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Smartphone startups take on Google, Apple and put privacy first

135 points by indidea 7y ago

megaraid999 7y ago
I like a lot the LibreM but I don't consider it a viable option for a use in the real world. On the other hand, the /e/ smartphone is doing a great world to keep me out of the Google ecosystem, and I'm very impressed how far they go on this aspect, even removing call to Google server during connectivity checks, replacing Google NTP servers by NTP pool servers. I don't know any other Android custom ROM doing this.
- Iolaum 7y ago
  Maybe because the actual privacy benefit for this change is negligible? (Or so I 've been told).
- paulcarroty 7y ago
  > even removing call to Google server during connectivity checks, replacing Google NTP servers by NTP pool servers. And audit all android code & third-party apps.
dangus 7y ago
I wish the article was a little more technically competent. It leaves out a lot of other important projects in this space like PinePhone, LineageOS, and even the proprietary alternative of Sailfish. I also take issue with a lot of articles talking about data collection as the boogeyman without actually explaining how data collection happens and how to minimize it. You don’t have to actually get rid of Apple or Google, which can massively handicap the usability of your device, to gain some semblance of privacy. There are a lot of simple changes to be made: - Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps - Auditing Google/Apple/social media account privacy settings - Make sure you’re on a recent/the latest Android version - Audit and minimize app permissions - Uninstall apps that you don’t need or have web alternatives - Installing content blockers on web browsers - Set up a PiHole - On Android, you could switch to an alternative App Store like F-Droid I suggest these sorts of thing only because these projects, while very admirable, are years away from being viable alternatives. Most smartphone users outside the technically inclined would absolutely not make the trade-offs required to live with something like a Librem or even giving up Google Play on LineageOS. The other issue I take with articles like this is that they fail to understand the value that data collection can provide to consumers as well. A lot of useful features actually depend on using your data. The assumption that the consumer is unhappy about this trade-off is not necessarily correct. A great example of that concept is how Google and Apple use aggregated location information to determine traffic conditions. This is a highly useful feature to most smartphone owners. It would be impossible to implement without collecting location data. That’s just one example of many. In many ways the utility of the smartphone outshines the personal computer precisely because it can gather more data from more sensors to be put to use. Fighting Apple and Google with alternatives is a losing battle if you ask me - privacy will never be protected until strong regulations with real teeth become universal. In reality, there will never be more than two smartphone operating systems that any significant number of the public use. If you don’t believe me just look to the personal computer world - in 30 years has any operating system gained any more traction than Windows or macOS? Sure, Desktop Linux is more usable and popular than ever, but the fact remains that 95%+ of the general population still doesn’t use it. While me and my technically inclined friends can finally use Linux as a daily driver and even play AAA commercial video games on it, something of a pipe dream 10 years ago, that doesn’t help the 90% of people that are still on Windows. That desktop computing situation is a lot like the future of smartphones - Apple and Google aren’t going anywhere. That’s why I say that regulations and laws are going to be the only way to reign in mass data collection, because getting people to switch to alternatives will never be more than 5% effective.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  > I wish the article was a little more technically competent. It leaves out a lot of other important projects in this space like PinePhone, LineageOS, and even the proprietary alternative of Sailfish. The article, submitted by u/indidea (Gael Duval) [0], sounds like a PR piece for eelo aka https://e.foundation/ https://e.foundation/ which was subject to controversy not long ago [1]. Both https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ and https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ are comparable alternatives, though /e/ really aims to go "full-stack" and comes pre-configured with alternative cloud-services to Google's. [0] https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/ https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21075675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21075675
  - dangus 7y ago
    Thanks for pointing this out!
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    I really wish /e/ would give more credit to the https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ project whose work they're piggybacking on. It's great they're trying to package this stuff and add a layer of consumer-friendly gloss, but it's frankly rude to not acknowledge key FLOSS contributions that make their work possible.
- MisterTea 7y ago
  > Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps Google dark patterns make this a no-go. I have multiple locations stored on my Google maps. With location history turned off I was fine until a few months ago when maps told me in order to access that data I need to turn location history back on. So google cripples their software unless you turn on tracking.
