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Mobifree – An open-source mobile ecosystem
- jqpabc123 2y agoproject works to give European citizens and organizations more choice Ok but why the geographical restriction?
- permanent 2y agoPerhaps because EU just passed a law for third party app stores?
- afavour 2y agoBecause European governments are passing/have passed regulations forcing big tech companies to open up their platforms. (it’s also taking funding from the EU, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re forced to cater only to EU citizens but the combination of these two factors means it makes sense to)
- rs999gti 2y ago> passed regulations forcing big tech companies More Euro governance, bleh.
- afavour 2y agoThat's a pretty reductive take. Is the European Court of Human Rights "More Euro governance, bleh"?
- its_ethan 2y agoI'm not gonna claim to know much at all about the ECHR, but this compliance graph from Wikipedia makes it look like a symbolic institution, but one that is largely ignored/ not really respected? Especially given that it's a declining trend, it seems like they may just be doing more and more political theater type stuff instead of "real" work. Anyway, it seems like it could somewhat reasonably fall under "governance bleh" depending on who you ask. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compliance_with_all_compliance-relevant_judgments_of_the_European_Court_of_Human_Rights_as_of_10_March_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compliance_with_all_compl...
- palata 2y agoHave a look at what the Digital Markets Act is, before you judge.
- _heimdall 2y agoUnless I've missed a very recent change, F-Droid isn't geographically restricted. Much of the blog post focuses on the DMA and its impact on Europe. I think the phrase you keyed in on, and really the bulk of the post, is just a marketing push for the European market and a bit of SEO trying to get keywords and phrases in there.
- wyldfire 2y agoIt's not restricted, it's a reflection of who funded the effort. The world can benefit from EU's investment here.
- jqpabc123 2y agoSo instead of "project works to give European citizens and organizations more choice" it should more accurately say "project works to give *the world* more choice"
- Grimeton 2y agoThey don't explain how they fix even one of the problems they mention at the top. Maybe I'm missing something here but this is just pure marketing bleh.
- rc_mob 2y agoyes it had all the hallmarks of an seo campaign
- 6510 2y agoI thought the same but eventually I recognized the sound of the government wheelworks of bureaucracy. The article simply explains a single thing elaborately.
- afavour 2y agoIt is marketing, yes. But it’s also announcing a brand new ecosystem that doesn’t exist yet so I’m not too surprised they don’t have in depth implementation details right now. Marketing isn’t automatically evil. If you’re starting an open source project you want people to contribute to you’re going to want to market it.
- hedora 2y agoI don’t think this ecosystem is new. Most of the projects they mention have been around 5+ years. I think this is a new funding initiative though, and I wish them luck.
- glenstein 2y agoThe first paragraph introduces the idea of a comprehensive initiative for an "all of the above" mobile ecosystem, listing out the key pieces of that ecosystem. Then there's a lot of mission statement and vision statement type things that appear to be directed at a broad audience, But then specifically they say this: >F-Droid will play a major role in this project, tasked with creating a decentralized distribution system for developers to deliver apps to Android users. It feels like that's kind of what F-droid does already (sans decentralization, unless we regard the capability of custom repos as adequate to the task). So I get the vision, I get the idea of it being under the umbrella of some broader project that's about other aspects of the mobile ecosystem such as operating systems, cloud services, and so on. I'm not sure what's different but I welcome the spirit of the initiative and I suppose that's the important thing.
- flettcher 2y ago"This project has been made possible by funding from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative: www.ngi.eu"
- nradov 2y agoEU funding is the kiss of death for technology initiatives. I can confidently predict that this will go nowhere.
- mitchitized 2y agoWhy? Do they mandate process or procedure policies that kill productive organizations, or what? I'm genuinely curious.
- nextos 2y agoI've been part of some large consortia. Generally, there is a ton of paperwork. Lots of project partners focus on filling in this paperwork to pretend they are doing something and pocket grant money. But, usually, nothing good is delivered, aside from some expensive DOCX. With that said, things are changing a bit and becoming a bit more efficient and dynamic.
