It is sad that it takes a Meta developer having some fun to realize they should open up ADB.

This isn't the repairability and reuseability of old devices mindset people have been begging for. This is some guy using internal privileges to having some fun, and deciding the rest of us should get a piece of the fun as well.

This is a "happy story" in the same way it is a "happy story" when some kid successfully fundraises a classmate's cancer treatment because the healthcare system neglects them.

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KaiserPro an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It is sad that it takes a Meta developer having some fun to realize they should open up ADB.

Former facebook research lab twat here. It wasn't one dev.

We asked when they shitcanned portal (which was a great product, badly managed) to open it up. Infact one of the kernel devs made a very direct plea to allow the community to adopt the hardware so that we could avoid Ewaste.

It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up. (I'm not an android dev so I don't know the ins and outs of that)

However, portal was a casualty of the dash to VR. They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted. The idea was that they portal would be the "portal" to horizon worlds. this meant that they pushed back the plan for thirdparty app stores that would have meant you had something to actually do on the device.

neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed, even though the next gen device was actually a really great media device (wireless, removable charging stand, excellent speakers, but nothing to run on it.)

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mft_ an hour ago | parent [-]

> It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up. (I'm not an android dev so I don't know the ins and outs of that)

Any idea what changed?

> neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed

Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure? Is there really no way for teams to progress projects with value somewhat independently?

	▲	ClikeX 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure? It doesn't sound that surprising, does it?
	▲	karlmedley 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is there any company set up so that the CEO's whim isn't a single point of failure?

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jenders 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

boz is the CTO

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petterroea 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Even sadder. Turns out all we needed to not have our old devices locked down was the CTO having some fun

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ashdksnndck 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?

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jazzyjackson 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just that the default reality is the hardware you buy belonging to someone else, who only really sold you a license to use the hardware on limited terms until the manufacturer drops support

	▲	ashdksnndck 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This generalizes to “good news is bad news because things must be bad by default for good things to be news”

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petterroea 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

as other has said, it is sad that it took that a CTO had fun to open it up, and not the rest of the public discourse about things like this.

I'm happy he had fun and all for him making decisions based on it. But it shouldn't have taken this.

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saagarjha 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why didn’t it occur to someone that this would be fun to do within the CTO having to realize this

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l23k4 an hour ago | parent [-]

Why didn't it occur to someone without occurring to someone first?

	▲	saagarjha an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Because the idea that something this obvious occurred to the CTO first is very, very unlikely. What is more probable was that leadership ignored people who disagreed until the CTO convinced himself it was a good idea and went ahead with it.

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Forgeties79 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because it could’ve just as easily never happened despite how simple of a feature it is to enable. That happens all the time. Tons of “useless” tech out there that can be made useful with 5min of effort but the incentives aren’t there, so they end up in landfills.

The default position should be trying to make devices useful as long as possible, even if they want to qualify it with “so long as it’s sufficiently reasonable to do so.”

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mock-possum an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It shouldn’t be left to the whim of a C-suite denizen.

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gnfargbl an hour ago | parent [-]

If the leadership of a company aren't the right people to make decisions about what that company does, who is?

Are you advocating for legislation? How would that work?

	▲	sham1 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to. Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.

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wfme 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

*all we needed was the technical leader of the company that produced the product to...

the same could be said for pretty much any change or update rolled out by any of these companies.

	▲	petterroea 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I feel like this is reducing the problem to a simpler one. Of course you'd expert larger product decisions to be made by a technical leader. The problem here is that devices being locked down is something being fought against, repairability is a big topic for discussion, and some companies even try to play into it pretty hard, like Framework and seemingly Valve. Yet, to this Meta CTO, this wasn't really a concern until he vibecoded something and decided everyone should be able to have this fun. It say's something about his (and probably other people in his position) awareness of public opinion and discussion.