  - Iolaum 7y ago
    This. Google maps becomes quite hostile&annoying to use if you deny that data access.
josefresco 7y ago
Link to the Librem 5 product page: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- Siecje 7y ago
  Can the Librem 5 phone make calls yet?
  - blendergeek 7y ago
    Yes. It has been able to for quite some time. https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/1212511969070239744 https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/121251196907...
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
If they can come up with a "Play Store" that developers can drop in ungoogled versions of their official apps, that would be killer.
- uncletammy 7y ago
  I think you're looking for this: https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/
  - ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
    The store I'm suggesting would contain commercial, non FOSS apps as well. There are some apps I use that will probably never be open source and there's no website version either. For wider adoption, I think this would be necessary. Otherwise these phones will always remain a niche product.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      FlatHub has commercial, proprietary apps in Flatpak sandbox format. It's generally targeted at "desktop" users, but the Flatpak sandbox ought to work just as easily on mobile devices based on mainline Linux, including the Purism phone.
    - FalconSensei 7y ago
      Agree I can install f-droid, but I would still need the play store for most things...
- prophesi 7y ago
  It's been in early development for ages, but MicroG's degoogled Play Store may fit the bill. https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ I could see there being a filter for apps without google dependencies. That said, I think F-Droid is still the better choice. If the source isn't open, then it'll be hard to prove that the apps aren't degoogled in the first place.
  - 7y ago
teekert 7y ago
They could have mentioned https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
xfitm3 7y ago
As someone who spent some time in the mobile industry the telecom operators are the greatest barrier to overcome in these situations. They're quite inflexible. When I was involved in a phone project we were provided a firmware blob for the baseband and it had DMA to the main processor. We did quite a bit of RF fuzzing and well, the results are what you would expect.
- Infernal 7y ago
  What I would expect is some snooping by the baseband - I’m curious, could you expand further on your techniques or findings?
ThePhysicist 7y ago
Ars Technica recently tested the current version of the Purism Libre: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands-on-a-proof-of-concept-for-the-open-source-smartphone/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands... It seems that it's still more a prototype than a functioning phone, where even basic functionality like replying to a SMS is not implemented yet. That's not really surprising or discouraging though, it's simply a lot of software that you have to reimplement, so even attaining feature parity with current phones seems quite difficult with this approach. I think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem, fighting back with technology will not work. Taking aside the usability issues I think these initiatives are fantastic though and while I don't think they will replace current smartphones they might find unexpected markets that can benefit from the open approach. For example, I think an affordable, fully open mobile computing device could become as successful as the Raspberry Pi and provide a great platform for many innovative, data-driven mobile applications.
- dmos62 7y ago
  > think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem I agree, and I'd add that that's because there isn't much money in privacy at the moment, and there's a lot of money in violating privacy. And, that's probably because there's too many people who don't understand privacy in technology, or don't consider it a priority. I think that regulation can't come soon enough. Anyone who helps privacy and tech politics move faster is a hero.
  - ThePhysicist 7y ago
    Yes, I think there's a trend (maybe fake, I hope real) that people become more savvy in respect to privacy. As the article says, 70 % of people say they learned more about privacy last year. We can already see the first large corporations that use this for their marketing (though with mixed real committments I'd say), and I think more will follow. Also, there are so many privacy legislations now and more are coming, not only in the EU but also in other parts of the world. It's a real problem and it will get more prevalent the more data we collect. I think we're only at the beginning of the data-driven economy and there's still so much potential for harnessing data to improve things, but we have to ensure the security of the data and the privacy of the persons that it belongs to.
me551ah 7y ago
It is really hard to beat apple and Google due to their app stores. Windows phone wasn't bad but it lost the market badly because of lack of apps. Any new phone OS is going to lack the apps which people are used to and won't sell. Devs won't make apps for a platform until it has users. It's a classic chicken and egg problem which is very hard to solve.
- jarjoura 7y ago
