Yeah, if Google kills ReVanced, I may as well get an iPhone. What's the difference at this point. You can't even unlock the bootloader on most of the quality Android phones.
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.
It's not side loading. It is just installing and running. I swear all this 'for your benefit' crap is going to relegate all of our computing hardware to the status of dumb terminal before long.
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.
It’s called that because you used to download the apks on a separate computer and then load them onto the phone, it has nothing to do with sounding illegal
With phones becoming our main computing platform, I wonder why do we look at it any different from our personal computers?
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).
> With phones becoming our main computing platform, I wonder why do we look at it any different from our personal computers?
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.
Not that Google needs any more cash, but ReVanced has to be the absolute worst defense for maintaining openness on Android. As in, you could have cited the thousands of legitimate apps that have nothing to do with circumventing a pretty reasonable subscription (compared to other media subscriptions out there) for Google's own app.
I disagree that it's a bad defense. It demonstrates well how reduced openness will allow Google to abuse its monopoly even more. It shouldn't be any business of the maker of my phone to support the business model of the most popular video sharing website.
Why is it weird? You install software on your computer. You install software from your app repository. You install software with your package manager. You install software on your server. You install software on the computers you administrate. "Sideload" was always the weird, Orwellian term.
(editted to add repository and package manager points)
This is what bothers me about the whole "App Store" stuff with the EU. This entire fight about Apple being required to allow third party "App Stores" -- how about simply the user can load whatever software they want to on the device which they are the owner of?
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.
It's weird because "sideloading" accurately captures that you're doing something ad hoc outside of the main channel. You install software with your package manager, from the app repository, and you sideload it with `curl | bash` or manually moving an .exe/.msi/.apk.
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.
Politician and corporations want you to not have ownership or control over your devices. Either for money or control, but they absolutely would love for things like Linux to not be possible or illegal so they can force you to watch ads and pay their next version of enshitified shit, not consume the wrong kind of news and absolutely not assemble in political opposition to their corruption.
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.
It's much more than that. It's an app that patches apks and has a series of community patches for specific apps. For youtube it's the usual ad blocking and sponsorblock, etc. but it can apply patches for all apps, one of the universal patches is changing the package name, this allows you to install 2 of the same app. I use this on youtube and tiktok so I have both accounts logged in at the same time, each logged in to a separate app.
Same here, being able to enjoy YouTube without ads is the only thing really blocking me from switching to ios. Silver lining is, maybe if using YouTube is made painful again it'll help me cure my last remaining internet addiction.
I used to think jailbreaking was the only way to do this, and mourned my adblocker tweaks when Apple made jailbreaking practically impossible. But turns out sideloading on iOS is a pretty easy alternative: just install AltStore via your computer, sign in with your Apple ID, and then import and install the YTLitePlus .ipa from their GitHub[1]. This gets you a YouTube clone with adblocking, SponsorBlock, custom UI controls, and all sorts of other quality-of-life features. You can even sign into and sync with your existing YouTube account.
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.
I watch YouTube without ads on iOS. Any decent Safari ad blocker stops YouTube's ads. Google seems to make YouTube an intentionally subpar experience in a browser compared to a mobile app, but it works.
And Microsoft. Microsoft basically killed Nokia from the inside. Symbian was fairly open in terms of installing applications from wherever you wanted.
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.
> Apple? I'd never give my money to the organization that's responsible for bringing us to this place.
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.
> You can't even unlock the bootloader on most of the quality Android phones.
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?
Not anymore, since OneUI 8. And before that, by unlocking the bootloader you were tripping Samsung's e-fuse, permanently marking the hardware as unlocked. That's why nobody ever bothered making custom firmware builds for Samsung devices.
>The proper alternative to Google Play is F-Droid, not downloading/baking .apks.
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.
I'd probably still want a common repo to get software from, for the same reason we use package managers and repos on Linux. Not to mention that the app store experience is more friendly to the newbies out there. But the 'just download an apk/exe/.app and run it' should still exist as a lowest common denominator. Not to mention that the existence of that possibility will hopefully keep stores in check and not become overtly hostile, since if they do, users can just say 'fuck it' and download their software piecemeal.
