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Comment by faraggi | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely but I'd hate for it to be windows. I'd love a good, OSS Linux phone.

Isn't Android good OSS Linux?

Google is slowly cripling everything opensource and replacing it with its own closed source stuff. Many, many apps won't run without google blobs on the phone and it's all by design.

You can always swap those our with other apps from f-droid or something though and if you're willing to run an open source phone you're largely going to be dealing with the same problems in that department - lack of apps. And that's not to mention MicroG which makes many such apps work anyways.

This is true for eg. a browser, alarm app and an irc client.

If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.

> If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.

GrapheneOS seems to do pretty well with this. It is a bit more involved and you have to check the docs but you can generally get banking apps to work just fine.

While I don't disagree with your sentiment, this is kinda like claiming that Canonical is crippling Open Source by offering Snaps on Ubuntu. There is still a significant portion of Android that is perfectly usable in an open fashion. In fact, I might even say that there is no clear path for Google to close off Android as a project.

But even now, many social networks, chat apps, and especially banking apps don't work without google play services. Yes, you can circumvent some of the requirements using different workarounds and hacks (micro G, app patching, etc.), but in some cases, even the basics (such as notifications on new messages) don't work without some google-based blob somewhere.

Banking apps et al have decided that without remote attestation, they do not want to expose the functionality their customers expect from them. Mostly because of confused threat models, and banks being banks are often erring on the side of safety. And chat/socials just want to evade the bots. An open source platform would have to provide similar attestation capabilities, as stupid as they are, people in suits will manage risks.

Not just attestation, also location services are usually via play services and also notifications (because noone wants to implement their own). I agree about the banks... if you root the phone after the banking app works, you can still extract all the keys, and usually with a magisk plugin or two, you can use the app too on a rooted phone... but not without google play services.

Maybe we need some more economic conflicts, for huawei and xiaomi to switch to their own "play services", and the developers will have to code apps that work on all android variants, not just google-based ones.

> There is still a significant portion of Android that is perfectly usable in an open fashion

There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP, you can't really compare it to Ubuntu. It's not made for tinkering or user ownership.

> There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP

Sure there are: https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image/

Can you point me a reference to a single phone? A phone running AOSP with open-source kernel drivers and not a single Google closed-source binary. Good luck to find that.

The only project I know about doing that is Replicant and targets ancient phones. It's also a community run project, none of those phone came fully open from the factory either.

Android is pretty open as far as I know. You can even run Linux distributions on it with Termux - although its future is looking unstable with Android's new OS versions changing the services it depends on.

I think (guessing) the main thing an OSS advocate might take issue with is that decisions are made by corporate bodies that might not benefit end-users in every case. For example, the aforementioned Termux issue and how Google recently deprecated the open source Messages and Dialler apps on Android, with vendors like Samsung giving proprietary alternatives.

That seems to me to be an issue with some other open source projects too (people complain about GNOME for example not listening to its users) but it possibly happens there on a lower scale since Android's a bigger project (likely most people in the world have seen or held or used an Android phone once in their lives).

Android is not pure OSS and it's heavily tied to everything Google. Phones with custom ROMs are hardly available so it's far from being the ideal model.

> Android is not pure OSS

The kernel modifications are all GPL-licensed and the userland is Apache. Android is pure OSS, it's distributions are not.

The reason you don't get phones with custom ROMs is that those can't get a license for preloading Google Play Services, Google Play Store, Google Maps, etc., and without those nobody would buy the phone. The monopoly of the Google Play Store has allowed Google to keep a tight grip on the ecosystem of their "Open Source" OS.

After multiple Google services being closed, awful, etc... I'm urgently wanting someone to Fork android and not attempt to bring it back to the Google branch.

I'm not sure how difficult it is to keep an OS going. What upgrades have I needed in the last 6 years? Security sure, but outside some phone system upgrades and messaging, I'm not sure what we even need to upgrade at this point.

Absolutely not, it's royal PITA to do anything else than "run android app" or "show a webpage".

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