Kind of like "jailbreaking" as a term. It makes it seem like you're a criminal escaping from confinement enforced by good and decent society.

It’s called that because you used to download the apks on a separate computer and then load them onto the phone, it has nothing to do with sounding illegal

> With phones becoming our main computing platform, I wonder why do we look at it any different from our personal computers?

Especially after people paying so much money for the devices, it's ludicrous that they are not allowed to make their own decisions and install what they want. Ownership, user rights, and privacy have been kicked in the face. If you can not install whatever software that you want, then people should be signing only rental agreements.

It is also more the reason to push Linux smartphones[1]. Android is not doing anything special, that people could not get or create for Linux phones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...

> With phones becoming our main computing platform, I wonder why do we look at it any different from our personal computers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085

The deal with Youtube was always presented as "You watch a couple ads, we show you a couple videos"

Google has dramatically altered that deal, and now shows much longer, less-likely-to-be-skippable ads, with much higher frequency.

Calling it "a prety reasonable subscription" is only reasonable if we forget that this wasn't the deal originally offered

Furthermore, this is a massive corporation closing up a project that got it's start by selling itself to geeks as Open.

It is Google's OS, and it is Google's app, but closing up the Open project to advantage their own app sure as hell feels like poor form

I disagree that it's a bad defense. It demonstrates well how reduced openness will allow Google to abuse its monopoly even more. It shouldn't be any business of the maker of my phone to support the business model of the most popular video sharing website.

Not paying for Premium is pretty cheesy but Revanced also fixes a number of hostile UX changes to YouTube no subscription let you escape normally.

It also allows you to patch other apps to make them work the way you want.

It's much more than that. It's an app that patches apks and has a series of community patches for specific apps. For youtube it's the usual ad blocking and sponsorblock, etc. but it can apply patches for all apps, one of the universal patches is changing the package name, this allows you to install 2 of the same app. I use this on youtube and tiktok so I have both accounts logged in at the same time, each logged in to a separate app.

And Microsoft. Microsoft basically killed Nokia from the inside. Symbian was fairly open in terms of installing applications from wherever you wanted.

And Maemo/MeeGo were basically normal Linux distributions. Right now, SailfishOS is a worthy successor. It runs on a fairly decent number of devices and is quite ready for daily usage. Following the Nokia tradition, offline maps are outstanding. There's also a proprietary Android emulation layer that works really well for most applications, in case that is needed.

SailfishOS and Jolla could challenge the duopoly if a critical mass of developers migrated to the system. Right now, there's a fairly small technical userbase that has nonetheless produced lots of great indie applications. I can't believe I had Linux in my pocket with the N770 in late 2005 and, right now, mainstream options are so locked down.

> Apple? I'd never give my money to the organization that's responsible for bringing us to this place.

Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and walled gardens are not illegal unless you do what the EU did and change the law.

What is going to bite Google on the ass here is selling users an "open" platform and then using anticompetitive tactics to yank those supposed freedoms away.

Look at Microsoft's Xbox platform. It was created, advertised and sold to the public as a walled garden with no legal repercussions at all, because walled gardens are not illegal.

On the other hand, Microsoft created Windows as an open platform and sold it to the public as such. When Microsoft tried to use anticompetitive tactics to maintain control of the platform they sold as "open", they were found guilty of antitrust in jurisdictions around the world.

Google made the choice to sell Android as open. "Sideloading" apps was the only way to install apps at all for the first couple of years. The decision to sell Android as "open" only to yank those freedoms away will have legal consequences again here.

How are they responsible?

Not anymore, since OneUI 8. And before that, by unlocking the bootloader you were tripping Samsung's e-fuse, permanently marking the hardware as unlocked. That's why nobody ever bothered making custom firmware builds for Samsung devices.

Sideloading doesn't require rooting the device.

Unlocking the bootloader is step 1 in rooting the device (usually) and is absolutely required to install an alternate OS (like grapheneOS)

And yeah majority of phones simply won't let you do that anymore

This is what bothers me about the whole "App Store" stuff with the EU. This entire fight about Apple being required to allow third party "App Stores" -- how about simply the user can load whatever software they want to on the device which they are the owner of?

