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Have a look at this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723594 from Emre @emrekosmaz

It is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11

Actual link https://nexphone.com/blog/the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...

It won't though, because there's a ecosystem of banking/insurance/whatever apps that have bought into the android/iphone lockdown mindsete that people will simply be locked out of. Open alternatives can grow when there is a viable means of slow growth, and cutting off the oxygen to such things is the implicit intent.

Until Android is crippled it will continue to take resources away from Linux Phone development and companies that will launch phones for it

Even if you have linux, there are still third parties that have control over your hardware. Even if you're using graphenos, you can't block the sim or the cellular radio stack, and likely other modules on the SoC, from at-will access to every sensor on the device. You can at least protect your files, unless there's a mitm or other vector that graphenos can't cope with. And at worst, they can simply clone all your encrypted bits and wait on Moore's law or sufficient cubits to go back and crack the copy, on the off chance there's anything they want with your data in the first place.

For me as a desktop linux poweruser, I find this potential transition pretty intimidating, I've never flashed a phone with a custom rom let alone switch to a completely different OS, and I am not sure if the phone can even be reset to its original OS, if things go south.

Expecting Google to give up control of one of the only alternative operating systems is right up there with believing in the tooth fairy.

What you're saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).

A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.

The limitation of linux phones is hardware. I have been watching the progress of postmarketOS on the fairphone 4, and looks promising.

> If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones...

It won't.

Yes it is, and no they didn't. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I'm not clear on whether any actually exist right now.

If a lawsuit tackles this problem in the EU, will we finally also see somebody go after MS for their obnoxious code signing certificates?

While MS code signing certs are more circumventable for power-users than Android's new approved developer program, their pricing is far more prohibitive for independent OSS developers and hobbyists, costing hundreds of USD per year.

How specific is the law? What if side loading requires a "trusted" signed certificate where trusted means from Google Play?

Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.

The kind of "side-loading" of notarized apps outside the manufacturer's app store that Apple allows in the EU is exactly what Google proposed to do for all its Android builds. We don't want that.

Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.

I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed.

However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.

I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.

I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:

- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption

> death of Android

death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?

A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.

You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policy

So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.

Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace

I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social

But this thread is about the option to install apps on your device regardless of OS vendor approval, and that's not possible either with iOS nor is iOS open source. And that's what this is all about. If you don't care about open-source and user freedom, then this change wouldn't matter to you anyway.

I switched back to Android in large part for KDE Connect. You can get continuity esque features that work with any desktop operating system. I also get to use real Firefox instead of a Safari wrapper. I still use as few Google services as possible, pretty much just Maps.

At this point, I wouldn't recommend Android other than enjoying the much steeper discount with the headset. For me, the only thing that is keeping me on Android is easier access to commas on the keyboard.

I love the Java/Kotlin userspace, even if it is Android Java flavour, and the our way or the highway attitude to C and C++ code, instead of yet another UNIX clone with some kind of X Windows into the phone.

In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.

I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.

However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.

If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.

> But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android?

How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.

Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.

I'm not even talking about its "walled concentration camp" app model.

you're a really vanilla user then.

wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.

Yeah, that's the biggest issue. And it all originally stemed from phone carriers wanting to lock customers into their services.

We need some pro-consumer regulations on hardware which mandate open platforms. Fat chance of that happening, though, as the likes of both the EU and US want these locked down systems so they put in mandatory backdoors.

People will keep using the OS their phone comes with and that would be Google's Android. It's worse than with Windows PCs and Windows to be honest because phones have a locked bootloader.

Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.

Google's own phones do not have a locked booloader. You can buy a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it in like 10 minutes. But basically no one does this, because no matter what people say in online forums they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.

People give a lot of flack to the EU, but this is the sort of thing they would regulate.

Or the fact that you need device drivers for every piece of hardware in a phone.

There is no such thing as non-Google Android. At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.

It's the same as the situation with Chrome/Chromium. There are a million "de-Googled"/"privacy focused" alternatives to Chrome all using the same engine, and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.

Get a large phone vendor to get a flagship phone with Graphene or so on the market. Otherwise nothing will happen. Even starting with the smaller ones like Blackview would do something. But almost no one will do that because users are said to want android; like my parents care... But they will care of course when their banking app stops working... That is the real issue imho.

Under what law is that a legal or ethical thing to do? Why not suggest ios be taken away from Apple as well and windows from Microsoft?

