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Comment by hnburnsy | Hacker News Reader

Why the f@#k on Android can't the user stop Apps from 1. Running at start up 2. Running in the background. At a minimum why aren't these user granted permissions?

This would stop a great deal of the apps that hover up data like this.

Google is complicit here. Change my mind.

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LineageOS used to be able to do this and more by spoofing apps with fake data as an independent permission system the apps couldn't bitch about. Google forced them to remove the feature.

Can you provide a source where I can read up on this - how could Google influence Lineage OS?

Ditto, would like to understand this. Lineage OS has much greater device support than Graphene. If you don't install Play Services why would Google have a say?

It was a Cyanogen feature called "Privacy Guard" in later releases. The devs haven't clearly explained what happened but it was likely threats of losing access to Play services and the Play store. Play services is the poison pill Google uses to support invasive tracking and ad delivery and they won't abide any interference with it.

That's not how this works. Google has no say in the matter. Custom ROMs always come without Google apps. You flash them on top of the ROM yourself if you need them. The file they come in isn't specific to any particular ROM either.

This happened back in the Cyanogen days where they released it on actual phones (by Oneplus if I remember correctly). They included the whole GAPPS-suite and of course fell under that license agreement.

You are confusing CyanogenMod (the custom ROM for which you supply your own Gapps) and Cyanogen OS (the commercial version of CyanogenMod) that was used by the OnePlus One and OnePlus Two.

Yeah, mobile really sucks for this compared to the 90s and 00s desktop experience. It really feels like a step backwards; at least you could delete things from the StartUp folder on Windows 98.

You can delete things real easy on iPhones.

Except Keychain credentials. I still don’t know how to make my iPhone forget how to log into Discord after deleting the app. (It logs back in after reinstallation.)

This is readily exposed to the user, and has been for a long time.

Settings --> Passwords, then just delete the entry for Discord.

Or have I misinterpreted your issue?

It might be that Discord is remembering user information in iCloud in a way that persists following reinstall, similar to how some games save progress. Clearing the password entry would thus be insufficient.

I have iCloud disabled, so that’s not it.

This is because each app has their own private keychain (separate from the saved passwords) which is not cleared when the app is deleted. Apple tried to change the behavior and have it wiped on delete, but many developers complained. This allows apps to track you across installs of the app.

That's...actually terrible. A bit of a search around seems to say that the only way to actually wipe it properly is the do a full device reset, which is obviously completely unacceptable.

Yeesh :/

Installing things however...

It sounds like what you want is graphene os.

https://grapheneos.org/

Yup, will keep that in mind for my next phone, thx!

tell that to your banking app provider

Gotta upvote GrapheneOS. It's great!!

How the hell is there no screenshots on the landing page of a smartphone OS

Projects like this tend to be built by people with no interest in marketing, and for a non-profit I think it's fine to keep that particular sort of poisonous corrosion at arm's length.

You can add them.

And I don't mean it as a knee-jerk response, this is open-source, anyone with skills is welcome and if you send a pull request here https://github.com/GrapheneOS/grapheneos.org with the screenshots presented in the way you'd expect them, it might get merged.

I can’t because:

- I don’t have a phone that can run it, I’m just curious but without seeing what it looks like it’s hard to become interested

- even if I could install it, there’s basically no chance I would install it because I have no idea what it looks like, because there are no screenshots on the front page

Or, if you want to completely abandon the Google ecosystem, GNU/Linux phones are an option, Librem 5 and Pinephone.

Yes. The librem 5 is a somewhat solid alternative. The pinephone seems to remain a developer platform as it lacks simple features expected out of a phone.

Something I experienced recently on Android was an app that every few hours kept popping up an alert saying something like "App X wants location data, so it has turned location on".

How is that even possible? I know apps can request location data to be turned on, but I was surprised the app can unilaterally turn it on. I couldn't find any way to prevent that.

These are the kinds of reasons why I can't trust any phones at all.

Android phones.

There is no way for an iOS application to just say "turn on GPS" and be granted granular location access without user intervention.

> There is no way for an iOS application to just say "turn on GPS" and be granted granular location access without user intervention.

Damn. Just like on Android.

The permission to always have location access(while closed) exists. Important for apps like Find My, etc.

But that has to be manually enabled per App in the settings. Apps can't even prompt for it, the location permission dialog only lets you allow usage while in the foreground. Also everytime your location is used in the background you get notified about it. So yeah, op either uses outdated android or enabled it manually.

iOS has Background App Refresh setting, per app on/off.

Because fuck Google.

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