The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.<p><pre><code> > Google simply regrets android being open source.
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Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.<p>But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
> But they won't learn that on their own<p>I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.<p>I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
Every time the HN crowd rediscovers that companies make business strategy choices rather than immutable principled philosophical decisions, the angst and dismay are really something.<p>When Android launched, making it open source (ish) was the right competitive decision. It got phone makers and carriers on board and accelerated the ecosystem’s development. Today it being open source (kinda) is a met negative for Google. So, yeah, they’re changing that.<p>Well-run companies aren’t zealots. They adapt to changing conditions. If a company’s actions happen to align with your personal preferences today, it doesn’t mean you’ve found a lifelong philosophical soulmate. Ditto if a company’s actions run counter to what you want today. Either can and will change, and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
companies aren't human beings with morals.<p>companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.<p>but unfortunately a lot of people wanna see the world as they wish it to be, not the way it is.
Not every business owner is a profit obsessed psycho. Most multinational CEOs are but you can find good people at every level. The "only exist to make money" thing starts when you let in shareholders, but a company can stay ethical as long as they put up strong barriers before taking outside investment.<p>A lot of people get the wrong impression from reading Dodge Brothers and think companies are legally required to put profit first. What really happened is Friedman and Reagan planted the idea of shareholder supremacy, convinced schools to teach it and now generations of business majors think it's a sacred truth they have to enforce anywhere they go. Never let a MBA take over.
Being "a profit obsessed psycho" might help some people rise to positions of power, but I think the stronger point is that a corporation is an emergent superorganism with its own identity above the individual human level, without a psychology, that operates on its own principles of self preservation based on the incentives of the environment it operates in and that individual choices result in a gestalt of behaviors that no one person really has full control over even though they are part of it and what they do does affect the overall outcome, like a cell and organs making up an animal.
And if I asked people to name companies which retain a good public perception of being not entirely profit driven, the ones that would most likely come to mind are ones like Costco, where there's someone who is setting the tone and not leaving it to the committee of free market/investors to decide the fate of the company. I wonder if there are parallels here to other similar economic models, hmm...
companies like Costco, Patagonia etc are rare why ? because deliberate actions & care have been taken to go against the grain of what a company should do.<p>just like the USA at it's founding - deliberate actions were taken etc that were counter to the normal. & going against the wind takes a lot of energy.<p>at a certain point in time - you run out of energy or you've to keep keep reinvesting to not run out otherwise barbarians are knocking down at the gate.
Are these the same companies that claim that companies are people?<p>They exist to make money but not by all means.<p>Companies are allowed to make money because it’s a net benefit for society.<p>If that changes companies lose their reason of existence.
> <i>companies aren't human beings with morals.</i><p>Companies are not sentient beings in themselves: they are made up of human beings with wills. If the human being(s) make moral choices the result will be companies that do moral actions.<p>> <i>companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.</i><p>That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine</a><p>There are others:<p>* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, <i>Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma</i>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III</a><p>* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics</a><p>Or going back a few decades:<p>> <i>In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”</i><p>* <a href="https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history/" rel="nofollow">https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...</a><p>> <i>American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.</i><p>* <a href="https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/" rel="nofollow">https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/</a>
An if you dont like to give them your work, but still do open source, there are the copy-left licenses: GPL and AGPL.<p>They stay away from those.<p>What license was KHTML again? Checked: LGPL.
Yet Chrome will still be used and installed. I hope Firefox gains numbers but I know it won’t
I think this is a different situation than what you're describing. It's one thing when a company acts in their own interests, their communications are consistent with that, you observe that, and align with them (or don't).<p>It's another when they say they're going to do one thing, you align with them, and then they do another later. That's generally frowned upon morally because it's considered to be deceptive/untruthful.<p>It's not surprising, but that doesn't mean people should be ok with it, especially when other businesses get by fine making more ethical business choices, or at least avoid outright lying for their own benefit.
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Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.<p>So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.<p>Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.<p>Google will do just fine.
I vividly remember my father coming home from Borders Books & Music one fateful day in 1998 with a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 5.1. (This was the distro that eventually became Fedora, not RHEL). It was the first Linux distro I’d ever used, but my dad also had some older SuSE and Slackware CDs and floppies in his archives as well. I’m confident Red Hat has always paid their employees, and I’m confident SuSE GmbH did as well.<p>Famously IBM did eventually buy Red Hat, but not for another 20 years. The fact is, Linux was alive and well and growing as far back as the late 1990s, and devs were getting paid. You could literally buy CDs in a box of an installable Linux distribution at an ordinary retail chain bookstore in 1998.<p>And for whatever it’s worth, the reason Linux took off the way it did when it did was because the Dot Com Bubble helped pump smaller companies like Red Hat or SuSE up, and they were certainly selling floppies and pressed CDs at a margin like Shareware as well, since most people didn’t have the time or hardware to download and burn ISOs until the early/mid-2000s when P2P music took over the world.<p>(I remember. I was there. I guess I’m old now…)
I don’t get the hate for business licenses.<p>I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.<p>So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.
It's a good idea if it actually works. Are enough commercial users paying up so that these projects get some serious funding?<p>If companies avoid using software governed by such licenses then the overall impact is negative in my opinion, because it will lead to competing and diverging clean room clones that just split the community and the ecosystem.
<i>which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.</i><p>Correlation is not causation.<p>What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.<p>DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.<p>Why?<p><i>To sell stuff</i>, and the guy was an advocate too.<p>It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.
Google learned that it's exactly not in in their best interest when they lost their court case against Epic a few years ago which is why they are shifting focus away from open source and moving towards Apple's walled garden approach. If they had locked down their platform similarly as Apple did, Epic would probably have lost it's case for similar reasons.<p>Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
> Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.<p>But the parts of Android that are majority outside developed is still available as the Linux kernel. I have my doubts that the uniquely Android bits of the userland and system services have many outside contributions.
I forgot about this. Epic lost the same kind of suit against Apple. That's hilarious.
I think this is true, but I also believe the original people who built it are not the people in charge now.
We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.<p>Google needs to be broken up.
Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.<p>If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.
Can anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ?<p>If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?
386BSD -> FreeBSD<p>NetBSD -> OpenBSD<p>To some extent I would argue that Linux is a spiritual fork of Minix and Unix.<p>But I think it’s also worth pointing out that these were in vastly different times where a single person or a small group of people could maintain an OS. An OS or browser is vastly more complex now.
The big ones that come to mind that were not already mentioned are MySQL => MariaDB, XFree86 => X.org.
OwnCloud -> Nextcloud, OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Elasicsearch -> OpenSearch, privacyIDEA -> eduMFA
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice</a><p>Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015, the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[49] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[50][51][52][53] In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[54][55][56]<p>Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.<p>OpenSearch & ElasticSearch both seem alive, as well as OC & NC.<p>Neither <a href="https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea</a> or <a href="https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA</a> say either is a fork of the other.<p>I think you failed to share 3, 2 seem to valid examples of my challenge but the other 2 are questionable.
AOO became a thing after LibreOffice essentially won.
Before that it was OpenOffice.org owned by oracle, forked into LibreOffice in 2010, with LibreOffice getting significant traction and Oracle throwing in the towel and donating OO to Apache Foundation in 2011.
> Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.<p>You didn’t ask for examples where both projects are alive!
LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, way before the difficulties of Apache OpenOffice (which didn't even exist back then).
>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.<p>It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
The biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders.<p>It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.<p>The modern web is user hostile by design.
If a web browser allows images, then the website always has full control over how content renders. It's the default. HTML and related standards are trying to persuade developers to cede some of that control in the name of accessibility, user choice, searchability, device compatibility etc. that all-image websites lack. But this can only succeed if the developers still can do everything they want to. If they can't, then they'll fall back to images and everyone loses.
This is true.<p>A lot of websites back in the 90s were just made up of images that were clickable using image maps. It was not a fun time.<p>I get what the parent comment is saying, though, and it's why I use Gemini (the protocol[0], not the AI). It doesn't align with corporate interests, but for now I consider that a good thing.<p>[0] <a href="https://geminiprotocol.net/" rel="nofollow">https://geminiprotocol.net/</a>
Yep, in the old days, a lot of websites used image maps (so that clicking a part of the image would go to another page).
Users want an app platform that 1) works on every device, 2) is 1-click (no app installation / management, click a link and go), and 3) has advanced capabilities which let them easily do the task at hand.<p>Think "an interactive visualisation for choosing a seat when buying a concert ticket." That's not a "traditional" webpage, should work on whatever device the user is currently on (so native is unsuitable), and shouldn't require the user to install anything.<p>People clearly want web pages to be exactly this; we're on iteration #3 of the idea now. Iterations 1 and 2 were Java Applets and Flash, not necessarily in that order, and they were massively popular despite their shortcomings. Clearly, if we somehow deprecated the web as it is now (which is an utterly ridiculous idea, which makes me really curious what comments like yours are exactly trying to achieve here), as long as we keep it an open standard, users will choose browsers which offer this capability in some form. We should appreciate that the current iteration is an open standard which anybody is free to implement, instead of some proprietary blob that you need to license from Oracle or Adobe.
This kills accessibility. You wouldn't even be able to select text unless the page implemented that feature itself. Screen readers would have nothing to work with. No high-contrast mode, no translation, no changing the font size, no reader mode........
Unfortunately none of the things you listed are what page vendors <i>want</i> you to have. They'd very much prefer you didn't. On the web, they're just too hard to prevent, so most don't bother.
I think that must be false. Serving the page as a static image was possible from the early days of the web, but vendors (mostly!) moved away from that as features like web fonts became available. I guess Flash was the big remaining exception. And remember Java applets? But even now as rendering to a canvas is possible, enabling animation and interactivity without necessarily including accessibility, websites are mostly not doing that. Accessibility is good for business. And sometimes it's legally required.
Software accessibility is bad for business - that's why it has to be legally mandated. There's no firm difference between "accessible", particularly to screen readers, and "amenable to end-user automation", and the latter is anathema to businesses.<p>As for the styling and fonts - it's all a bunch of low-key trade-offs here. The businesses want to exercise total control over the end-user experience, for sales/marketing and branding reasons. At the same time, going off the beaten path quickly makes development costs skyrocket.<p>Flash was a good choice back when all visitors were using a PC and there were like 3 different screen resolutions to choose from. Once laptops gained popularity, this started to shift, then pre-iPhone mobile briefly became consideration, and Flash stopped being sufficient; then iPhone came out, killed Flash, and started an era where every visitor has a different screen than the previous one. "Responsible web" became the cheapest option, and you can see its evolution as a trajectory towards giving more and more control over experience to developers, and less and less to the users.
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> Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).<p>The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.
> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.<p>Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.
Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
Indistinguishable because ad blocking still works at the visible end of the spectrum.<p>Under the hood, what the MV2 uBlock can do and Lite can't is at the least stripping tracking parameters from links and block 3rd party trackers that are cloaked in a subdomain of the originating site.
You’re right it doesn’t impact most people’s decisions but m2 and m3’s differences are quite substantial and meaningful.
That’s overly simplistic and glosses over the actual objections to mv3.
Differentiating isn’t as important as not engaging in Google‘s heinous practices
Chrome attained its user base not by merit but by paying third party Windows installers to bundle it.
Forcing it down users’ throats at the world’s most popular website might have helped. Slightly.
Yep. Google has been incredibly aggressive in promoting Chrome over the years, including practices similar to those Microsoft gets lampooned for doing the same with Edge.<p>The thing is that most of this is invisible to people who already live within Google’s bubble which is probably why they don’t get called out for it. The promotion is visible mostly to those of us who don’t, and it gets irritating.
This is complete nonsense, it's a post hoc copium where you're trying to dishonestly rewrite history from your personal hatered.<p>Chrome was better than competition pretty much all its lifetime and there's plenty of historic articles to prove it, no matter how much your emotions refuse to accept the history.
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The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.<p>Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
Windows only isn't still 90% market share because of Wine, then Proton.
More like thanks to Apple, in what concerns desktop computing.
Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
Gamedevs would still target Android, just like they target Windows, letting Valve run after them.<p>Android is even more of tragedy, given how all relevant NDK game development APIs are also available on GNU/Linux.
Reimplementing Windows was a huge task. If the windows source code was available, why wouldn't you begin with a copy-paste?
ReactOS was also a good idea.
The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time. None of it can be thrown away from humanity, wasting it.<p>The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.<p>Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.<p>This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, <i>definitely</i> can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.<p>The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.
> the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs<p>You forgot about one thing they care about above all others — cost.<p>And the easiest way to keep costs down is through "alternative revenue streams", which involve your own tracking, your own app bundling deals and your own App Store, which you're pushing on users constantly. And if you do that, you may as well get the branding win from doing the custom skin too.
> The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time<p>Assuming you can get a hardware vendor to support your fork.<p>Android has always been a weird blend of proprietary BSPs wedged together with the core AOSP project - we used to have an entire team whose full-time job was merging the Qualcomm BSP into our AOSP fork. At the time you didn't even get access to that BSP without inking a deal with QCOM...
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.<p>No, the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays.<p>AOSP apps were abandonned around Android 11, you can't just keep them as is for real users, it looks amateur.<p>Even the open-source ROMs came to the same conclusion eventually and developed their own.
If you are not working to destroy Android, you are supporting it. You might feel happy about your custom ROM nonsense and how it protects <i>your</i> privacy, but that just means you're selfish, because nearly everyone will still be trapped on Google's version.<p>Technologists need to <i>aggressively reject</i> solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. <a href="https://xkcd.com/1200/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1200/</a> While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify building a new one from scratch.<p>AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.
You mean proprietary AI can do that, running on big corp servers.
LLMs can't even get much simpler programs right without humans holding their hand, let alone an OS. The odds of an LLM just banging out an OS are nil.
Why bother building a compatibility layer when you can just start with Android and start promoting your LLM from there?
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. <a href="https://xkcd.com/1200/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1200/</a> While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify it.
but perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?
> Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source.<p>Yes, and now that they've achieved market saturation, it's time to pull up the ladder.<p>Thanks for all the free work, suckers!
Google started making proprietary APIs for their Pixel on their non-open version of Android. Even if they stopped contributing to the open Android, what ladder did they pull up? The open Android is still there.
Don't worry, we will fork and just repeat the pattern with new names! See you next time!
GNU generation is over 50 nowadays, and newer don't really get open source as we used to.<p>I mean, FOSDEM full of Apple laptops on the corridors, the message was really lost.
> I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.<p>This is correct but rarely in practiced.<p>During firefox DRM/HTML5 issue, I know many people from Free software foundation Europe absolutely telling in their blogs, talks etc please stop Mozilla from implementing this DRM or that... but finally when I spoke to these in private they told --- ya, whatever - I need to see this series in netflix etc- so I have another device with chrome etc to watch it. (Indeed Firefox did implement it)<p>This behavior is the reason average Joe gives up...
And this is also why I advocate for xGPL for open source projects. FSF's GNU Public Licenses are the only open source licenses (that I am aware of) that envisioned a users "right to repair" decades ago. This is enforced by ensuring that any source code licensed and distributed under xGPL, has to remain open source. If even a part of the source code is licensed under GPL, and used in any project, you cannot close source it easily. Other permissive licenses, like MIT, BSD or Apache, for example, don't <i>guarantee</i> the open source nature of the product that is licensed under it as it allows anyone to also use the code and distribute it without the source code.<p>(This is also why we should be be vary, and quite sceptical of, Canonical's new Rust-based port of GNU CoreUtils too. Apparently, Canonical plans to replace GNU CoreUtil completely in Ubuntu with this port. The original GNU Coreutils are licensed under the GPL, but the Rust based ports are not. This means that Canonical will now have the ability to stop distributing the source code of its CoreUtils port in future Ubuntu Oses).
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox<p>I never left. The only thing I don't like is that I can't directly donate to fund Firefox, only towards the Mozilla Foundation in general.
The important bits of Chromium are LGPL licensed,originally a fork of other people's code. Google cannot close it as easily.
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.<p>With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.
Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against <i>Google</i>. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.
Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?
Either way we're still stuck with it.
I'm not sure Mozilla clears it. Zen or Librewolf or PaleMoon clears it.
Mozilla definitely wastes a bunch of money building features I don’t want. But underneath it all, Firefox is still an excellent web browser. You just occasionally have to disable “pocket” or “gadgets” or something.
It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.<p>As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.
I don't understand this - what is wrong with Firefox these days? It does everything I need, and very few things I don't want.<p>Very puzzled why there isn't more love for Firefox, even on HN.
Yeah. It’s a tough balance to achieve but that’s the situation we’re in right now so Mozilla really ought to step up (and I totally wish they would).<p>My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.<p>Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.
Behaving like a native application also has tradeoffs. If you're only working on one platform, then sure you will want it to behave like a native application. If you're working on multiple platforms, chances are that you're going to value consistency. And while macOS users prefer their UI, the same can be said of Linux and Windows users. Guess which one is going to win out there.
Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy but using work provided mac with firefox for 15 years I never noticed UI being disjointed from the system any more than Chrome.
> Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy<p>Maybe you’re too preoccupied trying to discredit valid criticism as “fanboyism” to realise how important UI and UX are for products such as browsers.<p>Besides, Chrome itself is already an absolute mess of conflicting and downright distasteful UX choices and patterns. Firefox seems to be stuck in the past but Chrome seems to actively DESPISE being available on Mac.
What aspects feel foreign on macOS? The Firefox preferences for sure. Anything else?
It's not really a "both sides" thing given the scale difference between what Google is up to and that.
Mozilla gets 100M a year from Google ??? No fucking way they are biting the hand that feeds.
Where is the form, forum or spot in general where one can tell Mozilla?
I would say its even more proactive than support other projects.
It is becoming clearer that every single technically competent member of the friends or family is now required to educate and proactively change devices.<p>Remember this upcoming Christmas that the ye oldie tradition of fixing PCs clearing awful exploiting phone apps (and cancelling subscriptions) should also include the "fix my browser" again, instead of Internet Explorer being replaced by Chrome, our collective duties is to replace Chrome with Firefox, plus its useful extensions to block ads and improve the web experience removing trackers etc.<p>Your call to arms today is to ensure all your tech colleagues join the movement, and then we can see Google's management views on "market growth"; they forget they made Chrome, we sold it - its our fault we forgot the "infinite growth of shareholder value"...
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox<p>Implying I ever left Firefox in the first place.
Google is starting to turn into early 2000s / late 90s Oracle.
What's the licensing on AOSP? Everything I look for points to Google-owned things. Is it a GPL/similar that Google is actually legally required to share its changes?
Reminder to think twice when signing CLAs when contributing to these big company open source projects.
I wish that a consortium of Android phone makers would/could "LibreOffice" Android.
The “we” in your post is interesting to me. Who do you mean? Individuals?
Heavily rooting for Ladybird.
> So we move. We force their hand<p>What do you have in mind?
> We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
I'm reading your comment on Firefox. You can probably read mine and write a reply on it too!
Donate to Ladybird <a href="https://ladybird.org/" rel="nofollow">https://ladybird.org/</a>
Handing even a slight control over the web to an all-out white replacement theorist is somehow even worse than the status quo. Ladybird is run by the kind of person I'd never want to financially contribute to.<p>- <a href="https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/1969350008538370216" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19693500085383702...</a> (archive: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250920103645/https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1969350008538370216" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250920103645/https://twitter.c...</a>)<p>- <a href="https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/1874518295350837401" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/18745182953508374...</a> (archive: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250101180923/https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1874518295350837401" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250101180923/https://twitter.c...</a>)<p>- <a href="https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/1971287738268909576" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19712877382689095...</a> (archive: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250925185636/https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1971287738268909576" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250925185636/https://twitter.c...</a>)<p>- <a href="https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/1967178708852097278" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19671787088520972...</a> (archive: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250914104847/https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1967178708852097278" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250914104847/https://twitter.c...</a>)
These tweets all seem extremely reasonable and resonates with my experience.<p>White males don't have a monopoly on discrimination but it certainly exists.<p>When I worked at a fortune 50 company my annual bonus was dependent on how many minorities I hired. When I was job shopping I was told directly by recruiters that white males should not apply, but if I know any minorities to send them their way
I don't think he said anything factually incorrect though?
Where in those comments is the "white replacement theorist"?
They have their own problems. They may be "open source", but they don't accept contributions. I'm skeptical it will ever become more than a hobby project.
Is not accepting contributions the only/biggest issue you have with the project? I'm honestly becoming more and more okay with the "cathedral" style of open source. Depending on the project, catering to "the community" can lead a loss of focus, lack of a cohesive "vision" or scope, and just generally trying to be everything to everyone without the resources to maintain a giant beast.<p>With something like a browser (engine), I'm totally okay with someone saying "I'm an expert and I'm trying something with my own vision/priorities. I don't want input from random people that I have to spend time evaluating."
Commit activity actually increased after they blocked external contributions in June: <a href="https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/graphs/commit-activity" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/graphs/commit-ac...</a>
It's on BSD license, Google or someone else can again Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Well, it is time to realise that GPL and similar variants, are better
in the long term. I like MIT too, but GPL worked so much better for the
linux kernel. Google and others abuse the ecosystem of open source
contributors here.
<p><pre><code> So we move. We force their hand
</code></pre>
How?
> advocating for chromium.<p>Advocating for chromium to do what?
LOL "start" using Firefox. I've been using Firefox for half a decade. There's zero I miss about Chrome.
