Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
However, the crusade against the word and concept of "sideloading" is really weird. Yeah, installing from the repo is normal, and all the windows-land "download an .exe/.msi to invoke an installer" ways that then may or may not update the app are unusual and apart from an ordered process of system management.
The proper alternative to Google Play is F-Droid, not downloading/baking .apks.
Note how the term 'side loading' is already weighted against you doing it, it is supposed to make you feel you're doing something that is borderline illegal even if it is still possible and that you are bypassing safeguards that would stop you from doing this stupid thing if you only took the proper route.
Because that's what it is, despite the extremely successful campaign to paint people who want admin access on their mobile computers to be painted in the same light as pirates.
On my computer, I can choose to containerize applications I run with something like docker, flatpak or snaps; run them in a VM, under a separate user, in a chroot... or, not! I can get them from the Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/... archive or... not! Or I might compile it from source and run it directly or... not!
Based on source of the app I decide how much I trust it and thus decide on the encapsulation strategy for it (sometimes, none).
Yes, I understand having full control of your system has some minor downsides (you can mess things up more easily), but you can usually do that anyway (just fill up your phone storage with photos and see how your phone behaves).
Especially after people paying so much money for the devices, it's ludicrous that they are not allowed to make their own decisions and install what they want. Ownership, user rights, and privacy have been kicked in the face. If you can not install whatever software that you want, then people should be signing only rental agreements.
It is also more the reason to push Linux smartphones[1]. Android is not doing anything special, that people could not get or create for Linux phones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...
Google has dramatically altered that deal, and now shows much longer, less-likely-to-be-skippable ads, with much higher frequency.
Calling it "a prety reasonable subscription" is only reasonable if we forget that this wasn't the deal originally offered
Furthermore, this is a massive corporation closing up a project that got it's start by selling itself to geeks as Open.
It is Google's OS, and it is Google's app, but closing up the Open project to advantage their own app sure as hell feels like poor form
It also allows you to patch other apps to make them work the way you want.
(editted to add repository and package manager points)
The amount of legalism that's been brought in by both sides, Apple/Google and the regulators, layered in lies (we need to approve the software, register the developers, to protect the user from software), is divorced from the reality of the hardware-software relationship. This has led us down a path where everyone is debating the topics that Google, Apple, and revolving door regulators choose rather than the underlying reality.
There is a simple solution to all of this: Google and Apple should no longer be allowed to operate any sort of "App Store" or software distribution channel.
The Atari 2600 was an immensely popular home computer for a decade(ish), but it didn't exactly spark the personal computer revolution. Why? Because it used the iphone software distribution model. You could only buy licensed software (in the form of cartridges) even though technically it was of course a programmable computer. So it was as open as an iphone.
All the actual progress happened on Apple ][, C64, the Radio Shack computers and later the IBM clones. Because, obviously, anyone could write and sell any software they wanted so the market growth went exponential.
A lesson to society, there.
This is because the EU is not a citizens advocacy platform. They're an economic platform mainly built to smooth the cost of doing business in Europe for multinationals. They don't have our best interests at heart. They care more about a big neoliberal common market.
The European project started well but mid 90s it got hijacked by hard neoliberal interests, especially the commission.
“Simple” solutions can produce unintended outcomes.
You want to take a device that is targeted for “everyone” and not just tech savvy people and provide no control or standard to what can be loaded on it? The very idea of it is horrifying to me.
You have apparently never sat down on an elderly persons PC in the early ‘00s and tried to sort out all manner of shopping toolbars, coupon widgets, and crapware that has caused their pc to slow to a crawl. It’s literally bad enough with the poor performing apps in app stores but it could be so much worse without it
No thanks.
This is a fine distinction. And it will happen and should happen because there are always gaps. Without a way to fill them, you're left with a subpar experience.
And while many people are fine with it on their iPhones, I can't really imagine not having ReVanced apps, Molly, or a dozen other little fixes.
Who gets to decide what the main channel is?
For a lot of people here, F-Droid is their main way of installing programs on phones.