  I'd argue that Windows Phone was poorly executed on Microsoft's part due to redoing the OS 3 times in its short lifecycle. Every redoing forced developers to rewrite their apps in the new platform. Then Microsoft couldn't get cell phone makers to commit to updates leaving a splattering of versions that supported only subsets of features all over the place. Initially the phone had a following and if Microsoft built that following up, developers would have jumped on board.
- tsycho 7y ago
  This is the killer moat. It's hard enough to build a competent app for 2 app stores and make any money, that developers have no time/energy to build for a third one. Microsoft screwed up badly while they still had the chance by changing paradigms rapidly. They (correctly) tried to pay developers to build apps for them, since you don't really need a million apps, you just need the top 30 to work. The problem was that Google owns many of these top 30 and they weren't interested in helping Microsoft obviously. You can't have a winning mobile platform without YouTube, Maps, and for many, Photos/Gmail/Translate.
- nicolaslem 7y ago
  Except a handful of them, most of the apps in the Play store are barely more than spyware disguised as applications. I can see not having them as a feature. On the other hand the Librem 5 can apparently install the 60000 packages Debian supports, all of them respecting the user out of the box.
- deltron3030 7y ago
  It's dumb to target the same market, everybody. This ship has sailed. It doesn't mean that there isn't subset of a market for privacy/security enthusiasts (purism), or for productivity people and digital minimalists who could do with one app like Notion and maybe email.
xthreen 7y ago
These boutique type phones are cute, but they really only serve as a bell-weather on how much consumers are interested in privacy-enabled or unGoogled mobile devices. Between either having to wait 6 months, or pay $2k USD you're I find it unlikely that Librem/Purism will make turn the consumer market toward privacy/security.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  Is choose the privacy/security focused phone if they were as good as a mid range android. They're not even close to that but hopefully they'll catch up soon. Can't see Librem or Purism being the ones to do it though tbh
supernova87a 7y ago
It's hard to imagine that even a smartphone platform dedicated to privacy will be able to out perform the resources of Google, Apple who have entire groups working on solely that problem. Unless the point is to lock down the phone so strictly that no info can leak or be taken off the phone. That's simple. But that would make a phone that's practically useless for everyday personal use except if you're a paranoid spy. I guess the need to have privacy and security while offering users some level of reasonable usability through 3rd party apps is why Google and Apple are succeeding in the face of such privacy focused startups.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Google will at best deliver you privacy against everyone but Google.
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    Which is not at all considering their business model is to prostitute your data to the highest bidder.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  If anything, I would expect just the opposite. Keeping hardware the same, a degoogled AOSP rom handily outperforms the stock OS wrt. battery life and general performance/resource use, in a way that actually matters to average users. Of course it's harder to make such claims about Apple devices, since they're limited to running iOS.
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  > Unless the point is to lock down the phone so strictly that no info can leak or be taken off the phone. That's simple. But that would make a phone that's practically useless for everyday personal use except if you're a paranoid spy. Agree! In the end, people want to use their phones to socialize online, share pics, use maps, check weather, sync files and photos to the cloud. When you remove too much, and make the entry barrier too high, people will just ignore it.
WhyNotHugo 7y ago
Honestly, the killers are Google Photos and Google Maps. Google Photos lets me back up photos from my phone AND copy them to my PC. I haven't found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop (unless you use macOS). Since they already handle my photos, I might as well use it for backups. And Google Maps is pretty uncontested when it comes to moving around. Apple Maps doesn't even have a "biking" option (in a country where > 90% of the population bike everywhere, that's a killer).
- arriu 7y ago
  Agreed, but... check out the following app https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments I use it in conjunction with Google Photos as a secondary back-up of the original photos (to the local drive and a thrid-party cloud back-up)
- intopieces 7y ago
  >I haven’t found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop (unless you use macOS). iMazing does this, and is available for MacOS and Windows. https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-transfer-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-photos-to-your-mac-or-pc-computer https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-transfer-iphone-ipad-or-ip...
- hello_moto 7y ago
  Sorry stupid question: how do you copy the photos from G-Photos to your PC? Through Google Drive?
  - datguacdoh 7y ago
    https://photos.google.com/apps https://photos.google.com/apps - they have a utility for Mac and Windows called Backup and Sync.
