New company called Eelo will give you de-Google-ized Android for your privacy | Hacker News Reader

New company called Eelo will give you de-Google-ized Android for your privacy

phonearena.com

52 pointsnuand99937 comments

https://copperhead.co/android/ is already doing amazing work and sell devices if you want to support them. I've been running it for close to a year and I can't praise it enough.

Am I the only person who thinks Google specifically and the mobile app market in general combined with previously subsidized by carriers phones have completely destroyed the consumers perception of the value of software? It’s getting near impossible to find quality apps (even on iOS, but less so) available for a premium price, I have to constantly settle for IAPs to disable ads, or just free apps that are littered with ads, tracking, and god knows what else when if much rather just pay like $49 for a properly made application with a permanent license.

One of the consequences of iOS was the drop in quality Mac apps (this may possibly be my perception. I wonder if others feel the same). It seems to me what started happening was indie Mac shops who would sell their apps for $20-80 had to now support an iOS app as well and could not charge much, if anything, for it. So it was just an additional cost to be supported by their Mac app.

Further, Apple released the Mac App Store and dropped the price of iWorks apps to $19.99 (or 9.99?) thereby reducing the perceived value of Mac apps as well. Pre MAS, when Apple included iWork and iLife for free with your Mac you looked at it as Apple throwing in several hundred dollars worth of software for free with the Mac. By changing the structure where you now downloaded those apps, they assigned a value to them that was really low affecting the entire eco system.

Considering the massive growth of the Mac eco system, that the state of Mac software is at best as good as it was 10 years ago with a much smaller market is disappointing.

I think the drop of Mac OS X going from $129 to zero probably had as much, if not more, to do with that.

It's not that there's too many free apps, it's that upgrades _have to_ be free.

Back in the day, when you bought MyProgramSuite v2, you got v2. You want v3, you pay for it, creating an incentive to develop a better v3, v4, etc.

Now, imagine if anyone who bought Word 1.0, 2.0 automatically got all future upgrades for free. What happens when the market saturates?

It's not just mobile apps. Probably web apps, especially those with a freemium ad-supported model, and the mobile + web app rise at the expense of traditional desktop software, led to this.

Not to mention the ease of software piracy.

You are not the only person; I've thought this for quite some time. Way back in 2007/2008, I remember telling my co-worker, who was at the time building what later became a very popular time-tracking app for iOS, that app prices would trend to zero over time. People simply want free and appear nearly completely incapable of asking the basic question "What am I paying with other than currency?" They think $0 equals free.

> Am I the only person who thinks Google specifically and the mobile app market in general combined with previously subsidized by carriers phones have completely destroyed the consumers perception of the value of software?

Not entirely fair to Google here.

No one would have purchased the original iPhone were it not heavily subsidized by AT&T. No one. One could argue that the same forces apply today regarding most phone purchasers.

> and god knows what else when if much rather just pay like $49 for a properly made application with a permanent license.

Except the numbers of downloads show that this approach isn't gaining traction. In fact, look at how many applications switched to a subscription model the moment Apple permitted it?

On the side of development, subscriptions make sense. Software development isn't a one-off fee to make software these days, as 99.995% of the people here realize.

Isn't subscription the only sustainable model?

"No one would have purchased the original iPhone were it not heavily subsidized by AT&T. No one."

The original iPhone was not subsidized by AT&T at all. It cost about $500, had lines of people waiting to buy it, and went on to sell about 6 million units, making it one of the best selling phones of it's time.

I should have been clearer: it required a contract that AT&T offered lower data rates on the actual phone. This recovered the money they were paying to Apple IIRC. Still subsidized, but perhaps not explicitly on the phone itself.

I'm not agreeing with the grandparent either but I do have to admit that once carriers subsidised the iPhone, the sales skyrocketed. It can't be a coincidence.

While I don't disagree with you, I'm not sure what the problem with "I have to constantly settle for IAPs to disable ads" is? It's basically a form of shareware at that point?

It's too much of a hassle to create two versions of an app when only a small minority of users will pay for ad free.

I thought they were talking from a consumer point of view, not a developer one.

I also don't believe you need to actually create multiple versions, rather maintain some feature flags.

Nobody pays for software anymore, myself included. There are a lot of good apps on alternative stores like F-droid that snd blocking in app ads isn't very hard.

20 years of warez and piracy will do that, no need for a mobile app store at all.

So, I’m sorry if I misunderstand: they’re taking LineageOS, installing it on preexisting devices they did not engineer, and are taking a rather large profit? They’re just reselling? Why can’t someone just do this themselves for significantly cheaper...

Because everyone who trots out the "you're the product" cliché wants to be the customer, and this is what that looks like.

Development work and qa isn’t free. They are probably selling that one at a profit to help raise funding to get this off the ground.

It sounds like it will be open source for all though.

I'd think most tech-able people would be able to; I've had Cyanogenmod on most of my Android phones, and it's been fairly straightforward to install. It's not too difficult to install LineageOS (on which this is based, the successor to CyanogenMod) on most phones - indeed there are step-by-step guides to do it which don't require too much skill to complete - and it's possible to run it without any of the Google Apps.

Not sure what this project is going to provide that isn't already available after an evening's search, but they seem to be charging a fortune for it.

i’m probably able to, but that doesn’t mean i want to... or that i want to spend the time to potentially brick my shiny new i/nexus/pixel

My shiny new Nougatized phone doesn't have the LineageOS privacy guard or file manager and I'm thinking of switching just for that.

I support privacy focused upgrades!

If a device can be bricked just by a simple reflash of the OS partition, then it's a very good reason for me not to buy it at all.

But they're asking about £800 for doing it? Seems steep.

I didn't even look at the pricing. That's quite a bit.

The founder's blog is a bit more interesting https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/eelo-io-holiday-season-lat... with several posts prior on the project.

How does this compare to the Purism (https://puri.sm/) stuff? It seems that Purism is supposed to completely wall off the baseband processor. Does Eelo?

Collaborating with xiaomi makes it rather fishy.

Pardon my ignorance, but why's that?

They were caught including a whole lot of additional bloatware that was collecting user data.

Indeed, given their Android One is preloaded with lots of bloatware and possibly spyware.

$1-2k for a lineageos phone? A new Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 costs about 5-700 USD. What are they doing with the other 1300 USD?

For a ridiculous price

Unfortunately, privacy is turning out to be quite the luxury.

See Zuckerberg buying the houses that surround his and building himself a massive walled-off privacy compound in Hawaii for examples.

"Privacy is dead.. unless you're the one trying to destroy it"

Reminds me of this story where Zuckerberg's laptop is on a photo showing he uses tape on his iSight camera and audio jack. [1]

You can also read in the same article that he had 5 bodyguards whilst jogging in Berlin.

My point is: "Some precautions are expensive, some are cheap." Or, put more extensive: "Some precautions are out of reach for the masses, some are within reach." Although more factors than price define whether something is within reach for the masses, such as ease of use.

Your example is obviously (very) expensive, same with 5 bodyguards. That's reasonably expensive. Using tape on your laptop isn't though. That is cheap. Using cryptography or TorBrowser, for example, is also cheap.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3653442/Paranoid-lit...

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