- fabrice_d 2y agoThat was the case for big EU funded projects with lots of industrial + accademia participants. I worked at a place where we had people working full time on setting up proposals for these projects. This was a very political game (find partners in countries the EU wants to help this year!), and very low risk too for big partners. We were usually "selling" stuff that had been done already, and the new funding was used to work on new stuff. That meant we could always show successful projects, which in turn helped getting new funding - rinse and repeat. NGI is different, they seem to focus more on funding individuals and open source projects with relatively small grants. This has good and bad sides of course - a more level playing field, but makes it still difficult for projects that require long term work.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoAt this point the access points and the global data and surveillance system is too complicated and interconnected to dis-intermediate the access point and the network itself That is to say you cannot even connect to IP addresses unless you’re already part of the global whitelist for APs Try yourself. Get a VPN and then connect from certain regions and to won’t get very far and you’ll be slooooow You’ll say, oh, that’s because bad actors and are therefore blacklisted - and now you’re back to the same problem: their resource is being limited by some social structure that is by definition constrained You cannot differentiate the broader system from the access point, so long as the system controls which access point access then it doesn’t matter what you do The only solution is to build an entirely new Internet from scratch, not controlled by the people currently google, amazon, cloud flare, respective ISPs, Netflix, etc… The Internet is 99% controlled by a small set of corporations that most people haven’t heard of Just try launching a competitive DNS service and see how far you get
- spacebanana7 2y agoIt all depends what your privacy threat model is. There are very few organisations capable of identifying the human user behind a Mullvad connection with a VM. If you're worried about local law enforcement or advertisers it's probably enough.
- hughesjj 2y agoI'm more worried about future shakeouts and the end of anonymity, one ASN at a time. We're currently relying on AS' who 'play ball' with anonymous users, but that's not a requirement for AS operators by any means.
- sanroot99 2y agoIsp often sell data, ip can be deanonymized by buying data from different data brokers and triangulating the ip.
- sneilan1 2y ago> The Internet is 99% controlled by a small set of corporations that most people haven’t heard of I would love to know more if you have time to elaborate.
- rvz 2y ago[flagged]
- boxed 2y agoIsn't this just an android distro though? So just supporting the Google side.
- adamomada 2y agoI think it’s just alternate app distribution on existing devices. I get it that you have to choose one or the other, and it does make sense since f-droid has a bunch of open-source apps available already. They just need to work on the hardware and operating system now
- boxed 2y agoI mean... there are open source apps on the iOS app store too. I have several for example: https://kodare.net/apps.html https://kodare.net/apps.html
- talldayo 2y agoYou should consider actually trying it, before you confidently write it off. F-Droid is amazing and the single-greatest force keeping me off the official Google Play and YouTube apps. I don't suffer through ad-enabled PDF readers or subscription-service native apps; it's all just free software, and it beats the pants off every other mobile software store I've ever used. It is actually that good.
- c-fe 2y agoI wish them success ... but with a website that looks like this I doubt their engineering efforts. https://mobifree.org https://mobifree.org (screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/TITC9bN https://imgur.com/a/TITC9bN )
- smileson2 2y ago[dead]
- veqq 2y agoI agree. It's a far cry from the greats' HTML 2 comparability.
- ssivark 2y agoWhat about this website indicates low quality engineering?
- bogwog 2y agoHN is mostly web developers I think, so they tend to look at everything through one particular lens
- jillesvangurp 2y agoI asked chat gpt to criticize a screenshot of this website. I wont paste the full response here, people can do this themselves. But very briefly, it had a lot to say about inconsistent spacing, typography, use of colors, images, etc. In short, this is not a great website, to put it mildly. I'm not even close to being a good designer but I've seen good designers make a difference. And nobody that I would qualify as such was involved with this website. Tiny serif fonts, yellow on white CTA, etc. It all makes a bit of an amateurish impression. And that suggests the rest of the thing also might need a bit of work. I glanced through both the article and the website and it seems all a bit waffly and aspirational at this point and raises more questions than it answers. A lot of good intentions, preaching the virtues of OSS, etc. But not a lot of actionable information for someone that might want to take the logical next step of getting this on their phone. The CTA just leads to a "free your phone" section without links or useful information. It suggest twelve organizations are involved (who?) and lists some shared values. That's it. Not very encouraging.