    - beatgammit 7y ago
      What about Linux? The draw for many of these Linux phones is that they run Linux, so tools work the same between them. I've used third party utilities for mounting GDrive locally, but they're kind of a pain to use and aren't official by any stretch of the imagination. All of my personal computers run Linux exclusively, and only my wife's desktop runs Windows in our house, so Google Photos doesn't mean much to me.
Aaronstotle 7y ago
I think if someone could find a way to make an iOS compatible operating system (e.g. Current iOS applications could be built & run on the system with little modification), then it would be a huge hit. Not sure of the legal implications, for de facto reverse engineering, but it would at least put out another option.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  It's legal, but binary blobs are not compatible with privacy first approach. And it's a lot of work to reverse engineer and build such compatibility.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  This sounds a bit like what osmeta was doing–although it was ironically acquired by Facebook…
- ampdepolymerase 7y ago
  Correlium, currently being sued by Apple.
- oscargrouch 7y ago
  I dont think this is a good idea, because it would need a lot of cash and man-hours to burn just to have a mediocre finished mockup at the end. Microsoft had a better approach once, still expensive/buggy, but at least more doable, which was adapting the various iOS kits and calling back window primitives in the backend. And yet, they abandoned because its also a bad move in the sense that nobody will care about your platform if they just need to target iOS. You will be doomed and have to chase and implement everything they do in iOS, even if it doesnt make sense, and nobody will care about your platform. You will also end with more bugs and application crashes, so your platform will be seing as something inferior to Apple (emphasizing the "nobody cares about you" effect) By the way, Blackberry took that route by implementing Android and we can see how nobody cares about Blackberry as an app platform, because in the end you know they will have to follow Android. For me the only way to get out of this trap, is to have a distinct platform, that for some reason, people want to develop for it. I mean, the web did this trick once, Linux is also doing this. Its doable, but its a lot of hard work and community effort based a lot in other goals other than cash. Another way to do this trick, is to create a consortium, and to create some base API, inspired by iOS, Android and the Web, and to have a lot of industry leaders onboard. They would need to finance the prototype or the reference implementation on top of something like Linux. It was tried with Tizen, but given it was more of a Samsumg project without community to drive it forward it failed. Also, i dont think it can compete with Android and iOS in platform quality.. so this probably was also one of the reasons they have failed.
gentleman11 7y ago
Exciting times to live in with multiple privacy focused smartphones in development: we have /e/, purisms librem, and The pinephone. If just one of them succeeds enough to get to gen 3 or 4, the whole industry will be dramatically better
JohnFen 7y ago
> Rankin warned that tech giants were now "redefining the word "privacy" in their own marketing." While they may claim to protect it, what they really want is to protect privacy from their competitors, he added. "They add security measures to their software and services so only they can capture, view and sell all of your data and others can't." I've been making this case for over a year now, and I'm very pleased to see someone else making it too. It's an incredibly important point that not enough people are bringing up.
- open-source-ux 7y ago
  The tech giants redefined the word "privacy" years ago. How did they get away with it? Quite simply because the tech community let them get away with it. When it comes to privacy, the tech community is full of contradictions and double-standards. Too many people in the field view privacy solely through the lens of security i.e. if your data is securely held and never leaked that is good enough - no matter how much data is captured. This suits the tech giants very well. In fact, it appears to be how many of these tech giants view privacy themselves. Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Questions about how much data is held about users, or how relentless is the level of tracking are rarely raised. (Until some of that user data gets leaked and we get a glimpse of the sheer volume of data held.) Another example: the language around tracking users. It's purposefully worded to sound benign or neutral: telemetry, analytics, web beacons, logging. We don't challenge the use of this language - we gladly use it ourselves.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I agree (obviously, I suppose). > Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Privacy is not the same as security, and I agree that you can't have privacy without security. I also think that you can't have security without privacy. This is part of why the argument that some companies make about how securely they're holding our data is a nonstarter for me. That form of security only comes into play after the first form of security: preventing the unauthorized data collection. If the companies don't have my data, then their security practices around how they protect my data don't matter.

