If they hard fork, a lot of apps that are generally "necessary for the average person" (e.g. Uber, banking apps, Gmail, Whatsapp/Wechat/Line) might stop working.

Seriously, I don't see a mediocre android provider like Motorola running and maintaining a hard fork.

Forking is all easy, keeping it up to date year after year as codebases diverge is a whole different story.

I could see Samsung doing it. But they won't, they're too good buddies with Google. But they have the resources. A Motorola no. The grapheneos team won't either, maintaining a disparate fork and introducing new features independently from aosp would just be beyond their scope. You're not just hardening at that point. You're basically doing everything.

Don't forget when Huawei didn't fork. Well they started with that but then replaced every component with their own design. It's easier because if you fork you're still bound by decisions made by the original party. Better to greenfield the whole thing then.

And look at how many people made a soft fork of chrome with some ui changes. There's tons of those. There's no hard fork that no longer follows Google. Even a large company like Microsoft didn't.

The concern is AOSP engineers see them as annoying complainers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537268

There's clearly some kind of situation brewing here. Hopefully the GPL proves to be enough to keep code in the hands of GrapheneOS developers.

Remember when we thought IE's monopoly could never be broken? Or windows?

Anything can and will go down. Nothing is forever.

> There is no alternative.

There have been several projects like Ubuntu Touch to create an open Linux for smartphones.

That would be an open alternative.

Android is not open.

FuriLabs makes a Linux phone that is designed as a daily driver. Looking at it to replace Android.

Yes RCS is a pig with lipstick. Invented by the carriers to recoup some control over instant messaging, then abandoned and picked up by Google for the same reason. They're the ones that added encryption to it.

It was always meant to be a walled garden. Exactly what an open system shouldn't be.

Remember Pidgin and Trillium?

The source is here: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/latinime

Featured prominently in the "Source Code" container on https://keyboard.futo.tech/

AFAIK everything FUTO makes is open source? I haven't seen a counter-example (I have not looked hard though!), and https://futo.tech/about claims the following:

>All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.

I like Heliboard a lot, but its autocorrect gets stuck in the mud all the time.

It completely falls apart and starts injecting nonsense phrases made up of nonsense misspelled words moment you miss a space ('v' or 'b') or type a really long word it doesn't know.

It also stubbornly incorrects other things like 'a' into "and" if it thinks it knows a phrase fragment. It's always wrong. It just happened to me now twice. Above, "or type a" became "or type and". Also, "it's" became "IRS".

Heliboard would be perfect if it stuck to word-only spellcheck and never split words. Just now again, it tried correcting "heliboard" into "hellenized" and "he lib oars".

This is not a matter of just lowering how aggressive the spellcheck is. It will still generate slop every time. The only real option is to completely turn it off. Futo can have similar problems, but there are a lot more options to tweak and the defaults aren't so bad.

I dunno. If they're using AI, it's well controlled. I don't see a lot of artifacts you usually get from full-on vibe-coding.

I don't know much about RCS other than that carriers need to be involved, but there's a way to not involve them, which Google did for a while using some kind of compat-service (jibe or something?), and then they stopped doing it.

Never seen RCS working on any carrier ever since. I don't understand why Google couldn't just continue doing what it was doing. Why require carriers?

The RCS spec has encryption in its documentation. I think the current spec version is 4.0?

GrapheneOS does not want to adopt RCS for public perception. It is still a better option than SMS/MMS and providing it is beneficial. GrapheneOS will still recommend using better platforms and protocols but RCS being bundled and cross platform are great reasons to implement it.

Eh, I don’t think you have to include Apple here. If it were up to them, the iPhone would still have zero RCS support right now. The current implementation of RCS, even in iOS 27 beta, is clunky.

To me, the only they’re trying to maintain control of is AppleOS-to-AppleOS text communication.

In LTE and 5G there exists no cellular signal without data. That was a 2G/3G thing. Since 4G everything is data. The separate sms and voice services are gone. And 3G is rapidly being deprecated.

Thanks for clarification. Anything first party from Big Tech is a lost cause privacy wise. At the same time, nobody uses it (maybe that is different in the USA, don't know). So for me this would be ultra-low prio as I (and I expect almost every other GOS user) will never use it. But I believe GOS knows what it is doing.

Perhaps it's different in other countries, but I've never seen anyone use MMS. (Everyone uses WhatsApp nowadays, but even before WhatsApp existed, I never saw anyone use MMS.)

Its not part of the OS so why would it affect the Graphene OS license? Its an app, not a library.

Can the Linux kernel be included in the OS?

Yes I think this is the main reason for WhatsApp's popularity in Europe. Our providers were hanging on to sms as a cash cow and they were pretty much the most expensive bits you could send.

Malicious providers like kpn in the Netherlands even sought to charge extra for WhatsApp traffic because they lost so much revenue. However the EU shot that down hard under net neutrality.

But I remember it well and this is why I always disable RCS. I don't ever want to give my provider the chance to do that again. And I don't trust Google either. SMS is completely dead here too. It's been years since anyone sent me a personal message. It's just spam and poorly implemented 2FA shit.

It's not an issue here in Spain anyway. The only phone with iPhones are rich expats and posers (sorry for the term but we get a lot of them). Most of the people I know use cheap budget androids.

Text messages in iMessage or SMS are a fairly US-centric relic. That's not to say overseas is better - Europe depends on Whatsapp - but outside the US the whole 'blue box' thing isn't even a thing.

It makes group messaging work a lot better, too. Previously, group chats with a mixture of ios and android users were really buggy leading to iPhone users significantly preferring group chats with all ios, which led to some social exclusion for android users in the US, leading to market dominance for iPhones. Now, with RCS, you can make a functional group chat across platforms and you don't have to convince anybody to install something new.