- izacus 2y agoI can't figure out what "it" actually is. This blog post reads like something AI generated - what exactly are they talking about?
- glenstein 2y agoDecentralized mobile app distribution for Android. For my part I feel perfectly clear on what the "it" is but I'm a little unclear on how it's in a different from what F-Droid already does.
- nh2 2y agoF-Droid still has some big tasks in order to be useable for the general public, when comparing it with e.g. Google Play Store. For example, if you search it for "browser", Firefox will not show up because A) It's called Fennec B) The F-Droid search seems to be exact infix search, and Fennec's title is "Fennec F-Droid -- Browse the web", in which "Browser" does not appear, only "browse". So it doesn't find it. In general, the search has no clue what a "browser" is, and cannot use it for ranking, so in practice you need to scroll a lot in F-Droid until you find what you seek.
- izacus 2y agoThat sounds like they don't even deploy something as basic as Solr to drive the search :/
- sanroot99 2y agoUse droidify a alternative fork of fdroid
- rjzzleep 2y agoDroidify is so vastly superior it’s not even close. Fdroid still has the privileged extension whereas droidify and Neodroid can use Shizuku and other options. I do think that droidify is an unfortunate naming choice though.
- smusamashah 2y agoThis still doesn't bring up Fennec if searched for 'browser'. Neo Store does.
- genpfault 2y ago> Neo Store https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.fdroid/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.fdroid/ https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Store https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Store
- 2y ago
- wicket 2y agoIt seems that Mobifree largely depends on the Android/AOSP ecosystem, which is controlled by Big Tech.
- palata 2y agoBut being open source means that one could fork AOSP. Also the Google proprietary stuff comes with the Play Services, not AOSP. So AOSP is a lot better than the alternatives, I would say. I have a different feeling about Chromium: it is open source, but through it Google gets to control the future of the Web. But Android is not a standard, it's "just" one OS, so changes made by Google in AOSP don't really impact, say, iOS.
- wicket 2y agoLet me know when the efforts of Mobifree lead to something that will allow me to install mainline Linux.
- realusername 2y ago> But Android is not a standard, it's "just" one OS, so changes made by Google in AOSP don't really impact, say, iOS. That's interesting because I personally do believe that Android is kind of the mobile standard, it has everything to be one, from the wide variety of devices to the certifications of conformity.
- palata 2y agoMuch less than Chromium, right? Almost all users run Chromium, whereas you can run iOS and it has nothing to do with the AOSP codebase.
- dhosek 2y agoI’m just thinking that the name is an invitation for Big Entertainment (in particular, LucasFilm, owned by Disney) to sue for trademark infringement since they have a trademark on “droid” (I remember seeing billboards for Android phones sold under the name “droid” back around 2010ish that had footnotes acknowledging the trademark and the licensed use of the term).
- ravenstine 2y agoDon't jynx it! ;) It would not surprise me if Disney lawyers simply have never heard of F-Droid. Given that they were willing to go after the image of Spider-man on some deceased boy's grave stone, it would not surprise me if they at least demanded some disambiguating language from F-Droid, that is if they don't outright ask them to cease and desist. Hopefully they realize it isn't worth their time.
- porcoda 2y agoBasing something around a Google OS isn’t really an alternative to big tech. Given the reaction I’d expect if a Microsoft Open Source project was the basis of an “alternative to big tech”, I don’t see why something with a Google pedigree should be treated differently.
- fisian 2y agoAnd listing microG as an opensource alternative to Google services is disingenuous. It still uses the same Google servers to make requests, just the client is open.
- zaik 2y agoIt seems like the user has a choice to configure microG to use different providers other than Google though.
- nani8ot 2y agoIt's not possible to do push notifications for proprietary apps without making some requests to Google. The location services of microG support other providers and don't use Google. microG even replaces the Google map some apps integrate with another provider, at least it did a few years ago.
- meiraleal 2y agoExpecting Microsoft to create an alternative to big tech. Did I miss the /s ?
- alabhyajindal 2y agoThe Mobifree link in the article: https://mobifree.org https://mobifree.org Looks sketchy to me. > Our values are different Why? > Big Tech: bad for people and the environment Bad for the environment how? Do they think if they operate at the same scale as big tech, they'll be able to do a better job of managing infrastructure?