Android phones still have a huge price advantage on iphone: the least expensive iphone is 800€, the least expensive Google pixel is 550€ (which is much higher that 2 years ago), and the least expensive Samsung is 300€.
> 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.
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".
I am not paying for Youtube. Besides the cost, the last thing I want is Google to track what I view through logins and payment details (real name, address, etc.)
The government isn't going to save us, they love it and are in bed with these corporations; the more control, the better. Locked down computing, no anonymity online, the threat of losing banking/credit accounts, and authorities showing up to arrest you if you challenge the current dogma too strongly. We're so cooked.
Our politicians are bought and owned, and it's hard to expect anything else after Citizens United. If we want a government to serve and protect us we must ensure that our politicians actually represent us.
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.
2G and 3G networks are already being dismantled, if not already gone, in several parts of the world. Even if you do want to stick to those devices out of principle, you often can't, or if you can, only for maybe 5 more years.
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.
We are not cooked. You only need to recognize that covid policies were theater and enabled them to rapidly advance in this direction and that the typical cultural left/right bullshit is a distraction.
If people stop the bullshit it's not that hard to effectively oppose
What "covid policy" do you think contributed to Google locking down their device? Can you point to some of these "covid policies" and explain how it relates to this?
Non-sequitur. Covid policies weren't used to damage my online security or manufacture my consent for digital change.
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 think it's time for us to go back to having mobile phones (texting, virtual credit cards, tethered wifi hotspots etc). separate from mobile storage and compute (mp3 players, cameras etc.).
The modern mobile ecosystem is selling games consoles when the nerds want mobile Unix workstations.
The ratio between nerds and "normal" consumers is pretty high, and being a nerd does not automatically mean you care about having a "mobile unix workstation" (what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?), and even if you have one it doesn't mean you'll actually find a use for it. It's safe to say that the market is irrelevant, and, unlike things like woodworking, boutique manyfacturers can't really exist in this space
I don’t really care to do any task traditionally associated with full fat computers directly on my phone, simply because the input methods are extremely poor for that kind of thing. If my phone could act like an ultrabook/netbook when hooked up to a screen and proper desktop input on the other hand (similar to DeX, iPadOS 26, and the forthcoming baseline Android desktop mode), that’s a more interesting proposition and probably one that a number of more typical users would find interesting too.
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.
> what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?
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.
If you interpret “this space” a little more broadly, there are boutique manufacturers catering to hackers that sell tiny, cheap, wearable computers. Check out all the stuff Adafruit sells.
1. Presents a mobile hotspot, and
2. Supports CardDAV so I can actually sync my contacts
3. Records calls
There were none the last time I tried, about three years ago. And that even ignores the issue of trying to dial a number from a link on a web page or in a document.
It’s so strange that out of the box CalDAV and CardDAV support is rare for mobile devices. iPhones are the best somehow, with Android being heavily Google-focused and support is totally absent on non-smart platforms, which is the perfect opposite of what one might expect! It’d make way more sense if the more open platforms were built around open standards, but somehow here we are.
I am not 100% sure but my partner has the nokia “bannana” phone and i think it supports both. It for sure supports 4g hotspot and caldav but i think even carddav.
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.
There was a multiple years of gap between rollout of voice call specification on LTE(VoLTE) and launches of first featurephone operating system supporting it. Android and iOS were only implementation available for a while. For this reason, practically all "featurephone" style phones that supports voice call, except very few, runs AOSP. At the point where your product runs AOSP, you might as well launch it as a low end smartphone, which is what a lot of vendor do.
I suspect the solution may be a compact tablet running a touch-friendly Linux distro, and the "phone" is just a mobile hotspot. If you want some fantastic camera built in, that's a separate problem.
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.
The dipshits at Apple and Google don't provide what should be a built in feature (recording calls) and make it difficult to add it through third party software. At this point, iOS and Android are actively working against the user.
Modem Manager on Linux handles ppp and texting (even MMS if you're willing to build mmsd which isn't easy) with just a USB modem. You don't need a phone at all.
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.
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?
Especially since the mobile phone part legally can never be owned or controlled by the human person. Only corporations can own and use the baseband computer/modem because only they have bought the spectrum license rights and built out the infrastructure to justify it to the FCC. Similar situations exist in other countries.
