Android
DROID DOES
Welcome to the Android community on Lemmy. Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
view the rest of the comments
Google has been systematically moving stuff out of the open-source part of Android and into proprietary areas for some time now. They're making it harder and harder for anyone to make a working Android OS that isn't full of closed-source Google spyware. For now these projects survive, but Google is clearly hostile to them.
My last straw was when I had location services permission denied to chrome, and then one day discovered that it had turned them back on without notifying me...
Also, every time my apps updated they gave themselves back permissions that I had disabled.
What would it take to start from a clean slate? I mean, a mad lad said about 35 years ago "UNIX expensive. I'm gonna make my own OS"
What are the obstacles for something like this to happen for phones? I assume device drivers, but probably it is much more complicated than that
I see a lot of people responded with a true clean slate, but really, a fork is a clean slate.
It's not like Graphene, or Lineage, or any others would stop working. More maintainers would be needed for security issues, but way less than to get (non-Android) Linux phones up to speed.
Many graphene users, myself included, use all FOSS software from outside Google's store.
Yes, device drivers are an issue. Reverse engineering them is a bitch and slows you down, particularly if you want to support a wide range of models and those models keep getting hardware updates.
But that's not all, software ecosystem is another big one. Android and iOS have seen two decades of people developing software for them. In order for them to want to port their software over to your cleanSlateOS, it would have to have a significant user base. And in order for cleanSlateOS to draw that significant user base, it would have to have an attractive suite of apps to run on it. It's a catch-22.
You could, in theory, try to develop emulators or compatibility layers so that Android apps will also run on cleanSlateOS. But that, again, is time-consuming, will never be free of friction, and require you to make compromises with regard to security and privacy (many apps simply don't run properly without Google's main piece of spyware, the Play Services). It will also kind of tie you to Google again - and that was the thing you were trying to get away from in the first place...
I dream of a system with the same philosophy as unix: simple tools with one and only one job, that pipe with each other.
perhaps, defining some "common ground formats" to smooth the in/out across apps.
developers and apps will eventually come. but drivers, that depends on the manufacturers
I have a GNU/Linux phone I carry in my other pocket. Here are the biggest issues I can see:
I carry a Linux phone in my normal pocket, not my other one.
The camera doesn't work, I don't have any problem with apps but I am probably not a typical user in that regard, but my 5000mAh battery lasts me a day and ends on 30-40%, which is reasonable but not nearly as good as Android. My family members complain I sound like I'm underwater when I call them and the phone crashes every morning when I take it off the charger.
Linux phones are a wonderful promise but require a lot of comprimises. I hope they improve soon
Aren't there also issues with Banking Apps and their requirements around security and signing?
and authentication apps like itsme ...
access the bank website in the browser?
way ahead there, I use Android and my internet banking app is just a wrapper for their website.
The problem is: at least where I live, banks use mobile apps to generate second factor authentication. (No TOTP, all proprietary / homegrown mechanics.) No second factor - no login.
The proprietary second factor in bank apps tends to work fine, since it is displayed before any invasive authentication crap.
It feels stupid to have the whole app and that's all it does. But it tends to work.
But then, I consider a proprietary second factor app to be a huge red flag for security, so I prefer ones services compatible with Aegis or other open second factor solutions.
Not all have websites sadly. Virgin for example got rid of their web app and now direct you to download them mobile app as the only way to manage your accounts outside of the brick and mortar branches. Obviously I now rarely use that credit card, if ever. But others may have their main bank accounts and mortgages etc with such a bank and that would suck.
oof, yeah, that sounds like a good reason not to do business with them
As some other people mentioned the Waydroid app or their website can work. If you do Waydroid, you can install Gapps, and other banking app isn't happy with that, they typically offer decent mobile websites.
GNOME Web and Mozilla Firefox via this PWA extension let you have a dedicated app icon for any web service you want into your app drawer. The Firefox one works best, and I believe does a better job isolating stuff from the main browser.
What's cool is you can run an entire Monero wallet (or other cryptocurrency) on device for full mobile financial experience, though don't store more in it than you would a regular wallet.
FSF has a project called LibrePhone
Broken link?
librephone.fsf.org