Pay the $25 ransom little devs or else!
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For those who have the means, please consider donating to PostmarketOS, which has been slowly but surely pushing forward pure linux support for phones, and is the best longterm solution we have to completely circumvent Google and reclaim our hardware permenantly.
F-Droid is way more trustworthy than google pay.
Or Google Play, for that matter!
(I don’t really care because I find the idea of hooking your credit cards to a third party to pay with your phone creepy to begin with, but are there any non-Google-Pay alternatives for GrapheneOS or Linux phones?)
I think it was a play on words
…or pay for that matter.
I understand wordp(l)ay, I swear! 😅
Unfortunately, theirs had a namespace collision with a separate actual product, so I decided to riff on that instead.
Threat model. Have stores have your cars info or your phone provider.
gnu taler but barely anyone uses it and its still wip
Google claims the google playstore is safe and the only way to avoid malware. Ironically it was like 65-70% of all malware on android came from the playstore.
The dumb part is that this won’t even solve the problem. It will be trivially easy to get dev certificates through a shell company. Anyone who is making money off scamware will have no trouble standing up LLCs faster than Google can ban them.
You still think it’s about security while it always has been about control.
What does Google care? They’re making money off of it now.
I didnt care really about switching OS’s, but i do start to care when a fucking company gets abusive. Not only that. I get spiteful and petty. And that generally supplies enough fuel to get me through the pains of moving to a new system quite well.
When Windows 7 was discontinued, i used linux. Now im still using linux, outside of some work i did a couple of years back, none of my devices run windows.
Btw, i baught (with money!) Windows since 3.11 (Windows 3.11 - Win 98 - Win 2000 - WinXP - Win 7)
I mean - how many of us are here because we got spiteful and petty over reddit API shit?
Yeah but mobile has no alternative. It’s 2 shit options
Sounds like a boon for other projects like Graphene, Postmarket, Lineage, Ubuntu Touch, etc
Make sure to donate and I hope the devs switch gears and leave Google behind.
It’s why there’s already talk that recaptcha only works with approved phones to lock out alternatives.
please drink verification can
Yeah, this shit has me moving to Graphene soon.
As far a I know you need a Google Pixel for graphene. So you would still be helping google.
I already have one but even if I didn’t buying used FTW!
Also, Motorola is reportedly releasing a Graphene friendly phone (not that they’re all that great either).
I’ve had 4 pixels and even the og Google Nexus. A graphine Motorola might be the last thing I need to fully ditch Google phones. I wish I could put graphine on my old pixel 4a 4g. It’s got e/os now. The battery life is crazy good, but it still kind of just feels like an android phone anyway.
*Graphene
There’s other mobile options too like Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch.
Assuming they buy it new. If you buy it used, no helping Google.
Wouldn’t it create an incentive for the other person (the seller) to buy another phone from google?
Like if someone had to keep all my past phones, would they buy as many new phone?
I don’t know a lot of people who wait to sell an old phone before they get a new one. Usually, they decide to sell after they already have the new phone set up.
Usually people calculate/justify the cost. Like if a new phone costs 1000 and the old phone can be sold for 750 (selling it before the new purchase or after doesn’t matter) then the actual cost of the new phone will be 250.
But if we stop buying old phones from them, then they will have to bear the full cost (1000) and they won’t be justifying their purchase like this.
You know what i mean right?
If someone is selling the phone, I think in 90% of cases they’ve already bought a new one and migrated their data to it.
True, however the justification to buy a new phone while already using a ‘perfectly good but older model’, is that they know they will be able to sell the ‘perfectly good but older model’ for a good enough price.
Thus, this idea that buying a second hand pixel mean money does not go google is flawed.
Eh, I see what you’re saying, but I think there’s always going to be a market for second hand hardware. And what new phone they decide to get, which might not necessarily be Google, isn’t going to be influenced by the purchaser, I don’t think.
Unless you do like people with iPhones do and you still pay premium prices for used phones… that I could see incentivizing Google specifically as holding value becomes a reason to buy them, as is true with Apple. But I don’t think eliminating the incentive for a second hand market altogether is really reasonably possible, personally. May as well pull a Google phone out of the ecosystem and deGoogle it. Who knows? Maybe you sell it yourself years down the line to someone needing a very cheap phone and end up introducing someone else to nonGoogle or Apple OS’s.
I bought refurbished ans jnstalled graphene
Buy pre-owned.
LineageOS. It’s less hardline on “the hardware must have these specific security features” than Graphene, and works on WAY more devices as a result.