The amount of legalism that's been brought in by both sides, Apple/Google and the regulators, layered in lies (we need to approve the software, register the developers, to protect the user from software), is divorced from the reality of the hardware-software relationship. This has led us down a path where everyone is debating the topics that Google, Apple, and revolving door regulators choose rather than the underlying reality.

There is a simple solution to all of this: Google and Apple should no longer be allowed to operate any sort of "App Store" or software distribution channel.

It's weird because "sideloading" accurately captures that you're doing something ad hoc outside of the main channel. You install software with your package manager, from the app repository, and you sideload it with `curl | bash` or manually moving an .exe/.msi/.apk.

This is a fine distinction. And it will happen and should happen because there are always gaps. Without a way to fill them, you're left with a subpar experience.

And while many people are fine with it on their iPhones, I can't really imagine not having ReVanced apps, Molly, or a dozen other little fixes.

On windows, you mostly download apps from websites and sideload them. And windows is by far the most common OS

Politician and corporations want you to not have ownership or control over your devices. Either for money or control, but they absolutely would love for things like Linux to not be possible or illegal so they can force you to watch ads and pay their next version of enshitified shit, not consume the wrong kind of news and absolutely not assemble in political opposition to their corruption.

If you don't see the patterns of absolutely pathetic authoritianism, which most people cheered on during covid policies times, you're not going be very effective at opposing this crap.

I'd probably still want a common repo to get software from, for the same reason we use package managers and repos on Linux. Not to mention that the app store experience is more friendly to the newbies out there. But the 'just download an apk/exe/.app and run it' should still exist as a lowest common denominator. Not to mention that the existence of that possibility will hopefully keep stores in check and not become overtly hostile, since if they do, users can just say 'fuck it' and download their software piecemeal.

I wish that standard software development practices included encouraging the implementation of an "I know what I'm doing, stop coddling me" option.

They're intentionally fumbling on progressive web apps for the same reason.

I used to think jailbreaking was the only way to do this, and mourned my adblocker tweaks when Apple made jailbreaking practically impossible. But turns out sideloading on iOS is a pretty easy alternative: just install AltStore via your computer, sign in with your Apple ID, and then import and install the YTLitePlus .ipa from their GitHub[1]. This gets you a YouTube clone with adblocking, SponsorBlock, custom UI controls, and all sorts of other quality-of-life features. You can even sign into and sync with your existing YouTube account.

The only downside is that free Apple accounts must renew their certificate in AltStore (while connected to their computer's home network) once a week, or else it'll all be deactivated and you'll have to reinstall AltStore and YTLitePlus from scratch. But you can pay $99 for a year-long developer account, set a recurring reminder to renew, or worst case YTLitePlus makes it easy to export your settings so you can quickly restore it after reinstalling.

[1] https://github.com/YTLitePlus/YTLitePlus

Orion browser (from Kagi) and Brave block natively youtube adds on iphone.

I watch YouTube without ads on iOS. Any decent Safari ad blocker stops YouTube's ads. Google seems to make YouTube an intentionally subpar experience in a browser compared to a mobile app, but it works.

You can install iOS Safari ad blockers. AdGuard for example

I was with you on "easy to unlock", but the "not quite as good as a free phone from a MetroPCS store" is just a laughable, probably troll take.

> Wait, let me take out my word 97 CDs

oh, those things you literally load from the side? :P

/s

Atleast you get some decent hardware if you have to give up the freedom anyway.

I am not paying for Youtube. Besides the cost, the last thing I want is Google to track what I view through logins and payment details (real name, address, etc.)

Why would anybody give this criminal enterprise their money?

I wouldn't mind paying for lunch but they want me to pay for dinner and lunch.

Just allowed me to pay only for ad free and not include youtube music. I know youtube lite is a thing but its only available to limited countries.

Correction: free drugs are over.

