Brax Wink. The most private mobile phone. Modular. Open source | Hacker News Reader

Brax Wink. The most private mobile phone. Modular. Open source

braxtech.net

28 pointsdgellow22 comments

> Press and hold a permission to assign it to the privacy switch.

So it's a physical switch in name only. No actual hardware disconnects.

Looks cool, but I wouldn't call it a privacy phone.

Strange nitpick. I never heard of a phone with an actual hardware privacy switch. Is that a thing? I don’t think that’s enough to dismiss the „privacy phone“ label, given it is indeed a phone focused on privacy, and that label doesn’t have a strict industry meaning.

Though to be honest the privacy switch is a gadget feature, I don’t expect anyone to have an actual use case for this

Pinephone https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Privacy_switches/

Those are not really usable as something you toggle on/off when needed, since they are under the battery cover and you are strongly recommended to only flip them while the phone is off.

Cool that they are there, but not suitable for what most people actually want.

Furi Phone (furilabs.com) has 3 hardware switches on the side. Runs Linux

> I don’t expect anyone to have an actual use case for this

The people who remove the batteries from their cellphones do.

Actually, that would be a nice feature too, having a power disconnect switch as well.

Several Alt phones have done this, including the Librem in addition to the others people have pointed out to you in sibling comments.

GrapheneOS is opensource and google won't give them any special treatment, so any modification you make to the OS is the same as grapheneOS actual and can still use any workaround grapheneOS uses to enable rcs messaging or any other carrier feature that google has tried to monopolize.

> Mediatek

How many random no-name phones are we going to get with bad software maintenance post-release that all rely on cruddy SOCs?

Why are they trying to do everything at once? From what I am reading they plan to - design and produce phone hardware - create and maintain an android fork - create a chat and VoIP app - run

Because it is probably a vaporware...

I watched Brax a bit, and many of his technical assessments are incorrect. He has an attitude of a snakeoil salesmen. Hard pass.

I'm loving the physical keyboard, but only 8gb ram is a tough sell!

On a phone? What are you doing with all that ram?

> loving the physical keyboard

Such a shame that RIM shat themselves so badly.

It's cellular and modular, but is it interactive-odular?

Ring ring ring ring ring

Looks like it's Android-based - hard pass.

Zero Google services and zero proprietary code, unless the page is actively lying. The open source core of Android is a perfectly good OS, a little slower and less secure than iOS but there is no reason to avoid it and lose app compatibility.

There is good reason to avoid it, and that is to not being dependent on Google. Unless you've hard-forked AOSP (which doesn't seem to be the case here).

In case you weren't aware, AOSP is rubbish now. Development has gone partially behind closed doors, and Google have reduced the source code drops from quarterly to twice a year. So you're forced to wait for 6 months to get non-security bug fixes and other improvements. 6 months is a long time in the open source world, especially these days when things are moving so fast.

Even getting timely security updates are an issue now. Like high-severity vulnerabilities are shared privately with OEM partners well in advance (sometimes even months in advance), but AOSP gets the patches only when the monthly bulletin goes live, which leaves a huge gap, unless you stay on top of the security landscape and patch vulnerabilities yourself. I don't trust a random company like Brax to do that.

And given Google's trend towards locking down Android and nerfing AOSP, it's likely things will get even worse - maybe they'll reduce the source drops to yearly, or add other restrictions. Basically, depending on Google is a HUGE red flag.

Also, the app compatibility problem is overrated. First of all, because this Brax phone is completely de-googled, you won't be able to use a whole bunch of Android apps anyway due to dependencies on Google Play Services or Play Integrity / hardware attestation. So if you're already being limited by the number of apps you can run, you might as well just use a Linux phone and for run your few Android apps under Waydroid or similar compatibility layer - and slowly work towards eliminating that Android dependency altogether (maybe by paying a developer to code a native app, or reverse engineer it yourself with the help of an LLM). Of course, if you have quite a few Android apps that you absolutely can't live without then it's better to just run Android natively, but you'll never free yourself of Google.

The world doesn't need more Android phones, we need more Linux phones and break the duopoly.

Great points above. To add even more, Google is purposefully misleading user when designing user interfaces [0] [1]. Like language, user interface is affecting how we think.

Which only a hard-fork could fix, and who have the resources to fight that.

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/google-llc-to-pay-60-m...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/16/google-tr...

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