Rather than being smug, I’ll say awesome! The best time to start using Firefox is yesterday. The second best time is now.<p>IOW:<p>Don’t threaten to stop using Google Chrome if they do one more evil thing. Start now.
Some of us have been using it for two decades more or less.
LOL half a decade.<p>I've been using it for more than 20 years.<p>I don't know why either of use loled though
LOL, I've been using it since Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold, via Mozilla M3 (SeaMonkey tech preview), Phoenix, Firebird, and then finally Firefox :D
Me too. Too bad I had to abandon it because Mozilla seem more focused on making AI-nonsense than a browser nowadays. No, Firefox, you don’t need AI features. You do need a better UI. You do need smoother scrolling. You do need privacy focus (which automatically means you do not need AI features). You do need to feel like you belong on the platform you’re installed on and not wish everything were Linux. You do need better designers that understand UX is not just “add controls everywhere”.
I'm assuming you use Lynx now then? Because I don't think you would be using Chrome or its clone if that's where you draw the line?
Huh? What ai features? Firefox seems largely the same as it did a few years ago.<p>I’m not doubting they added some ai junk somewhere. But whatever they did seems very easy to ignore.
Oh, those great days when the competition was NCSA Mosaic.<p>A simpler, better time. I miss it :(
Mosaic :P
I've been using it since the time it was called Netscape Navigator. Just sayin'
Loved netscape navigator! That entire suite with mail, website builder (composer?)
Shit, remember Mosaic? Gopher?
Reminder that by now the Android version is also quite usable (typing this from FF). Just install Ublock origin.
Ahem. <i>Ladybird</i>.
> Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it<p>Just point out how that hurts security or privacy and we’re with you!
There are already several different forks of Chromium and they are able to make their own decisions on points where they want to differentiate from upstream or other browsers in the market.
It's sad we lost ChromeOS. They got Linux, they got open source, they didn't make so so so many unforced errors.<p>Now that the chromebooks are also Android, it feels like the slide is only going to grow ever more fearsome.
Who's we?
It's not a regret. Android would never have been popular in the first place if it had not been open source. If phone makers had been able to anticipate how much the demons at Google would be able to lock down the Android then they would never had used the OS back in ~2009.
I don't think this is actually true. Phone makers seem happy to have the platform locked down even further. They're putting even more roadblocks, as evidenced by most of them making bootloaders unlockable.
They're happy that it is locked down. They're not happy that they're not the ones doing the locking down.
They can easily go back 30 years ago, when each one had their own proprietary in-house OS, using current Android as baseline, or something BSD like PlayStation.
Any discussion about this is shut down. I just read an article <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o</a>
In the UK according to the BBC, politicians are pressing Samsung and apple to make stolen phones bricks. Samsung in response said that they have implemented several security features for this purpose. I think Samsung considers removing OEM unlocking a security feature according to the bootloader unlock hall of shame.<p>Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.
Normally the codes would be downloaded automatically from a server but sometimes the server would go down due to negligence because it would be owned by the school and well, student's laptops would start getting locked and they would have to go to a specific office somewhere in the city to get an unlock code from the it admin
Normally you have to unlock the phone before unlocking the bootloader, and that is the protection.
It could be disabled from the bios somehow if you knew the bios password or the bios could be reflashed with a programming Clip directly on the bios flash chip itself.
Making the bootloaders unlockable is a good thing.
This is what lots of people forget.<p>Android is <i>not</i> a Linux desktop or server distro. It is <i>not</i> about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.<p>Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.<p>When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.<p>For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.
> <i>For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder.</i><p>Wish I could upvote you twice for that line alone. It perfectly sums up what I always wanted Android to be. Alas, the closer we are to this in hardware, the further away we are getting in software.
Especially Android, which is an ever-growing pile of spaghetti almost as bad as Windows.
That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.
Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.
Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.<p>Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.
Not doing any OS upgrades from 7 to 8 and only very few from 8.x to 10 certainly didn't help either.
Yeah I guess Apple set too high a bar and MS was caught flatfooted (again) and was too far behind.
I don’t have visibility into what happened with the Windows Phone team, but Android from what I understand saw immediately that they needed to follow Apple’s lead and pivoted (originally they were building something closer to a BlackBerry). The Windows Phone team either didn’t believe they need to pivot initially or they just took too long to do so.<p>Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.
I remember trying phones in stores (shortly before Windows phone died). On Android you'd touch the phone and get instant reactions, on Windows you'd touch and wait for a slow woosh animation, until a few seconds later a text only app would finally launch. embarrassing.
Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were <i>good</i> alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.
Maemo.
WebOS was pretty cool (Palm). But I’m not sure if Palm would have licensed it. Lg ended up with it.
Also Bada
There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.<p>Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.<p>Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.
Not even wearing rose tinted glasses right now, for having daily driven them back in the days, maemo and then WebOS had touch ergonomics and multitasking abilities which took Android/iOS decades to incompletely mimic. Maemo/Nokia N900's design principle seems to have been "let's provide the user with desktop-level productivity tools, and shrink the desktop into their pocket", the package was massive for the era's standards, but is tiny for today's, and those dumb-down/low density ergonomics we have now give us less capabilities for more screen estate and weight (even something like an iPod pro is a "dumb" content consumption device in comparison). WebOS on the other hand was not about "producing/delivering on the go" so much as it was about getting your digital must haves (booking an appointment, updating a contact details, moving a meeting, ...) done and out of the way with just a couple key presses and finger flips as so distract as little as possible from the present. Only some advanced Android launchers get close, but it's never the focused, well polished and distraction-free experience it was back then (and for the same reason, Android/iOS are addictive content delivery vehicules meant to sink your eyeballs and time as to sell you stuff or collect and merchandise your data).<p>I'm interested and wishing to see a future mobile OS that does not pander to the "attention economy" like Android/iOS are, but with billions now addicted and trapped by it, I'm realistic that it won't be an overnight success.
No, everyone knew what they were getting into with Android. It wasn't taken lightly by the power users of the time either. I still have a phone somewhere with Ubuntu Touch on it. I really was hoping that would be my phone OS by now. Not that Canonical isn't capable of similar, but that it would bring about acceptance of Linux phones.<p>I think we're all <i>more</i> surprised by how long it took for Google to make these bad moves. For a period of time in the 2010s we actually started thinking maybe Google was alright.
It wasn't Canonical's limitation. Mozilla can confirm: the barriers to enter the phone manufacturing market are immense. Samsung, Ericsson, Sony, LG, etc, all had solid control of the deals with the network operators worldwide. It's a highly regulated market, you can't get in without Verizon, att, Vodafone etc to let you in. Canonical, Open Moko, Mozilla... Didn't have the strength to push through. Google and Apple did.
It's operators that have grips on manufacturers. Phone OEMs don't make any without the sales networks and financing structures of cellular carriers.<p>This is to extent that some carriers still insist that they design phones and phone manufacturers are just factories. People need to understand that power dynamic before blaming those "mere factories" for not making Linux phones.<p>There has to be like an SVP of SoandSo Wireless pushing like three pillar approach of iOS, Android and Linux. Otherwise the pitch decks for any alternative phones just go straight to trash(or into a motorized shredder if it is still physical).
Apple didn’t initially - they shopped around before they found a small carrier (Cingular) willing to accept their demands. Their popularity forced all the other carriers to gradually come around.
Worst case we can buy phones and physically replace their Application Processors with liberated ones.
Phone manufacturers had Symbian which became open source
It didn't become a major regret really until the antitrust treated android as a competitive space and iphone separate. That decision led to a lot of wtf and tactics changing. Because the platform had been made open it was then an issue of tying vs if it had just been closed like apple there wouldn't have been an issue was a pretty stupid take if you ever want to see an open platform again.
Google is also seriously dropping the ball in terms of security. The CVE-2026-43499 root LPE (aka ghostlock) is still unpatched across all Pixel devices, on the latest """security""" update, despite weaponized exploits being public for months.
Pixels used to have far better updates than any other Android devices but they stopped improving it years ago. It should have kept improving because it's not at all adequate. They need to be able to release OS updates more than once per month and it shouldn't take months for patches to make it into the OS. It currently takes them at least around 2 months to get even the most urgent patches into the OS. They could fix emergency calls being broken if the patch was made around 3 weeks before an OS release, but that's about as quick as they can go. It's not at all adequate for security and is a complete joke compared to Chromium's release cycle. They can get an emergency Chrome update released within a couple days. They should at least be able to do it for the Pixel OS in a week.<p>GrapheneOS is often around 4 to 6 months ahead on merging Linux kernel LTS releases. We used to handle this ourselves but switched to the Android GKI LTS branch maintained by Greg KH. Unfortunately, it was often struggling to keep up even before the absolutely massive increase in Linux kernel security patches this year. AI models have rapidly accelerated vulnerability discovery and it's an ongoing crisis for the Linux kernel. We want to be on the latest LTS revision within days and want to be using the latest LTS branch within months of it being released. We're not at all happy with how Android is handling things and plan to fix that ourselves. We'll get things back to how they should be.<p>We also ship all the AOSP userspace patches months before Pixels due to shipping all of the security preview patches as soon as possible. There are sometimes minor regressions but we find and fix them ourselves downstream. The security preview system has a terrible design especially considering that frontier AI models can reverse engineer the patches. There should at least only be a source embargo for around 24 to 72 hours rather than pretending as if it can work with the patches available 2 to 6 months in advance.
I just ran <a href="https://github.com/CakesTwix/Android-CVE-2026-43499" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/CakesTwix/Android-CVE-2026-43499</a> on my Pixel 9 Pro and it seems to have been patched. I did get a system update not long ago, though.
Try <a href="https://github.com/alex193a/Root-My-Pixel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alex193a/Root-My-Pixel</a>, worked on my 9a as of a few days ago (the version table in the readme is stale). I haven't checked the September update yet though (installing it now, to check).<p>Edit: September update for 8a has a kernel build from July. I believe it's still vulnerable but the exploit will need its offsets adjusting etc.
There's "dropping the ball" and then there's "not reaching out your glove to catch it to begin with".<p>It'd be interesting to see which one is happening here.
I'm convinced Android being open source is just an accident of history. It's been somewhat useful for Google to be able to ride on that goodwill, but they're not actually invested in open source beyond the ways it directly benefits them (or at least they haven't been in the last 10 years). Thus they're happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater if they believe they need the bathtub for anything that will earn them 0.1 cent more than that baby would.
It's like PC parts being modular. IBMs greatest mistake and the industry wants to make sure it never happens again.
Its more a reflection of the vastly different internal culture of the time (and different executive leadership).<p>When Patrick Pichette left and Sundar became CEO both led to massive culture shifts.
