Termux no longer updated on Google Play

I mean, I'll admit its tone is quite direct - I guess they could have copy-pasted some corporate-speak about what a difficult decision it was and how very sorry they were about having to make it, instead of being so direct and unambiguous. But that's pretty trivial IMHO.

In the era of ROP and gadgets (control flow being determined by data, to implement strange virtual machine and interpreters) it seems somewhat quaint, but it has made exploits a lot more complicated. The mixing of JMP/RET addresses and stack data is why stack overflow and ROP is so easy; CFG, CET and shadow stacks are all trying to achieve separate I and D stacks.

And again, the proof is in the pudding. If closed-down markets degrade and become awful over time, the market will eventually reflect and account for that in the future. Long-term consequences eventually materialize into immediate consequences after all. In fact, the market exists to validate lofty claims like yours because history is filled with failed attempts to dictate what people should produce, by minorities like you who believe they know better than the people who buy them.

> I do think it's slightly problematic to assume that users are conscious enough of security to make an educated decision to opt into a locked-down platform, but are not educated enough to avoid flipping a switch in the settings that turns that environment off and on.

This seems pretty obviously true to me. It's quite easy to realize you suck at security, all you need to do is suffer a security breach or know of one. For example, the Windows era taught many users just how insecure they could be, the lessons were pretty simple. Knowing when to disable security guardrails, however, requires actual security knowledge that most users don't have. We know users usually don't have them because Windows tested this with UAC, which users happily and quickly disabled to allow malicious programs that they didn't really evaluate at all; A long and painful case study in "how to let your users choose to fuck themselves".

Of course users don't think about a tradeoff between open access and security, the choice is obvious to them. Security matters and open access doesn't. On the one hand you have the tangible risk of getting your stuff or info stolen, and on the other you have danShumway's nebulous & unproven prophecies of a day that will soon(tm) come where the lack of open access causes stuff to degrade and become awful.

I don't personally make the same tradeoff because open access matters more to me personally, but I think the majority of consumers have made legitimate choices for themselves. They know what they want and have made choices to support their desires, same as you or I, and frankly no one should be able to violate their choices.

Note: definitely not about Pixel outside of US (or even in the US if the phone was direct from Google).

You underestimate the time that it takes to approve updates, even taking into account what Google have done to speed up the update process.

The SoC and the Kernel

From the start, you need to have good driver/HAL for the specific SoC of the device. Qualcomm is very spotty on these: historically, the 8-series revives updates for up to two years (which is an improvement already considering that some older chipsets only has around 1.5 years of updates). This would be a minimal problem if it is Windows-style (where drivers are separate to the system) but Android is currently based on Linux, which integrates the drivers to the build. This means that major kernel upgrades are PITA or even impossible. Worse, Mediatek and other SoCs (aside Samsung, but they control it anyway) tends to only have a binary build of the kernel and as a device manufacturer you have to deal with it (that's why HMD cannot disable the DuraSpeed optimisation that Mediatek has put on it because Mediatek controls to a degree the whole device).

OEM-specific Customisations

It is no secret that OEMs modify Android hard, to the point that the modifications they have done is beyond the UI of the device. This means that patching of the devices takes time even when the OEM and the SoC manufacturer are responsive (as alluded to earlier, not already good). Worse of all, some fixes are in the mercy of SoC manufacturers as they affect the kernel.

OEM Priorities

If you have a flagship phone, congratulations! You receive patches monthly. However what if you are using a regular device (or even a budget device) from an OEM? Unless it is a device from an Android One OEM or a Pixel, you usually only receive updates quarterly, if at all (see SoC and the Kernel above). Plus, good luck contacting your manufacturer about this problem. This rather obviously slows down patching.

Carrier's Shenanigans

If you are not using a carrier-specific device, congratulations! The update should come to you as smoothly as the OEM wants to. But wheat if you bought your device under a carrier? Depending on your country, no significant difference to the non-carrier version or your devices' updates is being hold to by your carrier because they wnat to check it (apparently). Sometimes, your carrier is benevolent and really has a team that checks if the update will break something and authorise the OEM to release the update within a day or two. However, it is more likely that the carrier will slow down the process to the point that the non-carrier version is three versions ahead.

