I want regulation that divides all software into two categories: part of the hardware, or not part of the hardware, with specific requirements.
Part of the hardware:
- Can be restricted to specific devices
- Must be available under GPLv3, including anti-tivoization provisions (forced bootloader unlock)
- May not attempt to use TPMs, DRM, or other systems to support assertions about client devices
Not part of the hardware:
- May only interact with hardware through public, documented, APIs in the "part of hardware" category
- Using alternatives from competitors must be fully supported
- When made by a company that also makes hardware, must also work on competitors' hardware (at least one, more if technically feasible)
- May be under a proprietary license
- Must not attempt to assert anything regarding the hardware, so things like Google Safteynet are now illegal. Security boundary must be shifted to consider client devices insecure
This is, I think, a good compromise to allow software developers to get paid without taking away ownership of hardware devices. Developers can be paid for "part of the hardware" software with money from selling the hardware, and "not part of the hardware" software can be trivially commercialized under a proprietary license. But, there is no way for a user to end up unable to control their hardware, or incentivized to configure it in a specific way.
Also, things like TPMs, Secure Boot, etc, are good security tools which can be used by an end user to get security guarantees over their device.
I use Secure Boot with Linux because, when done right, it means you can get full disk encryption without gaps (at best, without secure boot, you have an un-encrypted bootloader on a flash drive which decrypts your disk and boots your machine, and this is a clunky setup).
I use GrapheneOS's hardware attestation to alert me if something compromises my android phone's operating system.
Now it's true that these features are abused by companies like Google to force you to run a blessed Android build if you want to use e.g. Google Pay (which is the only mobile payment option in e.g. the UK). But it's important to separate the technology from the bad actors abusing it.
The difference is you using the tpm feature and anyone else using the tpm feature. The feature can exist as long as it's only there for you not for anyone else. You can satisfy yourself that no one has hacked your device. Your bank can not satisfy itself that they have ultimate control over your device instead of you.
The described mechanism doesn't say the hardware features can't assert the software features, only the other way around: the premise was merely that the software features need to be replaceable; in fact, this is exactly what you want, as it ensures that the mechanism in the hardware providing the secure boot feature is open source and it also ensures that the operating system you run is anything you want, rather than being locked into a specific choice by the maker of the hardware (or, if the people who make the hardware want to ship an OS with the hardware as if it were some kind of cohesive product, then that OS would also have to be open source and modifiable, which is how you can get a GrapheneOS in the first place).
That's a good idea in spirit but seems a little over complicated to me. I think it might be simpler to just categorically ban any and all technical measures designed to prevent users from controlling or modifying software on devices that they own. Distributing binary code without the source and build tools would count as such a technical measure. This would be an even more radical change in many respects, but also a lot simpler and more principled.
Curious to hear if there are any unintended consequences to this that I may not have thought of. Think of this as a strawman proposal.
You'd need to define "technical measure", or you'd have endless litigation to do it in courts. Trying to define that reasonably precisely is how I came up with my proposal.
I think that it might make sense as a kind of certification that can be available for computers that follow these specifications. However, it will need to be changed a bit; one change is that the division as part or not part of the hardware is not good enough and there should be one in between. Most of it looks like good, though.
No, I explicitly want the game console business model to be shut down. As it stands now, they sell hardware at a loss to then extract value later, at the cost of user control over what they bought. I'd like to see consoles cost what they really do, and then the same for games. I also don't like how restricted it is to make games for consoles nor do I like games being exclusive, since this blocks competition between consoles on their own merit. If a user wants to pay less upfront and more later, then we have a tool for that. It's called financing.
Why? If Sony is loosing money on selling these devices, they should perhaps just raise the prize. Why should we make carveouts to allow companies to compete on the market unfairly and to lock in customers?
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.
> prosecute Google for fraudulently marketing Android as open and force them to keep their promise.
Sorry man. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is forcing these changes. An operating system is a class 1 important product. A tamper-resistant microchip is a class 2 important product. A device with a secure element is a critical product. Your smartphone has all of these pieces. Manufactures must follow a list of best practices to enjoy a presumption of conformity. That list of best practices is being compiled and made ready for publication, with full effect in 2026/2027. Google knows what is coming. Everyone big knows what’s coming.
True open source with no monetization can get a pass. Everyone else has to do this.
If 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.
The only solution to this problem is new legislation. The case that Google fraduently marketed Android is flimsy at best.
People buying phones by and large do not care in the slightest about "openness". Whether or not their phone supports sideloading is completely and utterly irrelevant to them.
But aside from that, it would be enermously difficult to prove that Google made claims that were unequivocally false while advertising Android. Sure, they made some vague claims about Android being an "open" platform. But they had more than enough well-compensated lawyers on their side to avoid making specific promises about specific functionality that could eventually land them in court.
Finally, even if some of the claims Google made about Android in 2015 no longer hold up in 2025, that in and of itself is not illegal. Google is allowed to change and adapt Android over time as it sees fit. Though you and I may disagree with their findings, they have internally identified systemic security threats caused by unrestricted sideloading, and have created a solution to this real-world problem (however flawed it may be). There is no reason under the current laws of the United States that they should not be allowed to make those changes (aside from perhaps general antitrust law, but that is not enough in this instance as evidenced by the outcome of Epic Games' case against Google). Perhaps they will have to change their advertising going into the future, and they can definitely no longer reuse older advertising materials promoting Android's capability for unrestricted sideloading (if those exist). But just because they advertised Android as having feature X in the past does not mean that they would break the law if they were to remove feature X in the future after they stopped running those old ads.
(Yes, it gets a little blurry in the case of software because it often automatically updates and offers no option to downgrade. But phones don't last forever. In the worst case Google could just wait ~5 years from today to implement Developer Verification.)
Unfortunately sign on with social media improves engagement and conversions in apps. It's not about being lazy it's about doing what will bring more users.
Google 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.
And (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-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
Google selling Android as both open source and open to running any software you like in order to quickly gain market share, only to break those promises after driving competing platforms out of the market is nothing more than fraud.
there's also Palm OS (Palm, '96-'09), Maemo (Nokia, '05-'11), Moblin (Intel, '07-'09), webOS (LG, '09+), Bada (Samsung, '10-'13), Ubuntu Touch (Canonical, '11+), Tizen (Linux Foundation, Samsung, '12+), Firefox OS (Mozilla, '13-'15), KaiOS (FirefoxOS fork, '17+), Sailfish OS (Jolla, '13+), LuneOS (WebOS Ports community, '14+), postmarketOS (Oliver Smith, '16+), Mobian (Debian, '20), EMUI (Huawei, google-free since '20)...
yeah "Google has pretty clearly done an extremely bad job" at making competitors obsolete. Intel, Samsung, Nokia, etc. are all tiny companies who had no chance anyway, especially at the time before Android was firmly established as one of two platforms mobile developers bother making software for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... says otherwise; while Android variants have allowed other manufacturers to gain footholds, and some even are "de-Google-fied" in terms of services... all of them stem from a codebase that has been designed to be compatible with, if not explicitly promote, Google's revenue streams.
