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Comment by tkems | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion SafetyNet is no longer about security and is mainly DRM at this point. I think you are right on the money about the out of date devices too. I was going through my Dad's old phone collection this weekend and noticed that several old Android phones have specs that are not terrible today but are not useable due to no updates from the OEM. So now they are mostly e-waste. These are perfectly useable phones (maybe outside of an old battery) for basic tasks.

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That makes so much sense. Back when I had a rooted device, I was once blocked from using... the Instant Pot app. Yes, a recipe app. It gave me a message saying something vague about security.

SafetyNet was always about DRM. The Play Store contains tons of malware despite SafetyNet, and malware does malware things despite SafetyNet.

Also, SafetyNet makes alternatives to Google Cloud e.g. for Backups non-viable, so win-win for Google I guess.

You are confusing SafetyNet with Play Protect. Play Protect is about protecting devices from malware. SafetyNet is about protecting services from "untrusted" devices. It is a remote attestation API that validates that the device is running a "trusted" operating system.

What backups? It's literally impossible to take backup images of an Android phone (as in: the entire thing, not just some Playstore apps and some of the settings).

The last phone I used that supported taking a backup image of the entire phone was a 2013 BlackberryOS 10 device.

You cannot even backup all of the playstore apps, tons and tons set the magic "don't backup" bit.

You are totally right in that there are basically no useful backups on android whatsoever. The closest thing is "adb backup" when you have root and developer settings enabled, which is saying a lot.

Even adb backup isn't possible: it's been deprecated for years and I've never ever gotten it to work even with root and the right dev settings.

It starts creating an image of a couple of GB (takes a couple of hours, lol) and then just bugs out and stops. There's no error checking or anything and when it bugs out it means you have start all over again.

Even Firefox does this. Because of something something security.

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