Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Time for a new operating system (if we didn't already hit that mark with the 2013 NSA leaks).

Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei: they all exist at the pleasure of the state. Please ignore their glitzy PR-laden presentations about protecting people's privacy and upholding human rights. They will sell you out in a second if it's convenient.

On the mobile side of things, we need, at the barest minimum:

- a web based OS with granular permissions for any application that needs to access hardware APIs (just like a web browser)

- a general-purpose mobile SOC that hasn't hitched its wagon to Samsung/Apple/Huawei orders.

- FairPhone style modular, user replaceable parts, and to encourage an interest in self-repair.

- no native-app lock-ins. it's not 2007, the majority of apps people use run fine on a mobile web browser.

- significant efforts to fund tech literacy. More than a billion people have smartphones as their first computing device. They don't have the benefit of past knowledge, so they simply accept the locked-down nature of smartphones without question. Meanwhile in 2011, we could openly port Windows Phone 7, Android OS and the original Windows Mobile 6.5 on the same phone.

The operating system is not the missing part of the puzzle. There are plenty of FOSS operating systems already.

The missing part of the puzzle is that phones are much more than an OS. To get a phone, you need an SOC, baseband, drivers, regulatory approval, manufacturing, etc. Those are the missing parts.

I think it's a pretty futile effort to make a completely open phone. Even the richest companies on the planet outsource much of the above. Pretty much every previous effort to make an open phone has failed to make much of anything open beyond the OS, let alone all of it.

> I think it's a pretty futile effort to make a completely open phone.

No, it's not: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

If you can afford one, which most people can’t.

I don't think you can call anything with GSMA IP in it "open". Same goes for systems that won't run without their closed binary blobs loaded at boot or runtime to enable hardware.

So far, there has only been 3G-ish experimental SDR-based true open hardware, but it's the size of a shoebox, not a phone.

The Librem 5 is not completely open -- neither the hardware nor software. https://puri.sm/faq/

The Librem 5 is the best effort to this date, but the wifi, bluetooth, and baseband software are proprietary, as well as much of the silicon, and part of the boot chain.

There simply aren't any open source options that exist for these components, and due to regulatory constraints, it's unlikely that an open source baseband will exist any time soon.

You are right. For the ultimate openness, you could have a look at Precursor, but it's not really a phone.

The silicon on it is also proprietary. The wifi radio is fully proprietary, and while the FPGA is programmable, the silicon is proprietary.

It does solve the mobile radio problem though, by not having one :)

You don't need a whole new OS, Android is open source and can be forked. The problem is that people's expectation of polish on their phones is through the roof and nobody has figured out how to fund that kind of development effort. CyanogenMod came close but was torn apart, though LineageOS is still there.

In my opinion LineageOS should ditch the neverending cycle of trying to keep up with Google's increasingly useless Android releases, just pick a branch point and leave Google behind. It's the only way to implement OS features and be able to maintain them going forward. Then they should focus on features users actually want and that Google would never implement, for example OS level adblock and firewalls.

Instead of other existing attempts that focus on nebulous privacy and security, things that users don't really care about, the focus should be on giving users back the control that Google and Apple have taken away from us. Note that user-control and security can often be seen as being at odds. An OS that chooses user-control could be a strong differentiator that would set it apart from Google/Apple, who always frame their removal of user-control as a security/privacy feature.

But still, the tricky bit is figuring out a funding model.

Does this not all exist already in the form of Pinephone and Firefox OS?

FFOS was discontinued in 2015. Pinephone is an option however.

Mozilla stopped developing FFOS, yes, but https://capyloon.org/ is still here.

One could argue that Firefox OS does not exist at all.

I would add:

- The ability to send push notifications without replying on GCM/APN

- Support for mesh networking (multiple low power peer connections)

- Convenient "lockdown" mode that encrypts your phone's contents for international travel

- Included hardware wallet/keystore for signing all data that you upload to social media

Is it even possible to do push notifications without relying on a centralized system (Google, Apple, or whoever)? Sounds like a very difficult problem to solve while preventing privacy leaks, spamming, DOS attacks and still being reliable and globally available. Who would pay for the infrastructure?

(Please, no 'blockchain will solve this' answers!)

Doing it without killing battery life is... challenging. There are good non-user-hostile reasons it's centralized. Google was a bit wild-west about it for a while and lots of Android apps used custom push services, and the results weren't great.

