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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

From the /e/ Foundation website:

"The easy-installer beta version supports 15 devices"

This is the #1 problem, but it's not /e/ developers fault, as supporting devices is a time consuming and costly activity, and the risk of bricking an expensive device is just too high for normal users to want to try. Manufacturers are to blame. It's not a technical problem but rather a political one; manufacturers should be forced by law to unlock boot loaders and publish at least the bare minimum documentation enough for porting software to devices that became obsolete either by the introduction of a newer version, or after support has ceased. Until that happens, I'm afraid we'll see more and more projects supporting only a very small part of the available devices.

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I'd expect the installer to support more devices over time, since /e/ officially supports 269 devices:

https://support.e.foundation/devices

It's promising that more and more alternative Android distributions are offering installers to make them more accessible to average phone users. On the Linux phone side, even Ubuntu Touch has an installer that supports 81 devices: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/installer/

But, device manufacturers need to make bootloaders unlockable for these installers to work, and I agree that regulation is a practical way to make this happen. I can see Europe taking the lead on this with the goal of reducing e-waste by encouraging the reuse of old devices.

That looks like a copy of the list of supported devices of lineage. I highly doubt that the e foundation can test their installer on so many devices. They (or their own developer community) would need to get access to these devices at least. I guess the only way to broaden support for the installer a lot would be to work on upstreaming it to the lineage project so that the broader community does the work for them.

LineageOS currently supports 179 models, so it's not a copy of the LineageOS device list.[1][2] These projects support different selections of devices. There are devices that are supported by /e/ and not by LineageOS, and vice versa.

[1] https://www.lineageoslog.com/statistics

[2] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

The lists look a lot closer if you tick "Show discontinued devices" on the LineageOS site

Not one iPhone on the list.. Shame I have a perfectly good older iphone that just became a paperweight due to lack of support

The Mediatek platforms, at least in their early days, were relatively open. The flash utility, which ran off a ROM in the SoC, meant that you could backup and restore the complete state of the device, effectively making them unbrickable. They didn't even seem to have any form of secure boot. Plenty of documentation (only available as leaked, but they didn't care much about stopping that) available if you knew where to look. Huge numbers of devices made with the same platform/reference design, and a correspondingly large (but unfortunately Chinese only) community around them. They were probably the closest to being a "standard Android device" for a while; of course, in the Western world they were mainly shunned due to their low cost and performance, while the lack of (user-hostile) security features was used as a further means of discouraging others away from them.

Unfortunately, the current situation is quite different. MediaTek does not release kernel sources to the public, while Qualcomm does.

https://www.xda-developers.com/mediatek-source-code-release-...

Device manufacturers are obligated to release kernel sources to end users to comply with GPLv2, but many do not, and Qualcomm's source code releases make supporting Snapdragon-based devices a little bit easier for ROM developers.

It's a shame, since the Dimensity 9000 performs better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

MTK source code is(was?) available from the actual device manufacturer.

I can't say for Qualcomm in particular but from what I've seen in the past, open-source releases are not at all a good substitute for the actual documentation, which tends to be heavily guarded.

It suffers from the same problem as all other Android forks: no updates to binary blobs that actually make phone a phone.

I'm a strong believer in the right of people to use their devices as they see fit...but there's a real-world problem here.

You know who else loves unlocked bootloaders?

Cyberstalkers and domestic violence perpetrators, who use them to install hidden stalkerware.

I'm a strong believer in the right of people to cut their food as they see fit...but there's a real-world problem here.

You know who else loves knives?

Criminals and thugs, who use them to engage in larceny and assault.

And guess what? In some jurisdictions, including some US states, possession and sale of some types of knives is banned or controlled, because they are used by criminals and thugs for larceny and assault.

You're also not permitted to upload whatever firmware you like to your car's engine if you want to run it on the street.

Note also that I didn't argue that uploading alternate firmware to phones should be banned. I'm just pointing out that there are real-world safety reasons for restricting modifications, and if you want the freedom to do so you should at least try and engage on the downsides rather than just yelling FREEEDOM very loudly.

This could be easily solved if manufacturers simply allowed for using a unique password to unlock the bootloader. Want to install a custom ROM? Simple! Put the phone in recovery mode, insert the unique manufacturer-provided password, unlock the bootloader, flash the new ROM, go back to recovery, change the password to one of your choosing, lock the bootloader again, add the ROM's official private key to enable safe boot.

This is entirely possible, and yet nobody wants to make it accessible.

So if you forget your password, your expensive device is instantly and permanently bricked and becomes e-waste?

No, the password is only to lock-unlock the bootloader. If you forget it you won't be able to install a new ROM but you will still be capable of upading your OS or factory resetting it

Forgetting a password shouldn't cause permanent loss of functionality of hardware.

I'm not understanding your argument. You say that unlocking a bootloader is dangerous, so what's your solution? You can't have non-unlockable bootloaders because that would mean a loss of hardware functionality, which you just suggested you consider unacceptable. You can't have easily unlockable bootloaders because that would be dangerous. So now what?

I proposed a very reasonable solution that gives the user control AND responsibility of their own device. If you don't want the responibility (and the control) then stick with your manufacturer's locked bootloader and never touch it.

I don't know about you but I would really like if my work phone had a company-set bootloader lock just like my work laptop has a company-set BIOS lock in case someone steals it or gets lost. There are plenty of professional and personal reasons why my solution would make a lot of sense in my opinion.

> You say that unlocking a bootloader is dangerous

I didn't say that. In fact, I believe the opposite.

> You can't have easily unlockable bootloaders because that would be dangerous.

I do want easily unlockable bootloaders.

I confused you with the person I originally replied to.

Still, my solution still allows to have a passwordless bootloader if you choose to not set a password, so I really don't get what would be wrong with it.

Laws against custom engine firmware and knives are unjust themselves, so they shouldn't be used to justify other things.

I hate to have to make this argument, but here goes...

...where do you draw the line? An M240 machine gun? A Stinger missile? A PFOS factory? A Special Atomic Demolition Munition?

We regulate private possession of dangerous items all the time, and pretty much everybody draws the line somewhere despite vigorous dispute where that line should be drawn in specific cases.

What about pre-installed spyware tracking you? Where do you draw the line there?

Did you know that, for example, Roborock stock firmware sends your wi-fi password to Xiaomi? [1]

Does that make you feel secure? Where are the calls for regulation on this?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhyM-bhzFsI&t=586

You said you're concerned with "thugs" using knives to do bad things. That's where you seem to draw the line. I am afraid what you'll try to restrict when you see the reports about these people breathing air.

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