- prmoustache 2y ago> Bad for the environment how? I guess this relate to smartphones being out of support way too early.
- fsflover 2y agoI prefer these mobile operating systems not dependent on the big tech: https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Software/Releases/ https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Software/Releases...
- talldayo 2y agoPeople in hell want ice water.
- butz 2y agoIt would be great to have some basic, no nonsense Android applications, with least possible permissions possible and no internet connectivity. Some examples: SMS app, tasks, calculator, authenticator (2FA), weather, audio recorder, image/photo viewer, barcode/qr code scanner, calendar, file manager, music player, etc. Small app sizes, no Kotlin or support libraries. With very limited feature set, to keep maintenance efforts low.
- lawgimenez 2y agoWhat’s wrong with Kotlin?
- butz 2y agoI just noticed that apks built with Kotlin are a bit bigger than ones written in Java. Could be my own lack of knowledge, so I would be interested to read up on how to optimize Kotlin apks in size.
- jwells89 2y agoOne issue I’ve read that devs of good, no-nonsense, telemetry-free offline-only/first apps face on the Play Store is that they get review-bombed and reported by their less scrupulous counterparts to drive more users to their ad-filled, IAP-heavy, or borderline malicious apps. This could be fixed pretty easily if Google took fraudulent reviews more seriously and their handling of reports were less automated and opaque, but they haven’t shown much interest in either.
- dvngnt_ 2y agoi feel like everything listed can be found on f-droid
- nani8ot 2y agoI just noticed your requirement for no Kotlin and libraries. I'm still posting this because they are otherwise pretty simple and solid apps. Some examples available on F-Droid I've been using for a long time: - Fossify Gallery - Fossify Calendar - Fossify File Manager - Binary Eye supports reading/creating QR/bar codes and other formats - Aegis Authenticator - Fossify Audio Recorder - Material Files supports SMB, FTP, WebDAV Fossify is the continuation of Simple Mobile Tools, which sold out out [1]. They also have Phone, SMS, Clock, Audio Recorder apps, and more but I prefer the default GrapheneOS apps. [1] https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issues/241 https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
- udev4096 2y agoI wouldn't trust anything coming from /e/ because of their horrible track record. For instance, a few years back, their cloud storage had a bug which leaked private files to other storage accounts[0] [0] https://community.e.foundation/t/service-announcement-26-may/41252/24 https://community.e.foundation/t/service-announcement-26-may...
- bogwog 2y agoThat's terrifying
- reify 2y agoI fully support this work. I actually use both Lineage and E/OS. In my experience of installing E/OS on non tech savvy users phones, it takes just a short while for them to get the hang of it. They of course still want some of the non private data collectors on their phones and thats OK. I for one am convinvced that the more users we can encourage to move over to alternative android OS's the quicker the word will spread. We must not forget that these poor people have been brainwashed into thinking there is only one way to access what they like to use and engage with online. I usually set the E/OS app store to not use open source apps and install droidify to manage those. It is of course very easy for us who have the knowledge, experience and the confidence to install new OS's on android, but we were once beginners, everyone is. Its easy for us to know the difference between Fennec and Firefox. However, Its like me asking you to tell me the difference between the Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its easy for me but not for you. Even the most tech savvy are difficult to convince: One of my friends, who used to work for IBM as an engineer back in the day wants to get a new laptop with windows 11. I said "what are you doing you muppet install linux" He is under the impression that linux has changed very little over 25 years and its all terminal, no GUI or support for things like 3D printers even though I tell him otherwise. I personally dont use F-droid anymore I use Droidify which is simpler to use especially adding repositories. It is a pain adding repo's to F-droid.
- wkat4242 2y agoNice! I see MicroG is part of this initiative too: https://mobifree.org/ https://mobifree.org/ I hope it becomes a bit more mainstream now. Some custom roms like lineage are very hostile to it because they're afraid Google will do more against them if they include it. You can't even mention it in their community or you will get kicked. It's nothing nasty though, it's just a bare minimum implementation of google play services remade in open source, withholding as much information as possible and giving you the ability to fake things like device model and attestation "safetynet". Luckily there's a fork from the microg team https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ . So this is what I normally use. But it's a great middle-ground, you can still use google push and you replace all the other parts like the location DB with privacy-conscious alternatives (though with the abolition of mozilla's wifi location database this has become harder). I'm not a fan of /e/ though, especially because of the name that makes it impossible to google anything. And they are often years behind in android versions.
