6 ms·

We need another os in the market. A duopoly just isn't competitive enough. Too bad the cost of entry is so high.

by nabogh 1y ago

throw10920 1y ago
I agree with you idealistically, but practically, creating an entirely new mobile OS with market share competitive with the existing two is an unbelievably massive challenge. It'd probably be just about as easy to get people to care about sideloading in the first place.
- balder1991 1y ago
  The problem is moves like this will keep happening, since people don’t have much choice. Unless we bring up a societal trend of dumb phones.
  - runarberg 1y ago
    We used to have strong consumer protection advocates on both sides of the Atlantic, and those consumer protection advocates used to influence laws and regulation which forced corporations to stop doing anti-consumer stuff like this. Those days can return with enough organized labor and solidarity among the working classes.
    - calgoo 1y ago
      Yea, but you will need to organize offline because chat control will catch your terrorist messages and report you to the police. And make sure to leave the phone at home so they cant see all the phones meeting in one spot. But how do you go to the location then? Public transport uses the phone for payment, your car uses the phone as authentication / key. Its a very slippery slope that is very close to being implemented. In a way, we can hope that the current political climate somehow decimates the American corporations that control the systems, but it looks more like IBM during WW2 supplying counting machines to the Americans and to the Germans and everyone else. The phone platform is officially lost at this point, there is too much political pressure to control it. We are going to increasingly need to rely on sneaker nets, small mesh networks, and home made "illegal" communication devices. The internet will continue to exist, but it is going to fracture more and more with the political wars that are happening at the moment.
- Charon77 1y ago
  Remember how Android used to be an open source project and how we had Google backing AOSP? I think it's time we we maintain the latest fork and just use that instead.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    Is AOSP no longer a thing? I've been using GrapheneOS for a few years and admittedly lost track of AOSP, I just assumed it was still a thing despite Google generally wanting to control more and more.
    - ChocolateGod 1y ago
      Google now only drop through source code after a release, not during development. Also, much AOSP functionality has been moved to Googles Play Services which is closed source.
  - pishpash 1y ago
    That's not the problem. It's the bootloader locked hardware and the TPM anti-"tampering" security verification that more and more apps require. It's not just the OS makers. They're also responding to the demand of companies and governments to control their users through them. They will not say "no".
    - goku12 1y ago
      > It's not just the OS makers. They're also responding to the demand of companies and governments to control their users through them. They will not say "no". I don't believe that entirely. For example, how much safer is a banking app protected by play protect, running on an OEM ROM with tonnes of OEM/Google/Meta malware, compared to the same running on Graphene, Lineage or Calyx? I think it's the other way around. Google or their associates convince either the banking firms, or more likely the security audit companies that the play protect (safetynet or whichever latest flavor) is an absolute necessity for security on android. In the latter case, those security firms will give the developers a checklist to follow, which will include an item on enabling that API. It's unlikely that so many banks will choose them on their own accord like that, even if a bunch of them insist on Google providing it. I have even seen banks disabling the API in their apps through updates. And they also don't have any problems with their web applications that don't have anything similar to remote attestation. Besides if you look closely, it's in Google's interest, not the bank's interest to enable these APIs. Such apps will only run on the OEM ROMs, making the open source and custom ROMs somewhat untenable.
staplers 1y ago
A duopoly just isn't competitive enough. Too bad the cost of entry is so high. I've heard this one before.. given the apt political analogy , I wouldn't hold out hope.
sterlind 1y ago
use a fork. GrapheneOS is amazing. I feel like I own my phone, I trust my phone, and it obeys me, for the first time in a decade. unlock. flash. spread the word. use the fork, Luke.
- notrealyme123 1y ago
  This is also no long term solution. GrapheneOS can't diverge from Google android to much, otherwise modern apps stop working. And Google will definitely go for alternative roms next.
  - asimovDev 1y ago
    I could've sworn GrapheneOS or LineageOS people were in talks with manufacturers to deliver devices that run one of those OSes out of the box. I wonder if there were any updates on that front
    - notrealyme123 1y ago
      That would be a great step in the right direction. More people using it means more options down the line. Its soon time for me to get a new phone, but buying a Google pixel to flash GrapheneOS seems like paying the bully.