Imagine, if you will, an adblocker that could run across not just web pages but all apps, in a privacy-protecting and declarative way. Google has every incentive to simply slow-walk the OS-level support necessary for this kind of system, perhaps citing legitimate security concerns, but certainly not allocating resources towards solving the problem in earnest. And if you hard-fork Android to do this kind of deep work, rather than just maintaining packages or patchsets, you'll be forced to dedicate tremendous resources towards maintaining that fork to keep up with mainline fixes/APIs. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg.)
So it's an incredibly effective chilling effect in practice, quite intentionally so.
Do it, Google! Nobody's going to fight for their computing rights until you've stepped on them hard enough. I can't wait for the amazing (non-Google) products that come out after this.
The ability to install what I want is one of the reasons I went with Android, I guess I will have to look elsewhere when I next need a phone. I am hoping the new GNU Phone or Linux Phone get to be "thing".
This would make it no longer free software as per the FSF's definition. We could turn many more things into GPLv3, which would prevent this, however. Then, Android and iOS can use them if and only if they go under GPLv3 too, which includes provisions against bootloader locking.
Actually, how does that work? In my non-lawyer understanding, GPLv3 already says the end user must be allowed to actually run the code, to the point where the iOS app store can't have GPLv3 apps in it. So... does this change mean that GPLv3 apps can't legally be shipped for Android?
I think we need something in between. Permissive for individuals and small companies, but restrictive for mega corporations who impose their will on the populace.
The closest that I know of to this is GPLv3 with sold proprietary licenses. Then, when selling proprietary licenses, you can adjust the price to what you think that the customer can afford. There's debate on how ethical such adjustment is, and many companies (recently Slack and often Cloudflare) are criticized for it.
The bigger factor is whether or not Linux phones that are reasonably nice to use (everything works, isn’t flaky, battery life is decent-ish) come to market or not. Developers aren’t going to be interested in a platform that for practical purposes is at best a curiosity or something to tinker with, no matter how many idealist checkboxes they tick.
Good North America market availability sure would help too. There’s been stuff like Sailfish that seemed interesting in the past but didn’t have easily purchasable devices available in the US, completely precluding development for the platform for a significant number of devs.
Usage restrictions are not allowed to be considered an OSI-approved Open-Source license. Plenty of people think that the OSI "Open Source Definition" is the only valid definition of "open source", and will thus reject calling such licenses "open source".
I've been happily using "GNU/Linux phones" since 2008, with only 2-3 years around 2017 of using an Android device as a backup, so there's no need to "hope"; you can just act.
From 2008 to about 2011: Neo Freerunner, first on Om2007.2, then on SHR.
Then Nokia N900 with Maemo 5, in 2017-2019 augmented by Samsung Galaxy S3 with LineageOS as a secondary device since N900 was getting unusable for the Web by then.
And finally since 2020 up to now, Librem 5 with PureOS, which removed the need to carry an Android device again.
If so, I might be able invert my plan: use the Linux phone with phone/5G/useful software most of the time, and a cheap android phone in my bag that only comes out for things that need the monopoly apps and tethers to the useful one occasionally when necessary.
Depends on your definition of "lasting an entire day", but for me it lasts just long enough to usually not bother carrying a power bank with me. Usage patterns vary though.
I'll probably have an android phone in my bag for emergencies and use some kind of offline Linux phone for my mobile computing needs. or even give up on the mobile form factor for general use.
I started on Android in 2008. I maintained my own ROM, complete with a custom kernel. Then I moved on to various AOSP forks. I ran the local Android Developers MeetUp and evangelised the platform for so many years.
This year I finally moved to iOS. I don’t feel happy about it, but they are now both basically as closed as each other, both are run by what I consider evil corporations.
If you told the teenager me in mid 90s, watching the internet bloom all around me, promising freedom and democratisation of access to knowledge the world over, that one day we would replace the open, standards based, federated, decentralised World Wide Web with two proprietary walled gardens, beholden forever to the whims of two companies, I would have thought you’re nuts.
> The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.
The first part is obvious I think (they don't want to make registration in google's store a requirement for f-droid since that defeats half the purpose of f-droid).
The other half is suggesting they could offer uploading the apps put into f-droid to the store (under an f-droid account I'd guess) but they immediately discard that option since it would make f-droid the exclusive distributor, taking something from the dev.
GrapheneOS has been rock solid for me for several years now. Just pick any Pixel device. As for software, there are alternatives to everything you can find on the Play Store, assuming you're not reliant on a specific Google product. GOS has robust support for sandboxed Play services that work without Google, though I personally haven't used it. Even banking apps work without an issue for me, though YMMV.
I'm considering abandoning Android altogether in favor of a proper Linux device, but GOS is what makes Android usable for me.
General purpose computing has been the backbone of the modern tech economy for decades and has changed our way of life.
Efforts to restrict that such as no longer allowing people to install applications-Google-hasn't-approved on their own devices is only going to benefit Google at the expense of others and cripple future innovation in the software ecosystem for mobile.
"It's my device, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!"
The reason this argument isn't holding water and swaying popular opinion, in my opinion, is because everything else in life is heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted.
"It's my car, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold, either for driving, or removing the catalytic converter, or changing the tuning to be able to roll coal, or uninstalling the seat belts.
"It's my kitchen, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
"It's my home, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent, and broaden chance of success.
The technologist sees licensing from Google to develop Android apps as tyranny. The average person asks "where have you been? What can you do without a license?"
> I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
You can though. No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
> I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
A deck or addition might draw attention and run afoul of some rule depending on where you live, but a lot of places won't care. If you want to put in an outlet, the world's your oyster. The only real consideration is if you're worried you may do it wrong and may run into insurance denials after a catastrophe or something. You don't actually need anyone's permission. And it's October; I have decorations in my front yard right now. No one was consulted about this.
It's like my air conditioner broke a couple weeks ago, so I ordered a capacitor off amazon and fixed it. I've never touched one of these things before, but the only one stopping you from unscrewing it and going to town is you. If you passed high school you ought to have a basic understanding of how stuff works and be able to do some light reading to make sure you're doing this correctly and safely. LLMs make this even easier.
These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if your AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts. Or even more on point, required someone registered with e.g. Carrier (not actually any kind of professional certification; just someone gatekept by a business trying to monopolize things).
> No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
It's literally illegal in many US states and countries to do so. In my home state, MN, it is tightly regulated what kinds of "cottage food" you are allowed to sell.