135 points by indidea 7y ago

I like a lot the LibreM but I don't consider it a viable option for a use in the real world. On the other hand, the /e/ smartphone is doing a great world to keep me out of the Google ecosystem, and I'm very impressed how far they go on this aspect, even removing call to Google server during connectivity checks, replacing Google NTP servers by NTP pool servers. I don't know any other Android custom ROM doing this.

Iolaum 7y ago
Maybe because the actual privacy benefit for this change is negligible? (Or so I 've been told).
paulcarroty 7y ago
> even removing call to Google server during connectivity checks, replacing Google NTP servers by NTP pool servers. And audit all android code & third-party apps.

dangus 7y ago

I wish the article was a little more technically competent. It leaves out a lot of other important projects in this space like PinePhone, LineageOS, and even the proprietary alternative of Sailfish. I also take issue with a lot of articles talking about data collection as the boogeyman without actually explaining how data collection happens and how to minimize it. You don’t have to actually get rid of Apple or Google, which can massively handicap the usability of your device, to gain some semblance of privacy. There are a lot of simple changes to be made: - Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps - Auditing Google/Apple/social media account privacy settings - Make sure you’re on a recent/the latest Android version - Audit and minimize app permissions - Uninstall apps that you don’t need or have web alternatives - Installing content blockers on web browsers - Set up a PiHole - On Android, you could switch to an alternative App Store like F-Droid I suggest these sorts of thing only because these projects, while very admirable, are years away from being viable alternatives. Most smartphone users outside the technically inclined would absolutely not make the trade-offs required to live with something like a Librem or even giving up Google Play on LineageOS. The other issue I take with articles like this is that they fail to understand the value that data collection can provide to consumers as well. A lot of useful features actually depend on using your data. The assumption that the consumer is unhappy about this trade-off is not necessarily correct. A great example of that concept is how Google and Apple use aggregated location information to determine traffic conditions. This is a highly useful feature to most smartphone owners. It would be impossible to implement without collecting location data. That’s just one example of many. In many ways the utility of the smartphone outshines the personal computer precisely because it can gather more data from more sensors to be put to use. Fighting Apple and Google with alternatives is a losing battle if you ask me - privacy will never be protected until strong regulations with real teeth become universal. In reality, there will never be more than two smartphone operating systems that any significant number of the public use. If you don’t believe me just look to the personal computer world - in 30 years has any operating system gained any more traction than Windows or macOS? Sure, Desktop Linux is more usable and popular than ever, but the fact remains that 95%+ of the general population still doesn’t use it. While me and my technically inclined friends can finally use Linux as a daily driver and even play AAA commercial video games on it, something of a pipe dream 10 years ago, that doesn’t help the 90% of people that are still on Windows. That desktop computing situation is a lot like the future of smartphones - Apple and Google aren’t going anywhere. That’s why I say that regulations and laws are going to be the only way to reign in mass data collection, because getting people to switch to alternatives will never be more than 5% effective.

ignoramous 7y ago
> I wish the article was a little more technically competent. It leaves out a lot of other important projects in this space like PinePhone, LineageOS, and even the proprietary alternative of Sailfish. The article, submitted by u/indidea (Gael Duval) [0], sounds like a PR piece for eelo aka https://e.foundation/ https://e.foundation/ which was subject to controversy not long ago [1]. Both https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ and https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ are comparable alternatives, though /e/ really aims to go "full-stack" and comes pre-configured with alternative cloud-services to Google's. [0] https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/ https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21075675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21075675
- dangus 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out!
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  I really wish /e/ would give more credit to the https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ project whose work they're piggybacking on. It's great they're trying to package this stuff and add a layer of consumer-friendly gloss, but it's frankly rude to not acknowledge key FLOSS contributions that make their work possible.
MisterTea 7y ago
> Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps Google dark patterns make this a no-go. I have multiple locations stored on my Google maps. With location history turned off I was fine until a few months ago when maps told me in order to access that data I need to turn location history back on. So google cripples their software unless you turn on tracking.
- Iolaum 7y ago
  This. Google maps becomes quite hostile&annoying to use if you deny that data access.

josefresco 7y ago

Link to the Librem 5 product page: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

Siecje 7y ago
Can the Librem 5 phone make calls yet?
- blendergeek 7y ago
  Yes. It has been able to for quite some time. https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/1212511969070239744 https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/121251196907...

