Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tommstein | Hacker News Reader

Not cell phones. I remember when the most expensive phone you could get was like $700. Then all the stories about how prices were about to hit a ludicrous four figures. Now there's a wide variety of phones that cost four figures.

View on HN

Man, I miss the days when you could get a rootable phone that could run the latest LineageOS for like $80. (That's how much it was for my Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE which was extremely rootable.)

I miss the Firefox OS phones, I think mine was like $90?

It had it's problems but phone calls and SMS worked reliably.

I miss the days when there was hardware differentiation at any price. There is literally one brand of phone right now that both A) has a headphone jack and B) doesn't have some kind of screen cutout for the selfie camera, and that's the Sony Xperia line. Despite the price (their entire line of current models is >$1000), I would probably pay it (or buy an older year model on ebay) except that they are not compatible with my provider (or at least uncertainly so, the internet has mixed things to say and they are 100% for sure not _officially_ supported.

I ended up going with a 3 year old phone from a different manufacturer that is officially supported but still had to give up the headphone jack.

B is super important to me, so my phone right now is a OnePlus 7 Pro. It was one of the last models ever made that can still pass SafetyNet while rooted (due to being whitelisted for "basic" / non-hardware-backed attestation). Unfortunately now it's several versions out of date and will stay that way for the foreseeable future, on top of the fact that nobody's figured out how to lock the bootloader on a custom ROM, despite the fact that it'll get you back Widevine L1 keys (the 7 Pro doesn't erase them on bootloader unlock like most phones do).

But this all stopped mattering to me when something accidentally activated a "feature"[0] of TWRP that erased my device and the maintainers have so far been completely hostile to the notion of adding an option to disable that functionality. ADHD now permanently bars me from any form of tweaking because the risk of TWRP suddenly erasing my device one day cannot be mitigated whatsoever. Even making backups from TWRP is off-limits because I'm afraid of it erasing my device instead.

Now I just use my phone because OxygenOS is great, the hardware mute switch is great, lack of camera cutout is great (fuck rounded corners though), and it has some serious flagship specs. Not an advertisement or anything, but this was $300 refurbished from Back Market.

[0]: https://github.com/TeamWin/Team-Win-Recovery-Project/issues/...

Yikes, that issue you opened is like the exact opposite of proper etiquette for asking maintainers of open source software to help you. Basically what you’re doing is making a feature request, there is no bug or issue with TWRP as multiple people told you on GitHub. It’s absolutely not cool to continue to hound open source contributors for timelines like that. You’re not their boss, if it’s such an important issue to you fix it yourself and create a pull/merge request.

This is not just a nice-to-have thing, this is their project proactively running something that I did not authorize without informing me or giving me any chance to prevent it. I absolutely consider it a huge problem, not just a bug, that this functionality cannot be disabled in any way. Therefore I did not file a simple feature request for the setting because the deeper problem is that this functionality exists in the first place in a non-disableable manner.

I don't feel safe, no amount of discussion about etiquette will make me stop seeing this as a critical vulnerability that needs to be fixed, and it could take days or weeks of work for me to figure out how to compile TWRP properly if I were to fold at this point to the ten people telling me to just do it myself, which is a really stupid (imho) time investment that isn't compatible with my disabilities, sorry.

Something you did caused it to happen. Again, what you’re asking for has nothing to do with their project and is not a vulnerability in the slightest. It’s a feature working as intended, you should be focusing on what you did to cause it to happen. You’re also free to not use TWRP it if it doesn’t work for you.

I saw the issue you created and the comments, and they're pretty demanding IMO. It may be a grave problem and hypothetically the devs missed it and you're correct, instead of constantly adding new comments you can try forking and adding that option yourself.

The devs will be grateful, your problem will be resolved and you'll probably feel better about the whole situation.

The problem is that I'm absolutely not an Android developer and the process of building images for these devices is super convoluted. I have no idea how the official builds work nor can I find any consistent documentation on exactly what I need to do in order to configure everything properly to build for my device. It seriously is a mountain of work compared to someone who already has a development environment and my ADHD says no.

I almost said something along those lines too, how the skyrocketing prices have come alongside increasingly homogeneous boring phones with fewer features, but absolutely. I was recently going through my old HTC EVO 3D, and I would give my left nut to get that 3-D technology back in a new phone, the pictures and videos put you back in the moment in ways 2-D can't. Incidentally, I also just upgraded last week from my old Sony Xperia 5 II to a Sony Xperia 5 III. Which hopefully lasts a long time, because Sony is also removing features; the 5 III added a second zoom lens, but the 5 IV regressed to a single smaller one, and the just-announced 5 V removes the telephoto lens completely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com