ReVanced does more than ad blocking, e.g. SponsorBlock and others.

And as the parent already said, "I may as well get an iPhone".

Thanks for paying for my lunch

I'd still consider it hoarding.

Depending on how old they are, phones have diminishing network compatibility, and cheap, dumb devices are in production still, and will be for the indefinite future. So it's not like they are a resource that the world has run out of.

Old laptops age better, but it's not like anyone restricts software on laptops, or will ever be able.

2G and 3G networks are already being dismantled, if not already gone, in several parts of the world. Even if you do want to stick to those devices out of principle, you often can't, or if you can, only for maybe 5 more years.

You can still buy equivalent dumb phones, but they aren't any more open than the rest of the rabble.

Laptops are a different story, although I believe part of that battle was already lost when the Intel SSM and AMD equivalent came around. We'll see how things go when banks start to require you to enable (In)Secure Boot just to be able to log in through a browser on a PC.

Until they deprecate old SIM cards and make new ones that refuse to work in legacy phones.

What "covid policy" do you think contributed to Google locking down their device? Can you point to some of these "covid policies" and explain how it relates to this?

Non-sequitur. Covid policies weren't used to damage my online security or manufacture my consent for digital change.

If you're going to use unrelated discussions to launder your conspiracy theory, at least provide evidence. Otherwise we get to dismiss you without trial which is faster but less fun.

It’s so strange that out of the box CalDAV and CardDAV support is rare for mobile devices. iPhones are the best somehow, with Android being heavily Google-focused and support is totally absent on non-smart platforms, which is the perfect opposite of what one might expect! It’d make way more sense if the more open platforms were built around open standards, but somehow here we are.

I am not 100% sure but my partner has the nokia “bannana” phone and i think it supports both. It for sure supports 4g hotspot and caldav but i think even carddav.

Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.

There was a multiple years of gap between rollout of voice call specification on LTE(VoLTE) and launches of first featurephone operating system supporting it. Android and iOS were only implementation available for a while. For this reason, practically all "featurephone" style phones that supports voice call, except very few, runs AOSP. At the point where your product runs AOSP, you might as well launch it as a low end smartphone, which is what a lot of vendor do.

I suspect the solution may be a compact tablet running a touch-friendly Linux distro, and the "phone" is just a mobile hotspot. If you want some fantastic camera built in, that's a separate problem.

I've been more neutral about this in the past, but the current and future integration of LLMs (and other ML models) into the base operating system will mean these mobile phones do less of what the user wants and more of what the user does not want.

Secondly, Apple is in the process of becoming an adtech company and will not provide an alternative to Google.

Thirdly, Google may be forced to divest Android and the mobile business. If so, the buyer is likely to be as bad, or worse, because they'll have to figure out how to pay for the whole thing.

For a couple years I used the TCL Flip as a phone and mobile hotspot for my iPod touch. I'm pretty sure KaiOS supports CardDAV.

> Presents a mobile hotspot

I guess you can get a mobile hotspot and a dumb phone separately. Looks like 5G Wifi 6 APs are available for ~$100.

The dipshits at Apple and Google don't provide what should be a built in feature (recording calls) and make it difficult to add it through third party software. At this point, iOS and Android are actively working against the user.

I don’t really care to do any task traditionally associated with full fat computers directly on my phone, simply because the input methods are extremely poor for that kind of thing. If my phone could act like an ultrabook/netbook when hooked up to a screen and proper desktop input on the other hand (similar to DeX, iPadOS 26, and the forthcoming baseline Android desktop mode), that’s a more interesting proposition and probably one that a number of more typical users would find interesting too.

For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.

> what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?

I do most of my light/routine server management via SSH from my phone, plus keeping a version control checkout of my documents that I do actually work on in vim (yes, the limited keyboard is annoying but it's fine for light work). At a previous job, the former extended quite far; I could get paged in the middle of the night, connect to the VPN, SSH into the server, triage, and frequently diagnose and even fix the problem without having to actually get out of bed.