You're confusing ability with legality. Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens. This is despite, for most people, judging the health risks of food being wildly easier than the security risks of a sideloaded app.
> These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if you AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts.
That already exists in car repair; with key reprogrammers and especially anything engine-tuning being restricted to licensed individuals. Also, good luck messing with your catalytic converter, without the ECU by law detecting it and getting very angry. Take my relative's diesel truck from 2015 - a single failed sensor in the exhaust, and it caps itself as low as 30 MPH.
That's more a reflection of your neighbors not wanting to deal with your door-to-door nuisance of a business. If you have people that want to buy food from you, exactly nothing will happen. Same deal with e.g. babysitting/day care. Exactly no one will care if you do it or if you casually offer it in conversation with a parent. People might get annoyed if you go door-to-door soliciting about it and interrupt their day.
Ability vs. legality is the point; these things in practice aren't that heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted, and in fact no one will check up on you or try to stop you at all unless you piss someone off by somehow turning it into an annoyance. I don't know why you'd even think to check whether most of the stuff you listed is legal.
Using car restrictions (which are obviously mostly anti-consumer, especially for EVs) as some justification for similar actions in phones is interesting, to say the least.
I'm not in favor of extreme authoritarian laws being on the books at all for their abuse potential, but dystopian laws that exist but are only ever enforced in practice if you are a nuisance are obviously better than dystopian laws that exist and are regularly enforced. And actually "you're only not allowed to install an electrical outlet if you're too dumb to do it without starting a fire" seems like it's right about what the law should be, so if you only get in trouble if you start a fire... good? Likewise if you only end up in trouble for selling food in practice if you end up poisoning people. Sounds about right.
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Like I said,
> I'm not in favor of extreme authoritarian laws being on the books at all for their abuse potential
I'm not in favor of that. But obviously a police-state-on-the-books is better than a real-actual-police-state. Duh. Laws that are never enforced that say women can't wear pants or gay relationships are illegal are stupid. I like when legislators do "cleanup" bills to delete invalid laws and keep things tidy. The same laws if they are enforced are oppressive.
In practice I'm not sure that "you can do dangerous things as long as you are competent and are not negligent and don't injure others" is a bad guiding principle? Like yeah if it turns out you were not competent or you were negligent, then we (retroactively) say you should have at least known enough to not do that. Sounds reasonable. Especially if the law is effectively "thing is dangerous. Only people who know what they're doing should do it". It's on you then to know enough to know whether you know what you're doing. If you don't know whether you're competent enough, then I suppose you're not.
It would be better to have that explicitly be the law, but having it be the de facto law works well enough. It's sort of the same "if you know you know" kind of thing, but I guess with a different psychological filter where people are more likely to default to "I don't realize I can do this"? Personally I'd prefer we not infantilize people, so it's better to encourage them to better themselves and learn a skill rather than discouraging them and saying they "can't" do it, but maybe the type of people who allow themselves to be infantilized are exactly the ones you don't want to do it anyway.
Yeah, people on the Internet seriously freak out about things like driving drunk even if no one is hurt. The current de-facto legal interpretation is pretty good: drive as drunk as you want so long as you don't damage anything or hit a person.
Indeed, I think things like DUI checkpoints where you stop and question everyone passing through (or even those who turn around) are bad. There should be some observational evidence of poor driving or someone having reported you for negligently getting into and driving a vehicle when they know you've done significant drinking. Likewise I think the Build Back Better bill's provision to require all new cars to have some kind of anti-DUI sensors was an overstep.
note that you're confusing selling with ability. it's one thing for the state to say they can regulate and tax a sale, but to use your dubious analogy, this is more like the state saying I can't have my neighbour over for a (free) dinner because I need a license in food preparation and it has to happen in a rented location.
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now.
I think the relevant difference is that it has real-world consequences for other people. And the consequences are likely to scale with the magnitude of the audience, meaning that it is bigger players that should face stiffer regulation. And yes, I think some of the examples you give should also be allowed.
Catalytic converters are there because they reduce the emissions your car produces. Those emissions get out into the air and affect everyone around you, and (over time, potentially) everyone on the planet. Rules around selling baked goods exist to ensure you don't sell bread made with rotten eggs or something that would make people sick. (And there are now "home kitchen" laws in some places that do allow you to do this anyway.) Installing a new electrical outlet has potential fire risks which could affect nearby buildings. Building a deck has potential safety consequences, but I imagine there are many jurisdictions where you can do that without a permit, and even more where you can get away with doing so even though it's technically not allowed.
Me installing a tic-tac-toe game from F-droid doesn't have the same kind of ripple effects on other people. It probably has much smaller such effects than installing a mainstream app like Facebook.
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent.
The bigger you are, the more everything you do affects other people. To my mind the "logically consistent" approach is to impose greater restrictions on almost all sorts of behavior the larger and more powerful the entity performing the behavior. By this logic, it would be Google that is restricted from changing its policy like this, simply because it is big.
Google is very clear, sideloading has about 50x more malware than the Play Store. The Brazilian government in particular is absolutely furious about the amount of scams, and was openly planning legal interventions.
Your ability to distribute your app anonymously absolutely meets the definition of real-world consequences for other people.
I personally find it absurd we accept that the government regulates food (people can't detect bad food), and hair cutting (people can't detect inexperienced people with scissors), but the right to anonymous app distribution is sacrosanct, as though food quality is less transparent than app quality. It's not - all of these licenses need to be let go of on the small scale.
Why would you take them at face value? Just look at the Play Store yourself. I've seen plenty of privacy-invading (and worse!) apps on the Play Store, even when (especially when!) searching for a specific app I know is legit and good.
Meanwhile I can download anything with confidence on F-Droid, the subject of the article.
There are plenty of physical appliances you can modify how ever you want because it's really only your business. Installing the software of your choice on a phone is like that. It's not something like a car sharing a public road and polluting the air.
people might watch movies they haven't paid for. people might read books they're not supposed to read. people might start having ideas that the oligarchs don't approve of. it's terrifying!
I said it was inconsistent to fight for digital freedoms without real world freedoms. I did not say I was okay with the loss of digital freedoms.
I think people should be able to build a deck without state consent. I think people should be able to sell to their neighbors without the health department watching. I think people should be able to start a small business without needing IRS filings at first. I think a small business might need OSHA exceptions across the board for the first few employees. I even think, yes, that allowing some idiots to roll coal is worth more than tightly regulating car repairs and controlling car repair equipment. And I think, to most people, these freedoms matter more than digital sovereignty.
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Edit, posting too fast, cannot reply directly: In that case, that's a great argument for regulating app distribution, we need to protect people from scam apps. We can't possibly neglect people who don't know better about the risks of sideloading.
I'm sure you wouldn't say, "I just want to do whatever I want with code, while stopping my neighbor from building a dangerous deck," with a straight face, right?
