4 ms·
Locked app store was my primary reason staying away from iPhone. Now, this is gone. It also open door for censorship, like disabling ICE-tracking or other polit
by vzaliva 1y ago
Locked app store was my primary reason staying away from iPhone.
Now, this is gone. It also open door for censorship, like disabling ICE-tracking or
other politically inconvenient apps. This is a terrible decision for Android and for our freedoms.
- chasil 1y agoGoogle only directly controls the Pixel line. OEMs may be forced to do the same, but 3rd party ROMs will not. I do agree this cuts deeply for F-Droid.
- GeekyBear 1y agoGoogle only directly controls the Pixel line because of antitrust action from the EU. Originally, device makers who used Android themselves were contractually prohibited from manufacturing devices for any company that forked Android, for instance.
- bpye 1y ago> but 3rd party ROMs will not. Google are also making that harder, at least for the Pixel line by no longer publishing the device tree as part of AOSP. I know Fairphone do publish a buildable tree - though it's not yet available for their latest device - does anyone else?
- skrlet13 1y agoAlso, you cannot unlock most phone's bootloaders nowadays, so you cannot even try them.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 1y agoGoogle can force OEMs implement non-unlockable secure boot.
- j4hdufd8 1y agoWhat is non-unlockable secure boot?
- numpad0 1y agoState of the art SoC with silicon baked private keys laser fused for production configuration
- j4hdufd8 1y ago"Silicon baked private keys" are really vague buzzwords. That's pretty much standard and it can be implemented in a variety of ways. Not sure why you're calling this non-unlockable. Everything is unlockable with enough money.
- numpad0 1y agoYou're not going to be decapping and recapping SoCs at scale... Lots of eFuse implementations are just writable ROMs with erasing lines disabled, and people aren't taking out particle accelerators to wipe them.
- bri3d 1y agoWhatever silly OTP implementation is involved is 99.9% irrelevant to unlocking a phone, and OTP for root-of-trust has been in use in phones for 15+ years anyway. Maybe we use some hardware-level trick to get to some protected firmware initially to reverse engineer it, but almost universally it's what reads the state of the fuses (or something after it) that actually gets exploited. That's changing, too, but in general very slowly and at at the pace of hardware manufacturers learning how to make software (aka, glacial with a few notable exceptions).
- lucb1e 1y agoAnd (present tense) forces OEMs to not ship with utilities that let users access their own data Fairphone wanted to give users full access on the Fairphone 2, but were contractually disallowed if they wanted to also ship the Android Market, Google Maps, etc., which users can't otherwise install themselves so it was essential to pre-install for a normal user experience. That's why they made two OSes for that phone: a googleful one and a free OS based on AOSP that you can install if you don't want Google (https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-open.html https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-op...). Nowadays they let the /e/ Foundation do that work with e/OS. They're supportive of it but apparently don't have the internal manpower to continue making and supporting an extra distribution
- hparadiz 1y agoNot to be dramatic but I'll ask the question. Do we really want a future where 99.9% of people's pocket computers must ask for permission from one of two companies to run something on a device?
- GeekyBear 1y agoIt's entirely possible to prosecute Google for fraudulently marketing Android as open and force them to keep their promise. If they want to have a closed platform, do what Microsoft did with Xbox and create something new.
- the8472 1y agoSony didn't have to reopen the PS3, it got away with a settlement.
- GeekyBear 1y agoSony didn't spend a decade marketing an "open" platform that allowed users to run any software they chose to run.
- Ajedi32 1y agoIf the only thing standing in the way of closed platforms is that they have to be marketed as closed, you're just going to get everyone marketing their software like Apple does and nothing else will change.