> Pixels are now significantly harder to support than many other devices. ... It will be far easier for us to support upcoming Motorola devices than Pixels.<p>The Motorola transition can't come soon enough, IMHO
There's a non-zero chance that three-letter agencies are lobbying for at least some of this.
It makes perfect sense when you apply the Friedman doctrine to their actions. [0]<p>Google is a lawn mower, stop anthropologizing them. This goes the same with Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, ...<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine</a>
Agree. The only time a company does something in the public interest is when it believes doing so would ultimately benefit the shareholders. Everything is a business decision.
You conveniently forgot the OG, oracle.
They want to be like Apple here and lock things down. Remember SMS? The ubiquitous text messaging protocol that had an API that developers could access? Now, the latest standard, RCS, is locked down with no API and behaves just like iMessage. Ring any bells?
There was a split world for a long time even before the more recent changes because of the need to hide secret new features or products from the general public. It was always a tricky arrangement. They just decided one day that there wasn't a lot of folks contributing that lacked access to the private repos, so they might as well just switch all development to occur in that place. Honestly, it's somewhat rationale. If there was a significant number of folks contributing to Android without such access I'm sure that wouldn't have happened. We didn't lose as much as folks think we did given the code drops from the private repos still happened even previously.
The thread states that Google is putting out patches that affect other Android vendors too.<p>They're not treating GrapheneOS very differently from other vendors, except that Graphene isn't relevant enough to sign a contract with because they don't make phones (or money, really).<p>Google should be putting out the code and patches like they used to, but the constant badgering of Google on this issue feels off. I don't see anyone complaining that Samsung isn't supporting their security-focused fork enough, or complain that Apple is delaying the bootloader unlock process by a day.<p>Despite their very worst, selfish intentions, Google is the very best vendor of commercial open source software. While Google's open source project collapses, there's plenty of space for other vendors to step in.<p>We should bemoan Google's fall from grace, but only because they're on the way to becoming just as bad as every vendor but Librem if they keep this up another decade.
Librem seems as bad as a typical Android OEM. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong repository, but the barely seem to update driver firmware?<p><a href="https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/fw/firmware-librem5-nonfree" rel="nofollow">https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/fw/firmware-librem5-nonfree</a><p><a href="https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/arm-trusted-firmware" rel="nofollow">https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/arm-trusted-firmware</a><p>I hope I'm looking in the wrong place.
Well, based on your last sentence these decisions very much make sense.<p>But I agree with the other comments out there. It will get ugly and they will loose. I am convinced there many heavy weights just waiting for the right time to hit google hard on this. While I don’t know all of them and don’t like the ones I think I know, I will sing and dance when it’ll happen.<p>And no, Apple is no better.
<p><pre><code> > Google simply regrets android being open source.
</code></pre>
No, they are benefitting from it! They gained some trust and removed competition from the horizon. Now they are locking the platform down to do what their business is about: displaying ads.
As an outsider in a hyper competitive commercial space like mobile os (apple, android) which part makes you think it's active obstruction and not just moving fast and trying to keep up, get ahead, etc and they want the open source side but it's a lower priority?
> Google simply regrets android being open source.<p>Could Google backtrack on this if they wanted? If they suddenly decided to stop releasing public code updates, what would they be violating? I can guess: Anti-trust maybe. probable at least contractual commitments Or is there some stronger forcing function?
It's a net loss. Less data and in their view makes development harder.
And don't forget about Manifest V2/uBlock Origin removal!
Yeah I have trouble accepting it's pure coincidence this occurs just as GrapheneOS is starting to gain some noticeable traction.
> None of their decisions make any sense ..<p>What? Google is advertisement business. Not a software house. They sell ads. It all makes sense to build a walled garden. They are effectively a monopoly for half of the personal devices _in the world_. And they _will_ return their investments into the opensource. By locking Android and Chrome and showing ads to everyone.<p>Like the old days shitty TV, full of ads.
It's not that it doesn't make sense, you just said it, they regret - well maybe not regret since they'd never made it without, but they now want to reverse a decision they feel needs to be overhauled.
I always thought they'll replace Linux with Fuchsia but that hasn't happened and it's not like they couldn't have done it.
> None of their decisions make any sense,<p>Of course, it does. Google is no longer afraid to spit on open source. People happy to use Chromium features better remember this. You are renting everything and your landlord will soon come demanding it back.
> None of their decisions make any sense<p>It only doesn’t make sense if you’re assuming conspiracy.<p>It makes a lot more sense if you assume they just don’t give a shit.
If someone’s (or some company’s) decisions don’t make sense to you, you don’t understand their motivations.
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> <i>Google</i><p>Can we just stop saying "Google" as if it's same faceless org? No, it's not Google, one or two asshole execs are behind this policy.
When you realize that keeping people on proprietary mobile OSes is a matter of national security it makes more sense. The USA spares no expense for national security.
GrapheneOS does not even register on Google scale! It does not
even manufacture its own devices!<p>Bigger problem is HarmonyOS and similar devices, compatible with Android. Opensource threat from china!<p>And no NSA backdoors or honeypots!
If the hardware security is on par with iPhone / pixel 8+, then sure.<p>Otherwise there's no need for NSA backdoors (as Cellebrite matrix shows) :)
GrapheneOS does, however, register on the FBI's radar because a lot of criminals know to use it, and the FBI can't crack it.
Sure, let's just trade the NSA for the CCP, no issues there.
One poses an active, unchecked threat to the constitutional rights of US citizens, has a chartered mission to subvert and undermine the very field of cryptography itself - going so far as to bribe standards bodies to adopt backdoored algorithms (using taxpayer funds to do so), has plotted to mass-violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens and lie about it to the national legislature (which they carried out successfully, committing perjury in the process and facing zero consequences for it), secretly cooperates with the criminal justice system via parallel construction to target nonviolent, law-abiding political activists with fabricated criminal charges as retaliation for politically disfavored speech, while the other is about 6500 miles away, has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.
I agree–it's absurd to be more concerned about spying of China on American citizens than the spying of our own government. While allies of the US are problematic because of however many eyes.<p>Not particularly relevant but the lawful spying implemented in the telecommunications system by our own government has been abused by Chinese hackers as well.
+ 3 social credits, comrade
> has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.<p>lmao
So, the real thing that's happening here is:<p>* Google drop "real" Android source-code updates to OEMs _and_ the public every half.<p>* But they ship four Pixel updates, including documentation + SDKs.<p>* Now they added new APIs in a Pixel-only update.<p>* Google also drop security update backports to "trusted" OEMs monthly (which GrapheneOS have had access to for years).<p>So, there are now Pixel-exclusive app features on the Pixel SDK version which isn't available to OEMs - but, it's highly unlikely any app developer would actually depend on these new APIs, since Pixel marketshare is tiny to begin with. This in essence just makes Pixels a weird beta-testing device for what will come out a quarter later to "normal" devices, which is sort of an odd business decision, but also a weird thing to get really mad about, in my opinion (I do see what GrapheneOS are trying to do, with having OEMs saber-rattle about not getting features on the same cadence as Pixels, it just doesn't resonate very loudly for me).<p>However, the API headline seems to bury a deeper lede; in the thread, GrapheneOS also claim that the quarterly Pixel releases contain security content which is not appearing in the monthly backports. This is quite bad and very sloppy if true, since the Pixel releases can easily be patch-diffed and exploits backed out of them. I'd be interested in seeing this enumerated in more depth.
> * Google drop "real" Android source-code updates to OEMs _and_ the public every half.<p>All of the major OEM shave access to the internal source with a _very_ small delay. OEMs don't ship these intermediate releases because they choose not to, not because Google witholds the source for them.
Oh! I had thought they stopped at the same time they closed off AOSP commits - that makes this entire rabble-rousing effort _exceptionally_ silly, then; I can't see the angle GrapheneOS are trying to push at all in that case (like, I get their side of the _concern_, but "Google are shipping features to Pixels that you don't get" becomes... quite a poor argument indeed in that scenario).
The whole security embargo things seems incredibly stupid. OEMs are always too late rolling out security patches. So Google thought, "let's create an embargo of months so that the OEMs have time to integrate the patches". Anyone could see it coming that nothing would change and the OEMs would still wait until the very last moment.<p>So now everybody is off worse. Not only are OEMs still slow with security updates, while CVEs float around for months among those within the know (or reverse engineering skills) for months.
Patch embargoes are a debate as old as security.<p>I think the overall source embargo is rational _until_ fixes appear in a released binary build. Otherwise there's an integration/QA/rollout window where a source patch is public while the binary patch is unavailable to anyone, including attackers, which is undesirable. In "full" open source this has always been a time-suck mental gymnastics exercise around hidden mailing lists and obfuscated commit messages (which probably aren't useful in the LLM era anyway). It makes sense for Google to avoid engaging with that given they don't need to; I think it would be fully logical for them to perform source drops gated on the rollout cadence to the <i>first</i> available binary release channel.<p>I fully agree the slower-than-Pixel "vendor lead time" windows are really detrimental. Once the binary patch is out, the source patch and disclosure is effectively out too; those extra windows just let OEMs continue to be lazy as a matter of policy (which they love to do regardless) while exploits are already available.
> which is sort of an odd business decision<p>It's probably no decision at all, but merely poor coordination between separate departments.<p>Once a bureaucracy surpasses a certain size, odd side effects accumulate on their own, and the growing number of people affected by them seek to cast blame where no purpose ever existed.
I don't really see what the Pixel-only early API releases achieve except for allowing developers to work on Pixels ahead of time, but Pixels are such a small sliver of the universe that it basically just gives Google a leg up, I would assume. And if you're on Graphene why would you care about Google's beta edge apps?
The rattling is because of the security patches of course.
As someone who went through similar challenges with Google making it impossibly hard for BlackBerry to provide an Android runtime on BBOS10, and now running GrapheneOS, I trust Google exactly zero to do the right thing by any open source project it stewards. Combined with their other practices, and lack of ongoing support for their commercial offerings, means that my perception of them is irreparably damaged and I minimise my usage of their products as much as practicably possible.
Alright AI maximalists, what's the estimated token budget to remove the Google dependency?<p>GrapheneOS has the bootable AOSP and will have Google-alternative device support.<p>We probably need an equivalent to Play Services, app signing/porting/publishing tools.<p>With these in hand could we talk Valve into providing the scalable alternative to the play store?
GrapheneOS accepts donations and, to my knowledge, they spend it in hiring full time engineers.<p>They have replacement portions for Play Services already (attestation, an app store, and location), but it'd be interesting if they also offered something for push notifications.<p>If you have it to give you can spend your budget on a donation and fund the effort directly.
