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Comment by googlryas | Hacker News Reader

What's stopping people from just running the, say, Google build of Android on this phone? If there is custom device drivers or whatever, can't they just be copied from the custom ASUS android over to the standard android build, while avoiding all the crapware and lack of updates?

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It’s a huge pain in the ass. Usually trips up the android safteynet drm and doesn’t give kernel updates because no one has access to the proprietary driver blobs which no longer work with new kernels.

You can often get android api updates like this but not any real security updates.

I'm planning to test (but I hate reinstalling) https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk for safetynet whatnot.

But lack of kernel updates is pita and absolutely true :(

Nothing. People do that all the time - there is a huge community for aftermarket custom ROMs at places like xda-developers. However, I would guess that is like less than 1% of users since custom ROMs a) are not popular b) require some courage and technical knowledge c) often void the official warranty.

D) Are highly unlikely to support relocking for new keys in secure boot, or are limited to a very small number of models.

The attacks sold to governments fighting such evils as journalists and pro-democracy youth haven't yet been shown to include persistency across reboots, AFAIK, but relatively small percentages of politically active people using insecure boot could encourage them to build those features to more passively monitor a sub-sample as it is relatively easy and makes their work less detectable.

This is why I opened this thread. Such a critical feature for hardware to have these days.

Apps have started locking you out if they detect you have an unofficial build. Even dumb apps like McDonalds. Good luck using mandatory banking apps there as well.

I've deleted Revolut some time ago because of that. Well, they've since reversed their stance. Not sure why but now it works with Lineage.

I recall during my android root days that banks would block your phone from running apps if you were rooted - I needed to install a separate app and define which apps I could "sandbox" of sorts, to convince them they were running on a non-rooted device

Are there any workaround apps sort of like this now, or has Google finally plugged all the loopholes for this?

If one of my banks made an app mandatory, I’d find a new bank. All my banks function fine via desktop web browser.

That generally works fine, especially for the same Android version. However, as Android evolves, so do the driver requirements. Yesterday’s driver may simply not work with today’s Android. Only the driver supplier (typically the likes of Qualcomm) could realistically create an updated driver. Otherwise, extensive reverse engineering would be required.

Drivers and support for the features that require said drivers, as its often the case that only first party software has the secret sauce - very often the case for camera apps.

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