The particular problem with your kind of thinking is neglecting people are assholes.
It's cool and all for your neighbors to sell you raw milk until that case of brucellosis and staph kills off the breadwinner in your family and you're caught up for the rest of your life suing a family farm out of existence.
And that deck is great and all, until you go over to your buddies party where you're all drinking and 15 crowd on to that deck that suddenly fails leading to you being a paraplegic.
And small business OSHA exceptions are great until big companies sub out all their work to tiny contractors that end up dying without proper PPE.
And some idiot rolling coal is fine until you're the one trying to figure out how you got lung cancer even though you didn't ever smoke.
Libertarianism is what happen when you don't think in systems.
You can do whatever you want to do with your car, your kitchen, or your home. There is nothing a manufacturer can do to stop you. But you can't demand that they help you and provide you with assistance. Likewise, you can do exactly whatever you want with your iPhone or Android phone. You can rip out the chips and put in different chips, if you have the talent to do it. But you can't demand that the manufacturer helps you.
I think both Apple and Google should be able to set their own rules if they're just acting in self-interest. Some think they should be regulated due to being a duopoly, I disagree, but at the same time it's a reasonable argument to make.
Government crackdown is the scarier thing. It's suspicious seeing both "private" companies locking things down, while at the same time the US govt is increasingly making special threats and deals with big corps, and also Europe is trying to clamp down on encrypted messaging. So yeah the outcry over Android seems justified. Wouldn't be surprised if WEI comes back too.
If Google decides to abandon Android tomorrow, or go all in on Windows Mobile OS, is that an "abuse of market dominance"? In reality, private companies are free to make decisions that make sense to them.
There's no law that says things should be "free", or everyone should be "happy" with a companies decision.
I'm honestly surprised this didn't happen sooner. Apple's been a "lavish jail cell" since its inception, and the control definitely makes them the big bucks. ChromeOS was a jail cell from its inception too. You could do some dev stuff to enable user control, but it disabled other things. https://rainestorme.github.io/guide/ is a guide to jailbreak it. It shouldnt need jailbroken, ever. Should be yours from the moment you paid money for it and bought it.
Google/Alphabet's been slowly tightening all sorts of things. Of course "security" is the term bandied around. Of course, I'd say "security" is overloaded - is it security for the user, or security for google AGAINST the user? I think it's the second.
And we also have no valid 3rd party phone platform. In reality, there was Windows Phone, but that was even worse locked down.
There's a few Linux phone projects. Pinephone is an embarrassment and an abject failure. I think the UbuntuPhone is dead as well.
Once they do this, it'll probably be a while before a proper Linux phone hits the market.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
I want regulation that divides all software into two categories: part of the hardware, or not part of the hardware, with specific requirements.
Part of the hardware:
- Can be restricted to specific devices
- Must be available under GPLv3, including anti-tivoization provisions (forced bootloader unlock)
- May not attempt to use TPMs, DRM, or other systems to support assertions about client devices
Not part of the hardware:
- May only interact with hardware through public, documented, APIs in the "part of hardware" category
- Using alternatives from competitors must be fully supported
- When made by a company that also makes hardware, must also work on competitors' hardware (at least one, more if technically feasible)
- May be under a proprietary license
- Must not attempt to assert anything regarding the hardware, so things like Google Safteynet are now illegal. Security boundary must be shifted to consider client devices insecure
This is, I think, a good compromise to allow software developers to get paid without taking away ownership of hardware devices. Developers can be paid for "part of the hardware" software with money from selling the hardware, and "not part of the hardware" software can be trivially commercialized under a proprietary license. But, there is no way for a user to end up unable to control their hardware, or incentivized to configure it in a specific way.
Unfortunately it's never going to happen.
Also, things like TPMs, Secure Boot, etc, are good security tools which can be used by an end user to get security guarantees over their device.
I use Secure Boot with Linux because, when done right, it means you can get full disk encryption without gaps (at best, without secure boot, you have an un-encrypted bootloader on a flash drive which decrypts your disk and boots your machine, and this is a clunky setup).
I use GrapheneOS's hardware attestation to alert me if something compromises my android phone's operating system.
Now it's true that these features are abused by companies like Google to force you to run a blessed Android build if you want to use e.g. Google Pay (which is the only mobile payment option in e.g. the UK). But it's important to separate the technology from the bad actors abusing it.
The difference is you using the tpm feature and anyone else using the tpm feature. The feature can exist as long as it's only there for you not for anyone else. You can satisfy yourself that no one has hacked your device. Your bank can not satisfy itself that they have ultimate control over your device instead of you.
The described mechanism doesn't say the hardware features can't assert the software features, only the other way around: the premise was merely that the software features need to be replaceable; in fact, this is exactly what you want, as it ensures that the mechanism in the hardware providing the secure boot feature is open source and it also ensures that the operating system you run is anything you want, rather than being locked into a specific choice by the maker of the hardware (or, if the people who make the hardware want to ship an OS with the hardware as if it were some kind of cohesive product, then that OS would also have to be open source and modifiable, which is how you can get a GrapheneOS in the first place).
That's a good idea in spirit but seems a little over complicated to me. I think it might be simpler to just categorically ban any and all technical measures designed to prevent users from controlling or modifying software on devices that they own. Distributing binary code without the source and build tools would count as such a technical measure. This would be an even more radical change in many respects, but also a lot simpler and more principled.
Curious to hear if there are any unintended consequences to this that I may not have thought of. Think of this as a strawman proposal.
You'd need to define "technical measure", or you'd have endless litigation to do it in courts. Trying to define that reasonably precisely is how I came up with my proposal.
> ban [...] technical measures designed to prevent users from controlling or modifying software on devices that they own
Is this legal ownership or technical 0wnership?
I think that it might make sense as a kind of certification that can be available for computers that follow these specifications. However, it will need to be changed a bit; one change is that the division as part or not part of the hardware is not good enough and there should be one in between. Most of it looks like good, though.
What would this third division consist of?
Do you make any carveouts for software meant for game consoles, like the playstation 5?
No, I explicitly want the game console business model to be shut down. As it stands now, they sell hardware at a loss to then extract value later, at the cost of user control over what they bought. I'd like to see consoles cost what they really do, and then the same for games. I also don't like how restricted it is to make games for consoles nor do I like games being exclusive, since this blocks competition between consoles on their own merit. If a user wants to pay less upfront and more later, then we have a tool for that. It's called financing.
Why? If Sony is loosing money on selling these devices, they should perhaps just raise the prize. Why should we make carveouts to allow companies to compete on the market unfairly and to lock in customers?
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.
Not 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?
It'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.
> prosecute Google for fraudulently marketing Android as open and force them to keep their promise.