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

If they can come up with a "Play Store" that developers can drop in ungoogled versions of their official apps, that would be killer.

uncletammy 7y ago
I think you're looking for this: https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  The store I'm suggesting would contain commercial, non FOSS apps as well. There are some apps I use that will probably never be open source and there's no website version either. For wider adoption, I think this would be necessary. Otherwise these phones will always remain a niche product.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    FlatHub has commercial, proprietary apps in Flatpak sandbox format. It's generally targeted at "desktop" users, but the Flatpak sandbox ought to work just as easily on mobile devices based on mainline Linux, including the Purism phone.
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    Agree I can install f-droid, but I would still need the play store for most things...
prophesi 7y ago
It's been in early development for ages, but MicroG's degoogled Play Store may fit the bill. https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ I could see there being a filter for apps without google dependencies. That said, I think F-Droid is still the better choice. If the source isn't open, then it'll be hard to prove that the apps aren't degoogled in the first place.
- 7y ago

teekert 7y ago

They could have mentioned https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

xfitm3 7y ago

As someone who spent some time in the mobile industry the telecom operators are the greatest barrier to overcome in these situations. They're quite inflexible. When I was involved in a phone project we were provided a firmware blob for the baseband and it had DMA to the main processor. We did quite a bit of RF fuzzing and well, the results are what you would expect.

Infernal 7y ago
What I would expect is some snooping by the baseband - I’m curious, could you expand further on your techniques or findings?

ThePhysicist 7y ago

Ars Technica recently tested the current version of the Purism Libre: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands-on-a-proof-of-concept-for-the-open-source-smartphone/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands... It seems that it's still more a prototype than a functioning phone, where even basic functionality like replying to a SMS is not implemented yet. That's not really surprising or discouraging though, it's simply a lot of software that you have to reimplement, so even attaining feature parity with current phones seems quite difficult with this approach. I think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem, fighting back with technology will not work. Taking aside the usability issues I think these initiatives are fantastic though and while I don't think they will replace current smartphones they might find unexpected markets that can benefit from the open approach. For example, I think an affordable, fully open mobile computing device could become as successful as the Raspberry Pi and provide a great platform for many innovative, data-driven mobile applications.

dmos62 7y ago
> think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem I agree, and I'd add that that's because there isn't much money in privacy at the moment, and there's a lot of money in violating privacy. And, that's probably because there's too many people who don't understand privacy in technology, or don't consider it a priority. I think that regulation can't come soon enough. Anyone who helps privacy and tech politics move faster is a hero.
- ThePhysicist 7y ago
  Yes, I think there's a trend (maybe fake, I hope real) that people become more savvy in respect to privacy. As the article says, 70 % of people say they learned more about privacy last year. We can already see the first large corporations that use this for their marketing (though with mixed real committments I'd say), and I think more will follow. Also, there are so many privacy legislations now and more are coming, not only in the EU but also in other parts of the world. It's a real problem and it will get more prevalent the more data we collect. I think we're only at the beginning of the data-driven economy and there's still so much potential for harnessing data to improve things, but we have to ensure the security of the data and the privacy of the persons that it belongs to.

me551ah 7y ago

It is really hard to beat apple and Google due to their app stores. Windows phone wasn't bad but it lost the market badly because of lack of apps. Any new phone OS is going to lack the apps which people are used to and won't sell. Devs won't make apps for a platform until it has users. It's a classic chicken and egg problem which is very hard to solve.