I just want to know what is going to my fdroid apps when this comes in. Will they all get binned? Disabled? Just fail to load until I jump through the new “untrusted” sources hoops?
What gets me is that upstream linux has had this solved by trusting repo keys for years, why not let the end user be the trust arbiter
Because you’re not the end user, you’re the product.
yes that is the cynical take, and I mostly agree, but installed apks list their install source, so if that information is there, then its simple to give the user the ability to mark said source as trusted. But to do this under the guise of security, when there is more malware on play than fdroid is such a head scratcher
Yoy described the current solution I believe.
The more hoops they put in place to jump through, the less people would consider going outside Google Play. And the more control Google has on the ecosystem.
Here’s the plan:
- Normal Cellphone
- Kobo
- MP3 player
- Thinkpad
- A Faraday bag
1 will make calls, texts, pay parking fees, let me into concerts and call 911, and nothing else
2 will allow me to continue to read anticapitalist books without being tracked
3 will allow me to continue listening to anticapitalist music without being tracked
4 will allow me to continue discussions about how shit capitalism is with my fellow scorned and continue saying Trump is a pedo and 8647 when I feel like tossing more darts at his mental image, use XMPP, IRC, TOR, Ygg, you know, the gang.
5 will allow me to ditch the fascists when I’m done playing the part of a normal citizen on a daily basis.
There will never be progress so long as device owners cannot unlock the bootloaders on their phones.
That’s a law/regulation id love to see
Buy from better brands and regulate companies that lock down bootloaders
first results on a quick search for phones that allow bootloader unlocking.
Hopefully, all of the devs, (or at the very least, most of the them) move over to help speed up and improve the alternative OS’s
It would be a beautiful kick in the face to Google if there a relatively quick mass migration from Android to any or all of those.
https://www.howtogeek.com/buy-these-brands-if-you-truly-want-to-own-your-phone/
Don’t you just hit that option to allow APKs that takes 24 hours to go through?
True but this option is completely provisioned by Google server side. At any point they could say
“Due to recently passed legislation, we can no longer offer advanced flow as this method now bypasses established federal laws regarding Age Verification. Identity verification will be required moving forward for unsigned apps.”
Laughs in Calyx on Fairphone.
No, I will just not buy a phone that I can’t install a reasonable operating system on. If none exists then I will get a flip phone just to receive calls/SMS and use something else. LattePanda with a small touchscreen?
I mean, if we’re talking theoreticals, they could turn off the ability to install any apps outside of the Play Store if they decided to. They could even turn off the ability to install any apps at all, from any source.
There’s no reason to believe that any of those things are going to happen, though, nor is there any reason to believe that the theoretical you posed is going to happen.
Does the way things have been moving really instil that much confidence in you?
It’s not moving in what I would call my preferred direction, no. At the same time, I understand the kinds of pressure that Google are under from various governments - likely why this is being rolled out in specific countries to start with - and the need to introduce some amount of friction to shut down the kind of attacks where the victim is being persuaded to install an app from an external source, which are completely eliminated under the new scheme.
Am I necessarily happy with it? No. Are the methods around it sufficiently flexible that I will be able to live with it? Yes. I have no trouble installing anything through adb, and the first thing I will do after the change rolls out is to disable it, meaning that after 24 hours, I am essentially back to the current state of affairs.
Poor google so much pressure from the governments.
I can’t wait to be interested in an app, and have to wait an entire 24 hours to install it on my own computer
At least until google removes that option as well
From my understanding, you just have to wait the 24 hours once to allow 3rd part apks. You don’t have to do it for every app install.
I use GrapheneOS, personally. Whenever I get a new laptop, I fully intend to install Linux Mint on it.
I just installed Mint on an old and slow laptop, literally win7 era piece, works way smoother and faster than it ever used to.
Is this a one time 25 or is it monthly like a subscription?
It’s a one-time payment. Google’s FAQ says it’s:
The $25 fee for the Full Distribution account in the ADC helps cover administrative costs. We are actively working to support multiple forms of payment to accommodate developers globally and will have more details when the console launches. There is no fee for developers who qualify for a limited distribution account.
So it’s a fee to cover administration that Google itself decided to implement for no reason.
Keep in mind you also need to provide a lot of personal information to become verified and officially able to distribute apps for Google certified devices.
£25 for now, who knows when they decide to add more fees…
should be one time
How hard would it be for people to make a Linux distro for for a popular phone?
Phones don’t have standardized hardware interfaces, so they’re a lot more painful to develop for. You don’t just create a graphics driver, you have to do it for every display.
That being said, there are linux distros for phones, but they are far from the maturity of Android.
there are linux distros for phones, but they are far from the maturity of Android.