Sorry man. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is forcing these changes. An operating system is a class 1 important product. A tamper-resistant microchip is a class 2 important product. A device with a secure element is a critical product. Your smartphone has all of these pieces. Manufactures must follow a list of best practices to enjoy a presumption of conformity. That list of best practices is being compiled and made ready for publication, with full effect in 2026/2027. Google knows what is coming. Everyone big knows what’s coming.
True open source with no monetization can get a pass. Everyone else has to do this.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
There is no reason to punish users outside the EU who still have the legal right to demand that Google keep its word.
If 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.
Here in the States iOS, XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo's various gaming platforms are all perfectly legal walled gardens.
If you don't like that, you have to do what they did in the EU and change the law.
Fraud is illegal here today, and Google's marketing was definitely fraudulent, so there is clearly something that can be done about it today.
The only solution to this problem is new legislation. The case that Google fraduently marketed Android is flimsy at best.
People buying phones by and large do not care in the slightest about "openness". Whether or not their phone supports sideloading is completely and utterly irrelevant to them.
But aside from that, it would be enermously difficult to prove that Google made claims that were unequivocally false while advertising Android. Sure, they made some vague claims about Android being an "open" platform. But they had more than enough well-compensated lawyers on their side to avoid making specific promises about specific functionality that could eventually land them in court.
Finally, even if some of the claims Google made about Android in 2015 no longer hold up in 2025, that in and of itself is not illegal. Google is allowed to change and adapt Android over time as it sees fit. Though you and I may disagree with their findings, they have internally identified systemic security threats caused by unrestricted sideloading, and have created a solution to this real-world problem (however flawed it may be). There is no reason under the current laws of the United States that they should not be allowed to make those changes (aside from perhaps general antitrust law, but that is not enough in this instance as evidenced by the outcome of Epic Games' case against Google). Perhaps they will have to change their advertising going into the future, and they can definitely no longer reuse older advertising materials promoting Android's capability for unrestricted sideloading (if those exist). But just because they advertised Android as having feature X in the past does not mean that they would break the law if they were to remove feature X in the future after they stopped running those old ads.
(Yes, it gets a little blurry in the case of software because it often automatically updates and offers no option to downgrade. But phones don't last forever. In the worst case Google could just wait ~5 years from today to implement Developer Verification.)
Sony didn't have to reopen the PS3, it got away with a settlement.
Sony didn't spend a decade marketing an "open" platform that allowed users to run any software they chose to run.
OtherOS was an advertised feature of the PS3. Are advertising claims now advisory until they mature?
Given that Sony lost a class action case seeking damages in court, clearly not.
I can buy EU software for my PC only to be required to sign in with google, apple, meta or microsoft. The lazy dev world isn't much better
Unfortunately sign on with social media improves engagement and conversions in apps. It's not about being lazy it's about doing what will bring more users.
Google 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.
Google 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.
> 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?
Google can force OEMs implement non-unlockable secure boot.
And (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-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
What is non-unlockable secure boot?
State of the art SoC with silicon baked private keys laser fused for production configuration
Google selling Android as both open source and open to running any software you like in order to quickly gain market share, only to break those promises after driving competing platforms out of the market is nothing more than fraud.
Their trial proved that even if you lose you can still keep your monopoly.
It took them 17 years to finally pull the cage all the way shut. A long con indeed.
You think it's an accident that they've been abandoning developer APIs and replacing them with closed source Play Store versions for a decade now?
Not at all. I’m just sort of impressed that, like I said, they it took them this long to fully close it now.
Other hyperbole notwithstanding, Google has pretty clearly done an extremely bad job of driving competing platforms out of the smartphone market.
Tell it to Blackberry, Windows Phone, WebOS and the Nokia N900.
there's also Palm OS (Palm, '96-'09), Maemo (Nokia, '05-'11), Moblin (Intel, '07-'09), webOS (LG, '09+), Bada (Samsung, '10-'13), Ubuntu Touch (Canonical, '11+), Tizen (Linux Foundation, Samsung, '12+), Firefox OS (Mozilla, '13-'15), KaiOS (FirefoxOS fork, '17+), Sailfish OS (Jolla, '13+), LuneOS (WebOS Ports community, '14+), postmarketOS (Oliver Smith, '16+), Mobian (Debian, '20), EMUI (Huawei, google-free since '20)...
yeah "Google has pretty clearly done an extremely bad job" at making competitors obsolete. Intel, Samsung, Nokia, etc. are all tiny companies who had no chance anyway, especially at the time before Android was firmly established as one of two platforms mobile developers bother making software for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... says otherwise; while Android variants have allowed other manufacturers to gain footholds, and some even are "de-Google-fied" in terms of services... all of them stem from a codebase that has been designed to be compatible with, if not explicitly promote, Google's revenue streams.
Imagine, if you will, an adblocker that could run across not just web pages but all apps, in a privacy-protecting and declarative way. Google has every incentive to simply slow-walk the OS-level support necessary for this kind of system, perhaps citing legitimate security concerns, but certainly not allocating resources towards solving the problem in earnest. And if you hard-fork Android to do this kind of deep work, rather than just maintaining packages or patchsets, you'll be forced to dedicate tremendous resources towards maintaining that fork to keep up with mainline fixes/APIs. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg.)
So it's an incredibly effective chilling effect in practice, quite intentionally so.
Sounds like your describing a DNS adblocker; works regardless of device.
How many F-Droid users are there, exactly? We don’t know, because we don’t track users or have any registration: “No user accounts, by design”
I use F-droid since around 2015, install it also for many family members and give them option to use open source alternatives of apps.
Most used apps are from F-Droid, about 20% from Aurora Store. No play services or gaaps at all.
We're almost there, just about to kill off the custom ROMs/OSes. All we have to do is wait for the Android project to go closed source.
They've been abandoning developer APIs only to replace them with closed source versions that are only installed as part of the Play Store for years.
Do it, Google! Nobody's going to fight for their computing rights until you've stepped on them hard enough. I can't wait for the amazing (non-Google) products that come out after this.
Like EMUI from Huawei or Xiaomi's HyperOS? Be real. Nothing is gonna come of it.
The ability to install what I want is one of the reasons I went with Android, I guess I will have to look elsewhere when I next need a phone. I am hoping the new GNU Phone or Linux Phone get to be "thing".
edit: fixed spelling
It could be, if all FOSS developers slapped a new license on their projects saying "not for Android/iOS".
This would make it no longer free software as per the FSF's definition. We could turn many more things into GPLv3, which would prevent this, however. Then, Android and iOS can use them if and only if they go under GPLv3 too, which includes provisions against bootloader locking.
GPLv2 requires allowing reinstallation of modified versions too:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Actually, how does that work? In my non-lawyer understanding, GPLv3 already says the end user must be allowed to actually run the code, to the point where the iOS app store can't have GPLv3 apps in it. So... does this change mean that GPLv3 apps can't legally be shipped for Android?