User Efforts

Well, that's the users' fault then. Not really relevant considering that Windows users tends to turn off updates.

What Google has done to mitigate this

Project Treble and Play Services Updates (aka Mainline) have reduced the time of patching of devices significantly and prevent a whole class of attacks (including the Stagefright component, which decodes media files and often has bugs in it due to it being mainly a third-party component). However, you have noticed that the SoC, and hence the kernel, still has teetering problems when it comes to updating. The good news is that Google has requested SoC manufacturers to "mainline" their drivers (aka including the SoC driver source code in the kernel, not to be confused with Project Mainline). However, that is just last month and it is still somewhat rejected by SoC manufacturers. Qualcomm have even promised to improve the updates, but we haven't heard anything from Mediatek et al. And that even excludes the pesky carriers who holds updates for no apparent reason at all.

I suspect the focus of their engineering team is more "hardware guys kludge together driver"... And they probably have to do that because it's only the hardware guys that fully understand all the caveats and workarounds required to not trigger hardware shortcomings...

Concerning the transparency, I agree, they have some issues. But it does not concern me as long as they actually deliver (and they do).

Choppiness of the UI is not caused by the hardware specs, but by not yet fully optimized software. See here: https://social.librem.one/@dos/104984930233748319

Genuine question, I was interested in trying to play around with one a while ago, and I spent a fair amount of time searching and could not find a single monitor for under $1000, and most of them were in the $3000 to even $7000(!!!) range for a device that can literally only display a single line of text at a time.

If there are manufacturers making cheaper devices, or even just doing anything interesting with the hardware like building multiple-row 2D displays instead of 1D single-line outputs, I would love to know about them. It's a market I'm somewhat interested in.

The cheapest option I ever found was https://www.boundlessat.com/Blindness/Braille-Displays/Brail..., which is $1000 for a device that can display a whopping 14 characters at a time.

If you buy a Purism laptop today, you'll already pay a premium over companies like Dell. I suspect that Purism is happy to see companies like Pine existing, and I know that they want Linux smartphones in general to be a broader market, I don't know that they're seriously thinking about trying to launch $100-200 competitors. To me, it just doesn't match their other products, I don't see anything else they're offering that would fall into that same category.

And while people would like to see Linux completely take over the desktop/mobile space, I think there's a much broader category of people who just want the market to be big enough for us and to be big enough that it is able to meet our needs. Past that it's not the end of the world if it doesn't get larger.

This is also part of what's frustrating about stuff like the "year of the Linux desktop" joke -- in many ways, the year of the Linux desktop already happened a while ago. Linux got good enough that you can pretty easily mainline it instead of Windows without serious issues or downsides. I have not booted into a Windows computer in multiple years, I don't even have a backup install anywhere. It just doesn't come up anymore. In terms of software, Linux support is something that a sizable portion of the indie games market now talks about, and between Steam/Proton and the recent architectural/policy changes happening on Mac you're now about as likely to be able to run a game on Linux (if not more likely) than you are to be able to run it on a modern Mac device. Meanwhile, 'mainstream' Linux OSes finally got polished enough that it's completely reasonable to put a tech-unfriendly kid or parent on a Linux machine without worrying that you'll get tech support requests every week. There's still a little ways to go with some legacy/holdout software in more niche professional fields like graphic design, but if you're a relatively normal user, then at some point Linux stopped being a struggle to run.

So in the same way, when I talk about the success of the Linux phone market in general, I'm not necessarily aiming for "we monopolize the entire space and nothing else exists." I think it's completely plausible that the Linux phone market might grow, not put Apple out of business, but still grow enough that there is a reasonably priced, usable alternative for people who value privacy and freedom.

In them meantime, it's niche. As far as I know, the front camera on the recent Pinephones still doesn't have software support. So yeah, it's currently a niche market for people who have very specific wants and needs. It seems kind of premature to me for people to be complaining about price and hardware when we're still celebrating things like camera support; commoditization is something that happens to mature markets, not new ones -- and that all takes time.

You can either have a phone for tinkering or general usage. There is no in-between now.

Just use Android IPC mechanisms instead of trying to copy UNIX patterns.

Also, plenty of musicians, painters, designers, writers do real work on Android, my previous remark about real work was playing devil's advocate.