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Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face. Re

Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face. Really, the problem is that phone manufacturers want to be where the apps are, and app developers barely keep it together making native apps for the two dominant OSes. Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work, because the ugly truth is that no one is going to hire a full third team to develop for another OS that's just starting out.

josephcsible 5y ago
> Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the device is running an official, unmodified Android build, and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run otherwise.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow. I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and custom ROMs work otherwise? I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Magisk can fake them for now, but only because Google still supports some pre-TrustZone phones. On newer phones, you can't fake TrustZone, and eventually older phones will just always fail SafetyNet.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      That sucks. If this is what the future holds for Android, I think I'm just gonna switch to Apple already. There's no point to Android if Google insists on destroying everything that made it great.
      - josephcsible 5y ago
        No, don't! For as bad as Google is being, Apple is being worse on basically every axis.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Yeah, for now. Android is barely open source anymore, the old apps were replaced with proprietary Google stuff. The Play Store locks everybody into Google's proprietary ecosystem and it can't be legally distributed with custom Androids. Now there's this hardware attestation business that ensures we can't hack our devices and apps anymore. I bet one day we won't even be able to install unsigned apps anymore. It's all so tiresome.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  SafetyNet makes it impossible to run most Android apps on Linux using a container-based solution like Anbox. SafetyNet is also stifling innovation. Linux/*BSD/macOS can run many Windows apps without emulation via WINE, and those innovations allowed Steam to create potentially billions of dollars in value by making many of their games cross-platform with Proton, and allowed them to create new products like the Steam Deck. SafetyNet precludes ever creating value like that with mobile apps. Although they use emulation in WSL 2, Microsoft has done something similar with WSL and Linux apps, creating an untold amount of value for not only their platform, but for millions of developers, as well. SafetyNet prevents using something like WSL to run mobile apps on Windows. For those reasons, you can't build an alternative OS and run many Android apps on them with a compatibility layer, despite apps without SafetyNet working pretty well using compatibility layers like Anbox.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face." Google had a hand in that, though, by intentionally blocking interoperability with YouTube and other Google services for WP. Even back then they were willing to play dirty to keep their monopoly.
- bognition 5y ago
  With hundreds of billions of profits on the line this shouldn’t be surprising. The only thing a business cares about is profits. Everything else is branding.

josephcsible 5y ago

> Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the device is running an official, unmodified Android build, and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run otherwise.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow. I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and custom ROMs work otherwise? I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Magisk can fake them for now, but only because Google still supports some pre-TrustZone phones. On newer phones, you can't fake TrustZone, and eventually older phones will just always fail SafetyNet.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    That sucks. If this is what the future holds for Android, I think I'm just gonna switch to Apple already. There's no point to Android if Google insists on destroying everything that made it great.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      No, don't! For as bad as Google is being, Apple is being worse on basically every axis.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Yeah, for now. Android is barely open source anymore, the old apps were replaced with proprietary Google stuff. The Play Store locks everybody into Google's proprietary ecosystem and it can't be legally distributed with custom Androids. Now there's this hardware attestation business that ensures we can't hack our devices and apps anymore. I bet one day we won't even be able to install unsigned apps anymore. It's all so tiresome.
heavyset_go 5y ago
SafetyNet makes it impossible to run most Android apps on Linux using a container-based solution like Anbox. SafetyNet is also stifling innovation. Linux/*BSD/macOS can run many Windows apps without emulation via WINE, and those innovations allowed Steam to create potentially billions of dollars in value by making many of their games cross-platform with Proton, and allowed them to create new products like the Steam Deck. SafetyNet precludes ever creating value like that with mobile apps. Although they use emulation in WSL 2, Microsoft has done something similar with WSL and Linux apps, creating an untold amount of value for not only their platform, but for millions of developers, as well. SafetyNet prevents using something like WSL to run mobile apps on Windows. For those reasons, you can't build an alternative OS and run many Android apps on them with a compatibility layer, despite apps without SafetyNet working pretty well using compatibility layers like Anbox.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago

> "Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face." Google had a hand in that, though, by intentionally blocking interoperability with YouTube and other Google services for WP. Even back then they were willing to play dirty to keep their monopoly.

bognition 5y ago
With hundreds of billions of profits on the line this shouldn’t be surprising. The only thing a business cares about is profits. Everything else is branding.