You can sideload apps onto your Android device using a developer setup, which is the setup that anyone building free software would use.
I think we need something in between. Permissive for individuals and small companies, but restrictive for mega corporations who impose their will on the populace.
The closest that I know of to this is GPLv3 with sold proprietary licenses. Then, when selling proprietary licenses, you can adjust the price to what you think that the customer can afford. There's debate on how ethical such adjustment is, and many companies (recently Slack and often Cloudflare) are criticized for it.
sounds like corporations would no longer have a need to open source anything
It can go two ways. Either corporations work with their users, or they work against them.
The bigger factor is whether or not Linux phones that are reasonably nice to use (everything works, isn’t flaky, battery life is decent-ish) come to market or not. Developers aren’t going to be interested in a platform that for practical purposes is at best a curiosity or something to tinker with, no matter how many idealist checkboxes they tick.
Good North America market availability sure would help too. There’s been stuff like Sailfish that seemed interesting in the past but didn’t have easily purchasable devices available in the US, completely precluding development for the platform for a significant number of devs.
Usage restrictions are not allowed to be considered an OSI-approved Open-Source license. Plenty of people think that the OSI "Open Source Definition" is the only valid definition of "open source", and will thus reject calling such licenses "open source".
I've been happily using "GNU/Linux phones" since 2008, with only 2-3 years around 2017 of using an Android device as a backup, so there's no need to "hope"; you can just act.
I would be interested in hearing more details. What devices? N900? Pinephone? And what particular distro(s) / software stack(s)?
From 2008 to about 2011: Neo Freerunner, first on Om2007.2, then on SHR.
Then Nokia N900 with Maemo 5, in 2017-2019 augmented by Samsung Galaxy S3 with LineageOS as a secondary device since N900 was getting unusable for the Web by then.
And finally since 2020 up to now, Librem 5 with PureOS, which removed the need to carry an Android device again.
How's the battery life?
Does the phone last an entire day on a single charge?
I am trying out a Oneplus 6 on Mobian, and I got 29 hours of battery life on idle, and it is looking to be around 15 hours with light usage.
With a Librem 5, its 12ish hours on idle, 20 hours on suspend, and 4-5 hours light usage.
do they make phone calls? can they tether 5G?
If so, I might be able invert my plan: use the Linux phone with phone/5G/useful software most of the time, and a cheap android phone in my bag that only comes out for things that need the monopoly apps and tethers to the useful one occasionally when necessary.
Both of those phones support LTE only. Both make/receive phone calls, but the Librem 5 is more stable on that front.
The Fairphone 4/5 supports 5G, but I don't know how stable they are on pmOS/Mobian
any suggestions on how you would call somebody on an iPhone over 5G or WiFi instead of a proper phone call on these? currently use WhatsApp.
https://jmp.chat/
Depends on your definition of "lasting an entire day", but for me it lasts just long enough to usually not bother carrying a power bank with me. Usage patterns vary though.
it lasts 46 minutes
I'll probably have an android phone in my bag for emergencies and use some kind of offline Linux phone for my mobile computing needs. or even give up on the mobile form factor for general use.
I started on Android in 2008. I maintained my own ROM, complete with a custom kernel. Then I moved on to various AOSP forks. I ran the local Android Developers MeetUp and evangelised the platform for so many years.
This year I finally moved to iOS. I don’t feel happy about it, but they are now both basically as closed as each other, both are run by what I consider evil corporations.
If you told the teenager me in mid 90s, watching the internet bloom all around me, promising freedom and democratisation of access to knowledge the world over, that one day we would replace the open, standards based, federated, decentralised World Wide Web with two proprietary walled gardens, beholden forever to the whims of two companies, I would have thought you’re nuts.
Everything eventually becomes the Torment Nexus when greed becomes culturally acceptable.
Can someone explain this?
https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration...
> The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.
I don't understand the argument.
The first part is obvious I think (they don't want to make registration in google's store a requirement for f-droid since that defeats half the purpose of f-droid).
The other half is suggesting they could offer uploading the apps put into f-droid to the store (under an f-droid account I'd guess) but they immediately discard that option since it would make f-droid the exclusive distributor, taking something from the dev.
why would the dev lose the right to distribute their app?
Are there good Google-free Android phones? Recommendations?
https://murena.com (sells e/OS on Pixel, Fairphone, SHIFTphone, and "Hiroh powered by Murena" hardware, whatever that last one is)
https://www.shift.eco (need to somehow get ShiftOS-L variant; the -G variant has Google services on board)
GrapheneOS has been rock solid for me for several years now. Just pick any Pixel device. As for software, there are alternatives to everything you can find on the Play Store, assuming you're not reliant on a specific Google product. GOS has robust support for sandboxed Play services that work without Google, though I personally haven't used it. Even banking apps work without an issue for me, though YMMV.
I'm considering abandoning Android altogether in favor of a proper Linux device, but GOS is what makes Android usable for me.
So the best source for Google-free phones is ... Google?
If you don't want to sacrifice security, usability, or reliability, yes.
If you object to having any business with Google or using their hardware, then no.
well, it may be time for GrapheneOS
https://grapheneos.org/
So, the old smartphones (I'm thinking something like an Android 13) will still be able to install any software?
A lot of software like banking and governments' identification won't work on old Android versions.
Of course, two phones: one to Play, one to Pay
This was clearly the idea. Google doesnt like competition.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
and followup development is a week old now also
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428832
F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree (f-droid.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794 - 8 days ago, 567 comments
Answering questions about Android developer verification (googleblog.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428832 - 3 days ago, 121 comments
Absolutely no one gives a shit about the features the out of touch nerds value, which is why Android inevitably begins to follow Apple.
This post was brought to you by your local troll.
not so sure about that, if i found 100 android users out and about i'd be lucky to find 1 that gives a shit
You're missing the forest for the trees.
General purpose computing has been the backbone of the modern tech economy for decades and has changed our way of life.
Efforts to restrict that such as no longer allowing people to install applications-Google-hasn't-approved on their own devices is only going to benefit Google at the expense of others and cripple future innovation in the software ecosystem for mobile.
"It's my device, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!"
The reason this argument isn't holding water and swaying popular opinion, in my opinion, is because everything else in life is heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted.
"It's my car, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold, either for driving, or removing the catalytic converter, or changing the tuning to be able to roll coal, or uninstalling the seat belts.
"It's my kitchen, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
"It's my home, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent, and broaden chance of success.
The technologist sees licensing from Google to develop Android apps as tyranny. The average person asks "where have you been? What can you do without a license?"
> I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
You can though. No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
> I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
A deck or addition might draw attention and run afoul of some rule depending on where you live, but a lot of places won't care. If you want to put in an outlet, the world's your oyster. The only real consideration is if you're worried you may do it wrong and may run into insurance denials after a catastrophe or something. You don't actually need anyone's permission. And it's October; I have decorations in my front yard right now. No one was consulted about this.
