Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

KingMachiavelli

The real concern is not the loss of the AOSP apps but the lack of new but mandatory features in AOSP and even more undocumented APIs.

For example, RCS only works with Google messenger and there's no sign of that expanding (unless your Samsung). Even Visual Voicemail which should/is an open standard has a lot of carrier specific code (I think it can still be extracted from the Google Phone app but I'm not sure on the license).

NFC payments (tap2pay) seem to be impossible outside the few blessed implementations and even running those is a cat & mouse game with SafetyNet (now called Play Integrity).

Android is still the most open source mobile OS (that's functional and has real security; mobile Linux doesn't count). But IMO it better remember why people pick it over iOS.

I'm still optimistic, if open standards for the basic functionality is going to survive; it will be on Android.

- Sent from my Google Fold running GrapheneOS.

> RCS only works with Google messenger

I don't get how Google can continue to call RCS an "industry standard" and do their campaigns publicly shaming Apple for not implementing it when this is the case.

Not to mention RCS messages are mostly being routed through Google's own servers anyway because no carriers have implemented it. No wonder they want Apple to get on board with this "standard," it replaces SMS with a Google service.

Google should not even have the slightest say when it comes to messaging. They've launched and killed so many messenger services throughout the years.

You're of course right about Google being hypocrites because they want to route messages for Apple users through Google servers. The RCS standard doesn't support E2EE natively, so Google will see everything unless you use Google Messages which implements E2EE, but who knows that data they collect there..

I wonder if Google would agree to RCS with Apple running the servers. I seriously doubt it.

I am curious, how is the experience of running GrapheneOS on the Google Fold? On my Pixel 6 it runs quite well, but I would imagine that the Folding aspect brings in quite a bit of additional complexity.

So far it's been good, it's a lot faster than my Pixel 5 on GOS. I didn't play with the stock OS much but basic UI for the fold works the same.

It's individual apps that need fold and/or tablet support like I have the use Gboard to get a decent tablet mode keyboard and the Pixel Camera to support the different camera modes.

Overall it's quite obvious that it's really a phone + tablet which means a lot of things work OK but won't handle the 90 degree fold mode (table top) well. Also the tablet UI of many apps (especially FOSS) are unpolished.

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