The trouble is that banking apps will not work if you degoogle your phone. GrapheneOS was an attempt to make this sort of thing work, in a phone OS more secure than stock Android<p>But to be honest, many banking apps randomly stop working with GrapheneOS anyway. So if you see this...<p><a href="https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/" rel="nofollow">https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...</a><p><a href="https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report</a><p>And check the issues, it's unpredictable whether a bank will continue to work with GrapheneOS<p>So.. if you accept GrapheneOS might not be reliable for this use case, and decide have two phones (one just for banking stuff, another for.. using), then degoogling is fine.<p>Only thing is that the banking device probably needs to be a <i>phone</i> (or tablet I guess), I don't think you can emulate a real device good enough for it to work on something like Waydroid
Yes, if the banking app refuses to run on Graphene, you can forget about Waydroid completely. Hell will freeze over before Waydroid passes play integrity.
People always bring this up but I don’t get the issue. How often are you using your bank’s app? Banking apps are probably the least essential apps on my phone.
My phone is not that old but it stopped getting OS updates and I stopped considering it a way to do anything banking related when my bank declared that my phone OS was too old to run the app.
My bank can support my phone or accept that I'm going to come waste their time in person, I'm not backing down here.
This is what I ended up doing. I have LineageOS running on a Moto G. For banking, I have a tablet.<p>I didn't want two phones, because it just seems so silly. The tablet, based on it's larger size, at least offers things that another phone cannot.
Literally insane that banks will allow you to do banking on ancient phones with an unpatched Android full of CVEs, but won't allow you banking on a modern ungoogled OS.
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I think you could actually look at this via the OPPOSITE lense:
OpenSource was good for companies before, because they got free code/bugfix/labor, which would have been expensive to produce themselves.<p>Now with LLM and agentic factories pumping out bugfixes/code, does the equation on opensource still look attractive to a for-profit company? Why give away that sweet source code?
The token budget isn't to remove Google it's to create drivers for individual phone hardware, which phone and chip manufacturers keep closed source. Also it would be used to find exploits to unlock permanently locked bootloaders
The answer to this is - the real world comes knocking. Govt, banking, investment, grocery, transport, even some mainstream social/communication apps, all stop working - yeah, kinda cold turkey. And if your, or someone else's, answer to them is: ".. well then don't use those apps.. or maybe in mobile or desktop browser.. " (this is usually the tone on those "privacy" guide forums), then yeah it will work and can be done in hours theoretically, or days max :)
If only Graphene had a better marketing team. It pains me to say this but it is the absolute truth: the public does not know Graphene and does not care about Graphene. Even it’s name is absolutely awful. This is like the Linux distro hell: “you should use BingaBoingoKonohaOS_v34 or Peppermint_Cinn4monR0ll with the OutOfThisWorld DE, but steer clear of the Pancake package manager, use openMsPacMan with GrassFaceWhazzit frontend instead.” How is anyone (as in not us, the tech nerds) supposed to reason about this?<p>Things will keep as is for as long as they keep making these OSs FOR the tech nerds.<p>Downvote me all you want. You know it’s true. An OS made for nerds and by nerds will never reach mainstream and will not, ever, move the needle anywhere. Tech is no longer a hobbyist’s game.
GrapheneOS has a growing userbase, and of course many of the people who would like to switch to GrapheneOS are extra mindful of their devices' privacy and security. Maybe a majority of those people are more technically capable, but I can assure you our users aren't all "nerds."<p>We (yes, "we," not hiding who I am, check my bio) have seen many users from all walks of life asking for assistance. For example, I remember multiple times newcomers in our community asking for help self-identified as old, or retired, or grandparents switching to GrapheneOS. It's not hard to use, and we have a fairly large community of people who are happy to help others learn the ropes.<p>GrapheneOS is easy to use, just ask the grandparents rocking it. Our userbase will only continue to increase as we continue to deliver features that people want, with the latest being Secure Paste. Many of users are very excited about the feature. More are planned.<p>As for the complaint about the name, okay? GrapheneOS is open source. You can change the name everywhere and build it yourself.
Marketing team? You only need to market something if you're selling it. GrapheneOS isn't a product, people buy device brands not OS names. People don't buy OneUI they buy Samsung, they don't buy PixelOS they buy Google, they don't buy OxygenOS they buy OnePlus, people don't buy SteamOS they buy Steamdeck ad infinitum.<p>Great way to demonstrate you don't know the general public and think and speak only nerd.<p>That being said people DO buy Google Pixel for GrapheneOS and they WILL buy Motorola for GrapheneOS too.<p>That is the power of GrapheneOS that all the other BingaBoingoKonohaOS can only wish for.<p>What a weird angle to have a pop over.
> How is anyone (as in not us, the tech nerds) supposed to reason about this?<p>People have more than enough brain power to reason about this. "There are several distributions, I recommend this one" is not exactly rocket science.<p>We really need to stop treating people like they have an IQ of 30 and only 5 minutes of free time per day, or we'll never defeat Google et al that purposefully maintain us in this belief.
> An OS made for nerds and by nerds will never reach mainstream<p>By your own definition, is it meant to make the mainstream?
Well, Motorola's next flagship is shipping with GrapheneOS, so we'll see.<p>And I don't see how the name "GrapheneOS" is any worse than "Android". Really, the biggest barriers to adoption are:<p>- No phones come with it pre-installed (yet)<p>- They only work with Pixel phones (for now)<p>- Some apps like certain banking apps don't work
People can buy Pixels with GrapheneOS preinstalled from a bunch of companies despite it not being shipped that way from the factory.<p>Pixels are currently the only devices providing the required updates and hardware security features. There will be at least one Motorola flagship with GrapheneOS support in 2027 meeting the same requirements. It will expand to more Motorola devices from there. iOS only runs on iPhones but that's hardly a barrier to adoption for it. Pixels aren't quite broadly available enough and it will take time before we can support lower end Motorola devices in the same price range as an 'a' series Pixel.<p>The vast majority of Android apps do work. Banking apps are a special case where around 10% don't work due to banning using a non-Google-certified OS. Most banking apps definitely work on GrapheneOS.
Google will destroy any OEM which ships an Android fork out of the box. Google only permits alternative ROMs as long as they are niche and keep developers distracted from creating real competition.
It's the OS every drug dealer uses and the government can't break it. In privacy circles you can't get better marketing than that.
It is not the OS "used by drug dealers". The vast majority of criminals use the stock OS on whichever device they purchase. It is pure make believe to think that people are installing <i>any</i> alternate OSes to commit crimes.<p>There is also no statistics resulting from surveys, studies, reports, etc., that would indicate such a conclusion about user demographics.
If only privacy circles were big enough to matter.
I still dont get your point, its designed for the security audience and it has a very good reputation there. Its not aimed at normal people, by your own admission they wont even understand what it does and why they would want it. So why are you talking it down for not reaching more normal people?
What's particularly bad about the names of Graphene, Mint and Cinnamon? Especially compared to Android and iOS!!
On their own? Nothing.<p>But Graphene doesn’t mean anything to the general public. People aren’t buying “an iOS device”, they are buying iPhones. People aren’t buying “an Android phone”, they are buying “a Samsung/Galaxy” or a “Pixel”.<p>Mind you, when I say people, I mean the general population. Not those actually interested in these subjects.<p>My point is: people don’t care about these specifics, people care about having a frictionless experience (or as close to frictionless as possible). Having to explain what Graphene even is is friction enough for most people to not even bother listening to your explanation.
> People aren’t buying “an iOS device”, they are buying iPhone<p>Well, they kinda do. Apps are available on Android and iOS. They are not "available on Android, iPhone, iPad and Apple watch". iOS is actually used and recognized by the general public.
> They are not “available on Android, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch”.<p>No. They are available on the “Play Store” and the “App Store”. OSs are rarely mentioned. Store tags only feature store logos and store names, for device specific ones you get the device itself. The OS remains irrelevant in this scenario.
What's the token budget to build a new phone OS?
exactly
A <i>lot</i>. But I don't think you can do it with just tokens. Android without the Play store and Google Play Services is just not very useful (in the West anyway).
Buy HarmonyOS device. No google jumk, android compatible os, fdroid works, years of security updates from maker, and 40% lower price.<p>As a personal device it works pretty well. For ssh terminal and reading markdown, it has by far best display.
HarmonyOS kernel (HongMeng) is not only closed source but also encrypted. Those devices do not allow you to unlock the bootloader or install apps not signed by them (albeit I don't know how that works for emulator apps, a signed Android emulator could possibly allow arbitrary apks).<p>Huawei made a big mistake by not fully open sourcing HarmonyOS, you can't flash OpenHarmony so it doesn't count.
That's Huawei's Android fork, right? Is it available on devices outside of China? I'm not seeing an obvious place to buy a device running it.
I think it started like this, but it no longer is the case.<p>I feel like Huawei missed a <i>gigantic</i> opportunity there: forking AOSP may have gotten them traction. I would totally buy a Huawei device if it could run GrapheneOS, and I wouldn't mind if GrapheneOS was based on Huawei's fork rather than Google's.
LOL an OS controlled by the Chinese government?
I'm so glad we stopped microsoft from shipping a browser with their OS in the 90s, <sarcasm/>.<p>Regulate them! that is the only way.<p>Their should be a path for an AOSP build to be just as privileged as a google signed build.
Not everything is antitrust and regulation is always the worst choice.
They just walked away from an antitrust case with what can only be considered a huge win for them. I don't think regulating them is going to happen any time soon.
Important details further down: <a href="https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282129725629495" rel="nofollow">https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282129725629495</a><p>So it seems like the problem isn't that the new API is Pixel exclusive, but that the first and third quarterly release patches each year are Pixel exclusive?
<p><pre><code> No, these are standard Android APIs included since Android 17 QPR1. These will be available through AOSP and other OEMs via Android 17 QPR2 in December 2026. It's currently exclusive to Pixels because it was released as part of Android 17 QPR1 since QPR1 and QPR3 releases are now Pixel exclusive since Android 16.
This is simply the first time they've added APIs in a QPR1 or QPR3 release following no longer releasing QPR1 and QPR3 to AOSP after the release of Android 16.</code></pre>
QPR1 and QPR3 are now Pixel exclusive since Android 16. That means the new APIs for app developers added in Android 17 QPR1 are Pixel exclusive until Android 17 QPR2. There hasn't been a case of new APIs for apps not being open source or not being available to every OEM since Android Honeycomb (3.x).
Seems like that's anti-competitive behavior, holding back security updates except for Google's own stock users.<p><a href="https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282190165630051" rel="nofollow">https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282190165630051</a><p>> It would be interesting to know if Google's legal team is aware they're giving Pixels months of early access to new Android features and bug fixes including certain important security patches. Pixels being given this competitive edge over Google's OEM partners is very dubious.
I'm on GrapheneOS and I will never go back to Google Android or iOS. The amount of control you get is just liberating. I hope Google doesn't crush them.
I get the sense Android is going the way of MacOS and Darwin. At some point Google will release something non-free end users experience as an absolutely integral part of OS, and it won't be possible to continue as an equivalent alternative. AOSP will still be free and underlying the whole thing, but slowly rot away as anything more than a code base.
Installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 10 yesterday, only used the stock rom to start the installer... Am feeling a little unconfortable due to this situation: [0]. Hope this gets better. Really feeling the dislike for Google on this one.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49741510">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49741510</a>
It was shipped in the latest GrapheneOS release. It's currently in the Alpha channel due to reports of carrier compatibility issues for calls which are fixed in today's release. Today's release should be able to reach Beta in a couple hours and then Stable in under 24 hours.
<a href="https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026091700" rel="nofollow">https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026091700</a><p>Fixes/updates the modem firmware.
The world needs a Steam Phone.
It sure needs a large enough push from one of few big companies (with their explicit backing) that can bring businesses to support other app store(s). But imho that has to happen in a way that it doesn't create a need to write and publish apps in yet another language to yet another platform. Because if businesses have to do that as well that will be a good way to ensuring it becomes a DoA effort.<p>I've a feeling companies like Meta, Amazon, Steam are well placed to do this (esp. Meta and Steam). But not sure it will be helpful to them in any way, besides they'd want to ensure their own control and locks.
Does the Brax Phone fit?
Robert Braxman's provisions have ranged from highly insecure devices, EOL devices, charging for TOR as a service, an "e2e encrypted" chatroom that sends the key in plain text, etc.<p>He is a serial fabricator and charlatan.<p><a href="https://nitter.space/GrapheneOS/status/1894511926962446670#m" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.space/GrapheneOS/status/1894511926962446670#m</a><p><a href="https://forum.f-droid.org/t/brax2-alternatives/22469/6" rel="nofollow">https://forum.f-droid.org/t/brax2-alternatives/22469/6</a>
If you mean GNU/Linux phones, they already exist and can be used as daily drivers by technical people. Sent from my Librem 5.
Yes, but a popular one that's usable by regular people and with a very wealthy organization behind it.
How do you expect things to be popular without a company with self-interest? Producing a linux phone that people want requires immense capital, they're not just spending that and then releasing as open source forever.<p>By the time the product becomes "popular", it's then just one more platform that needs to follow investor interest and laws.
Valve is kinda doing that with SteamOS ? It's primarily made for their own hardware, but they also use work time to add features for installs on non valve hardware, and all of their components are open source.
Why GNU? I get the appeal of Linux, but Android has that angle covered. What makes GNU a better userspace than Android for phone use? I actually think the Andoid userspace is very good for what it is. If Google's influence were magically removed, Android would be more or less the ideal OS, at least for me.
I miss my blackberry
It's not the same, it does not run BBOS10, and de-Googled LineageOS will have to do for now (for me).<p>But at least we can get updated internals for the Q20 (and soon the Passport). It'll be the closest we can get to carrying a BlackBerry for some time, if ever, and I'm happy enough with mine that I picked up a spare mainboard<p><a href="https://zinwa.com/" rel="nofollow">https://zinwa.com/</a>
While it's not exactly blackberry-alike, a hopefully soon-to-be-released option is the clicks communicator[0] phone. I just ordered their bluetooth keyboard attachment for androids/iphones with magsafe backs, but if it's any good, I may shell out for their phone as well.<p>I was also a backer for the Mecha Comet[1] earlier in the year, which I'm hopeful about, although that's a couple of steps away from a daily driver phone at this stage, I guess.<p>I never owned a blackberry, but for me, the ultimate winner would be for someone to copy or licence the layout and form of the dopod838pro[2] (a.k.a. HTC Hermes 100) and pop some newer internals in it... If I had 100 million dollars, that's what I'd be doing...<p>[0] <a href="https://www.clicks.tech/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.clicks.tech/en</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-comet-modular-linux-handheld-computer" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://kaitech.hk/2006/10/dopod-838pro-htc-hermes/" rel="nofollow">https://kaitech.hk/2006/10/dopod-838pro-htc-hermes/</a>
This can be achieved if more people support the effort. If you expect megacorps to offer you a device respecting your freedom, think again.
They exist but they need more polish and support from device vendors to be a viable alternative to the duopoly. It should be just as easy for the average phone buyer to get <i>and use</i> a 'Linux phone' as it is to get an Android or fruit phone. This is more or less true now for Linux distributions no matter what the naysayers keep on repeating, the next step is to make it true for mobile devices. There will still be naysayers but... who cares? Let them listen to themselves in their echo chambers like they've been doing w.r.t. 'Linux on the desktop'.
Wake me when they get modern hardware.
Wake up, babe: <a href="https://forgejo.catcrafts.net/Catcrafts/fp6-img" rel="nofollow">https://forgejo.catcrafts.net/Catcrafts/fp6-img</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312326">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312326</a>
Graphene OS is the odd one, I don't know what to make of it. It seems to be the only entrant in the mobile OS space that has a remote chance to work as alternative OS for daily use - but it's optimizing directly for the philosophy opposite to what I hoped it would be, I.e. it's focusing on privacy and security. Which AIUI means also securing the device against its owner, much like the big players do.<p>I hoped we'll get an OS more amenable to opening up the device, exposing its capabilities to the owner, but alas, I fear there is no way for an OS to survive in this space unless it acts the same way the Big Two do. As it is, I can't help to think that Graphene is just the same as Google and Apple: just another security-maximizing vendor owning your computer.
You are expecting and hoping that it will act the same as desktop environments do.<p>Desktop environments can't/don't because there is an inherent expectation of users that they should work a certain way and they are built upon decades of neglectful security practices.<p>Mobile OSes are the attempt to change that and provide better security models from the ground up. AOSP being open-source is what gives you the actual control to modify your platform as you see fit, not having runtime root access exposed to the user.<p>The idea of "control" that you are describing is illusory and only serves to actually undermine your real control. If you expose root access in that way, you have a much lower guarantee that the rules and permissions that <i>you</i> set are going to be able to be enforced by the system, because you have allowed the system to be modified. If something malicious gains that access, you have lost that guarantee.
This is confirming my belies that Google is trying to block OEMs that don't pay them to be part of GMS, with the goal of eventually being the only android phone maker.
Look at that dev productivity go! The continually softening job market means c-suites everywhere care less than ever about their company’s image among developers. They’re surely thrilled to stop pretending to give a shit about anything beyond the next few quarters’ stock prices and their bonuses.
This news in particular seems similar to the other Android phonemakers like Samsung. They have their own custom Android forks that aren't open source. Maybe Google is wearing two hats here, Android and Pixel?<p>But if Pixels are getting early access to security patches too, that's more like one hat.
its kind of amusing in a wag degoggling requires pretty much a phone from google :') by the comments on those post. bit unrelated to this post ofc but thought and wondered if they do that on purpose and how far these devices really get reverse engineered to see if they are actually de-googled down to the chips. just having a different OS doesnt have to mean anything in that regard if the entire device is owned by them -_-.<p>especially since its radio and thats not too easy to determine if a device is or isnt sending weird stuff. (dont come with the lte or wifi sniffers or such things. u'd need thorough spectrum analysis during operations on a quite broad spectrum too to rule that out. the antennae in the devices can produce a lot of types of signals... or do they decap the chips and reverse those to see whats in it? i doubt it would be possible at the right scale but theres options i guess.<p>people in certain regions/ high assurance security work roles will do this to hundreds of devices that are identical to try and determine if a supplier is compromised or not. order a full batch, take em all apart. taking x-rays, dissolving chips package, etching layers one by one, taking pictures with electron microscopes etc, probing bond wires in the packages as they run etc etc.<p>somehow i dont see some OS creator do all of this, but ofc i could be very wrong :). interested to find out why people think google while with a different OS is truly de-googled or if they kinda just hope for the best...
Google - be evil.
I jumped ship to iOS a few years ago. Android is a strictly worse experience on all accounts with clear ambitions to be just as unfree as iOS, so there is just no point.
I would love to know what alternative phone OSes exist. I would happily throw money and my engineering weight behind a promising project.
Sailfish has a Linux-based OS with some Android compatibility.<p>Ubuntu Touch has left behind UBPorts which uses Android's hardware layer to provide a usable UI on existing Android devices.<p>There's the Librem phone with an open source stack, though its hardware doesn't come close to a cheap Android phone these days.<p>There are projects like PostmarketOS which work to get mainline Linux on phones. From there, you can run Linux on phones through desktop environments such as Phosh and Plasma Mobile which are touch optimized.<p>FirefoxOS died but was forked into KaiOS, though the modern iteration of KaiOS is an Android fork.<p>Samsung has TizenOS but I don't think any phones run it anymore. It's probably the closest equivalent to Android in the way it has been developed.<p>If you want to throw money at something, Sailfish may be the project to keep an eye on. All the other volunteer-run operating systems are worth donating to, of course, but Sailfish is actually trying to be a real third option rather than an open source proof of concept or alternative for shitty vendors stopping updates.
Plenty. The ones you want to donate to are postmarketOS, Alpine Linux (the distro postmarketOS is based on) and Plasma Mobile (the main DE used by postmarketOS and other distros like Mobian).<p>In terms of usability, SailfishOS is the most usable, but it has some proprietary components and is commercially backed by Jolla, so there's no need to donate to them. I do encourage you to buy their devices if you can though. Speaking of devices, Furilabs and Volla also make practical, decent spec Linux phones (based on Debian and Ubuntu Touch), so they're worth checking out as well.
I've been saying that for a while. We need a viable third option.<p>But it is not easy, and it takes a huge amount of effort. As others have said, theres SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS and a few others.<p>I'm not sure which one is in a better position to become that third alternative we need, but this year I'm experimenting with all of them on different devices, to try to understand where they stand.<p>"posted from an Ubuntu Touch mobile device"
I don't get why this is a discussion around Open Source, they also seem to have f*caked over other OEMs? Can't imagine Samsung will be OK with it.
Does anyone contribute to AOSP besides Google? Does Google actually accept any patches into "upstream" and ultimately into their own commercial distro?
The phrasing of your first question is ironic given GrapheneOS has upstreamed a ton of their security hardening.<p>You're probably asking if they're able contribute anymore?
quite a few manufacturers do, specifically in the automotive sphere and ofc samsung etc.<p>in terms of accepting, unless it's stuff like bugfixes to core mechanisms, not really.
AOSP = "Android Open Source Project"
Still waiting on the Motorolas with grapheneOS support to ditch my 7 years old phone.
I'm going to guess that google is afraid of the age of AI, they should be, those API's will be reverse engineered pretty quick. Lots of bad actors will using AI.<p>We live in a time, if you want to build an android app, you easily can, but installing will be harder due to google concerns.
Someone please make a linux-based, using proper cgroups/containers for app isolation, where programs are one of: regular JVM ByteCode, or WASM. APIs follow a JEP-style Process with multiple incubators until we got it right.