It's like my air conditioner broke a couple weeks ago, so I ordered a capacitor off amazon and fixed it. I've never touched one of these things before, but the only one stopping you from unscrewing it and going to town is you. If you passed high school you ought to have a basic understanding of how stuff works and be able to do some light reading to make sure you're doing this correctly and safely. LLMs make this even easier.
These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if your AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts. Or even more on point, required someone registered with e.g. Carrier (not actually any kind of professional certification; just someone gatekept by a business trying to monopolize things).
> No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
It's literally illegal in many US states and countries to do so. In my home state, MN, it is tightly regulated what kinds of "cottage food" you are allowed to sell.
You're confusing ability with legality. Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens. This is despite, for most people, judging the health risks of food being wildly easier than the security risks of a sideloaded app.
> These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if you AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts.
That already exists in car repair; with key reprogrammers and especially anything engine-tuning being restricted to licensed individuals. Also, good luck messing with your catalytic converter, without the ECU by law detecting it and getting very angry. Take my relative's diesel truck from 2015 - a single failed sensor in the exhaust, and it caps itself as low as 30 MPH.
> You're confusing ability with legality
No, you are. Google's restricting the ability, by decree. Laws restrict the legality, in certain places, by democratic consensus.
That's more a reflection of your neighbors not wanting to deal with your door-to-door nuisance of a business. If you have people that want to buy food from you, exactly nothing will happen. Same deal with e.g. babysitting/day care. Exactly no one will care if you do it or if you casually offer it in conversation with a parent. People might get annoyed if you go door-to-door soliciting about it and interrupt their day.
Ability vs. legality is the point; these things in practice aren't that heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted, and in fact no one will check up on you or try to stop you at all unless you piss someone off by somehow turning it into an annoyance. I don't know why you'd even think to check whether most of the stuff you listed is legal.
Using car restrictions (which are obviously mostly anti-consumer, especially for EVs) as some justification for similar actions in phones is interesting, to say the least.
You're saying these laws exist, they actively restrict our devices and our freedoms, but it's okay because they're complaint-driven (aka snitching).
That's worse, not better. Freedom by definition isn't subject to the whims of my neighbors.
---
Edit, posting too fast, because I can't reply directly: What you are advocating for is a police state. Think about it:
1. Laws should be intentionally overbroad: Make everything illegal, then only enforce when something goes wrong
2. Competence is determined retroactively: You only find out if you were "allowed" to do something after a disaster
3. Rights depend on outcomes: You had the right to wire that outlet... unless it sparked, then retroactively you didn't
4. Selective enforcement is good, actually: Laws that could be used against anyone but usually aren't are fine
This is nonsense.
I'm not in favor of extreme authoritarian laws being on the books at all for their abuse potential, but dystopian laws that exist but are only ever enforced in practice if you are a nuisance are obviously better than dystopian laws that exist and are regularly enforced. And actually "you're only not allowed to install an electrical outlet if you're too dumb to do it without starting a fire" seems like it's right about what the law should be, so if you only get in trouble if you start a fire... good? Likewise if you only end up in trouble for selling food in practice if you end up poisoning people. Sounds about right.
---
Like I said,
> I'm not in favor of extreme authoritarian laws being on the books at all for their abuse potential
I'm not in favor of that. But obviously a police-state-on-the-books is better than a real-actual-police-state. Duh. Laws that are never enforced that say women can't wear pants or gay relationships are illegal are stupid. I like when legislators do "cleanup" bills to delete invalid laws and keep things tidy. The same laws if they are enforced are oppressive.
In practice I'm not sure that "you can do dangerous things as long as you are competent and are not negligent and don't injure others" is a bad guiding principle? Like yeah if it turns out you were not competent or you were negligent, then we (retroactively) say you should have at least known enough to not do that. Sounds reasonable. Especially if the law is effectively "thing is dangerous. Only people who know what they're doing should do it". It's on you then to know enough to know whether you know what you're doing. If you don't know whether you're competent enough, then I suppose you're not.
It would be better to have that explicitly be the law, but having it be the de facto law works well enough. It's sort of the same "if you know you know" kind of thing, but I guess with a different psychological filter where people are more likely to default to "I don't realize I can do this"? Personally I'd prefer we not infantilize people, so it's better to encourage them to better themselves and learn a skill rather than discouraging them and saying they "can't" do it, but maybe the type of people who allow themselves to be infantilized are exactly the ones you don't want to do it anyway.
Yeah, people on the Internet seriously freak out about things like driving drunk even if no one is hurt. The current de-facto legal interpretation is pretty good: drive as drunk as you want so long as you don't damage anything or hit a person.
Indeed, I think things like DUI checkpoints where you stop and question everyone passing through (or even those who turn around) are bad. There should be some observational evidence of poor driving or someone having reported you for negligently getting into and driving a vehicle when they know you've done significant drinking. Likewise I think the Build Back Better bill's provision to require all new cars to have some kind of anti-DUI sensors was an overstep.
> Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens.
There's a lovely grandma in my neighborhood who has been doing exactly this for years. She sells the best tamales around. Just sayin'.
But yes, how viable and/or legal this is depends on where you live.
Tamale Lady who hits every bar near Mission in San Francisco? She’s been at it for decades.
note that you're confusing selling with ability. it's one thing for the state to say they can regulate and tax a sale, but to use your dubious analogy, this is more like the state saying I can't have my neighbour over for a (free) dinner because I need a license in food preparation and it has to happen in a rented location.
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now.
I think the relevant difference is that it has real-world consequences for other people. And the consequences are likely to scale with the magnitude of the audience, meaning that it is bigger players that should face stiffer regulation. And yes, I think some of the examples you give should also be allowed.
Catalytic converters are there because they reduce the emissions your car produces. Those emissions get out into the air and affect everyone around you, and (over time, potentially) everyone on the planet. Rules around selling baked goods exist to ensure you don't sell bread made with rotten eggs or something that would make people sick. (And there are now "home kitchen" laws in some places that do allow you to do this anyway.) Installing a new electrical outlet has potential fire risks which could affect nearby buildings. Building a deck has potential safety consequences, but I imagine there are many jurisdictions where you can do that without a permit, and even more where you can get away with doing so even though it's technically not allowed.
Me installing a tic-tac-toe game from F-droid doesn't have the same kind of ripple effects on other people. It probably has much smaller such effects than installing a mainstream app like Facebook.
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent.
The bigger you are, the more everything you do affects other people. To my mind the "logically consistent" approach is to impose greater restrictions on almost all sorts of behavior the larger and more powerful the entity performing the behavior. By this logic, it would be Google that is restricted from changing its policy like this, simply because it is big.