    - fithisux 1y ago
      If they do it, I will switch ASAP.
- green7ea 1y ago
  Sadly that's not always (or won't be soon) an option. I recently had to buy a new phone so that I could run the 'updated' banking app that requires attestation to run — I was running google free Lineage. Without attestation, banking apps stop working and without a banking app, you are locked out of modern life in many ways. This latest Google move makes it impossible to run an attested Android without the sideloading limitation. That means that you'll have to choose between GrapheneOS and using your banking app. I'm sad to say that I've already had to make that choice :-(. I feel that I was coerced into it.
jeroenhd 1y ago
Sailfish tried and failed. Various Linux distro also tried and failed even harder. Consumers at large just aren't interested in anything other than iOS and Android.
- oneshtein 1y ago
  Users need a new feature or a new power to justify transition. Learning of new OS is not free. Someone should reuse Android UI, but upgrade the OS to full Linux.
  - goku12 1y ago
    Mimicking the Android UI and UX is very trivial. The hard part is getting the OS to run on the mobile device in the first place. On top a tonne of custom drivers, it also requires way to either get accepted by the OEM locks or a way to bypass it entirely. This is getting harder by the day even with Android custom ROMs.
- konart 1y ago
  Consumers are interested in everything new. The problem is - linux (outside on server land and maybe SteamOS) is everything but (regular) user friendly. When people buy a new phone the expect a smooth experience without any major inconveniences and uniform UI. And apps. Lots of apps. Full of features and mature UI. Linux mostly have none of it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    The Linux experience on a decently powerful mobile device (i.e. not those open-source phones that perform like a 2010 smartphone) is perfectly fine. I find the Plasma experience to be a little lacking, but the Ubuntu experience is good when you find a phone UBPorts works on. Phosh (GNOME) works better on mobile than it does on desktop for a lot of things (multitouch touchpads come close to mobile in terms of smoothness). Consumers didn't pick up Windows Phone or HarmonyOS enough to matter either. Access to the two common app stores is crucial for user adoption even when the UI is good.
throwaway2037 1y ago
I had to do some light research on Wiki, but it looks like Firefox OS was supposed to fill part of this void. Sadly, it was not successful, and the project lost funding and support from Mozilla. I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work.
- choeger 1y ago
  It's not necessarily that Mozilla could not do it. Just look up Mozilla's revenue sources.
  - goku12 1y ago
    I'm not downvoting you. But the limiting factor probably wasn't the funding at all. It was the competence and marketing. At some level, they had to deal with the hardware stack - which IMO is a very hot mess right now. The only reason why it works for Android is because the OEMs are also in on the game - just like how it was (is?) for the Windows machines.
- latexr 1y ago
  > I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work. I don’t believe that at all. Mozilla has been on a string of awful decisions for a long while. They start dumb projects no one asked for or wants all the time and abandon everything swiftly, even the good ones. Look at Rust and Servo. Firefox OS barely lasted two years between release and discontinuation. It never even stood a chance for most people to even have heard of it or tried it, let alone be successful.
simianparrot 1y ago
Valve has managed something similar with SteamOS as well as Proton built on Wine to make Windows games run on Linux, performing as good as or often better than an actual (modern) Windows install. SteamOS isn’t too far from a mobile OS.
- chii 1y ago
  It's the mobile hardware drivers (such as for the modems and 5g etc) that likely roadblocks - these hardware manufacturers probably have some sort of OEM agreements, and so cannot opensource these drivers for all devices. I would wish that mobile devices' specs and hardware drivers are all available, so that i am not dependent on the manufacturer supplying a compatible OS.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  That will only work as long as Microsoft feels like ignoring it, and they are already starting with something similar to how netbooks were killed in the end. Valve will learn the OS/2 lesson, by not fostering a proper native Linux ecosystem.
  - simianparrot 1y ago
    They are doing that with their own games and tooling, look at CS2. But Valve can’t force all other developers and publishers to do the same, they can only show the way, which they do.
baq 1y ago
It’s like uber, doordash or carvana, you can’t fund a huge project like this without free money. ZIRP is the moat.
dismalaf 1y ago
There's already open source OSes that run on phones that aren't based on Android. Off the top of my head there's a Debian based one, a Fedora based one, webOS, PostmarketOS, probably others. Wouldn't be that difficult but yeah, the cost of entry is still probably tens of millions.