If you don't see the patterns of absolutely pathetic authoritianism, which most people cheered on during covid policies times, you're not going be very effective at opposing this crap.
I wish Android supported more profiles (for even better compartmentalization, like it would be nice to have a similar isolated profile for banking and such). But as-is Work Profile was a pretty great discovery on Android (for me) a year or so ago and a feature I think more people should play with.
There's an app called Shelter that builds off the Work profile plumbing to add support for even more profiles. I forget why I switched to using Work profile directly... I think I just wanted to see how the built-in stuff worked. There's other stuff about the Work Profile that I don't remember Shelter providing (with Work Profile you end up with copies of the app with briefcase icon to tell them apart and separate intent handlers, I remember liking that but I don't remember if Shelter supported that sort of thing)
The only downside is that free Apple accounts must renew their certificate in AltStore (while connected to their computer's home network) once a week, or else it'll all be deactivated and you'll have to reinstall AltStore and YTLitePlus from scratch. But you can pay $99 for a year-long developer account, set a recurring reminder to renew, or worst case YTLitePlus makes it easy to export your settings so you can quickly restore it after reinstalling.
Yes, it blocks ads but it also skips sponsored segments and other chaff with a SponsorBlock integration. Then it fixes all the little UI annoyances across apps, for example letting you filter out low-view videos and live streams from your TikTok feed.
It turns mass market apps into something that an HN user would make for themselves.
And Maemo/MeeGo were basically normal Linux distributions. Right now, SailfishOS is a worthy successor. It runs on a fairly decent number of devices and is quite ready for daily usage. Following the Nokia tradition, offline maps are outstanding. There's also a proprietary Android emulation layer that works really well for most applications, in case that is needed.
SailfishOS and Jolla could challenge the duopoly if a critical mass of developers migrated to the system. Right now, there's a fairly small technical userbase that has nonetheless produced lots of great indie applications. I can't believe I had Linux in my pocket with the N770 in late 2005 and, right now, mainstream options are so locked down.
Nokia was dead man walking since the first iPhone dropped and Nokia employees of that time will tell you the same as they also wrote here before.
Even before Microsoft took over, Nokia's corporate structure, culture and management was too slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome to modern SW development, to be able to turn the giant ship around and catch up with what Apple and Google have already launched, let alone overtake them. It was game over for them already, Microsoft or no Microsoft.
Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and walled gardens are not illegal unless you do what the EU did and change the law.
What is going to bite Google on the ass here is selling users an "open" platform and then using anticompetitive tactics to yank those supposed freedoms away.
Look at Microsoft's Xbox platform. It was created, advertised and sold to the public as a walled garden with no legal repercussions at all, because walled gardens are not illegal.
On the other hand, Microsoft created Windows as an open platform and sold it to the public as such. When Microsoft tried to use anticompetitive tactics to maintain control of the platform they sold as "open", they were found guilty of antitrust in jurisdictions around the world.
Google made the choice to sell Android as open. "Sideloading" apps was the only way to install apps at all for the first couple of years. The decision to sell Android as "open" only to yank those freedoms away will have legal consequences again here.
I'm actually pro-app store as long as it's helping apps to be malware-free. But I'm 100% against shutting out side-loading. Side-loading was never common let alone a common vector for malware, at least not that I've ever heard. But what it is, apparently (or we would not see these Google shenanigans), is a long-term threat to Google's own app store.
Some idiot executive decided this.
Was the iPhone the first device to come with that concept?
Can you not do this on Samsung phones? I was considering buying a used s22 ultra as an iPhone user to explore more freedom and pirate apps, etc. Is andoid really this locked down now? I have heard that quite a bit, but can't you sideload or install any apps you want on Android? Why do you need to unlock the bootloader?
Sideloading doesn't require rooting the device.
And yeah majority of phones simply won't let you do that anymore
Disagree entirely. Google Play refused to download some app on my phone because it thought the specs weren't good enough for whatever reason even though it worked fine on my previous weaker phone.
I found the APK, I downloaded it, and just installed it. Why would I want to first download some other middle-man to deal with any of this shit? Ideally there would be no "store" at all on my phone.