Google is very clear, sideloading has about 50x more malware than the Play Store. The Brazilian government in particular is absolutely furious about the amount of scams, and was openly planning legal interventions.
Your ability to distribute your app anonymously absolutely meets the definition of real-world consequences for other people.
I personally find it absurd we accept that the government regulates food (people can't detect bad food), and hair cutting (people can't detect inexperienced people with scissors), but the right to anonymous app distribution is sacrosanct, as though food quality is less transparent than app quality. It's not - all of these licenses need to be let go of on the small scale.
How is "50x" measured? Is that number of apps or number of app installs? Are they considering things like Facebook and TikTok as "malware"?
Why would you take them at face value? Just look at the Play Store yourself. I've seen plenty of privacy-invading (and worse!) apps on the Play Store, even when (especially when!) searching for a specific app I know is legit and good.
Meanwhile I can download anything with confidence on F-Droid, the subject of the article.
They way they implement the rules also removes the most trustworthy apps. Seems like a bad trade.
> Google is very clear, sideloading has about 50x more malware than the Play Store.
The butcher says that vegetables is bad for your health, and you should only eat meat.
Google is full of shit.
There are plenty of physical appliances you can modify how ever you want because it's really only your business. Installing the software of your choice on a phone is like that. It's not something like a car sharing a public road and polluting the air.
A compromised phone could be used in a botnet, and might even cripple the cellular infrastructure itself with a DDoS attack.
What real world consequences occur from installing whatever software you choose on your device?
people might watch movies they haven't paid for. people might read books they're not supposed to read. people might start having ideas that the oligarchs don't approve of. it's terrifying!
Are you trying to further normalize the situation?
I said it was inconsistent to fight for digital freedoms without real world freedoms. I did not say I was okay with the loss of digital freedoms.
I think people should be able to build a deck without state consent. I think people should be able to sell to their neighbors without the health department watching. I think people should be able to start a small business without needing IRS filings at first. I think a small business might need OSHA exceptions across the board for the first few employees. I even think, yes, that allowing some idiots to roll coal is worth more than tightly regulating car repairs and controlling car repair equipment. And I think, to most people, these freedoms matter more than digital sovereignty.
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Edit, posting too fast, cannot reply directly: In that case, that's a great argument for regulating app distribution, we need to protect people from scam apps. We can't possibly neglect people who don't know better about the risks of sideloading.
I'm sure you wouldn't say, "I just want to do whatever I want with code, while stopping my neighbor from building a dangerous deck," with a straight face, right?
The particular problem with your kind of thinking is neglecting people are assholes.
It's cool and all for your neighbors to sell you raw milk until that case of brucellosis and staph kills off the breadwinner in your family and you're caught up for the rest of your life suing a family farm out of existence.
And that deck is great and all, until you go over to your buddies party where you're all drinking and 15 crowd on to that deck that suddenly fails leading to you being a paraplegic.
And small business OSHA exceptions are great until big companies sub out all their work to tiny contractors that end up dying without proper PPE.
And some idiot rolling coal is fine until you're the one trying to figure out how you got lung cancer even though you didn't ever smoke.
Libertarianism is what happen when you don't think in systems.
You can do whatever you want to do with your car, your kitchen, or your home. There is nothing a manufacturer can do to stop you. But you can't demand that they help you and provide you with assistance. Likewise, you can do exactly whatever you want with your iPhone or Android phone. You can rip out the chips and put in different chips, if you have the talent to do it. But you can't demand that the manufacturer helps you.
A libertarian who somehow also wants rigid restrictions on technology? Did someone steal your crypto or something?
I find this position hard to reconcile.
You are mixing up legitimate government regulations with a corporation abusing it's power to fuck over consumers.
Following your rationale, we just actually need the government to step in and regulate that Google cannot do what they want with Android.
Since I live in the EU, that's exactly what I am hoping for.
> You are mixing up legitimate government regulations with a corporation abusing it's power to fuck over consumers.
Anytime similar argument is brought up for Apple, people always say "Their platform, their rules". Isnt that the case here?
> Anytime similar argument is brought up for Apple, people always say "Their platform, their rules". Isnt that the case here?
Apple told users in advance that they would be buying into a walled garden.
Google, on the other hand, fraudulently marketed Android as open.
Fraud is illegal. Walled gardens are not.
I think both Apple and Google should be able to set their own rules if they're just acting in self-interest. Some think they should be regulated due to being a duopoly, I disagree, but at the same time it's a reasonable argument to make.
Government crackdown is the scarier thing. It's suspicious seeing both "private" companies locking things down, while at the same time the US govt is increasingly making special threats and deals with big corps, and also Europe is trying to clamp down on encrypted messaging. So yeah the outcry over Android seems justified. Wouldn't be surprised if WEI comes back too.
I cannot speak for other people. You can look up my comment history on similar discussions if you so desire.
My position when Apple was throwing a hissy fit because of EU regulations is that Apple should go fuck itself.
Now, likewise, I hope the EU assrapes Google with fines if they move on with this bullshit.
> EU assrapes Google with fines
Why? On what grounds? It hurts upsets a few people?
On the grounds that they are abusing their market dominance to harm consumers.
I, and many others, rely on being able to slideload apps on Androids.
> market dominance to harm consumers.
If Google decides to abandon Android tomorrow, or go all in on Windows Mobile OS, is that an "abuse of market dominance"? In reality, private companies are free to make decisions that make sense to them.
There's no law that says things should be "free", or everyone should be "happy" with a companies decision.
> If Google decides to abandon Android tomorrow, or go all in on Windows Mobile OS, is that an "abuse of market dominance"?
Yes.
> In reality, private companies are free to make decisions that make sense to them.
And that's why governments should regulate them very strictly. I fully expect corporations to fuck over consumers if it makes them a couple of bucks.
> There's no law that says things should be "free", or everyone should be "happy" with a companies decision.
Most countries have regulations protecting consumers.
I'm honestly surprised this didn't happen sooner. Apple's been a "lavish jail cell" since its inception, and the control definitely makes them the big bucks. ChromeOS was a jail cell from its inception too. You could do some dev stuff to enable user control, but it disabled other things. https://rainestorme.github.io/guide/ is a guide to jailbreak it. It shouldnt need jailbroken, ever. Should be yours from the moment you paid money for it and bought it.
Google/Alphabet's been slowly tightening all sorts of things. Of course "security" is the term bandied around. Of course, I'd say "security" is overloaded - is it security for the user, or security for google AGAINST the user? I think it's the second.
And we also have no valid 3rd party phone platform. In reality, there was Windows Phone, but that was even worse locked down.
There's a few Linux phone projects. Pinephone is an embarrassment and an abject failure. I think the UbuntuPhone is dead as well.
Once they do this, it'll probably be a while before a proper Linux phone hits the market.