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Comment by dugite-code | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a third competitor in the phone space. These are hand held computers but for some reason we've all fallen into having to accept restrictions that would have been unthinkable for a laptop or desktop not to long ago. Now similar restrictions are infiltrating the general computer space.

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All in the name of reliability and security supposedly. For example not being able to use banking apps on a rooted phone… yet I can use them on my perfectly secure regular computer where I have full root/admin access.

> can use them on my perfectly secure regular computer where I have full root/admin access.

yooooooo shhhhhh

Don't give them any ideas :(

Also it's not like insane security ideas around banking access compliance are unprecedented, see e.g. South Korea's insane Internet Explorer deal (transitively caused by US's ITAR on encryption)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_...

Brazil once had a similar problem. Banks used to force users to install these obnoxious "security plugins" into their browsers. One day I got fed up with the inexplicable slowdown they were causing and decided to see what they were doing. Turned out they were intercepting every network connection.

There is no limit whatsoever to what a bank feels is justified in doing when it comes to preventing fraud, money laundering or whatever else that impacts their bottom line. They literally believe they are entitled to any and all access.

Can you confirm transactions there, though?

Many banks in the EU require a smartphone for that at this point (or a dedicated authentication device).

But instead of using actually secure technologies like Android’s protected confirmation (which couldn’t care less about running on a rooted phone, as it runs in a trusted HW enclave), they usually just settle for (often very spoofable) “root detection”. It’s quite sad.

Banking apps are usually huge data collectors (scaning installed apps for example) that invade privacy instead of giving proclaimed security.

I can- it is done over text so if you have apple devices, you can confirm on any of the devices. Technically it is routing through the phone though.

In the name of security, my workplace just enabled a policy that forces me to let them monitor my location 24/7 via Microsoft Defender.

Needless to say, I am happy I have a second work phone I keep disconnected from WiFi while not working.

My bank will let me make deposits from my phone, but not from my computer. A few months ago, the phone app tightened its Play Integrity usage, and will now no longer run on the phone it had previously happily run on.

just use the web site?

The only hope for this is if the pace of hardware improvement slows down (for screen tech and semiconductor node).

Manufacturing a low-volume, open device isn't going to be cost-competitive without the hardware being a commodity.

I think we're getting closer to that point, though.

I'm hopeful that we're at that point right now, I think we're mostly waiting for the complexity on the software side to sort itself out.

The vast majority of the market isn't in flagship phones, and even in those the last few generations of flagship features have been mostly based around software anyway.

I'm guessing we're one or two more big nudges away (i.e. - EU regulation/gigantic privacy kerfuffle/Google breakup) from a standard open-source phone software stack being a viable standalone business model almost by necessity. App stores currently take something around 30%? Maybe in the future you'll pay $25 up front for the phone software, and this open source software stack will take a 15% cut from the developer side instead.

Or maybe I'm just dreaming.

There is something like the pinephone where a portion of sale price was donated to the OS it ships with. But it is free to use any OS such as postmarketOS but you can donate as well.

The hardware is too slow to use as my main phone (it's like 10 years behind normal phone HW), but I assume that as the performance needs of average users plateaus "10 year old hardware" will be more than enough eventually. Look at how modern phones have not changed much in the past 5 years.

People have warned about this since the inception of Android and how the supposed security of a centrally managed software store will lead to restrictions.

This is why "computers" like Chromebooks are useless as well, I wouldn't even let pupils have them if the goal is to teach digital and technical competence.

I don't believe these restrictions will be successful on a PC to such a degree. Remote attestation does exist though and I recommend to leave it for remote machines managed by yours truly.

Usually phones are technically quite capable, but the OS landscape seriously inhibits innovation.

Calling these devices "phones" was really disastrous, now we're conditioned to treat them as appliances instead of computers.

Reminds me of the (now removed) article on encrypting saved games in the Godot game engine:

> Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

> But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

> No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.

Link here for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20181101221927/https://docs.godot...

I used to find this sort of thing appealing. Then I realized it does nothing to even try to fix anything, and in fact likely does more harm than good.

> I really wish there was a third competitor in the phone space.

People say this, but I don't know if it's actually true. It would've just done a triopoly instead of a duopoly - especially when you consider the fact that the third player would've most likely been Windows Phone, which was also very closed off back when it existed, and Microsoft has only gotten more anti-consumer since.

What we really need are better laws and policies.

Because these were the first mass adopted computers, in the numbers, dwarfing what the "pc" was. Everyone has a smartphone now, lots of now essential services expect you to have one, and no resistance was made during the process because those adopting it took it for good not knowing the better alternative.

>I really wish there was a third competitor in the phone space.

Why stop at 3? Let's have 100 so that app developers can spend all their time porting to other platforms.

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