| ▲ | devsda 3 days ago |
| I'm just surprised how the responses here(including the original announcement post) at HN of all places are mild and at times indifferent to the fact that we are about to give up control of our devices and make Google the arbitrator of what we can run on them. That ship may have sailed for ios but it hasn't for android yet. This is the time to ask what we can do about this, how do we stop it. How do we raise awareness among people, among law makers or people whose opinions matter to make Google take notice. I'm all for alternatives like linux phones but it's not realistic in the timeframe. It will be a sad day if this comes to pass without least bit of resistance. |
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| ▲ | GeekyBear 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| If you sell your new platform as "open" to gain market share and then break that promise of openness after you successfully drive competing platforms out of the market, that sounds a lot like fraudulent marketing to me. |
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| ▲ | ixwt 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sounds like standard modern business practices to me. | | |
| ▲ | star-glider 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah I mean it's literally what the term "open source rugpull" means. Every business will ultimately renege on their open source promises. It's literally against their fiduciary duty to shareholders not to, once they've run out of actual growth ideas. Even if current management is idealistic, eventually, they will be replaced with "real leaders" who know that they need to make money. But, ideally, it's not that big a deal, because the community (or even newer non-calcified businesses) can fork the last open source branch and continue development. Unfortunately, with something as complex as an OS, that's incredibly difficult. It does seem regrettably unlikely that, for the foreseeable future, there will be no practically usable open-source phone OSes. | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's like the meme with "they're the same picture". Standard modern business practices are evil. | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Both can be true at the same time. |
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| ▲ | darkoob12 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The mild response shouldn't surprise you. I think the majority of American consumers and developers use iOS and they have little to no problem with the highly controlled and monopolized system. Apple controls ridiculous detail of your application and there are many developers who think that it is necessary for Apple to keep the high quality of iOS. Actually I was shocked when one of my coworkers told me that it is a very good idea and Google should have done it sooner. |
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| ▲ | GeekyBear 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I think the majority of American consumers and developers use iOS and they have little to no problem with the highly controlled and monopolized system. Those users knew in advance what they were buying into, since Apple was honest about the nature of the platform they were offering for sale. Google's Android customers, in contrast, were lied to -- and it's solely Google's fault that Google lied about Android being both open to running any software you like and open source. Everyone should have spoken up when they first started moving necessary developer APIs into the Play Store. | | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Google's Android customers, in contrast, were lied to They were, but I think for most users this is a sort of technical lie that they don't really care about, like if a restaurant says you can choose one of these four side dishes and when you ask for the onion rings they say they're out. I'm often hair-raisingly stunned at how little concern, or even awareness, people have about issues of privacy and user control. > Everyone should have spoken up when they first started moving necessary developer APIs into the Play Store. No, people needed to speak up long before then. They needed to speak up as soon as the iOS/Android duopoly began to emerge, as soon as advertising began to shift to Facebook, as soon as brick-and-mortar video rental stores started to close, and a million other things like that. The issue is that we have allowed a small number of companies to control too much infrastructure that too many people depend on too much. With that power they will find a way to screw us. If it wasn't this it would have been something else, and if there are workarounds or walkbacks on this it will still be something else later. The only way forward is wholesale dismantling of the system that has led to this. Unfortunately a lot of people would rather have convenience. | | |
| ▲ | GeekyBear 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > They needed to speak up as soon as the iOS/Android duopoly began to emerge Android drove the other options out of the market because of Google's fraudulent marketing about giving users the freedom to run anything they liked and being open source. The fraudulent marketing came first, and truly open Linux based options previously in development were the casualties. > for most users this is a sort of technical lie that they don't really care about People have been going on about Android being open and iOS being a closed walled garden for as long as both platforms have existed. The excuse making about Android becoming a walled garden, so walled gardens are OK now started only after Google altered the bargain. |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | tux3 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >This is the time to ask what we can do about this, how do we stop it. How do we raise awareness among people, among law makers or people whose opinions matter to make Google take notice. You and me don't get a vote on the Google board. The current government is not what I'd call fiercely pro-consumer. People say that money talks, but what's really in this season is tacky golden bribes; not an area where consumer advocates have a comparative advantage. Raising awareness for a change that Google is already communicating widely and openly, is unlikely to scare Google very much. If you want to take this seriously, it's going to need something beyond the usual token resistance that consists of angry social media posts. |