Who else is going to maintain and develop it? It's the same issue as with Chrome, even if you force Google to give it to some other company, they're all just as bad. And it's too big and too costly to maintain for anyone else but tech giants.

The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source developers. And good luck with that.

The same reason nobody is doing a hard fork of Chromium.

The gigantic task of maintaining and developing a mobile OS that needs to retain compatibility with AOSP/GPS anyway to tap into the huge amount of applications that are available?

It will cost a lot of money and as long as Google is still doing regular AOSP code drops, what's the point?

GrapheneOS is great. But that currently means you have to buy a phone from Google to work around Google looking down Android.

EU did bring regulations that helped consumers. I have a feeling that criticism of EU regulations mostly come from people who are not in the EU.

Maybe daddy won't beat me this time?

Well, Google has marketed Android as an open source operating system (AOSP) and openness about the system [1] and encouraged manufacturers and developers to build on it based on the premise of openness and of course being "free". People advocated for Android because it was open source compared to other alternatives. But with this change they are simply ending that openness. People that have developed F-Droid and other alternative stores have contributed to the platform value (such as not being able to de-google their phone), the same goes for many other developers who have spent countless of hours developing for Android.

To say they don't owe you nothing seems like a betrayal on the promise that Android was an open platform (and open source).

> You are free to not use their products or start a company to compete

That's not an option as you are making it out to be. For a user switching means buying a new phone, repurchasing apps (if you bought) and maybe apps won't be even available to the new system, for developers that means all their knowledge about the system gone. Building a mobile operating system requires millions if not billions of dollars, years of work and convincing developers and businesses (hardware makers) to use your operating system. The barrier to enter is so high that telling people to just compete with Google is not a realistic solution.

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...

Party A does not owe Party B the right to sell in Party A:s legal area.

Party B is allowed to choose not to sell in EU. If you wanna sell in EU you have to comply with EU rules. If you wanna sell in US you have to comply with US laws. That simple.

That is not how the European Union works. One of the core goals of the EU is to guarantee the European single market. One of the core principles of the single market is the Freedom to establish and provide services [1]. The Apple/Google duopoly have effectively created a market within the single market where the core principles of the single market do not apply anymore.

Tech has a strong tendency to favor outcomes with only a handful large players that make competition impossible due to network effects, etc., distorting the market. The Digital Markets Act was made to address this problem.

IANAL, but Google's Android changes seem like a fairly clear violation of the DMA.

This is typically hard for people from the US to grasp (I saw that you are not originally from the US though). In Europe, capitalism is not the end goal, the goal of capitalism is to serve the people and if that fails, it needs to be regulated.

---

As an aside, the lengths people go to defend a company with $402.836B yearly revenue :).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market#Four_fr...

Are we still talking about massive companies with power to arbitrarily decide how billions of people use the personal computers they bought? Who's doing the feeling? Why would we presume all of their conduct to be moral?

> Party B owes you nothing. You are free to not use their products or start a company to compete.

When 99% of government/banks/etc require you to use a certain service to access basic services, you need some way of ensuring you don't have to sell your soul to use it. Alternatives would be really great, but Google is part of a duopoly.

Just because you build the rails doesn't mean you get to decide who gets to use the trains.

Party B has access to the market of Party A at Party A's mercy.

Party A enforces Party B's intellectual "property"

My moral justification is that my right to do with the physical property I have in my physical hand is more important than any noncorporeal corporation's right to do anything with their noncorporeal intellectual property.

The truth is, I gave party C money for a product. Party B does not get to say anything about what party C gave me. And they absolutely do owe me something, and that is the use of the product they gave me for my money. Whatever their terms of service say about licensing versus owning should not trump the fact that I made a one-time purchase and I have physical ownership that they cannot revoke. This is not a car lease where I have a contract with the dealership and they can reposses the car if I don't make the payments.

Google is engaging in immoral business practices. Since they are immoral, it is morally justified to say they must be stopped.

> how would you feel if you were on the receiving end of such a dictum?

I continue to be astounded how people still just flat out assume that everyone must be a capitalist.

If I were on the receiving end of a dictum aimed at stopping immoral behavior, I would cease my immoral behavior. But I'm not going to be on the receiving end in the first place because I don't aim to do immoral things in the first place.

The moral justification is the same anyone else employs. I have a tool to create an outcome and I'm going to use that tool to produce that outcome. It's that simple.

