What happened since then? Are people more satisfied with stock ROMs and see less use for them? FWIW, my own phone is on LineageOS, and love the freedom it provides.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2009-11-01%202...
Android has also gotten a lot better - many of the modifications people were doing just aren't as necessary anymore, most of the features I used from GravityBox back in the day are now part of the OS. The difference between major versions has dwindled. Back in 2014 we had some of the most hackable devices just starting to age out when new Android releases with major changes were hitting and manufacturers refusing to support them.
Personally I still root and stick to Pixel and OnePlus devices where it's easy to do so. Magisk makes it relatively easy to achieve a safetynet bypass and having things like Advanced Charging Controller around means my device is going to last for years longer, but it's no longer as simple as it once was. With the Android improvements though it's hard for even me to rationalize the need to load custom ROMs until my manufacturer has abandoned my device though.
It really debunks that myth that open source software could ever handle the strong encryption that's so desperately needed to protect new movies and TV shows from showing up on The Pirate Bay.
I for one welcome this cogent and secure technological response to a market issue.
> You are forgetting that DRM stopped all that piracy that bankrupted the movie industry. That's also why there were so few movies released in the last 15 months or so.
DRM didn't stop anything, and the movie industry is not bankrupt.
One could easily argue that there might be other reasons why few movies were released since the start of 2019.
> It really debunks that myth that open source software could ever handle the strong encryption that's so desperately needed to protect new movies and TV shows from showing up on The Pirate Bay.
The myth? Do you realize that literally every single web browser is built on an open source foundation? And how is decryption in the browser going to keep a determined person from grabbing the screen output or even grabbing the keys?
Remember, not your keys, not your lock.
> I for one welcome this cogent and secure technological response to a market issue.
Why would a technological response be appropriate for a market issue?
These services are not successful because of exclusivity, but because of convenience, feature richness, legality, speed of access... in other words they are worth the price.
It's important to be aware of this: the media streaming landscape becoming more and more fragmented directly impacts the most important reason why people are paying for these (convenience), which could lead to a harsh reality check for production companies.
You need to define 'victory' in a proper manner.
Businesspeople don't really care if some lone hacker in some forsaken internet forum broke their DRM. They don't need to fulfill the perfect technical victory condition. So long as they've limited the use of the devices for nearly all users for the commercial lifespan of the device*, and (most importantly) so long they think they make more money than without, they've won as far as they're concerned.
Their criteria is far more realistic and relevant to the world at large than the technical 'never ever get hacked' criteria. There's a good argument that perfect protection (if it were possible) would actually be counterproductive to the bottom line.
* Just look at how general computing has been getting more and more restricted.
A) only allow movies to be played in theaters
B) watermark all content, and vigorously track down freeloaders based on the watermarks
You can still find most movies/TV/books/music for free on the open web as long as you use a search engine other than google.
Without the protected path, how do you know that a malicious program doesn't use a low-level API to start a payment from your account without you noticing ?
2- You don't, but sandboxing should be enough to isolate untrustworthy apps from OS-level APIs that could do what you're afraid of.
Scary to see all the hits. For complete - requires a lot of work and the custom ROM builders do not appear to be so interested.
A "pure" analytics service may be blocked when reaching to a known spyware server. Bundled spyware and telemetry (is that "google core") are unfortunately not blocked.
Daniel Micay,author of GrapheneOS (an Android fork), pointed out some shortcomings of XPrivacyLua on reddit[0]:
You do probably want the ability to force apps to see fake data, but this doesn't do that. It's a client-side check inserted into the app that the app can bypass (even unintentionally, by using a different client-side implementation) or disable.
It does not provide any isolation and cannot fundamentally improve privacy / security because it's based on client side checks, which is not a working approach. It relies on apps not accessing the data via other approaches or alternate implementations of the client-side code, which isn't uncommon. Apps can also detect it and simply work around it directly. This will only give you a false sense of privacy / security. Apps will likely use the fake data for their user-facing functionality, making you think that it works, but a tracking SDK bundled with the app can easily bypass this and harvest your data if you allow the permissions via the OS. This is harmful approach...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/ch5kv8/is_magis...
Many apps nowadays refuse to run on phones that aren't using authentic OEM software. With every new version, the tradeoff kept getting steeper for rooting or customizing Android phones. Also, Android has huge fragmentation with a large diversity of devices one has to cater to if someone wants to release a customized ROM.
Pixels still have junk - but it's only Google's junk. There's value in getting rid of the base image and switching to LineageOS (or another distribution) but the situation isn't so dire as it is with other vendors.
I love that LineageOS is still going strong and it fills a huge gap once official software updates cease. I just no longer view it as a hard requirement.
Lineage never achieved the same level of accessibility. It always felt like you had to dig through a wasteland of forum posts for random "unofficial" builds where the camera wouldn't work or LTE wouldn't work or bluetooth wouldn't work or Snapchat wouldn't work.
Sure soujd like official support for 18.1 on the Nexus 7 is available! Commentors below note that the repartitioning process required for these newly supported versions can be tricky, but that doesn't scare me off, and I'll be taking to updating mine this weekend c:
I'm probably going to have to go back to a custom ROM sometime soon, now that Google has stopped supporting it... but it was perfectly fine to use as-is for the past 3 years.
Netcraft confirms it.