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| ▲ | squigz 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Outside of regulation, or a large portion of users switching to better, freer alternatives, I think the question is quickly going to become: how can we get around this and other identity verification nonsense? |
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| ▲ | drnick1 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The solution here is to reject Google devices and switch to AOSP-derived distributions like Graphene and Lineage that patch out such arbitrary restrictions. You can buy a Pixel (ironically), flash GrapheneOS, and enjoy a phone that runs most Android apps without giving Google any of your data. |
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| ▲ | guelo 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | They're slowly tightening the screws on alternative Android builds as well. Most recently they removed distribution of factory builds for Pixels, which are used for figuring out drivers and such. | | |
| ▲ | star-glider 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They're also literally just not pushing code to AOSP anymore. QPR1 still isn't available. It probably will be, eventually, but this year it's two months late, next year it's six months late, then nine months, then "eventually" and then finally only to OEMs. I don't think Google looks at any of these forks as threats; they just don't care. | | |
| ▲ | 1oooqooq 3 days ago | parent [-] | | because everyone here didn't care when bigtech was killing gpl. heck, most people here will still defend mit/bsd while crying that google is taking their linux device to themselves. |
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| ▲ | soulofmischief 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Until the government labels the use of Graphene as suspicious behavior, dragnets all alternative OS supporters, and wiretaps communications solely based on the fact that "'terrorists' use GrapheneOS". Eventually we see a Chat Control esque law outright banning unapproved operating systems or unlocking devices. The authoritarian ratchet turns slowly but steadily, even as you sleep. And all of the big tech corps support this vision of the future. Apple, Google Microsoft, Meta... They all release locked-down hardware and software, and have so far been on board with the convergence towards unmodifiable trusted computing. This may accelerate as local AI inference becomes commonplace and CorpGov demands unmodifiable safety controls that mediate the use of onboard models. | |
| ▲ | magicalhippo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Last time I tried, things like my banking app didn't work. What's the situation now? Because without those it's unfortunatly useless to me. | |
| ▲ | em-bee 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | this solution is not available to the majority of people. ok, well, they could buy a phone from china with a chinese android version. but i don't know if i would want that either. |
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| ▲ | fluidcruft 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honestly just asking what good is Android certification on a device that has no network access? Turn certification off and your... banking apps... and wireless pay... and play store... and online game cheat detectors... stop working? That you... already weren't using apparently because you have no network? Sorry, I'm having a really the hard time following the use case behind the outrage here. Everyone is mad because they won't have Android certification on devices that can't benefit from Android certification? |
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| ▲ | 1vuio0pswjnm7 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "I'm just surprised how the responses here(including the original announcement post) at HN of all places are mild and at times indifferent to the fact that we are about to give up control of our devices and make Google the arbitrator of what we can run on them" Some might argue the corporate OS[1] user never had "control of [their] devices" As in the past, more hassles are to come for Android users, but some might doubt this idea that users currently have control or ever had control Why the hassles Because the user has no control over the OS The corporation might increase or decrease the hassles, making users happy or unhappy (or indifferent), but either way the user never has control In a non-corporate OS the user can generally edit the OS to her liking Introducing hassles in a non-corporate would cause users who were annoyed to remove them In other words, if users choose a non-corporate OS where users have control then there is no need to "raise awareness among people, among law makers or people whose opinions matter to make Google take notice" 1. For example, the ones from Silicon Valley and Redmond |
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| ▲ | ActorNightly 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >How do we raise awareness among people People are aware, they just don't care. |
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| ▲ | braebo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| We lost capitalism a long time ago. Us frogs are beyond the boiling point, hurdling towards the inevitable. |
