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Comment by v1ne | Hacker News Reader

The question is: Who is the beneficiary of the app sandbox? Is it you, the user, because no malicious processes can taper with your apps? Or is it the corporations, because they prevent you from modifying their apps – which makes you a pure consumer?

I think, for the tech-savvy, the latter is more accurate and I think it is very important to be able to crack open these sandboxes and tinker with processes. Be it to inject ad blockers, automate them, modify their appearance, etc. It should be a right of a user to be able to do these things.

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I, the user.

Malicious apps sneak through the vetting process all the time.

Genuine, honest apps have to process unsafe content (be it we pages, messages) all the time.

One exploit should at most make single App vulnerable, not expose everything I have on my phone.

Strong, restrictive sandboxing, memory and execution protections are the only safe way.

And how is destroying the sandboxing related to having more rights as a consumer? You could still patch and repack them in the way Lucky Patcher does with ads, for example?

> I think, for the tech-savvy, the latter is more accurate and I think it is very important to be able to crack open these sandboxes and tinker with processes

Anyone tech-savvy that wants to mod their Android (like they'd mod Linux distros), should consider purchasing Android devices (like Pixel) that support ownership transfer (that is, unlocking then relocking the bootloader), and flash CalyxOS/GrapheneOS usereng/eng builds.

Undortunately the trend set by google is becoming extremely antagonistisc for modders. It's becoming a tradeoff between security and convenience, arguably that was not the case back in early android version, actually it was nearly the opposite. i remember hiw CyanogenMod features were surpassing the state of Pure Android at the time, it was fun to see the innovation happening in that space. Then came the ostracization of modders, from GApps restrictions to Play Integrity, all of those made it nearly impossible to have an android OS built to your taste, while able to run useful apps like banking and payments. It's sad that I have to carry 2 devices with me because Google took the greedy way.

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