Editing to add this from the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082595 (F-Droid site certificate expired)
Wait, let me take out my word 97 CDs to read the "sideloading instructions" booklet. Oh wait, what was considered a normal install Same on mobile phone in symbian era. It's not "sideloading", it's a "normal install".
oh, those things you literally load from the side? :P
/s
Dont get me wrong, im not accusing Pixels of being "quality". In my experience, they're not quite as good as a free phone from a MetroPCS store.
As for calling me a troll, fuck right off, asshole.
Now? I feel like I'm sitting on gold by keeping these cheap dumb devices around.
Depending on how old they are, phones have diminishing network compatibility, and cheap, dumb devices are in production still, and will be for the indefinite future. So it's not like they are a resource that the world has run out of.
Old laptops age better, but it's not like anyone restricts software on laptops, or will ever be able.
You can still buy equivalent dumb phones, but they aren't any more open than the rest of the rabble.
Laptops are a different story, although I believe part of that battle was already lost when the Intel SSM and AMD equivalent came around. We'll see how things go when banks start to require you to enable (In)Secure Boot just to be able to log in through a browser on a PC.
If people stop the bullshit it's not that hard to effectively oppose
Later we get the wet dream of surveillance with V passports. Social credit style. If you watched the ads companies were trying, you would've seen it. But of course you're going to call me a conspiracy theorists just like it happened back then.
Locking down your devices, putting age restrictions and therefore digital id and no privacy to access the internet, it's all pretty convenient.
But hey, Google is doing this all for your own good, or they aren't and the good EU will stop them because there's no way they'd like control.
If you're going to use unrelated discussions to launder your conspiracy theory, at least provide evidence. Otherwise we get to dismiss you without trial which is faster but less fun.
I don't give a flying fuck if you dismiss me. You already did in 2020, 2021 and so on and I'm still here, didn't you?
Now I get to see you move uncomfortably while still ready to lick the next boot.
Enjoy it.
The modern mobile ecosystem is selling games consoles when the nerds want mobile Unix workstations.
For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.
I do most of my light/routine server management via SSH from my phone, plus keeping a version control checkout of my documents that I do actually work on in vim (yes, the limited keyboard is annoying but it's fine for light work). At a previous job, the former extended quite far; I could get paged in the middle of the night, connect to the VPN, SSH into the server, triage, and frequently diagnose and even fix the problem without having to actually get out of bed.
They're more powerful than plenty of computers from not too long ago
1. Presents a mobile hotspot, and
2. Supports CardDAV so I can actually sync my contacts
3. Records calls
Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.
I've been more neutral about this in the past, but the current and future integration of LLMs (and other ML models) into the base operating system will mean these mobile phones do less of what the user wants and more of what the user does not want.
Secondly, Apple is in the process of becoming an adtech company and will not provide an alternative to Google.
Thirdly, Google may be forced to divest Android and the mobile business. If so, the buyer is likely to be as bad, or worse, because they'll have to figure out how to pay for the whole thing.
I guess you can get a mobile hotspot and a dumb phone separately. Looks like 5G Wifi 6 APs are available for ~$100.
I never left. Well, my flip phones have had cameras in them, but. On the other hand, "virtual credit card"? What?? And what good is proper "mobile storage and compute" if I don't at least have a laptop-sized screen and a proper physical input device?
This legal reality is showing itself more and more in the practicalities of actual using "smartphones". The only real solution is what op said, make the modem completely separate from the computing device.
So how about we just stop making "mobile phones" and just sell what they are: pocket computers. And that name immediately tells legislators what's appropriate hardware control, namely: none. If you buy a pocket computer, you can now do with that computer whatever you want, and the company that makes the hardware has no say over that, and the company that makes the OS has no legal basis for locking you out of anything. And if those are the same company, then the EU can finally go "how about no, you get to break up or you will never sell anything in our market again".
I called my mom yesterday (to her landline), and then I sent a text message to my friend from a parking lot to let them know I'd be there soon.