I've rebuilt Linux servers with my phone from multiple countries over. I've also reconfigured BGP speaking routers with it.

> unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone

They're more powerful than plenty of computers from not too long ago

If you interpret “this space” a little more broadly, there are boutique manufacturers catering to hackers that sell tiny, cheap, wearable computers. Check out all the stuff Adafruit sells.

No CardDAV sync. How do you get contacts on and off the device?

Do you actually carry around a Linux laptop with a USB modem instead of a smartphone? Can you blog about it?

This.

Apple stopped selling all iPod hardware, including iPod touch, for a reason.

This isn't going to happen.

You won't have modern mobile banking or cellular communications in a device without binary blobs or "trusted" compute modules you cannot inspect.

This.

It's time for an antitrust breakup of Google (and Apple).

These two companies control mobile computing like a dictatorship. This is a sector where most people do all of their computing. This isn't gaming or a plaything - it's most people's lives and trillions of dollars of business activity. All gatekept by two companies.

Here's what needs to happen:

1. We need government mandated web installs of native apps without scare walls ("this app is dangerous and may delete your files") and enabled by default without labyrinthine settings to enable.

2. We need the ability to do payments and user signups without Google or Apple's platform pieces. We should not be forced to lock ourselves into their ecosystems.

3. Google search and Chrome cannot be the defaults on mobile platforms. We need the EU-mandated browser / search picker.

4. First party applications should not be treated as first class while third parties are left to dry. Google and Apple should not be allowed to install their platform components by default - a user must seek them out.

5. No more green text / blue text bubbles. All messaging must be multi-platform and equivalent with no favoritism.

6. Google and Apple wallets should not be the defaults, but rather the user should have the ability to configure their bank, PayPal, Cash App, or whatever payment provider they choose.

There are options out there for you to do this. Hell, build your own. That’s what nerds did long ago. Keep up the same effort today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls

I called my mom yesterday (to her landline), and then I sent a text message to my friend from a parking lot to let them know I'd be there soon.

99% of my communications are SMS/MMS and while i do avoid phone calls my friend called me yesterday, and i called a business to ask about their holiday hours this weekend.

And it's all LTE, your pocket computer needs a network whether you use SMS or some IP messenger. Therefore carriers get involved, and they make horrifying demands of users and manufacturers.

But yeah, i don't want a phone, i want a pocket computer with VoLTE

Lina Khan was doing pretty good

I believe there is a private right of action on anti trust.

If you're really interested in it, I suggest subscriber to https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

Which ones?

Eagerly awaiting Apple doing the same on Macs then. Let alone any Linux distribution.

7 years lifetime is nothing. All iPhones have to rotate in that timeframe. That's incredible amounts of waste.

Every shitty iPhone could still be a MP3 player, home control or something else. But no, its Garbage because your only way to install is by going online and hoping that your critical apps are still in a useful version in the app store.

I'd say that's a spurious correlation, if it exists at all. Just look at all the Android phone makers who don't allow bootloader unlocks and those who do. Personally I'd say Google Pixel or Sony Xperia phones last longer than Huawei ones, though I wouldn't dare say reprogrammability has anything to do with it.

Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.

One of my desktop pcs is like 15 years old. It faced a ram upgrade and 2 gpus died over time, the processor still holds. The windows 11 upgrade killed it though, but I'll move it to linux and that should be ok.

> The most locked down mainstream option on the market – the iPhone – is also the one with the longest market life

Compare that to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone), which will be supported forever, since they run mainline Linux.

They may say that if they publish the code, other countries will copy it for free.

security through obscurity maybe?

This probably falls into the "right to repair" and "green" initiatives, so I think it's going to happen in this decade.

Yes, if you support https://eff.org

Haven't European politicians already legislated against this anyway, with the DMA?

IoT sensors, thermostats, dashcams, home intercoms, mobile data modems, smart TV dongles... I could name a dozen more products that could have an old phone as their heart, if they were cheap, unlocked, and easier to develop for.