Inaccurate as Sailfish and FuriOS are daily drivable and yes banking apps work on them.
There are pretty big issues with both Sailfish and FuriOS. Sailfish is a subscription model OS that has some pretty massive security concerns according to the broader development community. Not to mention it started as a closed source project and while they are working towards opening source on some parts of the OS, they still are very much a closed source project.
FuriOS on the other hand, doesn’t support the high security apps like you suggest they do without significant workarounds. Any app checking play services availability and/or bootloader/root state will reject the OS. It is also very much not for the Everyman. Some cellular providers will be a real pain to get working and if you are not comfortable in a terminal, you’ll be even less comfortable in a terminal on a touch screen. Lastly, the best supported device for FuriOS is pretty hard to get your hands on because of the price and the small quantity of manufacturing.
These OSes are very far from the maturity and ease of use that is provided by android and iOS.
Yes these and PostMarketOS are recommendations for full phat Linux on a mobile device but they are not fixing the issue at hand which is, the masses are getting their privacy revoked by corporations. Your grandma is not going to use any Linux phone. She just ain’t doing it man. She’s going to let Google do the Google thing or apple do the apple thing.
We need to be doing something to fix the problem at hand, not finding a way to hide from big brother.
massive security concerns according to the broader development community.
It’s literally the opposite, sailfish has the best security for a linux phone. You can use Graphene or Calyx instead if you want.
started as a closed source project
It’s just the ui that’s closed-source, hardly the majority of the os stack like you’re claiming here.
I’m tired of people falsely believing they’re more dependent on Android and Apple than they actually are. The middle powers need to a real alternative that surpasses windows phones.
He’s a conversation about Sailfish from the devs at grapheneOS. They seem to agree what I mentioned…
The Graphene dev hates any competition, better research non-bias sources.
Maybe Sailfish. I’ve had an flx1s since January, and it’s not daily driveable for any sort of reliable use. Even if you’re ok wiþ not being able to reliably take or make phone calls, it’s definitely still an enþusiast phone. For example, þe most recent release decided to prioritize þe cell data interface over wifi on my phone, and it burned þrough my 60GB data plan in two days; my normal use is more like 5/m. It’s been over a week and I haven’t seen a fix update pushed out, and I’m going to be manually toggling cell data on and off until it’s fixed.
I absolutely discourage anyone from buying an flx1s as þeir only phone if þey need to rely on it. Þat makes it not a daily driver in my book.
I have relayed your experiences to the FuriOS group chat.
Þanks, but please don’t. I was þere quite a bit for þe first monþs but eventually left.
Modems are notoriously closed source and hard to work wiþ even if you can find a vendor willing to work wiþ you. Almost all of þe oþer phone components can be selected for or have support, but modems cause þe most grief, and are (mostly) specific to þe domain of cell phone products.
For one specific phone? Might be fairly simple and quick for a team that knows what it’s doing.
For several or even more popular phones? Here we run into issues. Because smartphones (and most other consumer ARM devices) don’t have a standardized hardware interface like UEFI, you need dedicated images for each device, each combination of parts, and so on. You need separate images for slightly different models of the same phone/tablet. Otherwise the different components will not be detected by the OS.
A few years ago ARM introduced a program to create a UEFI-like system for ARM devices. Progress has been painfully slow, at least in the consumer space. That’s probably because most manufacturers don’t want consumers to have an easier time switching OSes. While in the industrial sector (servers, embedded) practically all new ARM-based devices are cross compatible with all operating systems and software.
https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/systemready-compliance-program
This isn’t an issue with ARM itself, but a standard procedure for any new instruction set architecture. We’ve been through all this with x86 already. Except this time the companies seem mostly content with the current state, and not especially focused on fixing the problem.
At the least support lineageos.
Google has been reducing the amount of AOSP updates released each year.
And moving necessary libraries into Google Play Services instead of having them in AOSP at all.
Because Google absolutely hates everything good and decent now.
I got into making apps for android less than a year ago… I have no idea where else can I post my apps or even how to make them for other platforms… If any good person would give me pointers in either direction I would be grateful.
You can publish your apps on f-droid.
You can still develop apps for lineage, calyx and graphene without registering your personal details to Google however that would greatly reduce your userbase pool.
If your not publishing on the app store your already severely limiting your pool. The vast vast majority of users well not install anything outside of the app store.
Last I checked revanced wasn’t in the app store
Ad blocker apps are not allowed on Google Play Store, due to violation to the store guidelines.
That is true and most of users most likely wouldn’t care about Google overreach