And it's all LTE, your pocket computer needs a network whether you use SMS or some IP messenger. Therefore carriers get involved, and they make horrifying demands of users and manufacturers.
But yeah, i don't want a phone, i want a pocket computer with VoLTE
Apple stopped selling all iPod hardware, including iPod touch, for a reason.
You won't have modern mobile banking or cellular communications in a device without binary blobs or "trusted" compute modules you cannot inspect.
It's time for an antitrust breakup of Google (and Apple).
These two companies control mobile computing like a dictatorship. This is a sector where most people do all of their computing. This isn't gaming or a plaything - it's most people's lives and trillions of dollars of business activity. All gatekept by two companies.
Here's what needs to happen:
1. We need government mandated web installs of native apps without scare walls ("this app is dangerous and may delete your files") and enabled by default without labyrinthine settings to enable.
2. We need the ability to do payments and user signups without Google or Apple's platform pieces. We should not be forced to lock ourselves into their ecosystems.
3. Google search and Chrome cannot be the defaults on mobile platforms. We need the EU-mandated browser / search picker.
4. First party applications should not be treated as first class while third parties are left to dry. Google and Apple should not be allowed to install their platform components by default - a user must seek them out.
5. No more green text / blue text bubbles. All messaging must be multi-platform and equivalent with no favoritism.
6. Google and Apple wallets should not be the defaults, but rather the user should have the ability to configure their bank, PayPal, Cash App, or whatever payment provider they choose.
All phones have these days is "the app ecosystem" which is designed and optimized just to rent you out to corporations. Exposing yourself to it is almost always a loss.
1. Termination of WIPO Copyright Treaty (prerequisite for #2)
2. Repeal of DMCA. (primarily because of Section 1201)
3. Enact and enforce, Right to ownership, Right to repair laws.
4. Enforce antitrust laws. / Break up monopolies.
I've given up hope of politically-appointed prosecutors ever doing a thorough and effective job of this. Sure there are some high-profile cases (AT&T, Standard Oil, Microsoft (almost), Google (maybe), etc) but the vast majority go unprosecuted.
There are really only two ways to fix the antitrust disaster:
1. Private right of action (like RICO) for the Sherman Act -- let nonprofits and individuals file the charges. This takes the implicit pardon power away from politically-appointed prosecutors.
2. Graduated corporate income tax, which creates a natural diseconomy of scale. The income tax code already contains a decades-old mechanism (search for "common control" in the IRC) to prevent evasion using shell-company shenanighans. It's very well tested, it works, and it has been working since the 1980s -- mainly to prevent US persons from evading the extra requirements for owning controlling interests in foreign corporations.
If you're really interested in it, I suggest subscriber to https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
I know you have “let’s reprogram old phones” in mind, but approximately nobody does this even when it’s an option. If you don’t like phones being locked down, then argue that on its own merits; e-waste is not a good argument.
Every shitty iPhone could still be a MP3 player, home control or something else. But no, its Garbage because your only way to install is by going online and hoping that your critical apps are still in a useful version in the app store.
Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.
Compare that to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone), which will be supported forever, since they run mainline Linux.
But that kinds of threats must be theoretically established and acknowledged - which I think is ultimately inevitable but could be delayed or hastened by human actions. The point is, you could be seen as throwing pointless tantrum about your toys until it happens.
Approximately nobody is going to be reprogramming their 8 year old iPhones to "prevent creating digital waste", especially when the CPU is unbearably slow and the batteries are well worn out. Say reprogramming is important for user freedom or whatever, but claiming it's going to make a meaningful difference in reducing e-waste is always going to be a spurious justification.
An iPhone doesn't have to be an iPhone forever, and end-users don't have to be the ones doing the conversion. All we need is a law that would stop phones from going to a landfill and instead actually get them recycled as general computing devices.
The market can figure out the rest. If manufacturers today are willing to deal with antique toolchains and expensive programmer gear to save a few cents on microcontrollers, imagine what they could do with cheap boards running Android or iOS.
And saying this in a forum literally named after the act of hacking and repurposing devices is quite bold.