An iPhone doesn't have to be an iPhone forever, and end-users don't have to be the ones doing the conversion. All we need is a law that would stop phones from going to a landfill and instead actually get them recycled as general computing devices.

The market can figure out the rest. If manufacturers today are willing to deal with antique toolchains and expensive programmer gear to save a few cents on microcontrollers, imagine what they could do with cheap boards running Android or iOS.

All my personal and family computers are more than 10 year old, running latest Ubuntu. They have probably slower CPUs than that 8 year old iphone, but can run the latest web and email clients just fine. These are almost all salvaged from e-waste. I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.

My 8 yo iPhone is perfectly usable, the battery wasn’t expensive or difficult to replace.

Cool. So if the device is ostensibly so old and unusable now, what possible commercial rationale could exist for preventing its use for other ends?

Approximately nobody is not nobody.

And saying this in a forum literally named after the act of hacking and repurposing devices is quite bold.

I have old devices still laying around in the hope one day I could reuse them for something, anything useful, I simply can't get myself to throw away something which seemed magical a few years ago.

Those 8 year old phones were plenty fast when they were new. Why did operating system, apps, and websites need to get more bloated? Do they even do anything they didn't (or couldn't) do 8 years ago?

I also meant microcontrollers. I am sure someone would remove chips from old devices and resell if they were reprogrammable. Also you could use them for your hobby for free.

How about 8 year old Macs with Apple Silicon, which are rapidly going to become a thing in just 3 short years, and are the same thing as an iPhone architecturally

What happens when Apple stops putting new macOS versions out for the M1, which by all accounts is as far better computer than my old Sandy Bridge Thinkpad, but will become completely useless far earlier?

8 year old phones are fine if you run a decent OS on them.

A spurious justification is not ideal, but it would be acceptable at this point.

The first iPhone is more powerful than the VAX computer my high school used to teach in over fifteen simultaneous terminals.

Weird, did the CPU somehow slow down over time? Did it get tired?

I think the real question here, aside from how to displace Android and IOS, is: how do the developers get paid for the upgrades, new features, security analysis and fixes, developing new boards and coming up with bsp (board support packages, essentially a "distribution" for hardware manufacturers that works on whatever new boards they relase) and infrastructure of such an OS.

Let's just assume this is about the amount of effort Mozilla puts in. So they'd need to collect ~500 million per year.

Where does that money come from? Presumably the answer can't be Google.

It doesn't need to be on the Play store, as long as they allow sideloading apps from known developers.

It would be challenging for Google to argue that the app should be banned entirely, as it's basically a web browser with extra APIs, like TCP/UDP sockets.

PWAs can't use TCP/UDP sockets. There's probably other interesting stuff in WASIX worth supporting.

I don't think phones were ever "user-controlled", each one is designed fundamentally to connect to corporate-run wireless networks. Thus they want a say in the types of communications you do, gating certain kinds like RCS behind attestation. To that end there will be never be an alternative without some channel control.

Not totally unlike the way Bell used to strictly regulate their own user endpoints in the 20th century.

Within that stage, I could be wrong, but I would expect a somewhat freer software ecosystem there, as it is an economy oriented around manufacturing, and it is useful to write many various applications around that end.

In my case, it is because there aren't any left that don't do this. Two banks still provide web interfaces that work through normal browsers, but only for their business clients.

This trend started in China, spread to countries like mine, and (as recent history shows) the relatively free democracies have been more than happy to copy some pretty nasty ideas from autocracies like ours — we went through your current news cycle 10-15 years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if removing the last few vestiges of having control over your computing also came to you in another five to ten years.

I'm not aware of a bank that is /only/ accessible with an App (maybe that is your point?), but obviously wanting to obtain the best financial offers, interest rates, etc., trumps software freedom for most people.

Part of the story is that it only takes a /single/ major scandal RE sideloading to seriously injure a bank's reputation, even if the vast majority of sideloading use cases are legitimate.

it doesn't matter, if GrapheneOS is going to be the only one to allow "side-loading", then the market for application installable without a store will disappear