Technology

60047 readers

2782 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1249

Custom ROMs have had just about enough of being Android's second-class citizens (www.androidauthority.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

251 comments fedilink hide all child comments

TL;DR

Efforts like Graphene OS face increasing pressure from apps that refuse to run on non-standard Android.

The custom ROM project characterizes Google’s approach to device attestation as incomplete and flawed.

Graphene OS is prepared to take legal action if Google won’t let it pass Play Integrity checks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 123 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Here's a harsh truth and a reality some tech users need to wake up to.

Google has never cared about open-source. They have never cared about user-choice/user freedom. They could easily tomorrow make Android closed-source and that would be the end of Android. It has always been about control. Apple got that authoritarian idea correct long ago by locking down the entire OS.

Google is allowing open-source modding only because there's a large community out there that cares and wants it to thrive. And since it runs on Linux, it would make Google look VERY bad if they removed bootloader unlocking, open source, removed features that causes issues for custom roms.

Google doesn't care you YOU. If they really cared, they wouldn't be slowly removing features or adding anti-user features that in the long run, don't benefit anyone but them.

I'm glad the government declared them a convicted monopoly. I'm still ashamed it took them this long to finally go through with it.

What an insane world we live in.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Afaik GPL 2 would be stopping google from making android closed source anyway, unless I got something wrong about the license terms. But if anything that supports your argument. The main reason google is generally supportive of open source is that they recognize that they benefit from it. The moment that changes, google will try their best to close off anything it can (granted I don't think it's that likely to change, but they're already abusing their position plenty).

[+] [email protected] -52 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

There is another side to this coin though,

Android roms took googles work. The community could have assisted with other mobile os systems like Firefox OS or Ubuntu mobile but didn't.

Instead ROM developers wanted a cookie cutter solution.

In practice, Android is actually fairly open. Republicans have a weird obsession with Google (remember that weird hearing where they clearly didn't understand technology). You can even disable the inbuilt apps

This could lead to a situation like windows where 50 popups are added. It's could backfire and it benefits Apple a lot. That's what I'm concerned about. I'm worried that I'll end up paying for Gmail or more for Android. And Google will get blamed for it

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago

Android ROMs community took Google's work? Are you forgetting which community developed Kernel does Android use? Let's not think about the custom ROMs community as free loaders, please. They provide a free and amazing service.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Can you handily disable notifications being monitored or the keyboard informing google on your typing? Disabling apps is surface level, the software is free to te end user for a reason, google harvests us.