Ah, the classic con job is starting to close its cycle. Get who-knows-how-many-millions-of-dollars of free work and thought, and then when the free labor has finally elevated you above it and your power is overwhelming, you simply just crush the gullible peasants beneath you and act like they never existed.<p>People thought they were part of some collaborative, good of the world type effort, when the reality is that there were always ulterior and hidden motives to manipulate and exploit that gullible and rather foolish nature of Americans in particular; a foolishness that has long, if not always existed in the genuine American core character, but at the very least was cultivated and even selected for a long time ago.<p>How do you motivate people in modern times to do free labor for you as the parasitic ruling class without the threat or resort to violence? You of course trick them into believing that what they are doing or support makes them a good boy, regardless of all the evidence and proof to the contrary.
The next cat and mouse game you are going to lose.
Feels like the "Pixel = reference implementation of AOSP" relationship is starting to erode.
Many developers will likely be developing at Android 16 APIs only. Will rely on Aptoide+AOSP exclusively. This is likely the timeline we'll see a decline in Play Store and Pixel usage.
You vastly overestimate how many people care (developers included) outside of FOSS and HN circles.<p>Nothing will happen, as it never does.
Pixel market share is and always has been absolutely tiny, and the people that care about this are a rounding error.
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I wonder how low Google will sink next time.<p>Respect for the GrapheneOS for pushing through regardless, even if they have to reverse engineer stuff. Can't wait to buy their phone.
> Can't wait to buy their phone.<p>Good phrasing. It's certainly not _your_ phone, you're just an untrusted user who is extended the privilege of using it.
It absolutely is. You can fork GrapheneOS, modify it, and sign the images with your own key; all to your heart's content.<p>Exposing root to userspace does <i>not</i> make you the owner of it, and serves to erode the guarantee that the OS is enforcing the rules you set. The way it is used is a hacky shortcut to achieving functionality that should be written into the OS itself so that the security model can be maintained.
Isn't GrapheneOS rootable?
> I wonder how low Google will sink next time.<p>Oh, the possibilities are endless and they're just getting started. Besides stopping releases of AOSP completely they could also mandate that any "certified" Android device should not allow bootloader unlocking (albeit OEMs will disallow that anyway)..
Google is increasingly locking down Android. I wouldn't be surprised if they killed off AOSP entirely in a few years...
Google managing to get worse every day.
The fraud of Android just gets worse.<p>The great "open-source" OS that was supposed to free us all from vendor and telco tyranny has... not.
Android really going for the gutter recently.
At this point there is no point buying into Android if it becomes the same walled garden as iOS.
Android is irrelevant to me, there is only GrapheneOS.<p>Go bankrupt, Alphabet!
Android has been so thoroughly disappointing through the years. Started as a great open free form alternative to iOS, to becoming the very thing it sought to combat.
I had never considered using lineageos and the like, but honestly the writing is on the wall. Google is going straight into a closed AI device.<p>I'm going to start donating to a few free android distros I guess, I'm probably going to be trying them sooner rather than later, and without AOSP support the dev burden is going to be much higher, and it probably means they'll end up diverging and incompatible at some point (not in both directions, lineage will probably always have to have Android app support)
If Android wants to be the inferior not-open-source mobile OS, why would I not just buy an iPhone instead then?<p>It’s closed too, sure, but at least it’s more consistent.
Android has free and open artificial pancreas that is still easy to install and keeps us with complex type 1 diabetes alive.<p>Google may just want to kill us and Apple don't even let this kind of software exist without massive hurdles...
Because it still allows installing apps with some hoops, and iOS doesn't allow it at all.
Because it's much worse (for me).<p>However at this point, as a GrapheneOS user if I couldn't use it for any reason I'll go to iOS (even though I used it for a couple of years and I've been fed up).
Because (1) you'd be rewarding the entity that originated and normalized the loss of freedom that Google much later adopted, and (2) as Apple restricts more freedoms you'll still be able to enjoy them on Android for a few more years as Google remains (comparatively) more user friendly.
Oh! These are HID! I wonder if this is for Pixel, or if this is something they had to shoehorn in fast to make Chromebooks work?
Forget Android. The future is Plasma Mobile.
All FOSS consumer operating systems suck. We only tolerate them because they are FOSS.
I disagree. Linux (especially a top-notch distro like CachyOS or Aurora) is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to Windows in several aspects (performance, filesystem features, workload-specific kernel tuning, DE customisation etc). Several benchmarks out there that can show you the performance edge Linux has over Windows. Plus there are several features completely missing from Windows, like atomic updates, immutability, not to mention all the cool features found in filesystems like btrfs. Of course, Windows has some benefits too, but making a sweeping blank statement like <i>"All FOSS consumer operating systems suck"</i> is very egregious and insulting to the all volunteers around the world, who continue to work tirelessly to make FOSS better every single day.
I desperately want to use it, but it runs on precisely no decent hardware as far as I can tell. My attempts to get it working on the fxtec and furiphones failed miserably.
Agreed. Linux is the future, fk Android. GrapheneOS should stop wasting their efforts on Android, when they could've contributed towards PostmarketOS or similar, or even made their own distro. Working on Android is a complete and utter waste of time and effort.
Yes ditching a secure OS for one that can easily be pwned by police / ICE / DHS with ease (especially in a time in the US when they’re doing this more and more) when AOSP can just be hard forked users. Thanks for the input, government agent.
Yes, indeed AOSP is trivial to hard fork and maintain independently of Google, which is why so many maintained hard forks of AOSP exists... right, right? Thank for the input, world's most brilliant coder.
This is partially pointing out that every time these discussions invariably come up, nobody addresses the cognitive dissonance of ideologues claiming that the benefit of open source like Linux and Firefox is that “the community can hard fork it and maintain a free version”<p>Yet somehow this same logic somehow becomes invalid when any open source software made by Google is brought up.<p>If Linux was targeted for mobile devices, there would inevitably be wasted effort reinventing the wheel just to match the feature set of Android when there’s already a suitable base to start community work from.
For what it is worth, GrapheneOS have expressed interest in a new base OS with an Android compatibility/virtualisation layer, but they do not have the resources to build it themselves and a suitable open source one does not already exist for them to leverage.
The future is an inappropriate OS with catastrophic battery management, zero software available, no sandboxing or proper security measures, and the oh so stable kernel ABI & Gnome APIs to develop for, yep yep yep.
The future is an inappropriate OS which spies on you and harvests your data, gets more and more locked down with every release restricting user freedom, and prioritises corporate interests over end user interest, yep yep yep.
Yes, let's abandon a very mature OS that is still open source, has millions of apps, and billions of users by one one that was designed for desktops, with a security posture fitting the 90s, virtually no phone apps unless you emulate said very mature OS, and which will have all the same problems with remote attestation, etc. </s>
Android 17 is swagged out lol
How surprising.
Worth reminding folks that the EU DMA Act is forcing Google to start unlocking some of their APIs, such as the AI services AI. Right now a bunch of the apis for digital assistants/chat stuff are kind of proprietary, and this is demanding interoperation. August 1, 2027 is the deadline for most of this (but open access to hotword listening capabilities is slated for Aug 1, 2028).<p><a href="https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/interoperability/alphabet-specification-proceedings-interoperability-ai-services_en?prefLang=hu" rel="nofollow">https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/in...</a><p>Side note, that API here is HID. USB HID is so cool. There's so much stuff in this spec! Chargers and batteries can both communicate all kinds of status, which, well, afaik no one does, there's all kinds of sensors. It's this ancient spec that has so much, and weirdly is just so far ahead of where we are. More HID on Android will be great. Wish they'd played with others to make this so though!
I mean, even if android is/was open source, it was always fastidious to build a de-googled android image for a phone model.<p>Of course it's not great for their business model. Not to mention, no more trustworthy app distribution.<p>I don't see the EU really being able to forcing them to de-google android phones.<p>I am also curious how much those phones would cost, BTW, since the cost calculation to release such an OS would be a bit complicated.
EU was very clear that closing down the OS (Apple) is how they avoid fines with their latest rulings. They punished Google for open sourcing the OS and left Apple get away free with explicit explanation that closed OS doesn't need to adhere to same rules.<p>So yeah, don't expect EU to defend you here.
GrapheneOS scares them.
Jsjsjsksk
Google is a for profit company. It does what it needs to stay profitable.
Are the actions of Google moral? No!<p>Governments are paid out to not intervene. They should have stepped in decades ago. They should have made Google to release source code and interoperate with public services. They already make profit from their services.
Out of curiosity, do closed APIs mean OEMs can’t fuck them up or at least limit how much they can?
Embrace, extend, extinguish, and old playbook.
Fine, whatever but no Android 17-derived Google-free AOSP distribution for me if these APIs are in any way essential to the functioning of the device or required by one or more of the government/bank-mandated applications which are sometimes needed. If they are in any way related to some Google service I don't care since I don't use those anyway.
One can not simply trust Google. While I personally like the MIT licence more, I think it is time that the GPL or variants of it (Affero etc...) get used a lot more. It worked very well with the Linux kernel. Corporations keep on abusing this.
So...if you vibe code API shims Google can't sue your right? It would be clean room implementation by definition.
Google is a cancer on humanity.
Why do you so desperately want to use their software then?<p>This whole topic is basically people demanding that Google continues giving them their code for free for their operating system.<p>If it's really such a cancer, why whine and demand the continued work then?
Google is just one symptom of late stage capitalism.
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Says people should take a critical stance on GrapheneOS while providing no actual basis other than 'my feels' 'I've got a tingling' or 'my stomach made an unusual noise when I thought about it' as their position to smear it.<p>If I was reading this critically I'd say you have an axe to grind and want to continue to show why HN is a useless source of news or content.
Which "other, shady (imo)" interests? This feels like innuendo. Just say what you think actually motivates them.
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GrapheneOS have discussed and explored replacing Google Play/Google Mobile Services functionality with equivalent or open source replacements. See: eSIM management, location services, push notifications et cetera. What they have refused is bundling a privileged component (for full Google Services functionality/compatibility) and enabling signature spoofing support.<p>GrapheneOS also heavily promote the use of open source Android apps. What they refuse is having app stores that reuse app package names, centralise the signing of app packages, perform reproducible builds on outdated infrastructure, significantly delay app updates et cetera.<p>I cannot deny your opinion, but just want to suggest that from my understanding GrapheneOS are not against microG and F-Droid as concepts, just against their current implementations.
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i despise where Google is going with this. it's a duopoly in the smartphone OS space and we need (for lack of a better analogy, spare the technicals) open-source distros like we have with Linux on desktop.<p>Graphene is reaching that status for me every day and i'm looking forward to switching to it as my daily driver.