Even restricting the mitigation to "students and hobbyists" is bad.

I should have the right to have parents, friends or anyone use a "free" store that is not under control of Google if the user and app developer wish so. But also, somehow there should be something done to avoid the monopoly forcing to use the Google services. Like major institutions like bank, gov and co being forced to provide alternatives like a webapp when they provide app tied to the Google play store.

I think you've omitted the next section, which seems more relevant. It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text. Seems reasonable?

Not sure if you have been following the LLM space or even the emulator handhelds space, but Chinese companies have been doing great with putting out open source software lately.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text?license=open-source

The irony is that software coming from China is a lot more open than western software. Biggest examples are huggingface models mostly coming from Chinese institutions. Its also strategicaly wise for China to go this path.

As of version 5, HarmonyOS doesn't have the Android compatibility layer. There are emulators that allow APKs to run, but they're a bit clunky.

Half, or more, of the world thinks exactly the same in regards to the US

Meanwhile the NSA and Mossad can see you fapping on your phone and scan your face in real time and you're implicitly fine with it

This is what lack of options does to a MF

There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company. And before you say something along the lines of, "But they don't need to compete, they just need to be good enough", that still requires business to put their apps on some open source app store and make them compatible with the open source OS, and there is close to zero incentive for them to do so.

Somehow, Stallman returned.

I run Graphene on my Pixel and banking apps just work. There is no Google Pay, obviously, since Google dependencies have been stripped out from the system. I just carry a credit card.

90% of your usage on your phone is banking apps or NFC payments? That seems hard to believe.

No idea why you are even bringing this up. It works just fine right now.

>this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem

Maybe, but there's no technical reason for this. As I've mentioned before, I can do banking just fine on my Gentoo machine where the entire corpus of software on it, is FOSS and compiled by myself.

To you.

Laptops exist.

The amount of open stuff that was migrated into the Play Services closed source blob over the years just keeps growing.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I was talking about the whole permissions system where the user is a third class citizen. Device manufacturers are second class citizens (restricted by Google via CDD/CTS) and the only true winner on that system is Google.

Regarding some concrete examples - Google can deeply integrate Gemini, but a competitor can't do this and users get no final say here either. Competitors are restricted by the permission system, Google is not restricted at all.

While rooting can alleviate this to some extent, Play Integrity is there to make sure the user regrets that decision to break free..

> Aren't the politicians or their appointed bureaucrats who'd be making all the decisions if these needs were government owned?

Well that would be true under a capitalist government.

> Why would state control lead to less policing?

Its not just "the state runs it", its "we actively become the state".

Collective ownership through peoples councils, peoples courts with a world view that keeps it all open: socialism.

The world view of not allowing individual ownership over collective goods, the world view of socialism, is the life line of the movement. The actual practice of daily democracy, of running production and of deciding social functions is everyones responsibility and it should not be left to what has become a professional class of liars.

Public office members, which should only exist where absolutely necessary, should be locals and serve as messengers with 0 decision making power. All power should be in the local councils. We can mathematically implement this today (0 knowledge proofs).

Every single book on socialism is on theory and practices of acheiving this. Thats what the "dictatorship of the proletariat is", the dictatorship of working people, collectively.

> What incentive structure would lead to innovation without a profit motive, when even the modern communist world relies on capital markets?

We've been innovating for hundreds of thousands of years before capitalism. You dont need to generate money to innovate, the innovation itself is the driver, AKA a better life. No need to lock and limit production behind the attaining of profits of those who lead it.

They have the incentive to never chose this.

If we force it upon them by begging politicians, corporations still have the incentive to find a way to remove it or circumvent it.

Youre playing the cat and mouse game because you've been taught that solving it is too extreme (thats not a coincidence).

We dont need to endlessly fight a whole class of people, capitalists, for them not to use the things we require against us. Only socialism can solve that.

Yep it's definitely on my list but my Pixel is on its last legs and I'm considering going back to iOS.

>Come on, that's absolutely laughable.

It's not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices.

It's going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of "phone calls only mode" and forced us to rely on their half-baked "priority mode" that's an opaque shitshow.

When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".

Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.

The rumors that I have heard (and one government document I read that was poorly translated from Thai) is that there are some countries who are pressuring Google on this to combat info-stealing malware. Apparently, account-takeover/theft is very prevalent in SE Asia where most banking is done via Android phones.