I have old devices still laying around in the hope one day I could reuse them for something, anything useful, I simply can't get myself to throw away something which seemed magical a few years ago.
What happens when Apple stops putting new macOS versions out for the M1, which by all accounts is as far better computer than my old Sandy Bridge Thinkpad, but will become completely useless far earlier?
Full ownership of all our computers must be norm again. It's fine if tech companies want to charge extra to sell walled gardens and market it as extra security. But they must sell computers and software that the buyer actually owns.
A user would install the runtime, signed by a developer who shared their government ID with Google, and then use the runtime to launch whatever app they want. It's probably infeasible to launch an APK from another APK, so the runtime could be based on WASIX+WebView or something.
We could call it "General Computation". Google could start a cat and mouse game of banning developers who sign the app, but at least this "war on general computation" would be obvious and ironic.
It would be challenging for Google to argue that the app should be banned entirely, as it's basically a web browser with extra APIs, like TCP/UDP sockets.
Let's just assume this is about the amount of effort Mozilla puts in. So they'd need to collect ~500 million per year.
Where does that money come from? Presumably the answer can't be Google.
Or any sufficiently hard-boiled alternative from the inside. IMO things like custom ROMs lack sufficient vertical organization and that is why they're not so relevant (but at that point, you're basically constructing something much like a corporation once again, if not an entire society stemming out of it).
lol: HUAWEI will no longer allow bootloader unlocking (Update: Explanation from HUAWEI) - https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-bootloader-unlocking...
(It was surprisingly hard to find any news articles covering this. Most media just don't care that one of the biggest manufacturers in the world won't let users control their own phones. So much for holding the powerful to account, or protecting liberties.)
Not totally unlike the way Bell used to strictly regulate their own user endpoints in the 20th century.
Within that stage, I could be wrong, but I would expect a somewhat freer software ecosystem there, as it is an economy oriented around manufacturing, and it is useful to write many various applications around that end.
This trend started in China, spread to countries like mine, and (as recent history shows) the relatively free democracies have been more than happy to copy some pretty nasty ideas from autocracies like ours — we went through your current news cycle 10-15 years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if removing the last few vestiges of having control over your computing also came to you in another five to ten years.
Part of the story is that it only takes a /single/ major scandal RE sideloading to seriously injure a bank's reputation, even if the vast majority of sideloading use cases are legitimate.
I’m very much a credit card point churner and I have an HYSA. The same rates and offers are on the websites and the apps.
And how would a bank know if you’re using a website on a rooted phone?
People are complaining about the app stores when they are choosing banks which are app only - which I would never do - you should be complaining about your bank.
If there's something like a Play Store with OS-level integration preventing unsigned applications from installing and running, FINE, that's an arguably useful security feature for regular users who have no interest in writing their own apps or consuming software outside the Play Store.
This doesn't preclude allowing the user (with admin rights) adding signing keys of their choosing.
If I want to trust Lennart Poettering's or Jonathan Blow's binaries to install/run on my computer/phone, let me install their public keys, a one-time addition gated by admin rights.
If you're not enabling me to potentially put bits of my choosing on my computer, its software better be in ROMs getting physically swapped out for "updates".
This was the case long before Apple, and started at the carrier telco's. Apple was the one who wrestled the control of the app store from the telco's, who were even worse!
Myself and a buddy built cool fun a bartender app (recipes for alcohol drinks) for the Danger Hiptop. It was rejected by the telco (t-mobile) because they were afraid of lawsuits due to the 21+ nature of the app. We never really got a formal rejection notice, they just stopped responding to us. It was also one of those things where you had to build the app first, submit it (to Danger, who then presented it to the telco), take the risk on everything yourself, and then get silently rejected. What a mess.
In effect fewer people use computers now than used to. They're all online but not empowered the way we had hoped. It's all vice with none of the good parts.
It’s already cumbersome to run your banking app (and other „required“ apps) on a custom ROM with all the attestation going on. I assume these distributions will bleed users and see a reduction in new ones due to higher entry barriers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI
So basically market forces and profit optimization is at work here as always.
