5 ms·
Think how bad the market got. Today we have preinstalled garbage apps like LinkedIn, garbage apps mandated to be preinstalled by the government, ads, cloud acco
by codedokode 4mo ago
Think how bad the market got. Today we have preinstalled garbage apps like LinkedIn, garbage apps mandated to be preinstalled by the government, ads, cloud accounts, notifications spam, telemetry. This is not only Chinese smartphones, for example Samsung also plays this game. I assume there are Chinese backdoors, American backdoors and national government backdoors on almost every phone.
And there seems to be no way to buy a "free" smartphone without Google Services and telemetry below $250. Why 250? Because free OS have multiple bugs and issues and it is not rational to pay more than that.
I am considering two options, one, try to clean up and patch the firmware for a cheap smartphone (remove almost everything proprietary including Google Services, Unrusted Execution Environment, except for basic GUI and launcher), or two, port something like Lineage OS to my phone. Also I need to examine the network traffic and scan for potential weak points like SUID binaries. It is scary to think how much time I will have to waste for this.
Also, it is pretty stupid, in my opinion, to make an OS not based on Android, for example, use Qt for GUI, because there will be no apps for it.
- tomaytotomato 4mo agoThe paranoia is completely warranted, but there is a solution. Just root your Android phone and put a custom ROM like LineageOS etc If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.
- qwertytyyuu 4mo agoDo the support the razr?
- ux266478 4mo agoEasier said than done in the US. Even of the phones that allow for rooting (which is few and far between these days) you're at the complete mercy of the carrier for whether or not that ability is actually available to you. Even if the gracious lords may allow it, you have to engage in a long and drawn out Byzantine rite just for the privilege. Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root. Give me a Linux phone with halfway decent modem drivers, or give me death.
- codedokode 4mo agoIf you do not update the phone, chances are high that there is some Linux vulnerability you could expoloit. The privileged vendor software also can have vulnerabilities. For example, here [1] researches hacked the phone with Verified Boot using a boot logo parsing error. My impression that you should treat your phone as something that can be hacked any moment and not store anything important there. [1] https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2024/SSTIC-actes/when_vendor1_meets_vendor2_the_story_of_a_small_bu/SSTIC2024-Article-when_vendor1_meets_vendor2_the_story_of_a_small_bug_chain-rossi-bellom_neveu.pdf https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2024/SSTIC-actes/when_vendo...
- dataflow 4mo ago> Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root. Stop buying phones from Verizon?
- codedokode 4mo ago1) My phone is not officially supported by LineageOS so I will have to port it first. 2) I did not analyze LineageOS yet and how it is different from stock Android, so I need to go through complete diff. > If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself My goal is to have an open source system that is under my full control and doesn't play tricks on my by sending telemetry or collecting forensic databases. Because now I cannot even connect the phone to Internet and it is not as useful as it could be.
- Semaphor 4mo agoI’d assume that with such a level of required inspection, you also have quite some security requirements. I’d say at that level nothing works as well as GrapheneOS (though you have to either delay security updates or accept temporarily closed source (they get access to the code only in exchange for not publishing it until X days or something) updates, thanks Google). As that currently requires a Google phone, the only way to get close to your price target would be buying it used.
- neurostimulant 4mo agoI wonder if you could ask Opus 4.7 to port LineageOS for your phone. The LLM must’ve had plenty of training data from the gazillion LineageOS ports for other devices, so perhaps it might actually work (or brick your device).
- bookofjoe 4mo agoRe: de-Googling yourself: Goldman Sachs paid $6 million to try to get its [soon-to-be] former chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler's Google search results highlighting her close friendship and many-years-long association with Jeffrey Epstein off the first few pages of results. Today, the first result on the first page of a Google search for her is the opening paragraph of her Wikipedia biography: >Kathryn H. Ruemmler (born April 19, 1971) is an American attorney who was principal deputy White House counsel and then White House Counsel to President Barack Obama.[1] Previously a partner at Latham and Watkins co-chairing its white-collar defense group,[2] Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs in 2020 and was Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel.[3] She announced her resignation from this position in February 2026, effective at the end of June, over her links to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.[4][5][6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Ruemmler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Ruemmler >How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image https://archive.ph/Biztm https://archive.ph/Biztm
- thfuran 4mo agoI'm not sure what your point is.
- bookofjoe 4mo agoWrote tomaytotomato 3 hours ago: >If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now. My point is that even with unlimited resources it's impossible to de-Google yourself.
