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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

We are entering the dark ages rapidly. Soon you will no longer be allowed to install what you want. Sorry! That app is illegal now. All under the bullshit reason of safety/security. We can have both without setting everything up for an orwellian state.

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We entered that age a decade ago with the rise of smartphones and tablets. General-purpose computing devices that allow you to run any code you want are gradually disappearing.

For how long will we be able to run unsigned code on Windows or MacOS? And for how long will 'secure boot' hardware allow us to run Linux?

Soon we'll have to buy very expensive and specialised development kits/development workstations to create content for the other 'content consumption computing' devices

On Android I can still run whatever software I want, and there are ecosystems of apps that rely solely on sideloading because they are not allowed on Google's app store.

Google or Microsoft trying to prevent you from running whatever you want would probably lead to swift action from EU courts, it looks too much like an attempt to control competition on their platform. So instead they stick to scare-mongering with opt-out.

Apple gets a pass because they are the underdog (30% market share in the EU)

> On Android I can still run whatever software I want

You can sideload apps, which is better than iOS, but for root access most devices need some sort of hackery.

Heck, why do we even accept that 'sideload' is a word. It should simply be 'load'.

Depends on the manufacturer, on a lot of phones getting root access is not that difficult. The problem is that a lot of applications started to check for root access and will refuse to work if they detect it. So in practice you will loose some functionality that can be important, like your bank application.

It's not just individual bank apps. Netflix, Snapchat, Android Pay, Pokemon Go, and Super Mario Run will all refuse to run if they detect root or any other modifications.

So apart from banking nothing of value was lost

My local bank removed a bunch of these checks from their application, presumably because they started requiring everyone use that app for 2FA now and promptly had their support lines overloaded by customers no longer being able to do any banking.

I was one of those people threatening to either walk or get another option - lo and behold they signed me up for the old 2FA for a few extra weeks.

I don't know what they were thinking, really. Rooted phones, or in my case, custom ROMs like LineageOS are quite common in these parts.

My bank is just one of many using a reskinned version of the same 2FA app, so you might want to re-check yours.

> We entered that age a decade ago with the rise of smartphones and tablets. General-purpose computing devices that allow you to run any code you want are gradually disappearing.

GNU/Linux phones are general-purpose devices running desktop Linux. Support them if you want to have the freedom to run anything.

I've had a lot of weird out there smartphones, webOS, BB10 and Windows Phone 7/8. GNU/Linux phones just don't even seem close to being ready with basic phone features not working well from what I've read. If I could get one that worked reliably, lasted at least a day on battery and had some sort of NFC payment method I would.

> worked reliably

Probably depends on your usage pattern. Pinephone works quite reliably for me.

> lasted at least a day on battery

Pinephone fits here

> and had some sort of NFC payment method

Not available yet, but in the works (you will just replace the back cover): https://www.tweaksforgeeks.com/linux-based-pinephone-to-come...

The phone market is lost. May be better to focus on keeping desktop/laptop Linux hardware available.

But the way things are going, the open source community might soon have to start designing their own CPUs, as you may not even be able to buy a high-performance CPU within a couple of decades, they'll be proprietary tech that only exists as part of a locked-down platform, like Apple are now doing.

This is my greatest fear but you have to wonder if the reverse will happen, where tech companies get so large, they they can afford to develop and support their own distro (or even operating system).

> The phone market is lost.

Anything to back this claim up? I disagree here. Librem 5 and Pinephone are getting more and more popular now. The first one is even recommended by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/

> the open source community might soon have to start designing their own CPUs

Like RISC-V?

...or Raspberry Pis...

Every year since 1995 has been "The Year of Not Being Able To Install What You Want". And yet, here we are, still sideloading on Android and running bare .EXEs on Windows. It's the hot take that keeps giving!

It started on just niche devices like the TiVo. It's been slowly branching out to more and more devices since then. Also, have you never seen an Android device where sideloading was disabled and you couldn't re-enable it? Because I have.

Is it really expanding though? The market for devices is also expanding. Don't confuse absolute numbers with relative numbers. Of course I have encountered devices that don't allow sideloading, are you saying that is expanding also? Or has "rooting" always been something many carriers and manufacturers sought to disable?

In both absolute and relative terms. Basically every new computing device that's not a desktop or laptop is locked down in some way, and even some laptops are locked down too (e.g., Windows RT on ARM laptops).

All Android devices are locked down? That's not true, most Android devices can be "rooted" quite easily.

Then kindly reveal which Android devices are this crippled - not being able to install software the normal way, via ADB - so we can avoid them.

I also wonder: how can you develop on them? Android Studio would fail app deployment, the way you tell it.

You don't develop on them. That's the point.

One device I know of that doesn't allow sideloading or developer mode is the Ratta Supernote A5X/A6X.

Coincidentally last year (and this year) in many places in the world you couldn't go where you wanted for the same reason.

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