However, if we can still unlock the boot loader and install Lineage OS or something like that and have a way to pay for developers to release their apps on stores like f-droid we can use the hardware.
The biggest problem with having freedom to use our devices is that the model is broken for the developers who support them. You "can donate", but from the numbers I've seen it's like 1 in 1000 donate. No pay == developers can't invest their time to improve the software.
So if there is "really" a substantial number of enthusiasts that are ready to pay for the freedom they crave, then companies like Librem will have enough customers to create decent and usable products for this audience. Want digital freedom - prepare to support the people who provide it.
Yes, that might mean that we'll need to have 2 devices, 1 for "banking/government services" that is "certified" and one for our own usage. Shitty but we'll be forced to do that sooner on later. The efficiencies for the government to enforce the policies is so strong that they can't helps themselves. And corporations like to have more data to squeeze every cent from the customer.
So if there is a working business model for "freedom" we might have a partial freedom. If there isn't we'd be just a digital farm animals to be optimized for max profits and max compliance.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI
Wow, that's in Talks at Google. Listening to the Q&A is just so weird. The audience (I assume Google employees) are openly advocating for digital freedoms and the classic hacker ethos. Crazy how much the Overton window has shifted. I wonder where those people are now.
You could install a free os on the phone instead and own the whole thing.
Correct. They are paying for the physical device and the license to use the installed software.
My Samsung phone is not linked to my Google account and I don't have a Samsung account. I have no WhatsApp/Facebook/Meta account. I don't use Apple devices or have an Apple account.
Possibly the only apps on my phone that have an account linked with them are Telegram and AnkiDroid.
You didn’t buy a physical book, you bought the paper, but the words are owned and licensed by the publisher.
You will need their permission to read it under an approved light, to sell it again, and even it lend it.
Wrapping the bs in a thin veneer or “software” doesn’t magically make it okay.
You are overly restricting yourself.
Correct.
> You will need their permission to read it under an approved light, to sell it again, and even it lend it.
No. The physical media is transferable and the implied license carries with it. You just can’t make a copy and then retain it if you give the original copy away.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-356...
by strcat, Graphene OS founder https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679100
What the future holds is unknown however.
This is a complete and total ripoff. Everyone knows it.
Just pointing out that the deal with Google is implicit in the piece of metal you bought - and with some phones you have at least the choice of a free system. It’s more of a choice than I have with my iPhone.
Mobile phones are not, and have never been, general-purpose computers. If you think they're locked down now, you'd be completely astounded to learn what the industry was like pre-iPhone/pre-App Store.
I can still put metal in my microwave and set my home on fire, but I cannot sideload apps.
Apple, for their part, should have just buried the option to "sideload" deep in the settings. They could have put up a dialog, or maybe 5 dialogs in a row, each one scarier than the last, warning the user that if someone told them to do this, they are being scammed. They could have done it every time someone installs an app from outside the App Store. Make the user wait 10 seconds or a minute between each dialog. Put the option behind their passcode, or their Apple ID password. Void AppleCare if they do it, for all I care. They could have done any of this. Anyone actually concerned about their security would have avoided it anyway.
This is what they should have done. Now it looks like regulators are going force their hand. Why Google is doing this now, of all times, is beyond me. Have they read the news lately?
The regulation should be for phones, computers, and game consoles too.
I know this isn't an unpopular opinion... whatever. I gotta vent somewhere.
It feels so transparent that their concern isn't actually user safety here.
The solution is to integrate sideloading into the parental controls. There are already existing permissions in iOS to restrict the installation and deletion of apps, so adding a sideloading permission should be straightforward. (They can still leave it disabled by default and bury it a bit behind a few menus and dialogs...) If a family member is really so technologically inept they can't be trusted with their own phone, then you should already be making use of parental controls in some fashion. Set a pin for them which you know and they don't know. It's as simple as that.
Perhaps that's a bit harsh, but we should not be sacrificing these freedoms at all, let alone at a time when there are already existing solutions for protecting those who are vulnerable.
(The relative simplicity of this solution is yet another piece of evidence this issue is not really about the security of users.)