- RachelF 2y agoThe main problem now with many custom ROMs is VoLTE support. Many countries are shutting down 3G networks, and many VoLTE solutions (for 4G and 5G voice) are not available in the open source ROMs.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah that sucks. The industry really screwed up those standards. The whole idea of a standard is that it's... Well standard. That it always works and you don't have to validate each device and firmware. But for me voice is no longer a big deal. I do all my calls on WhatsApp anyway.
- RealStickman_ 2y agoLineageOS recently included the patch to finally allow signature spoofing for microG. I don't think they're actively hostile and there are obviously people who support it. Afaik Lineage for microG is independent of the microG project.
- bogwog 2y agoThree chat apps. Why can't Quicksy's contact finding feature be added to Conversations instead of being a whole fork? Delta chat I kind of get why it's a separate thing since it works differently, but it still seems counter productive to have so many chat apps.
- zaik 2y ago> Why can't Quicksy's contact finding feature be added to Conversations instead of being a whole fork? Quickly is designed to have easy phone number registration and contact discovery like the currently popular walled garden chat apps. Conversations works with any XMPP address and you need to ask people for their chat address (like email).
- joh6nn 2y agoThose aren't meant to be apps representative of the Mobifree "platform", those are existing projects that have agreed to partner with Mobifree towards a common goal. They're bulletpoints in thd same list as Murena the E Foundation. As far as answering your actual question, you'd probably need to ask the project devs for Quicksy and Conversations?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kkfx 2y agoFew small notes: - we can't have privacy on mobile PERIOD. Mobile platforms are not "open" like PCs (witch are less and less open, more and more stuffed of proprietary fw, but still far less closed than mobile SoC); - we can't win Big Tech at it's game BUT we can win, and relatively easy, at OUR game, witch means self-hosted services, decentralized protocols, the hard issue it's not on sw per se but on humans who do not know nor understand that, fortunately a scam at a time people start to understand that the commercial model turned to subscription is not a good idea for them, so there is a bit of hope anyway.
- beretguy 2y ago1. Is it only available for EU citizens? 2. They/somebody needs to make a good quality android/iOS alternative that is NOT based on android and is stupid simple to install on any android and/or develop good quality affordable (< $200) smartphones to run it (some should have 4 inch diagonal screens). I tried kaios devices, I’ve got pine phone, i cannot afford anymore things like fair phone and the likes. If banks/parking meters/washing machines expect us to use smartphones somebody needs to provide us with a small, simple device that can do those things without spying on us, tracking us, selling our data, etc.
- CJefferson 2y agoWhy not based on android, out of interest? Basing on android gives you lots of driver support which would be very hard to recreate, and lots of open source apps immediately available.
- rakoo 2y agoI think the message is not clear. Mobifree is not a software stack, or a consortium, or that kind of thing. TFA and the official site make a poor job at explaining what it is. Mobifree is a grant from the EU to any open source maker. This means existing applications can do the changes everyone complains about all the time while its developers see some of their pressure relieved. New software, infrastructure can pop up for the benefit of everyone, hardware projects can iterat a few more times to make something right. Anyone can actually apply for some it through https://nlnet.nl/mobifree https://nlnet.nl/mobifree : NLNet is an NGO that has repeatedly helped and supported the floss ecosystem, but this time with a focus on mobile. You can see their sub-grant here: https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/ https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/ F-droid is the expected partner for this given they only distribute floss software by default. The grant page has maybe more information: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135795 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135795
- rasengan 2y ago> where it will be reviewed using F-Droid’s proven ethical review process. Trade one gate keeper for another. Something tells me you don’t know what decentralized means.
- teresaschneeman 2y ago[dead]
- riedel 2y agoI think what is realy missing in this consortium is a payment processor. I can already do most stuff people do with their smartphones google free (also thanks to the involved partners). However contactless payments or app micro payments are not working and are depending on google or other big tech. Really curious if the future digital euro will work on the foreseen ecosystem
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