It's a very difficult problem, no doubt. Implementations are currently battery-constrained, hence the usefulness of GCM/APN for efficiently batched polling. I suspect a fully decentralized system could be feasible for use cases that can tolerate higher latency.

Push is already possible with https://unifiedpush.org/. Apps use a local API and you choose the push provider.

This would be awesome if it worked on iOS too

You might like Librem 5 phone with the smart card running GNU/Linux.

At least Google and Samsung don't give in to dictatorships. Yes, hypothetically the US and South Korea hold some power over them... However Google has stood up to Russia, China and others. Unlike Apple...

I'd somewhat hesitate to give out credit like that. It's more of that China kicked out Google, thus freeing Google to "stand up" to the CCP. I would love to see more of an example where a company had a lot on the line and still oppose the CCP

Google was kicked out for not censoring certain things lol. That's literally standing up to China...

fair enough!

No, Google never stood up to Russia. A year ago they blocked a perfectly legal list of candidates published by Navalny team.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-is-fined-390-mln-r...

If Apple breaks Chinese law in any big or meaningful way... there is no iPhone 15. Full stop. Apple is dead in the water without their CCP-jurisdiction manufacturing which produces approximately 100% of their products (and all of their biggest moneymakers).

And they chose to be reliant on a dictatorship... The reasons don't matter, the fact is Apple cooperates with whatever the CCP demands.

What happens when China invades Taiwan? Will they aid our enemy?

They were reliant on the cooperation of an authoritarian dictatorship with or without Chinese manufacturing; they are one of the largest companies in Silicon Valley.

You can't fight city hall.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

It works precisely the same in every huge superpower. Absolutely nothing about this situation is unique to China.

China didn't become an authoritarian police state AFTER Apple went in there with their manufacturing. They absolutely knew about CCP behavior, but they went there anyway in order to save money. So, they can't really play the helpless multi-hundred-billion-dollar-corporation victim card.

Apple don't move to China to save money, they moved to China in order to meet high demand. There was simply nowhere else that could produce the volume. And technically, Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, but that's not an important detail. Point is, only Chinese/Taiwanese contract manufacturers could give Apple the volume they needed.

I really wish you could talk to some more manufacturing types -- there are many on this site. A lot of things at scale can't be done anywhere except in China.

Now, you can argue that's just about "saving money", because Apple should have built its own automated ports and infrastructure and commodity trading hubs and paid to relocate workers to create a bespoke manufacturing center somewhere else -- but subject to realistic constraints, there was China and no second option to produce iPhones at scale.

>Apple don't move to China to save money, they moved to China in order to meet high demand. There was simply nowhere else that could produce the volume.

This is the situation now, but was it also the same situation when Apple started iPod production there in 2001?

From what I understand most of these electronics supply chain advantages China enjoys now are due to large companies like Apple building those out in China in the late 90's and early 2000's. You might remember Japan had a massive electronics manufacturing industry which became "too expensive", so China was the answer to the need of cheap(slave?) labor.

Don’t forget that this isn’t one company: Apple circa 2000 couldn’t afford to buck an industry-wide trend and since they were using more components made by other companies you get a lot of synergies from having assembly happen near where other parts are made.

This doesn’t excuse them – I think MBAs gave China enough leverage to include Harvard’s business school in human rights lawsuits – but it’s the kind of thing which is larger than the company whose logo is on the box and the answer has to be legislative.

> Apple don't move to China to save money, they moved to China in order to meet high demand. There was simply nowhere else that could produce the volume.

I'm calling BS. Money is based on volume (supply) and demand. China does mainly assembly which makes up a paltry 4% of costs [0] and assembly is low skill labor. With a 25% profit margin, there's no way they couldn't spend/invest in other countries to build up assembly capacity.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/apple-iphone-7-and-...

This sounds like https://serenityos.org/

As much as I love serenity, I think the parent is talking about a mobile OS.

> a web based OS

I consider decent battery life and a low-latency interface table stakes for a mobile OS. I'd regard the floor for this as Android, though I'm only setting it that low to avoid charges of being contrary (I'm not happy with how much iOS has slipped on this, even, especially latency/responsiveness). It would be billionaire-mintingly novel if a team managed to clear that bar with webtech.

Regarding low latency, one of the reasons FF OS failed it was laggy on 2014-era mobile web APIs and device hardware. That's definitely not the case today.

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