jarjoura 7y ago
I'd argue that Windows Phone was poorly executed on Microsoft's part due to redoing the OS 3 times in its short lifecycle. Every redoing forced developers to rewrite their apps in the new platform. Then Microsoft couldn't get cell phone makers to commit to updates leaving a splattering of versions that supported only subsets of features all over the place. Initially the phone had a following and if Microsoft built that following up, developers would have jumped on board.
tsycho 7y ago
This is the killer moat. It's hard enough to build a competent app for 2 app stores and make any money, that developers have no time/energy to build for a third one. Microsoft screwed up badly while they still had the chance by changing paradigms rapidly. They (correctly) tried to pay developers to build apps for them, since you don't really need a million apps, you just need the top 30 to work. The problem was that Google owns many of these top 30 and they weren't interested in helping Microsoft obviously. You can't have a winning mobile platform without YouTube, Maps, and for many, Photos/Gmail/Translate.
nicolaslem 7y ago
Except a handful of them, most of the apps in the Play store are barely more than spyware disguised as applications. I can see not having them as a feature. On the other hand the Librem 5 can apparently install the 60000 packages Debian supports, all of them respecting the user out of the box.
deltron3030 7y ago
It's dumb to target the same market, everybody. This ship has sailed. It doesn't mean that there isn't subset of a market for privacy/security enthusiasts (purism), or for productivity people and digital minimalists who could do with one app like Notion and maybe email.

xthreen 7y ago

These boutique type phones are cute, but they really only serve as a bell-weather on how much consumers are interested in privacy-enabled or unGoogled mobile devices. Between either having to wait 6 months, or pay $2k USD you're I find it unlikely that Librem/Purism will make turn the consumer market toward privacy/security.

rorykoehler 7y ago
Is choose the privacy/security focused phone if they were as good as a mid range android. They're not even close to that but hopefully they'll catch up soon. Can't see Librem or Purism being the ones to do it though tbh

supernova87a 7y ago

It's hard to imagine that even a smartphone platform dedicated to privacy will be able to out perform the resources of Google, Apple who have entire groups working on solely that problem. Unless the point is to lock down the phone so strictly that no info can leak or be taken off the phone. That's simple. But that would make a phone that's practically useless for everyday personal use except if you're a paranoid spy. I guess the need to have privacy and security while offering users some level of reasonable usability through 3rd party apps is why Google and Apple are succeeding in the face of such privacy focused startups.

pjc50 7y ago
Google will at best deliver you privacy against everyone but Google.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  Which is not at all considering their business model is to prostitute your data to the highest bidder.
zozbot234 7y ago
If anything, I would expect just the opposite. Keeping hardware the same, a degoogled AOSP rom handily outperforms the stock OS wrt. battery life and general performance/resource use, in a way that actually matters to average users. Of course it's harder to make such claims about Apple devices, since they're limited to running iOS.
FalconSensei 7y ago
> Unless the point is to lock down the phone so strictly that no info can leak or be taken off the phone. That's simple. But that would make a phone that's practically useless for everyday personal use except if you're a paranoid spy. Agree! In the end, people want to use their phones to socialize online, share pics, use maps, check weather, sync files and photos to the cloud. When you remove too much, and make the entry barrier too high, people will just ignore it.

WhyNotHugo 7y ago

Honestly, the killers are Google Photos and Google Maps. Google Photos lets me back up photos from my phone AND copy them to my PC. I haven't found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop (unless you use macOS). Since they already handle my photos, I might as well use it for backups. And Google Maps is pretty uncontested when it comes to moving around. Apple Maps doesn't even have a "biking" option (in a country where > 90% of the population bike everywhere, that's a killer).

arriu 7y ago
Agreed, but... check out the following app https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments I use it in conjunction with Google Photos as a secondary back-up of the original photos (to the local drive and a thrid-party cloud back-up)
intopieces 7y ago
>I haven’t found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop (unless you use macOS). iMazing does this, and is available for MacOS and Windows. https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-transfer-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-photos-to-your-mac-or-pc-computer https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-transfer-iphone-ipad-or-ip...
hello_moto 7y ago
Sorry stupid question: how do you copy the photos from G-Photos to your PC? Through Google Drive?
- datguacdoh 7y ago
  https://photos.google.com/apps https://photos.google.com/apps - they have a utility for Mac and Windows called Backup and Sync.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    What about Linux? The draw for many of these Linux phones is that they run Linux, so tools work the same between them. I've used third party utilities for mounting GDrive locally, but they're kind of a pain to use and aren't official by any stretch of the imagination. All of my personal computers run Linux exclusively, and only my wife's desktop runs Windows in our house, so Google Photos doesn't mean much to me.