- BenjiWiebe 4mo agoDe-Googling (in this context at least) means not running Google software on your phone. No Google Play Services always running in the background, plus not using Google apps.
- bookofjoe 4mo agoAh. I misinterpreted "de-Googling." It is refreshing, though, to know that the cranky folks of HN still downvote honest mistakes.
- Larrikin 4mo agoI recently spent twenty minutes sitting outside of an MLB stadium because MLB decided they needed the same level of play protection as a foreign banking app and it refused to work on my friend's LineageOS phone. We only got in by installing the app on my Sony and him signing into his account. They charge a fee now to get paper tickets from the box office.
- beepboopboop 4mo agoBrutal. I had a similarly annoying experience recently, where in order to enter my local big arena for a concert, the TicketMaster app was not enough. I had to step out of the entrance line to download the _arena-specific_ TicketMaster app to access my tickets. I hate the ticket systems that dominate the market, we deserve better.
- Hizonner 4mo ago... and you continue to let them abuse you.
- Larrikin 4mo agoGive a solution
- skinfaxi 4mo agoDon't give your money to these places? HSBC won't let me use my rooted phone either, so guess who lost my business?
- Larrikin 4mo agoNext time we will go to the professional baseball stadium across the street instead.
- ofieiehdiehe 4mo agoYou can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want this stop, you gotta stop using these services, even if it means sacrificing a hobby. If, on the other hand, you care more about your hobby than these quirks annoy you, than by all means, go right ahead.
- merryocha 4mo agoMy biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.
- lsowen 4mo agoHave you tried the FUTO keyboard? I actually find I prefer it to gboard now. https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/
- merryocha 4mo agoI don't think I ever tried this one. I think I tried every keyboard on F-Droid but apparently FUTO isn't in the main F-Droid repo. I'm liking it so far. I'm a swipe typer and on most keyboards the swipe functionality is much worse than GBoard but this one seems to work pretty well. I'm going to try it for a while, thanks for the suggestion!
- eskori 4mo agoI was in the same boat until a year ago or so. FUTO^[1] finally provided a good text prediction/correction pair + that simply better feeling the Gboard has^[2]. [1]: https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/ [2]: I never investigated this, so I always assumed that GBoard predicted what key I wanted to press when close to two letters. With FOSS keyboards, with a physically identical layout, I tended to make way more mistakes.
- ezst 4mo agoI find GBoard to remain superior in multilingual typing, futo just can't seem to be able to switch to other languages consistently, even with the multilingual option enabled, it's also not as good at "recovering" from typing too many letters (Gboard sometimes adequately completes with likely shorter words)
- codedokode 4mo agoI do not type a lot on the phone (I own a laptop), so no worries.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoNot sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too. It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regardless of how little you use them. Android, because of the whole OEM story, of course is much worse, but I don't feel like any of what you share is new, been going on for decades at this point.
- mitchell209 4mo agoYou can delete almost all apps on iOS except the obviously core apps that are necessary for it to function.
- dannyw 4mo agoYou can now. You couldn't do this in the early versions of iOS.
- u_fucking_dork 4mo ago> even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regardless of how little you use them You see, the user you replied to spoke in the present tense, and is addressing the “(and still comes with)” portion of the original comment.
- basisword 4mo agoAnd they added this ability a DECADE ago.
- u_fucking_dork 4mo agoSome people want so badly for the iPhone to be bad and only bought by sheep as a fashion accessory to signal to their wealth to their peers.
- VortexLain 4mo agoAlthough you will have to buy a used phone in order to pay less than 250$, it seems like GrapheneOS is the best solution for that problem. Not optimal, but the best among what we have.
- futune 4mo agoI was thinking the same. But it worries me that these news about Motorola in particular doing shady shit. I was looking forward to the upcoming GrapheneOS/Motorola partnership :(
- y0eswddl 4mo agographene will still be a separate OS outside of Motorola's control. GrapheneOS team is helping Motorola build secure phones to spec. but Motorola won't have some special bloated flavor of GrapheneOS installed
- cyberclimb 4mo agoHow about the FairPhone running /e/os (which is de-googled)? You can buy it preinstalled directly from Murena. Although this is not at your target price point. But /e/os can be used on hundreds of android phones (as opposed to GrapheneOS). So you can probably install it on your current phone https://doc.e.foundation/devices https://doc.e.foundation/devices
- VortexLain 4mo agoHaving no GMS implementation at all or using microG introduces compatibility issues for a lot of proprietary software. GrapheneOS is the only ROM which supports running GMS in an isolated manner, without giving it direct access to privileged system APIs such as geolocation (which is sent to Google just because they can).