Play integrity doesn't protect anything, disallowing side loading has no security benefits. Thats just a lie, a convenient piece of propaganda to convince you to advocate against yourself.
There is no security on the play store. Can apps ask for way too many permissions? Yes. Are they open source? No. Are builds reproducible? No. Does Google check the code? No. Is it almost all adware and spyware? Why, yes!
Google does not give a flying fuck about the quality of the play store and anyone who disagrees is legitimately delusional. Have we looked at the play store? Seen what's recommended?
I mean, for fucks sake you can't download a goddamn calendar app without it asking for phone permissions and showing you popup ads.
Look - Google allows malware on the playstore because they have to. They make money off of ads sold on the playstore and advertisments in apps. Google has ZERO incentive to stamp malware. But they have every incentive to prop it up.
I don't need Grandma to download an unsigned binary from the internet to compromise her. Get fucking real dude. I call her, ask her to install anydesk, and remote control her device, all Google approved.
It's a far cry from native apps and it comes with its own issues. But in my case, the vast majority of apps I use regularly have a competent mobile web interface.
This is of course limited by what the OS will allow as we see with Apple's purposefully poor support for them and Google would likely follow suit. Maybe alternative browsers could offer what's missing.
Maybe there'll be more power behind a Linux distro for Android that puts browser apps and self installs first?
People have a natural desire for ownership in some form, I'm sure we'll find a way. But things do look bleak right now.
For those of us who know enough there is no need to enable it.
For those that are not as technological (like elders), a familiar/friend can enable it and no matter what they try, they can't "harm" the device without asking you first.
The only ones not getting any benefit are non technological people without technological contacts, but even in those cases I'm sure shops would gladly provide that support (like the usual "setup support)
Hell, I don't care if it's a generation or two behind smartphones. I don't understand why this doesn't exist when non-bleeding-edge hardware has become so mind-bogglingly cheap!
What am I missing?
It's a travesty that this behavior is allowed, of course, but as long as it is, I'd keep the cheapest possible regular smartphone around for this purpose alone. I'd try to think of it as an unwieldy fob-like device.
For another example, Mint Mobile now charges $3 per eSim to swap devices. So now you're paying for something that used to be free, and that is likely a preview of what we have to come.
If I move the sim, I have to go through similar bullshit as I would if I wanted to move an eSIM (attempts to upsell the plan, charge for the “service” of moving the sim, etc, etc.)
At this point, I don’t see any disadvantages for eSIM, since the backported the enshitification to physical sims.
Can't wait for Windows 12 to have a mandatory S-Mode and a Microsoft account tied to your PII, for your protection. No anonymous writer can publish the 21st Century equivalent of the Federalist Papers and our tyranny is safe.
Also the two are not in conflict. People are getting promoted for things that advance company goals. They are following rational self-interest of the company.
Spent a week with it uncharged in my drawer recently, that was great, should try that again.
This is just letting them win. And if you think the forced pushing for control over what we can do with our computers will simply leave Linux alone, I don’t know what to tell you.
Even if you do that, it won't work in many cases because even in the government agencies, there are some that have gone app-only mode.
I would walk out.
You can't access it via browser? Maybe there's a few fintechs that are app-only (think robinhood, at least initially) but it's not like all banks only offer access via smartphones.
>public transport
???
Landlord would rather leave shops empty than rent it at lower price. In order to combat rental restaurants cut cost by having QR Code ordering system.
The uses of QR Code, whether it is for payment or information makes Smartphone mandatory in those places.
Spending Money online with VISA or master now requires Mobile App log in for Authentication. Government Digital Log in System now also default to Apps.
I may be missing a few things, and there will be many more things to come that moves to Mobile Apps only direction.
The latest neobank might require an app, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't find any bank in your country that allows you to spend money without using mobile apps.
Ask if you can order/pay without using the QR code. I'd be surprised if venues didn't have a paper menu as backup.
Do you want to bring back leper colonies, then? Should it be illegal to buy eggs from the grocery store while sick with a communicable disease? All kinds of horrific policies can be justified to prevent disease spread.