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.
Or, and hear me out this is going to sound crazy: we finally stop pretending that we're using phones. When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls to a phone number that wasn't "phone support because the company involved is so ancient or dark patterned that they only offer phone support"? Or voluntarily initiated sending a text message, rather than using email or messenger software?
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".
99% of my communications are SMS/MMS and while i do avoid phone calls my friend called me yesterday, and i called a business to ask about their holiday hours this weekend.
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
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.
I'm kind of surprised by this. Google is already under a lot of heat, especially in Europe. All sorts of lawsuits everywhere because of they monopoly abuse. And they decide to pull this move?
> 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.
Maybe it's time for the legal requirement that every computing device or microchip more powerful than 1 MIPS and having writable storage, must support reprogramming, to prevent creating digital waste.
This doesn’t make sense. The most locked down mainstream option on the market – the iPhone – is also the one with the longest market life, with iPhones holding their market value far longer than alternatives. So there seems to be a negative correlation between being locked down and e-waste.
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.
7 years lifetime is nothing. All iPhones have to rotate in that timeframe. That's incredible amounts of waste.
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.
One of my desktop pcs is like 15 years old. It faced a ram upgrade and 2 gpus died over time, the processor still holds. The windows 11 upgrade killed it though, but I'll move it to linux and that should be ok.
I'd say that's a spurious correlation, if it exists at all. Just look at all the Android phone makers who don't allow bootloader unlocks and those who do. Personally I'd say Google Pixel or Sony Xperia phones last longer than Huawei ones, though I wouldn't dare say reprogrammability has anything to do with it.
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.
You have to shock European politicians with credible model of threats showing that not implementing such a regulation could very well lead to their daughters getting home address shared open to the world and harassed 24/7, e.g. so much widely known that it would be trending in Central Asian language while completely walled off from their eyes in languages used around their residence. Not that I endorse that kind of things or that I think faking one will do, of course.
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.
IoT sensors, thermostats, dashcams, home intercoms, mobile data modems, smart TV dongles... I could name a dozen more products that could have an old phone as their heart, if they were cheap, unlocked, and easier to develop for.
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.
All my personal and family computers are more than 10 year old, running latest Ubuntu. They have probably slower CPUs than that 8 year old iphone, but can run the latest web and email clients just fine. These are almost all salvaged from e-waste. I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.
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.
Those 8 year old phones were plenty fast when they were new. Why did operating system, apps, and websites need to get more bloated? Do they even do anything they didn't (or couldn't) do 8 years ago?
I also meant microcontrollers. I am sure someone would remove chips from old devices and resell if they were reprogrammable. Also you could use them for your hobby for free.
How about 8 year old Macs with Apple Silicon, which are rapidly going to become a thing in just 3 short years, and are the same thing as an iPhone architecturally
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?
The community could work around this problem by creating an open source general purpose app runtime for Android.
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.
Developers shouldn't have to share personal information with Google or anyone. The real solution here is unlocked bootloaders and free/libre operating systems. Anything less and you don't truly own your phone. You can only use it to the extent allowed by Google/Apple.
I think the real question here, aside from how to displace Android and IOS, is: how do the developers get paid for the upgrades, new features, security analysis and fixes, developing new boards and coming up with bsp (board support packages, essentially a "distribution" for hardware manufacturers that works on whatever new boards they relase) and infrastructure of such an OS.
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.
It doesn't need to be on the Play store, as long as they allow sideloading apps from known developers.
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.
This doesn't stop with handheld computers. If Google will be able to get away with it on phones (which is FAR from guaranteed atm), they will do it on Chromebooks. Microsoft will do it on Windows. Apple will do it on Macs. Then the hardware manufacturers will only allow "trusted" developers via TPM.
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.
Readit News
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.
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...
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/YTLitePlus/YTLitePlus
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.
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.
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.
Free lunch is over yo.
Just allowed me to pay only for ad free and not include youtube music. I know youtube lite is a thing but its only available to limited countries.
And as the parent already said, "I may as well get an iPhone".
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
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.
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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.
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They're more powerful than plenty of computers from not too long ago
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.