We need another os in the market. A duopoly just isn't competitive enough. Too bad the cost of entry is so high.

by nabogh 1y ago

We need another os in the market. A duopoly just isn't competitive enough. Too bad the cost of entry is so high.

I agree with you idealistically, but practically, creating an entirely new mobile OS with market share competitive with the existing two is an unbelievably massive challenge. It'd probably be just about as easy to get people to care about sideloading in the first place.

balder1991 1y ago
The problem is moves like this will keep happening, since people don’t have much choice. Unless we bring up a societal trend of dumb phones.
- runarberg 1y ago
  We used to have strong consumer protection advocates on both sides of the Atlantic, and those consumer protection advocates used to influence laws and regulation which forced corporations to stop doing anti-consumer stuff like this. Those days can return with enough organized labor and solidarity among the working classes.
  - calgoo 1y ago
    Yea, but you will need to organize offline because chat control will catch your terrorist messages and report you to the police. And make sure to leave the phone at home so they cant see all the phones meeting in one spot. But how do you go to the location then? Public transport uses the phone for payment, your car uses the phone as authentication / key. Its a very slippery slope that is very close to being implemented. In a way, we can hope that the current political climate somehow decimates the American corporations that control the systems, but it looks more like IBM during WW2 supplying counting machines to the Americans and to the Germans and everyone else. The phone platform is officially lost at this point, there is too much political pressure to control it. We are going to increasingly need to rely on sneaker nets, small mesh networks, and home made "illegal" communication devices. The internet will continue to exist, but it is going to fracture more and more with the political wars that are happening at the moment.
Charon77 1y ago
Remember how Android used to be an open source project and how we had Google backing AOSP? I think it's time we we maintain the latest fork and just use that instead.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  Is AOSP no longer a thing? I've been using GrapheneOS for a few years and admittedly lost track of AOSP, I just assumed it was still a thing despite Google generally wanting to control more and more.
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    Google now only drop through source code after a release, not during development. Also, much AOSP functionality has been moved to Googles Play Services which is closed source.
- pishpash 1y ago
  That's not the problem. It's the bootloader locked hardware and the TPM anti-"tampering" security verification that more and more apps require. It's not just the OS makers. They're also responding to the demand of companies and governments to control their users through them. They will not say "no".
  - goku12 1y ago
    > It's not just the OS makers. They're also responding to the demand of companies and governments to control their users through them. They will not say "no". I don't believe that entirely. For example, how much safer is a banking app protected by play protect, running on an OEM ROM with tonnes of OEM/Google/Meta malware, compared to the same running on Graphene, Lineage or Calyx? I think it's the other way around. Google or their associates convince either the banking firms, or more likely the security audit companies that the play protect (safetynet or whichever latest flavor) is an absolute necessity for security on android. In the latter case, those security firms will give the developers a checklist to follow, which will include an item on enabling that API. It's unlikely that so many banks will choose them on their own accord like that, even if a bunch of them insist on Google providing it. I have even seen banks disabling the API in their apps through updates. And they also don't have any problems with their web applications that don't have anything similar to remote attestation. Besides if you look closely, it's in Google's interest, not the bank's interest to enable these APIs. Such apps will only run on the OEM ROMs, making the open source and custom ROMs somewhat untenable.

staplers 1y ago

A duopoly just isn't competitive enough. Too bad the cost of entry is so high. I've heard this one before.. given the apt political analogy , I wouldn't hold out hope.

sterlind 1y ago

use a fork. GrapheneOS is amazing. I feel like I own my phone, I trust my phone, and it obeys me, for the first time in a decade. unlock. flash. spread the word. use the fork, Luke.

notrealyme123 1y ago
This is also no long term solution. GrapheneOS can't diverge from Google android to much, otherwise modern apps stop working. And Google will definitely go for alternative roms next.
- asimovDev 1y ago
  I could've sworn GrapheneOS or LineageOS people were in talks with manufacturers to deliver devices that run one of those OSes out of the box. I wonder if there were any updates on that front
  - notrealyme123 1y ago
    That would be a great step in the right direction. More people using it means more options down the line. Its soon time for me to get a new phone, but buying a Google pixel to flash GrapheneOS seems like paying the bully.
  - fithisux 1y ago
    If they do it, I will switch ASAP.
green7ea 1y ago
Sadly that's not always (or won't be soon) an option. I recently had to buy a new phone so that I could run the 'updated' banking app that requires attestation to run — I was running google free Lineage. Without attestation, banking apps stop working and without a banking app, you are locked out of modern life in many ways. This latest Google move makes it impossible to run an attested Android without the sideloading limitation. That means that you'll have to choose between GrapheneOS and using your banking app. I'm sad to say that I've already had to make that choice :-(. I feel that I was coerced into it.

