming from, but does it really? I think that assumes that everyone that works on this would work on a true open source OS otherwise, and that if they did, that would result in us breaking free from Android where we otherwise wouldn't. I'm not confident about either of those assumptions.

Meanwhile I'll keep complaining to orgs that don't allow me to work through their website, and tell them that their app won't work on my phone.

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r-wtoday at 10:23 AM

> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it

Source?

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realusernametoday at 11:08 AM

The day AOSP sources aren't relased, Google will just lose control over Android and it will be managed by a Chinese consortium instead.

8 of the 10 top smartphone manufacturers are Chinese, there's no going back from that.

ameliustoday at 10:02 AM

You don't have to use Chrome or Chromium.

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charcircuittoday at 10:18 AM

Chrome did not crack down on adblockers in Chrome. In fact the chromium team worked together with adblockers on mv3.

>it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser

While Chromium is complex, it is modularized which does make it possible for teams to maintain features.

preisschildtoday at 10:11 AM

> We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.

But currently AOSP is very much open. That's also what the GrapheneOS devs say and why they want to continue using Android. Until it becomes clear that they will completely stop releasing the source code under a free software license i dont see why one should not use Android.

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