- wolvoleo 4mo agoYes but just barely. The pixel 9a was on offer recently here in Spain for 319€ and that includes 21% tax. At major chain called media markt. That phone is one of the few supported by grapheneos.
- chasil 4mo agoYou should all be aware that Lenovo (the owner of Motorola Mobility) has some dark moments in its past. https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty...
- ryukoposting 4mo agoAsus does this on many of their consumer motherboards now, too.
- ryukoposting 4mo ago> Think how bad the market got. How bad it's always been? Go find a Windows Recovery image for a Sony Vaio from the 2000s. Prepackaged shitware has always been a thing. I read this article and thought "wow someone finally matched an old Vaio." That said, I want to hear a statement from Motorola on this. The GrapheneOS phones they announced a few months ago were going to be my "out" from this kind of nonsense. I want confirmation that I'll be able to trust them when it finally gets released.
- subscribed 4mo agoI'm on the Pixel GoS for quite a while and I'm confident this Motorola will be a secure device without bloatware in the same way current GoS is. Their user base wouldn't ever trust them again if anything shady happened - there's enough trolls and French prowling on the perimeter already.
- rootsudo 4mo agoCheap smartphone path is harder and harder. Unfortunately the pixel series is easiest but comes in double they number for unlocking the bootloader and flashing lineage, etc. Xiaomi has been ironically the pioneer in this field, but their phones are inaccessible in the USA assuming you’re USA based. The mediatek chipset also is more fun for this over Qualcomm. Besides suid binaries, the radio firmware and subsequent radios for WiFi and Bluetooth do give out a lot of information and are open to exploitation. The most opaque and privileged attack surface is often the modem/baseband and vendor diagnostic stack and allow carriers to process local side AT commands. Qualcomm is more documented, though there are fun discoveries on mediatek I’ve made just using binwalk.
- codedokode 4mo agoIf the modem cannot access main memory and CPU then it's ok.
- neurostimulant 4mo ago> Xiaomi has been ironically the pioneer in this field, but their phones are inaccessible in the USA assuming you’re USA based Xiaomi has virtually stopped allowing users to unlock their bootloaders. They only allow 2000 device unlocks per day, which resets every day at 00:00 Beijing time. You can set an alarm and press the unlock button exactly at 00:00 Beijing time, only to get frozen out due to the thundering herd effect and fail to secure an unlock quota. Then, when you try again at 00:01, you just get the dreaded "quota limit reached, try again tomorrow" message.
- rootsudo 4mo agoThat sucks, before it was a one week countdown timer.
- ksymph 4mo agoOn that last point, GNOME/Gtk/Adwaita apps generally function really well on small screen sizes. The design language naturally suits it, and in my experience most apps will even make some layout adjustments where they're needed when resized to ~phone screen dimensions. Anecdotally, out of the ~50 or so I have installed right now on my laptop, which covers the basic calculator/calendar/contacts/etc., and also things like file compression, torrenting, a Mastodon client, RSS reader, and so on, all of them are ready to use on a phone. Alas, if only there was a (reasonably priced + fully functional) phone that could use them.
- codedokode 4mo agoI assume the number of GTK apps is even less than the number of apps in F-Droid.
- vitally3643 4mo agoBuddy, there has been an un-removable Facebook app on literally every version of Android right from the very beginning. Not every handheld model for sure, but at least one model in every generation from the very beginning has had Facebook and other apps burned indelibly into the operating system. Before we even had smartphones, your flip phone came with utterly indelible versions of Facebook and others. And you'll be shocked to hear this I'm sure, but the very lowest level code that governs the radio in your phone is legally mandated to be managed by your service provider, and essentially always has been. None of this is new. Not in the slightest. It's not even worse nowadays except that the apps themselves got more malicious. There aren't more baked in apps than before, and they aren't any more un-removable. The most important code on your device isn't yours, it never has been.
- m3047 4mo agoIn the US DMCA provides "frigate harbor" for the the British consul, etc., etc. IF they've managed to get you to install the "app" instead of utilizing something preinstalled on the phone (a uh errr... web browser?). Potential law migrants banned by law!
- its-summertime 4mo ago"I assume [...] backdoors" Its more of a frontdoor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_Application_Toolkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_Application_Toolkit Pinephone is being sold for 200 with included dock.