jeroenhd 1y ago

Sailfish tried and failed. Various Linux distro also tried and failed even harder. Consumers at large just aren't interested in anything other than iOS and Android.

oneshtein 1y ago
Users need a new feature or a new power to justify transition. Learning of new OS is not free. Someone should reuse Android UI, but upgrade the OS to full Linux.
- goku12 1y ago
  Mimicking the Android UI and UX is very trivial. The hard part is getting the OS to run on the mobile device in the first place. On top a tonne of custom drivers, it also requires way to either get accepted by the OEM locks or a way to bypass it entirely. This is getting harder by the day even with Android custom ROMs.
konart 1y ago
Consumers are interested in everything new. The problem is - linux (outside on server land and maybe SteamOS) is everything but (regular) user friendly. When people buy a new phone the expect a smooth experience without any major inconveniences and uniform UI. And apps. Lots of apps. Full of features and mature UI. Linux mostly have none of it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  The Linux experience on a decently powerful mobile device (i.e. not those open-source phones that perform like a 2010 smartphone) is perfectly fine. I find the Plasma experience to be a little lacking, but the Ubuntu experience is good when you find a phone UBPorts works on. Phosh (GNOME) works better on mobile than it does on desktop for a lot of things (multitouch touchpads come close to mobile in terms of smoothness). Consumers didn't pick up Windows Phone or HarmonyOS enough to matter either. Access to the two common app stores is crucial for user adoption even when the UI is good.

throwaway2037 1y ago

I had to do some light research on Wiki, but it looks like Firefox OS was supposed to fill part of this void. Sadly, it was not successful, and the project lost funding and support from Mozilla. I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work.

choeger 1y ago
It's not necessarily that Mozilla could not do it. Just look up Mozilla's revenue sources.
- goku12 1y ago
  I'm not downvoting you. But the limiting factor probably wasn't the funding at all. It was the competence and marketing. At some level, they had to deal with the hardware stack - which IMO is a very hot mess right now. The only reason why it works for Android is because the OEMs are also in on the game - just like how it was (is?) for the Windows machines.
latexr 1y ago
> I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work. I don’t believe that at all. Mozilla has been on a string of awful decisions for a long while. They start dumb projects no one asked for or wants all the time and abandon everything swiftly, even the good ones. Look at Rust and Servo. Firefox OS barely lasted two years between release and discontinuation. It never even stood a chance for most people to even have heard of it or tried it, let alone be successful.

simianparrot 1y ago

Valve has managed something similar with SteamOS as well as Proton built on Wine to make Windows games run on Linux, performing as good as or often better than an actual (modern) Windows install. SteamOS isn’t too far from a mobile OS.

chii 1y ago
It's the mobile hardware drivers (such as for the modems and 5g etc) that likely roadblocks - these hardware manufacturers probably have some sort of OEM agreements, and so cannot opensource these drivers for all devices. I would wish that mobile devices' specs and hardware drivers are all available, so that i am not dependent on the manufacturer supplying a compatible OS.
pjmlp 1y ago
That will only work as long as Microsoft feels like ignoring it, and they are already starting with something similar to how netbooks were killed in the end. Valve will learn the OS/2 lesson, by not fostering a proper native Linux ecosystem.
- simianparrot 1y ago
  They are doing that with their own games and tooling, look at CS2. But Valve can’t force all other developers and publishers to do the same, they can only show the way, which they do.

baq 1y ago

It’s like uber, doordash or carvana, you can’t fund a huge project like this without free money. ZIRP is the moat.

dismalaf 1y ago

There's already open source OSes that run on phones that aren't based on Android. Off the top of my head there's a Debian based one, a Fedora based one, webOS, PostmarketOS, probably others. Wouldn't be that difficult but yeah, the cost of entry is still probably tens of millions.