Aaronstotle 7y ago

I think if someone could find a way to make an iOS compatible operating system (e.g. Current iOS applications could be built & run on the system with little modification), then it would be a huge hit. Not sure of the legal implications, for de facto reverse engineering, but it would at least put out another option.

zzzcpan 7y ago
It's legal, but binary blobs are not compatible with privacy first approach. And it's a lot of work to reverse engineer and build such compatibility.
saagarjha 7y ago
This sounds a bit like what osmeta was doing–although it was ironically acquired by Facebook…
ampdepolymerase 7y ago
Correlium, currently being sued by Apple.
oscargrouch 7y ago
I dont think this is a good idea, because it would need a lot of cash and man-hours to burn just to have a mediocre finished mockup at the end. Microsoft had a better approach once, still expensive/buggy, but at least more doable, which was adapting the various iOS kits and calling back window primitives in the backend. And yet, they abandoned because its also a bad move in the sense that nobody will care about your platform if they just need to target iOS. You will be doomed and have to chase and implement everything they do in iOS, even if it doesnt make sense, and nobody will care about your platform. You will also end with more bugs and application crashes, so your platform will be seing as something inferior to Apple (emphasizing the "nobody cares about you" effect) By the way, Blackberry took that route by implementing Android and we can see how nobody cares about Blackberry as an app platform, because in the end you know they will have to follow Android. For me the only way to get out of this trap, is to have a distinct platform, that for some reason, people want to develop for it. I mean, the web did this trick once, Linux is also doing this. Its doable, but its a lot of hard work and community effort based a lot in other goals other than cash. Another way to do this trick, is to create a consortium, and to create some base API, inspired by iOS, Android and the Web, and to have a lot of industry leaders onboard. They would need to finance the prototype or the reference implementation on top of something like Linux. It was tried with Tizen, but given it was more of a Samsumg project without community to drive it forward it failed. Also, i dont think it can compete with Android and iOS in platform quality.. so this probably was also one of the reasons they have failed.

gentleman11 7y ago

Exciting times to live in with multiple privacy focused smartphones in development: we have /e/, purisms librem, and The pinephone. If just one of them succeeds enough to get to gen 3 or 4, the whole industry will be dramatically better

JohnFen 7y ago

> Rankin warned that tech giants were now "redefining the word "privacy" in their own marketing." While they may claim to protect it, what they really want is to protect privacy from their competitors, he added. "They add security measures to their software and services so only they can capture, view and sell all of your data and others can't." I've been making this case for over a year now, and I'm very pleased to see someone else making it too. It's an incredibly important point that not enough people are bringing up.

open-source-ux 7y ago
The tech giants redefined the word "privacy" years ago. How did they get away with it? Quite simply because the tech community let them get away with it. When it comes to privacy, the tech community is full of contradictions and double-standards. Too many people in the field view privacy solely through the lens of security i.e. if your data is securely held and never leaked that is good enough - no matter how much data is captured. This suits the tech giants very well. In fact, it appears to be how many of these tech giants view privacy themselves. Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Questions about how much data is held about users, or how relentless is the level of tracking are rarely raised. (Until some of that user data gets leaked and we get a glimpse of the sheer volume of data held.) Another example: the language around tracking users. It's purposefully worded to sound benign or neutral: telemetry, analytics, web beacons, logging. We don't challenge the use of this language - we gladly use it ourselves.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I agree (obviously, I suppose). > Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Privacy is not the same as security, and I agree that you can't have privacy without security. I also think that you can't have security without privacy. This is part of why the argument that some companies make about how securely they're holding our data is a nonstarter for me. That form of security only comes into play after the first form of security: preventing the unauthorized data collection. If the companies don't have my data, then their security practices around how they protect my data don't matter.