GrapheneOS is pretty neat, <a href="https://postmarketos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://postmarketos.org/</a> is also pretty damn polished out of the box these days. I'd argue the "mobile desktop Linux systems" are actually a bit more polished than Graphene, esp. when it comes to default apps (no AOSP abandonware dialer, contacts etc. apps to fight with, it's all just maintained, responsive GNOME/KDE apps)
I want to believe this, but it's hard for me to take this at face value. It's been about 4 years since I've run pmOS, so my experience IS very out of date, but I also have a hard time believing that the experience has radically changed in the meantime.<p>The short is that yes the GNOME/KDE apps do often look more impressive, but they suffer the same sort of malaise which seems to have infected Linux desktops sometime since Eternal September, and between the sporadic crashing and "this doesn't feel right", it's <i>really</i> hard for me to accept "It's more polished than AOSP!".<p>pmOS's installation page opening with a warning:<p><pre><code> Make sure you read state of postmarketOS before installing postmarketOS.
</code></pre>
Which leads to a page that opens with:<p><pre><code> The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for everyone, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first. If you are looking for an OS that is as usable as iOS or Android, this project is currently not for you.
</code></pre>
Does not do a lot to dissuade my skepticism. I know you said the apps specifically, but even there, it's like... I dunno.
GrapheneOS provides drastically better usability, robustness, overall functional and app compatibility. Privacy and security are also drastically better in AOSP and especially GrapheneOS than that desktop Linux software stack ported to mobile.<p>All of the default apps in GrapheneOS are being rapidly overhauled or replaced. It wasn't a priority due to the incredibly good open source app ecosystem with many existing alternatives available. There isn't a similarly large and high quality open source mobile app ecosystem available for what's being promoted.
GrapheneOS provides drastically better usability, robustness, overall functional and app compatibility. Privacy and security are also drastically better in AOSP and especially GrapheneOS than that desktop Linux software stack ported to mobile.<p>All of the default apps in GrapheneOS are being rapidly overhauled or replaced. It wasn't a priority due to the incredibly good open source app ecosystem with many existing alternatives available. There isn't a similarly high quality open source mobile app ecosystem available there.
I tried getting it to run on a Pixel 3a and struggled for hours, eventually gave up (albeit I tried running it with Wayland and Niri which seems less tried-and-true).
GrapheneOS provides drastically better usability, robustness, overall functional and app compatibility. Privacy and security are also drastically better in AOSP and especially GrapheneOS than that desktop Linux software stack ported to mobile.<p>All of the default apps in GrapheneOS are being rapidly overhauled or replaced. It wasn't a priority due to the incredibly good open source app ecosystem with many existing alternatives available. There isn't a similarly large and high quality open source mobile app ecosystem available for what's being promoted.<p>Pixel 3a will lack firmware updates regardless of what you put on it. Having serious unpatched vulnerabilities for radios and other firmware is considered acceptable for desktop operating systems but definitely not by us.
I recently installed pmos on two 3a's and it was as simple as a Lineage image. Works well too!
PMOS doesn't run with full support and performance on any decent hardware. Would love to be proven wrong.
GrapheneOS provides drastically better usability, robustness, overall functional and app compatibility. Privacy and security are also drastically better in AOSP and especially GrapheneOS than that desktop Linux software stack ported to mobile.<p>All of the default apps in GrapheneOS are being rapidly overhauled or replaced. It wasn't a priority due to the incredibly good open source app ecosystem with many existing alternatives available. There isn't a similarly large and high quality open source mobile app ecosystem available for what's being promoted.
2nd vote for postmarket. have put it on an old tablet i pulled out of ewaste and it is excellent.<p>there is clearly no future for android for anyone wanting an open and spyware free platform. its time to invest out efforts elsewhere.
GrapheneOS provides drastically better usability, robustness, overall functional and app compatibility. Privacy and security are also drastically better in AOSP and especially GrapheneOS than that desktop Linux software stack ported to mobile.<p>All of the default apps in GrapheneOS are being rapidly overhauled or replaced. It wasn't a priority due to the incredibly good open source app ecosystem with many existing alternatives available. There isn't a similarly large and high quality open source mobile app ecosystem available for what's being promoted.
Graphene has been my daily driver for the past year or so. The only thing I miss is the ability to do contactless payments. Otherwise, it's been awesome. I don't run any games nor do I care about any of the AI features. YMMV.
I just wish Graphene had better support for non-Google hardware.
They can't due to the shortcomings of the hardware (why develop a hardened os to the grossly insecure hardware) or the vendor (no/slow updates, etc).<p>Anyone is free to fork, add the desired hardware support and flash.<p>(that's aside of some Moto flagships in 2027)
Those Razr phone updates need to start landing sooner ....
More like OEMs need to take security more seriously and add in the capable hardware and commit to firmware updates long term.
Unless there is a real market advantage to it, they won't. Consumers prove over and over again they are willing to trade security to save a few dollars. Furthermore, why commit to providing hardware and software support for a device to last 5+ years, when ~25% of Americans report damaging their device each year[0]. Most of a device's population will have been replaced in 3 years.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2024/03/15/322486.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2024/03/15/32248...</a>
Yeah unfortunately this is the case. Privacy and security in general are things most average consumers don’t necessarily care for, and especially don’t care for when it provides inconveniences. Even in more tech enthusiast crowds you see this reflected most obviously in people wanting to use Firefox over any Chromium variant of a browser.<p>Not to mention to reach GOS’ requirements the cost of the phone would have to significantly increase which I imagine only hurts Android phones even more for no real gain since GOS users are minuscule overall.<p>And the long term support is definitely not the norm yeah. It’s pretty much just Apple and Google doing it for their own devices. Motorola will be a newcomer to this concept with GOS. But we can only wait and see if they actually stick to it, given their track record prior to the collaboration.<p>Google probably got away with it cause they made the chips and security chips themselves. I read something like Tensor costing $70 vs. a Qualcomm chip with MTE costing $250.<p>But even with of all this, it wouldn’t make sense for GOS to spend it’s limited resources developing for a less secure platform when appropriate target devices exist (they mentioned something to this effect a few days ago on reddit too): <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1wifsiq/comment/paac5gz/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1wifsiq/comment...</a>
i so desperately wish we were still in the days of manufacturers making their own OS. It's why I moved to iphone: when the hardware company makes the software and vice-versa the integration is much better and less error-prone/bloated. It never made sense to me for android to be shoehorned into thousands of devices, instead of a fork being made and for thorough OS rework to happen to support the device.
That is <i>definitely</i> not how I remember the feature phone era. The OS was an afterthought seemingly whipped together a couple months before the device hit the shelves and nothing was ever consistent even across recent models from the same manufacturer.<p>Back then the primary goal was checkboxes for the carrier to advertise and UI/UX was a distant second priority at most. Sometimes an advertised feature would just flat out be unusable (such as MP3 players), but good luck waiting for any kind of update because by then those developers had already been reassigned to the next handset model they promised to carriers.<p>Also, Samsung <i>extensively</i> customizes their OneUI fork of Android, with its own UI look and feel that evolves independently from Android based on their own priorities. Plus Samsung's Android maintains hundreds of features that either don't exist at all on AOSP/Pixels or later get folded into mainline Android.<p>(Including the little known killer app suite "Good Lock" available on Samsung's Galaxy store which gives power users an almost obscene amount of additional niche options and customizations that would give UX minimalist designers at Google or Apple a heart attack)<p>But despite how different Pixel vs. OneUI look and feel, I can use the exact same apps whether on a Pixel or Galaxy or $100 trash phone. Interoperability is very easy to take for granted and Android app ecosystem is (still) paradise compared to the lowest common denominator J2ME "app" era of the 2000s.
If Google doesn't smarten up, it will no longer be in control of Android.<p>Oracle was a mighty powerhouse when it bought MySQL, StarOffice, and more. It lost defacto control of all of them, due to its stupidity. In the world of open source, the tighter you hold on, the less likely you'll retain control.<p>And yet, here we are, with Google playing games.<p>Google, a note: there are far more relying upon Android than you, and now there are forced alternative stores in the mix. If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're <i>out</i>. Gone. Nada.<p>They can now fork, and force old Android to have their new fancy pants 'Play' store too.<p>Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
> If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.<p>The OEMs are incapable of writing a competent operating system, and don't particularly care to.<p>> Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".<p>With what maintainers?<p><a href="https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizations/commits?repositories=blink,chromium,v8&organizations=all&grouping=quarterly&colors=organizations&kind=both&metric=commit&chart=line&dates=2016-01-02,2026-09-18" rel="nofollow">https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizatio...</a>
> Oracle was a mighty powerhouse<p>It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.
as someone who is associated with “the big guys”, I can tell you this is changing.<p>Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres from Oracle because it doesn’t make financial sense anymore.<p>now, if we could only stop eating at the trough of Broadcom…
Are they still forbidding benchmarking the Oracle database in their T&Cs? I laugh. Such litigious losers.<p>Postgres ftw. Long may it eat their lunch.
I'm advising a startup doing software for banks, and the overall attitude of their clients is: "We want to get away from the #&I$*@&^#$ Oracle, but we're stuck for now".<p>Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.<p>A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".<p>And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?
Agreed, I had the same talks around 2000 but at the time it was still very much mssql/db2/oracle for 'real companies'. Yet i'm still surprised how much pushback we get, especially in Asian countries (India) but we do get it, a lot. And we have conversations with financial partners in the US as they advice our VCs; those calls go the same way 'ah, you are using that hipster open source stuff, yeah we don't do that here'.
I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.<p>Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
> it will no longer be in control of Android<p>Who will step up to maintain it? Keep in mind that it has to be somebody that every other OEM trust. In other words it would likely have to be an alliance of manufacturers. And they'd inevitably treat OEMs outside the alliance poorly and we'd be back to the current situation, but worse.
Google and Samsung have a closer relationship than ever these days, with cross-branded Google features even featured in advertisements for the last couple Galaxy models which would have been unthinkable back in 2012 or so.<p>They have their private own agreements with Google to secure whatever access they need to maintain their OneUI fork and are not the one making any public complaints. Samsung did have a love/hate relationship with Google that was openly simmering with resentment during the early years of Android but those days are long past.<p>Samsung already includes their own Galaxy store alongside the Play Store on all their devices, and have for 10+ years. But during that time have actually moved the opposite direction from your hypothetical fork scenario and both companies clearly view their current relationship as mutually beneficial.<p>Even though GrapheneOS and Samsung both maintain their own Android fork their views on AOSP/Google are not aligned.
Google's Android customers are phone OEMs. The major ones seem to like how things are going. Until Samsung and whomever start the OpenHandset Foundation or some such and fork Android, there's never going to be the Mariadb of Android.
Thank god that AI is progressing well enough that agents can figure out most of the changes and do the reverse engineering to get this stuff, but it's introducing a lot of inefficiency to the ecosystem that doesn't change the final outcome.